Is complacency creeping up on you, like it does to so many of us? Are you getting overly comfortable with things? Sliding into a state of easy contentment? Blissfully unaware of your life traps or leadership derailers? Showing the signs of complacency?
Complacency can prevent you from doing the things you really want to do in life.
There are many areas in which you can become complacent. For example:
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Comfort and satisfaction aren’t inherently bad. They’re good, up to a point.
The issue arises when you become too comfortable and complacent, losing the motivation and passion to embrace challenges and chase your dreams.
Complacency drains your drive and leads to inaction when you should be taking steps forward. It prevents necessary improvements, reduces initiative, and diminishes your sense of hope. Over time, it fosters mediocrity, closes windows of opportunity, and stalls personal growth and career progress.
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Are you seeing signs of complacency in your life, work, or relationships?
What steps will you take to regain the drive and urgency to escape this trap?
Postscript: Inspirations on Signs of Complacency and Urgency
“Complacency keeps you living a comfortable life… not the life you desire. Challenge yourself to do something different. Then, notice the new charged quality of your life.” -Nina Amir, author and coach
“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta, author
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” -Benjamin E. Mays, Baptist minister and civil rights leader
“By far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.” -John Kotter, professor, author, and thought leader in business, leadership, and organizational change
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Many of us lack authentic alignment in our life and work. We don’t have a good fit between who we are and how we live. On the problem with lacking authentic alignment, why it happens, and what to do about it.
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Are you being true to yourself? Is there a good fit between how you live and who you really are? In other words, do you have authentic alignment in your life?
If you’re living in authentic alignment (1), there’s a good match between your inner world of your thoughts, hopes, and dreams and the outer world of what you’re doing with your life. There’s coherence between your core values, beliefs, priorities, and actions. With authentic alignment, you’re more likely to have not only physical but also mental, emotional, and even spiritual health and wellness.
There’s great power in the integrity of what author Kevin Cashman calls “total congruence” between who you are and what you do. As well as in the wholeness of what educator and author Parker Palmer calls “an undivided life.”
“A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ancient Roman Stoic philosopher
The Problem of Lacking Authentic Alignment in Your Life
There are many instances in which we can see the problem with misalignment. If your car tires are out of alignment, for example, you can have poor handling, uneven tire wear, reduced fuel efficiency, and suspension problems. What happens when the players on a team are all over the place instead of acting as a disciplined unit? How will it go if a married couple isn’t on the same page about children and finances? What happens to organizations when they’re not aligned?
There’s also a cost to lacking authentic alignment in your life. When it’s missing, you tend to:
spend a lot of time doing things you don’t really want to do
be disconnected or cut off from yourself, making you feel off kilter
suspect that you’re going through the motions of life
be anxious, frustrated, or overwhelmed more often
feel lethargic or exhausted
What’s more, misalignment undermines your ability to do good work and perform at your highest levels.
“…there can be no greater suffering than living a lifelong lie….
in the end what will matter most is knowing that we stayed true to ourselves.”
-Parker Palmer, educator and writer
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Lacking authentic alignment is common. But why? There are many factors that can disrupt the rhythm of marching to the beat of your own drummer, as the expression goes. For example, you may drift away from your core because you:
don’t know who you are (or have forgotten it)
feel a need to please others or feel beholden to other people’s expectations
take too many things on because you’re overambitious about what you can do
have become a prisoner of success, perhaps due to an excessive need for recognition
Sometimes, an external shock can create misalignment. It can be moving to a new community, losing a job, having a health crisis, or losing a loved one.
Benefits of Authentic Alignment
When you’re playing your own tune in life, it can bring you many benefits, including:
a sense of wellness, including inner peace and harmony
When you have authentic alignment, you’re more likely to feel content and secure. You’re better able to move on and let go of things that aren’t good for you. And you’re able to tap into your inner voice and intuition.
With authentic alignment, you’re also better at setting boundaries and bolder in doing the things you really want to do. You’re likely to develop and maintain better relationships because you’re no longer hiding yourself. People will get to know the real you as you show up in the world with more honesty and vulnerability, in turn fostering connection and intimacy. You’ll tend to attract people who are a better fit for you in things like friendships or romantic relationships.
When you have authentic alignment, you don’t fret about wasting time because you’re intentionally engaging in good things in your life. This can help you move from a vexing sense of doubt about whether you’re living well to a sense of clarity, satisfaction, and serenity.
Living in authentic alignment can bring you a sense of profound satisfaction, with no need to keep chasing things because you already feel whole. Finally, it can help you avoid the common regret of living your life according to other people’s expectations instead of a life true to yourself.
“Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration” (since their realization came too late)…. “It is a pity that being who we truly are requires so much courage, but it does. It takes enormous courage at times.”
-Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
How to Create and Maintain Authentic Alignment
How to go about creating more authentic alignment in your life? Here are 14 approaches:
1. Develop your self-awareness. Know yourself so well and deeply that you feel a sense of clarity and comfort about who you are and what makes you tick, helping you feel more comfortable in your own skin.
2. Strip away your ego, pride, and ambition. Set aside the expectations of others. Tap into your heart instead of your ego.
3. Remove your mask in front of those you love the most, deepening connection. Stop pretending to be something you’re not. Let them see the real you and invite them to reciprocate.
4. Explore the root causes that led you to want to avoid being yourself. Perhaps it was outside expectations? Or fear of judgment or failure? Fear of rejection, or of being hurt? Afraid to be seen for who you truly are? Sometimes, your life may be overly full, cluttered with too many commitments and too much “busyness.”
5. Return to your center by finding or creating sanctuary in your life. Sanctuary is a place or practice of peace in which you can leave the distractions, interruptions, and chaos behind and be present in silent, deep reflection. It could be a quiet room at home, a place of worship, or a quiet and solitary spot in nature.
6. Notice when you’re becoming misaligned. Pay attention to how you’re feeling. Is it frustration? Shame? Something else? Tune into your body and your emotions. Also, pay attention to the situations where it’s common: what are you doing and who are you with? See if there are patterns.
7. Practice disciplined self-care regularly. It’s easy to become misaligned when you’re tired, overworked, or burned out. Maintain healthy habits and rituals so you don’t fall into traps that get you out of alignment.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
8. Discover yourcore values. Your values are what you consider most important in life, what’s most worthy and valuable to you. Are you living in accordance with your values?
9. Discover yourstrengths. What are the things you’re good at and that make you feel powerful when you’re engaging in them? Make sure that you’re using them often.
10. Discover yourpassions. What are the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time? How can you integrate them into your days more often?
11. Discover yourpurpose. Think about why you’re here and what feels purposeful and meaningful to you. Are you living purposefully? This can be a tough one for people. Author Richard Leider points out that there are two types of purpose. First, is a “BIG P” Purpose (a noble cause or something you can dedicate your life to). But you can also have a “little p” purpose (daily choices of how to contribute to others). Leider notes that “little p” actions are just as worthy. Also, they can add up over time into something potent.
12. Craft avision of the good life. Think about how you want to live. What’s a bold and vivid picture of that? Make sure you’re working toward living it.
13. Be vigilant in declining activities that aren’t a good fit while agreeing to ones that are in alignment. When opportunities and requests come your way, do you have a good way to screen them? Without some sort of criteria or filter, you can end up with days filled with things are far afield from what you want to do.
14. Pay attention to when you need to interrupt the pattern and make a more radical shift. In a Harvard Business Review article, Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder point out that you may need to break the cycle with a catalyst like a course or sabbatical so you can spot unhealthy patterns and give yourself time to make needed changes.
Conclusion
Though authentic alignment may sound straightforward, it’s common for people to drift out of alignment.
It’s essential to be honest with yourself. If you can’t admit to yourself that you’re out of alignment, you’re unlikely to get it back.
It won’t help if you’re too hard on yourself when you drift. A little self-compassion can go a long way. Misalignment is common. If you find yourself judging yourself harshly and engaging in negative self-talk, change the channel and flip toward ideas for how to bring alignment back into your life.
It’s also important to have your own back. Go to bat for yourself just as you would your best friend. Finally, recall that authentic alignment is an ongoing process. Expect to have ups and downs. That’s okay, as long as you work to bring it back when you drift.
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
“To thine own self be true.” -William Shakespeare, English poet, playwright, and actor
“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -e.e. cummings, poet, painter, and playwright
“I know who I am. The more we try to be something we’re not, the less successful we’ll be…. I don’t care what I do as long as I adhere to certain values.” -Jael Kampfe, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” -William Stafford, from his poem, “Ask Me”
“I think I’ve always had a strong sense of who I am, but allowing myself to be that person is more recent.” -Bridget Bradley Gray, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Being true to who you really are can be one of the hardest things to do in life.” -Carlii Lyon, Australian executive
“Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must This need we may call self-actualization.” -Abraham Maslow, psychologist
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
“…the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most. A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we (or others) feel we ought to do, and what we think we want to do. Our advice? Concentrate instead on who you are, and the rest will fall into place.” -Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger, Do What You Are
“I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.” -Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything
“The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world… life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.” -Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations
“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
“Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“If you are experiencing unease or demotivation in your life, it is probably because you are not living according to your values.” -Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan, Self-Leadership
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“That’s who I am at my core, what I love. I mean, if a young person calls me and says, ‘Hey, can you help me? Can you listen to me?’ I can’t say no to that. It’s almost physically impossible for me to say no.” -Gerald Chertavian, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, author and entrepreneur, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
Appendix: Related Concepts
There are several concepts related to authentic alignment that can help us understand it better.
Authenticity. When you’re authentic, it means you’re genuine, real, and true. Researcher and author Brene Brown defines authenticity as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Other researchers describe it as “the degree to which a particular behavior is congruent with a person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, motives, and other dispositions.” (Source: Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Leary, M. R. (2019). The enigma of being yourself: A critical examination of the concept of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 133–142.)
Authentic Integrity. In our book, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and I noted the importance of “authentic integrity”: “integration of all aspects of our lives in a way that coheres with our true nature.” It means living in alignment with our “core identity,” including our purpose, values, strengths, and aspirations.
“I just felt like I’ve lived a life that was true to itself…. Anybody who’s ever hung out in an ‘old man bar’—you know what I’m talking about—sees what happens when you don’t let that part of yourself do its thing.”
-Mary Cutrufello, musician and songwriter, in our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
Self-concordance. Originally, researchers thought of self-concordance as being in touch with your deeper self. More recently, researchers are conceptualizing it as congruence between your implicit motives (unconscious, automatic drives) and explicit motives (conscious drives like personal goals). When you’re self-concordant, you tend to choose goals that are more personally productive and fulfilling. It enhances your ability to grow, achieve your goals, and feel happy. Researchers measure self-concordance via the relative autonomy index, with a continuum ranging from external to internal motivation. (Source: Kennon M. Sheldon and Erica A. Holberg, “Chapter Four—Using free will wisely: The importance of self-concordant goal pursuit,” Advances in Motivation Science, Vol. 10, 2023.)
Self-congruence. When you have self-congruence, you tend to behave consistently with who you really are and what you’re really like, according to researchers. This can include things like your “true self” or your attitudes, beliefs, and values.
True North. Authors Bill George and Peter Sims define your true north as “the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point.”
Critiques. Not surprisingly, there are also critiques of concepts like “authenticity” and “true self” in the research literature. For example, in their article, “The Enigma of Being Yourself,” Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno and Mark R. Leary write: “the human personality invariably contains myriad personality dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible even though they are genuine aspects of the person’s psychological make-up…. People are genuinely multifaceted.”
“Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -Walt Whitman, poet
Do we truly understand ourselves, including our behaviors, and the reasons behind them? Are our self-perceptions biased, incomplete, selective, or even inaccurate, as some researchers suggest? Additionally, how much does nonconscious mental functioning drive our behavior?
Researchers have noted that there’s ambiguity and variability in the definitions of terms like “authenticity,” not to mention cultural differences. They also warn against having an idealized version of the self, because it’s unattainable, leading to potential feelings of inadequacy or failure. For some, the pressure to “be authentic” can result in significant anxiety and stress.
Jongman-Sereno and Leary also note that our ability to adapt our behavior to suit different situations is generally beneficial for our psychological wellbeing and social relationships. We often find ourselves playing various roles at home and work, and that’s normal. (But there’s a significant difference between making small adjustments to ease interactions and wearing a mask to disguise who we really are.)
A brilliant but troubled young man from a tough neighborhood in south Boston is working as a janitor at an elite technical university. Despite his incredible potential, he plans to stick around with his childhood buddies and not use his gifts. His therapist comes from the same neighborhood and is fascinated by the smug young prodigy.
Sound familiar? It’s the plot of the acclaimed film, “Good Will Hunting,” of course, starring Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, and Minnie Driver. And it’s also a case study in root causes.
In their first session, Will shocked his therapist, Dr. Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams, with cutting observations about him based on his painting on the wall. When they met a few days later at the park, Sean told Will that, while he’s brilliant, he’s just a kid. Though he knows an astonishing amount of facts and figures, he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Will hasn’t traveled outside of Boston. He hasn’t yet experienced the things of the world that bring you deep wisdom, or real love with a partner.
Sean sees that, though Will has incredible intellectual abilities feeding his crass self-assurance, he’s really just lost and afraid. Sean asks him:
“You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some f*ckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.”
Will, perhaps for the first time in his life, had the tables turned on him. Later, in an emotional exchange in Sean’s office, they trade stories of their violent fathers. Will recently broke up with his girlfriend and suspects that Sean will give him some textbook theories about attachment disorder or fear of abandonment.
But Sean does something surprising. He drops Will’s psych file on the desk and says, “It’s not your fault.”
Will says he knows that. But Sean keeps repeating it, over and over. Until it finally cracks Will’s heart open and the pain comes streaming through—and healing.
They’d finally gotten to the root of it.
What Are You Struggling With?
Think about whether there are any recurring patterns or challenges in your life. (If so, welcome to the human race. You’re not alone.) Common ones include feeling stuck in your career and struggling with things like money, body image, self-doubt, or toxic relationships.
Have you, like Sean and Will, gotten to the root of it?
When you’re passed over for a promotion, your first response might be to blame your ungrateful manager. Upon further reflection, though, you might realize that you’re deflecting responsibility. Without understanding and addressing the root cause, you’re stuck spinning unhelpful stories and playing the victim.
Are your financial woes really about your stingy boss or your mindset, habits, and choices? Are your health problems really about your stressful job or about your numbing of deeper issues?
Difficult issues, for sure, but how long will they go on if you’re not addressing them at the right level?
When your yard has weeds, do you mow over them, or do you get down in the dirt and grab them by the root?
You may notice that many of the traps of living—the things that inhibit our happiness and quality of life—come with common root causes. Examples:
Having avictim mentality often stems from difficult experiences or trauma, leading you to feel powerless and believe that other people or outside circumstances dictate the terms of your life.
Blaming often originates in fear of vulnerability or failure. You may have learned to deflect responsibility as a coping mechanism to protect your self-image or avoid the irritation of accountability.
People-pleasing often stems from a desire for approval and acceptance, perhaps caused by early experiences of conditional love or approval. Maybe you internalized the message that your worth depends on meeting others’ expectations.
Workaholism can come from a need for achievement, perhaps driven by difficult or embarrassing situations early in life. Parental, peer, or societal pressures that equate success with achievement can fuel it. Your excessive work may be a means to gain control or validation.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Here are nine things you can do when engaging in root cause analysis:
1. Use the “five whys” questioning technique to get beyond surface-level symptoms and drill down to root causes. When you encounter a problem, ask “Why?” five times. That inquiry can help take you down to the underlying issue. (See the “Practice” section below for more on this.)
2. Recognize that, while it may be tempting to externalize the problem and shift the blame, the root cause is often internal. Keep your focus on how and why things have happened instead of on who’s causing you difficulty. That way, you’ll focus on things you can control and avoid going down the rabbit holes of blaming and victimhood. Consider whether the root cause has to do with your mindset, beliefs, choices, attitudes, or habits.
3. Think about several challenges you’ve experienced and see if there’s a pattern. Sometimes, by looking at a series of things, you can trace them back to a common denominator. For example, it could be a fear of looking bad or of failing.
4. Challenge your limiting beliefs. Identify your limiting beliefs and then dig deeper into the assumptions behind them and consider where they come from. For example, if you believe you’re damaged goods, a failure, or not worthy of love, think about whether you somehow got the message that you need to act a certain way or achieve at a certain level to be a good person.
5. Note that while getting to the root cause is ideal, sometimes you may need immediate relief. In some cases, it’s helpful to address acute problems to give yourself more running room.
6. Note that there may be multiple root causes. Sometimes, there’s a confluence of factors causing you pain. If you’re experiencing anxiety, for example, it may stem from life events, personality traits, peer pressure, cultural influences, childhood upbringing and parenting approaches, genetic factors, and/or brain chemistry imbalances.
7. Don’t do this alone. Seek help from trusted friends and colleagues, a small, supportive group, or a therapist. That will help you identify blind spots, bring in fresh perspectives, and challenge your assumptions.
8. Look for ways to prevent the root causes from coming up in the future. For example, getting to the bottom of why you feel stuck in your career can help you identify key issues, such as a lack of clear and compelling career goals, insufficient skill development, and fear of change. Perhaps your lack of clarity stems from not taking the time to reflect on your core values, strengths, passions, and aspirations. And maybe your lack of skill development stems from complacency or an overfull schedule.
9. Also look for the root causes of your victories and successes, not just your defeats and failures. Doing so can help you continue having good results and also port those approaches to other areas of your life.
Conclusion
Engaging in root cause analysis is vital to success and wellbeing. By understanding the underlying factors that contribute to your struggles, you can implement targeted approaches to address them, leading to better outcomes. This proactive approach can enhance your self-awareness and your personal and professional growth. By committing to this reflective process, you can finally unshackle yourself from the things that have been holding you back.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
“When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo, author
“Negative thinking is subtle and deceptive. It wears many faces and hides behind the mask of excuses. It is important to strip away the mask and discover the real, root emotion.” -Robert H. Schuller, pastor
“We lack emotional connection even when we are surrounded by other people. This feeling of being profoundly alone is the root cause of unhappiness in the human race. It is the root cause of addictions. It is the root cause of suicide. It is the root cause of acts of terror. And it is the root of the dysfunction in the way society is structured.” -Teal Swan, author
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Practice: Using “Five Whys” to Identify the Root Cause
In the 1930s, Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda developed a questioning technique known as the “five whys” method to improve manufacturing processes as part of the Toyota Production System. With this now-famous and widely used method, workers ask why at least five times when they encounter a problem, helping them discover and address the root cause of the problem instead of addressing surface-level symptoms.
Here’s how it works: When you encounter a problem, ask why it’s occurring, and then answer that. Then ask why again, and answer that. And so on, five times.
The idea is to encourage people to go deep enough and not stop too soon. But in reality, five isn’t a magic number, and the deeper why questioning process can end with any number of whys. But five is a good proxy for going deep.
Here’s an example:
Why does Alicia feel stuck in her career? Because she hasn’t taken on any new responsibilities lately.
Why? Because her current workload feels overwhelming.
Why? Because she spends a lot of time people-pleasing and managing tasks that could be delegated.
Why? Because she worries that her team members might not complete them to her standards.
Why isn’t our new product selling well? Because customers aren’t making repeat purchases.
Why? Because they’re dissatisfied with the product’s performance.
Why? Because it doesn’t meet their expectations set by our marketing claims.
Why? Because they overhyped the product and didn’t do sufficient testing before launch.
Why? Because there was pressure to launch too quickly due to the upcoming board meeting.
Appendix: Examples of Getting to the Root Causes of Things
Example: Missing Motivation. Marcus is unhappy with his job. His motivation disappeared years ago. Lately, he finds himself procrastinating and missing deadlines, which never used to happen. It’s leading to guilt and stress. Unbeknownst to him, what’s really going on beneath it all is that Marcus resents feeling undervalued. Two years ago, he was coldly overlooked for a well-deserved promotion and felt humiliated. Today, he’s filled with frustration and self-doubt—and thinking about resigning.
Example: Careening Career. Maria has been in the same work role for years but feels unfulfilled. And resentful. Despite her years of experience, she avoids seeking new opportunities because she fears she won’t be taken seriously. A previous boss dismissed her ideas callously, causing her to doubt her abilities. Today, she remains stuck in a position that bores her, feeling frustrated and trapped.
Example: Lost Leadership. When Catherine discovers that her team is missing its quarterly sales goals, she implements stricter sales quotas and adds daily check-ins. What she’s missing is that her team lacks confidence when selling because they don’t fully understand the new product’s features and functionality, and they don’t feel comfortable coming to her. Unbeknownst to her, Catherine’s task-driven approach comes across as cold and uncaring.
Example: Rocky Relationship. Cynthia and Thomas have been arguing a lot lately. They’ve been fighting about all sorts of things—the dishes, the kids, the budget, the yard. And things are escalating quickly to shouting storms. They’re frustrated and caught in a cycle of mutual blame. And they’re too busy finding fault with each other to step back and notice that, for a long time, Cynthia has felt unappreciated despite doing more around the house, and Tom feels unsupported in his stressful career.
Example: Nonprofit Nosedive. A nonprofit organization is experiencing a severe drop in participation at its events. In response, they’re ramping up their marketing efforts and changing their event formats. What they’re missing is that many families in the new demographic they’re targeting don’t have access to reliable transportation.
Example: Startup Struggles. An app development startup has a talented and dedicated team, but they’ve been missing important milestones lately—a shock to all. While they continue to blame individuals, the real problem is a lack of defined roles within the team, coupled with poor communication. Without clarity, their efforts are often redundant. Meanwhile, projects fall behind, clients get frustrated, and team members lose their enthusiasm.
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As a human, you’re naturally social. You’re wired to consider how others perceive you. This makes sense, since relationships are key to your well-being.
But this can be a big trap for you. When you’re overly worried about others’ opinions, you might make choices that harm you in the long run. You might avoid the short-term pain of disapproval in exchange for the long-term loss of missing out on better things.
This focus can lead you away from your true self, from your deepest desires, pushing you toward what others want or expect. In the process, you might lose yourself while seeking approval or trying to please others.
These are common traps—and with painful consequences.
When you let outside expectations drive you, it can lead to several problems. For example, you may struggle to communicate openly during disagreements. Setting boundaries becomes a challenge. You may start to work too much and become overwhelmed. Or you might begin to shy away from pursuits that genuinely interest you. You might miss potential opportunities as you focus more on meeting others’ expectations and less on following your own path.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
4. Set High Standards for What You’ll Spend Time On: Take time to evaluate new tasks and requests, ensuring they align with your standards.
5. Gain Perspective: Consider how much others’ opinions will matter in the short and long term versus your own convictions.
6. Experiment with Disapproval: See what it feels like to experience disapproval and assess its true significance (that is, whether it’s really as bad as you originally feared).
7. Boost Your Confidence: You might view confidence as an innate trait, but in truth it’s something you can build systematically by improving and developing mastery.
8. Earn Respect: Understand that setting boundaries and staying true to your goals can earn you respect.
9. Surround Yourself with People Who Accept You As You Are: Avoid people who are constantly trying to change you to fit their preferences. And be sure to return the favor by accepting your family, friends, and colleagues as they are.
10. Enjoy the Freedom of Being Your True Self: Anticipate the power of getting over this common stumbling block and basking in the release from worrying about what others think. Enjoy the peace that comes from trusting yourself.
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Postscript: Inspirations to Help You Stop Caring Too Much about What Others Think
“The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what other people think.” -C. JoyBell C., writer
“The most freeing experience of my life thus far has been to… be unapologetically myself, and to stand in my own light.” -Hannah Rose, therapist and writer
“Being dependent on approval—so dependent that we barter away all our time, energy, and personal preferences to get it—ruins lives.” -Dr. Martha Beck, Harvard-trained sociologist, coach, and author
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, entrepreneur and author
“So long as you’re still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.” -Neale Donald Walsch, author
“Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.” -Janet Wojcicki, professor, Univ. of California at San Francisco
“The problem comes when people are so eager to win the approval of others that they try to cover their shortcomings and sacrifice their authenticity to gain the respect and admiration of their associates.” -Bill George, CEO and leadership author
“Listen to your heart above all other voices.” -Martha Kagan
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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Do things feel heavy and dense in your life right now?
Maybe you’re stressed out about a challenge at work, or a problem at home that’s got you off balance. Perhaps you lost your job, or lost a big account at the office. Maybe you’re struggling financially, or have health concerns in your family. Perhaps your team is struggling with performance and motivation.
It may feel like the world is closing in. In those moments, it’s hard to maintain perspective.
The Problem with Lacking Perspective
Feeling that way is understandable, but losing perspective can be a big problem—and even make things worse. How?
When you’re stressed, you tend to view things through negative filter, causing angst, resentment, and pessimism. And when you lack perspective you have a hard time determining the relative importance of things. (See my article, “How to Stop Catastrophizing—Managing Our Minds.”) That can cause you to let things get out of whack, leading to new problems down the road.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
When you can put things in perspective, it means you can think about them in a reasonable and sensible way without making them better or worse than they are. Doing so has many benefits. For example, keeping things in perspective helps you:
assess the importance of things in their broader context
focus on what matters most
understand situations and other people’s viewpoints
keep anxiety and worries in check
understand things more clearly and accurately, thereby reducing mistakes
view things from different angles
see both positives and negatives
react intentionally and constructively instead of impulsively
maintain your objectivity
develop empathy and compassion for people instead of judging them
avoid unnecessary conflicts
improve your relationships
forgive people instead of holding onto counterproductive grudges
learn from experience
discover new ways to view your problems
develop your resilience
grow as a person and leader, in part by seeing how you can transcend your current limitations
Maintaining perspective is also important for leaders, in part because they face so many challenges.
Part of the job of a leader is finding problems in and discovering ways to get them solved. Encountering problems can feel overwhelming if you don’t have the ability to rise above them and see the big picture.
“One of the things leaders have to be good at is perspective. Leaders don’t necessarily have to invent ideas,
but they have to be able to put them in context and add perspective.” -John Sculley, businessman, entrepreneur, and investor
Adaptive leadership is a modern leadership framework focused on how leaders can prepare and encourage people to deal with changing environments that are beyond the technical capacity of people to solve with straightforward solutions or the normal way of doing things.
Instead of trying to be the hero and solve everything, adaptive leaders motivate the people in the organization to face their difficult situations and adapt to the challenges they face together. They recognize, as Harvard leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz says, that “The work is through the people.”
One of the keys for leaders, according to Heifetz, is for them to “get on the balcony.” He explains:
“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of ‘getting on the balcony’ above the ‘dance floor’ to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.” -Ron Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
The idea is for leaders to maintain both sharp focus and broad comprehension at the same time. This will help them understand the situation, the challenges, and the people. Meanwhile, leaders must reframe their view of conflict, seeing it not as a problem to be avoided but rather as an opportunity for learning, growth, and advancement. Doing so requires perspective.
Strengths Search
We all have core strengths–the things in which we most excel. Take this self-assessment to determine your core strengths so you can integrate them more into your life and work.
How can you maintain perspective when it feels like things are spinning out of control? Here are 12 ways to do so:
1. Read. One of the best ways to develop and maintain perspective is to read a lot, including classics of philosophy and literature as well as religious or spiritual texts.
2. Project forward. Think ahead five or ten years and imagine looking back on your current situation. That can help you see it in the larger sweep of your life so you don’t blow it out of proportion.
3. Talk things through. Lean on family, trusted friends, colleagues, a mentor, or a small group. That way, you can connect with others about what’s going on and hear their views on things. You’re also wise to talk to people from different vantage points (e.g., age, gender, culture, circumstances, history).
4. Distance yourself from the situation. You can do that conceptually, by looking at it from another person’s perspective (e.g., if you’re struggling financially, consider your challenges from the vantage point of someone with far fewer resources than you). Or you can do it physically, by changing your scenery. Often, removing yourself from the situation helps in ways big and small.
5. Do a reality check. Keep in mind that bad things happen to all of us, and that’s okay. It’s the nature of life. Be clear about what you can and can’t control.
6. Recall your capabilities. Think of times when you’ve overcome challenges in the past. Why shouldn’t this time be any different?
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
7. Start working on solutions instead of worrying so much about problems. With small but steady steps, you’ll start to see that your problems are probably more manageable than you thought initially.
8. Get out into nature. Go on a hike. Get out on a lake or into a forest. Feel the sun on your face and breathe in the air while taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of our bustling world. Contemplate the vastness of the cosmos and observe the intricate mesh of nature and life with reverence and awe.
“They will forget the rush and strain of all the other weeks of the year, and for a short time at least, the days will be good for their bodies and good for their souls. Once more they will lay hold of the perspective that comes to those who every morning and every night can lift their eyes up to Mother Nature.” -Theodore Roosevelt, conservationist, naturalist, and former U.S. president
9. Be grateful for what you have. Pausing to think of all the blessings in your life can help you avoid excess negativity and keep the positive things in your life front and center in your thoughts.
10. Meditate. With a meditation practice, you can train your mind to be more present, focused, and still, with a calm and clear awareness of the present moment. That can help you avoid anxious reactions to life’s vicissitudes.
11. Pray and attend religious services. Prayer can help you tune into a divine perspective. Attending religious services can connect you with ancient scriptures and teachings—and the importance of viewing life from a sacred perspective.
12. Contemplate your death. Engage in the ancient practice of memento mori, which is Latin for remembering that you will die. In many ways, death can be the ultimate purveyor of perspective. It can help you see trivial things for what they are. And it can help you face up to the fact that much of what you worry about isn’t so important after all.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when you maintain perspective you’re able to weather storms better and keep your focus on what’s most important. Getting good at having and keeping perspective will serve you very well in life and leadership.
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
Passion Probe to help you identify your top passions and start integrating them more into your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Song: “The Long Run” by The Eagles
Postscript: Inspirations on Perspective
“Plan with your whole life in mind.” -Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher
“Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river…. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here…. You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, novelist, and scientist
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” -George Eliot, Middlemarch
”Some things are just plain more important than others; in fact, some things are so important—your life, your health, your family—that others are trivial by comparison.” -Stephen R. Covey, Primary Greatness: The 12 Levers of Success
“As you look back on your life, you may realize that the things that mattered most were too often at the mercy of things that mattered least… that you were terrorized by the tyranny of urgency, and that you enjoyed very little creative freedom…. How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.” -Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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Daily life can be demanding. Work. Family. Bills. Deadlines. Dishes. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, especially if you fall into the trap of focusing too much on others’ needs.
This challenge is common among caregivers like nurses and teachers. Also, many women struggle with it, in part due to all the expectations they encounter around nurturing, caregiving, and supporting homes and families. But it can affect anybody, especially those wired to give. This trap can result in empathy overload, compassion fatigue, and giver burnout.
Signs of being too focused on others’ needs include difficulty setting boundaries, struggling with saying “no,” internalizing others’ emotions, feeling responsible for fixing other people’s issues, and losing yourself in relationships. These habits can become ingrained.
The Problem with Being Too Focused on Others
Focusing too much on others’ needs can lead to neglecting your own needs, harming your health, and feeling exhaustion or burnout. It may also pull you away from pursuing your own goals. It may even lead to an addiction to helping others that inhibits your own healthy functioning.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
How to Avoid the Trap of Focusing Too Much on Others’ Needs
What to do about it? Here are 14 things you can do to avoid this trap:
1. Recognize that sacrificing yourself to help others isn’t sustainable. Be warned: troubles lie ahead if you continue down this path.
2. Create separation and distance between yourself and others when needed. Remove yourself from these situations when you can.
3. Designate times to enjoy life free and clear without the press of outside needs and obligations. Go for a walk. Read a book. Watch a movie. Choose activities that bring you joy. Make time for renewal and sanctuary.
4. Get better at setting boundaries and saying “no.” State clearly that you can’t help right now. Since you’re human, you have limits. Honor that so you can thrive personally and have the energy to continue helping others.
5. Develop a shield. University of Miami psychologist Heidi Allespach advocates for medical residents to cultivate what she terms a “semi-permeable membrane” around their hearts. This counsel extends to anyone grappling with compassion fatigue. She explains, “Without enough of a shield, everything just comes in.”
6. Reduce the extent of your assistance when needed. Remember that looking after someone doesn’t equate to swooping in to save them. Understand that even the smallest gestures can have a significant impact. People can feel upheld and comforted even by small acts of kindness and connection. They might not even need or want a ton of help. Sometimes, a simple visit, call, text, or meal can mean a lot.
7. Enlist the support of others, ensuring you’re not alone in providing help. Bringing a network of helpers is likely to lift the person’s spirits and ease your own load in the process.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
8. Clarify what you need from others and ask for it directly even as you’re providing help. Don’t hesitate to articulate your own needs and requests while also being generous towards others. Master the art of advocating for yourself so you can continue helping effectively.
9. Try “cognitive reappraisal”—reframing how you see a situation involving someone in need. Rather than assuming people will suffer or fail without your assistance, imagine how they might cultivate fresh coping mechanisms that will help them help themselves in the future.
10. Imagine a friend experiencing compassion fatigue (and feeling guilt for not being able to help more). You’d probably advise them to give themselves grace and take care of themselves first.
12. Guard your heart and don’t let yourself get to the point of empathy overload or compassion fatigue. Pay attention to the emotions that arise when you witness others’ suffering. Allow these emotions to pass through you. Acknowledge them without clinging to them. This practice can help you stay grounded in the present moment with equanimity.
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
13. Connect with family and friends. The research unequivocally points to the profound advantages of healthy relationships. They play a pivotal role in enhancing your happiness and fulfillment.
14. Preserve your time and energy for the others you care about and who rely on you. Focusing too much on assisting one person in need may hinder your ability to support others, including your family or colleagues. And it may detract from other important tasks.
In the end, the solution isn’t being selfish or neglecting others. It’s about taking care of yourself so you can maintain the energy and stamina to keep helping others.
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
“Don’t lose yourself trying to be everything to everyone.” -Tony Gaskins
“Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.” -Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
“It’s OK to do what is YOURS to do. Say what’s yours to say. Care about what’s yours to care about.” -Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran minister
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Do you struggle with perfectionism? It’s a big problem today for many, including ambitious professionals and leaders. It’s also widely misunderstood, and even misappropriated as a badge of honor.
Perfectionism is a personal standard that demands or expects flawlessness. It typically includes overly critical self-evaluations and excessive concerns about harsh judgments from others.
Perfectionism entails striving for unrealistic or even unattainable goals. What follows, of course, is disappointment when you fail to achieve them. If you’re a perfectionist, you translate low performance into low self-worth.
The assumption behind it is that perfection is the only route to self-acceptance. Some people praise perfectionism as a desire for self-improvement, but in reality it’s much more about seeking acceptance and approval. It’s about conflating your identity and worth with your performance and accomplishments.
Here are signs that you have perfectionistic tendencies:
fixating on your mistakes being overly critical of yourself striving to be flawless being overly cautious seeking to control situations getting defensive about feedback
Researcher Brené Brown suggests that perfectionism isn’t binary. Instead, she notes that we all fall on a continuum of perfectionistic tendencies, ranging from occasional and situational bouts of it to “compulsive, chronic, and debilitating” versions of it.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
How does perfectionism affect you? In sum, it lowers achievement while bringing stress. Perfectionism inhibits your work, harms your relationships, and causes needless suffering, degrading your mental health.
It can fuel fear and frustration, as well as disappointment and discontent. It even takes away from your enjoyment of accomplishments because you’re focusing on the things you could’ve done better.
According to the research, it’s linked with psychological distress and low self-esteem, as well as with fear of failure and workaholism. By tapping into your fear, perfectionism can divert you away from your creativity and deeper wisdom.
You may feel like your perfectionism can help motivate you to do a great job on things but, at the same time, you suspect that it can invite anxiety into your life and turn people off around you.
It can get confusing, so you’re wise to distinguish between perfection (which is impossible in human pursuits) and perfectionism, and between the pursuit of excellence (which is positive) and perfectionism (which can be quite harmful).
Perfectionism isn’t the same as the pursuit of excellence or striving to be your best. Instead, it’s a self-destructive expectation that you can be perfect.
What to Do About It: 14 Approaches
Thankfully, there are many things you can do to address your perfectionistic tendencies. Here are 14 practical approaches:
1. Distinguish between tasks that warrant perfection, or at least a very high standard of performance, and those that don’t. If you’re involved in brain surgery, airline repairs, or financial reporting, you need to get things right. But if you’re responding to an email or taking notes on a meeting, you don’t need to agonize over every word or phrase. A simple example: do your colleagues need a verbatim meeting transcript that’s beautifully formatted, or do they need short summaries with helpful headlines and bullet points for the key action items?
2. Think about the ratio of inputs to outputs. Consider things like your effort and time on the front end and then estimate how much they translate into real value for others on the back end.
3. Factor in the opportunity cost of your perfectionistic behavior. Recall that there are diminishing returns to continued work on something after a certain point. Think about better uses of your time. You can make a greater impact on more things if you use your time intentionally instead of slavishly giving in to your perfectionistic impulses.
4. Force yourself to get started on important things right away. That way, you’ll sidestep the avoidance problem that comes with perfectionism. Many perfectionists don’t get started on something unless they know precisely how they’ll do it and they can convince themselves it will be flawless.
5. Show early drafts of your work to others and request quick feedback. Mention that it’s just a draft and you’re looking for high-level feedback, not fine-tuned edits as if it were a final version. Ask them if it’s good enough. And if not, how close to being done is it, and what would make it so? Often, you’ll discover that your early draft is either good enough or close to it, and that it would be wasteful to spend many more hours honing it.
6. Reach out to a trusted friend when you’re having trouble getting started. Talk through your initial ideas. This will often help put things in perspective, organize your thoughts, and help you realize you do have something valuable to contribute. And often, they’ll provide not only ideas or input but also encouragement and inspiration.
7. Remind yourself that most things involve a process of getting a rough start, making improvements, and then making final tweaks. Don’t let the perfectionist in you fail to start because the first draft won’t be perfect. Take a page out of the lean startup methodology common in the startup world in which they start with a “minimum viable product” and release it out to the world so they can get early customer feedback and learn from it before spending too much time and effort on something.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
8. Give yourself a deadline. That way, you’ll avoid getting caught in an infinite loop of fixes.
9. Remind yourself that getting something done is more important than making it perfect. Recall the old saying, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
10. Flip the switch from negative self-talk topositive self-talk. Change the channel on your inner voice so that it focuses more on potential and growth and less on deficit and critique.
11. Focus more on process and not just results. Recognize that results aren’t always fully in your control. When you focus on the process, you’re more likely to get lost in your work and not freeze up due to fear of failure.
12. Adopt a growth mindset instead of afixed mindset. In a growth mindset, you recognize that you can develop your intelligence, abilities, and talents—that they’re not static. Our mindset, according to the research, shapes our enjoyment of challenging tasks, ideas about what we will strive for, and performance on tasks.
13. Change your focus from perfection to progress. Use a checklist and regular reviews so you can see your advances (and celebrate them).
14. Remember that you matter and have worth regardless of how you perform on the specific task in front of you. Don’t fall into the trap of conflating your performance on everything with your self-worth. Recall that many great achievers got that way by stretching themselves, failing often, learning from their mistakes, and persevering through adversity.
Choose progress, not perfection.
Done is better than perfect.
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Postscript: Inspirations on Overcoming Perfectionism
“Perfectionism isn’t about high standards. It’s about unrealistic standards.” -Professor Andrew Hill, York St. John University
“At its root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success.” -Michael Law, author
“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.” -Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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Are you self-aware? It’s common for people to overestimate their self-awareness.
Being self-aware means having a clear and accurate understanding of yourself, including your feelings, motives, desires, core values, strengths, and weaknesses.
Do you have a realistic view of yourself,
including a good and true sense of how others perceive you?*
Based on multiple investigations with nearly 5,000 participants, organizational psychologist Dr.Tasha Eurich and her colleagues found the following:
“…even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality:
We estimate that only 10-15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.” -Dr. Tasha Eurich
Psychologist Daniel Goleman considers self-awareness one of the four domains of emotional intelligence (along with self-management, social awareness, and relationship management). What’s more, self-awareness is the foundation for the other three.
If you lack self-awareness, you’ll have blind spots that cause problems. For example, if you don’t know the reasons for your actions, you’re likely to keep making the same mistakes. Also, you’ll be less likely to take responsibility for them, damaging your credibility.
There are many benefits to having high self-awareness. For example, it can help you communicate more effectively, improve your relationships, and increase your happiness and fulfillment. It can help enhance your sense of personal control, improve your decision-making, increase your confidence, and augment your influence.
“…self-awareness is a predictor of success in leadership.”
-James Kouzes and Barry Posner, A Leader’s Legacy
Also, how can you expect to find good work that’s a good fit for you—and know what work you should avoid—if you don’t know your strengths, passions, and preferences, and if you don’t know what energizes you and what drains you? How can you avoid conforming to the desires of others if you don’t know your own heart?
“When you start thinking that you don’t know what to do with your life,
what you really mean is that you don’t yet know who you are.”
-Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
How to Develop Self-Awareness: 7 Powerful Approaches
Here are seven things you can do to elevate your self-awareness:
1. Engage in frequent self-reflection.
Reflect on meetings or other encounters and their emotional wake. Pay attention to what you love, what you long for, and what makes you come alive. This means sometimes getting out of “climbing mode” (striving to move up the ladder of success, focusing on achievement and advancement) and getting into what I call “discover mode” (learning about who we are, including our values, strengths, passions, and dreams, and what we can do in the world). Listen to your inner voice.
2. Take assessments.
They can facilitate not only your self-awareness but also your personal development. For example:
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
3. Ask for input from family, friends, mentors, and coaches.
Solicit honest feedback, not only about your behaviors and strengths but also about your weaknesses and blind spots. At work, this can include “360-degree reviews.”
4. Consider not only what you know about yourself but also what others know about you.
For this, check out the Johari Window, a framework that can help you identify what’s known to yourself (or not) and what’s known to others about you (or not). See below.
Source: Adobe Stock
How many people get to see your true self? Do you have blind spots—things that are known by others about you that you’re not aware of? Consider writing down ten words that describe yourself—your main characteristics. Then have people who know you well do the same for you. Compare the lists to see how much overlap there is (or isn’t).
5. Journal.
As you journal, reflect on your experiences and feelings. Seek insights and look for patterns.
6. Join or start asmall group.
When run well, small groups can facilitate deep conversations about meaningful things. Make sure the conversation includes not only self-reflection but also input from the group. That way, participants will have a chance to consider new insights in a safe environment.
Engage in daily restorative activities (e.g., meditation, yoga, or gardening). Find places or practices of peace that help you guard and recenter your heart. Without renewal and sanctuary, you’re likely to be too scattered and frazzled to maintain high self-awareness.
Developing your self-awareness will have powerful effects on your life, work, relationships, and leadership. It’s an investment that pays big dividends.
“’Know thyself’… is still the most difficult task any of us faces. But until you truly know yourself, strengths and weaknesses, know what you want to do and why you want to do it, you cannot succeed in any but the most superficial sense of the word.” -Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader
Reflection Questions
How well do you know yourself?
Might you be overestimating your self-awareness, like so many others?
Are you asking for feedback regularly, and are you truly open and receptive to it?
Tools for You
Strengths Search Tool to help you identify your core strengths and integrate them more into your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search
We all have core strengths–the things in which we most excel. Take this self-assessment to determine your core strengths so you can integrate them more into your life and work.
Tasha Eurich, “What Self-Awareness Really Is (And How to Cultivate It),” Harvard Business Review, January 4, 2018
Related Books and Videos
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Tasha Eurich, Insight: The Surprising Truth about How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More than We Think
William L. Sparks, “The Power of Self-Awareness,” TEDx Asheville
Tasha Eurich, “Increase Your Self-Awareness with One Simple Fix,” TEDx Mile High
Postscript: Inspirations on Self-Awareness
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” -Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher
“Know thyself.” -inscribed on the temple wall at Delphi, 6th century BCE
“If a man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and his powers?” -Michel de Montaigne, 16th century French Renaissance philosopher and writer
“Self-knowledge is best learned, not by contemplation, but by action. Strive to do your duty and you will soon discover of what stuff you are made.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, poet, and scientist
“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” -Witold Gombrowicz, Polish writer
“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
“The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’ It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’… Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening…. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
“To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.” -Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
“Self-awareness is the foundation of authenticity. You develop it by exploring your life story and your crucible, and by understanding how these experiences shape you as a person and leader. You enhance it as you seek honest feedback from others. You refine it by adopting practices that help you remain mindful and aware, even amidst life’s chaos.”
-Bill George and Zach Clayton, True North: Emerging Leader Edition
* There are two types of self-awareness, according to researchers. The first type, internal (or private) self-awareness, is about how clearly you see yourself and whether you notice and reflect on your own internal state. The second type, external (or public) self-awareness, is about how aware you are of how you appear to others.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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Have you become complacent? Have you been lulled into a state of easy contentment? Or are you at risk of not paying enough attention to potential problems? Is complacency preventing you from trying harder and making needed improvements?
It’s a common trap. Perhaps you’ve been complacent about your health—or the health of those you love? Have you been complacent about your work, team, leadership, or organization? Or complacent about your relationships? About democracy or the planet?
You may be struggling with complacency if you’re taking things for granted or if you have too much routine. Do things feel monotonous?
Are you sticking to what you know? Staying in your comfort zone and avoiding risk? Are you “phoning it in”? Have you stopped learning and growing? Is your ambition waning?
Perhaps you’re wondering,
Is this it? Where did all my time go? Isn’t there something more I should be doing with my life?
There’s nothing wrong with comfort per se, or with feeling satisfied. You probably want them in your life. The problem is when you have too much of them and lose your inner fire to fight for your dreams or your zest for life.
Complacency becomes a problem when it’s sapping your motivation, when it’s leading to inaction when action is warranted, when it’s detracting from your sense of hope, when it’s leading to mediocrity. Is it robbing you of future opportunities and benefits, or derailing your career?
14 Complacency-Busting Actions
Fortunately, there’s much you can do to avoid complacency (or to break through it when you’re in it). Here are 14 complacency-busting actions you can take:
1. Start acting with urgency. Like your time counts. Because it does—and probably more than you’re realizing now.
2. Invoke deliberate agitation. Try using what Tyler Hakes calls “deliberate agitation.” Think of it as shaking a snow globe. He writes:
“You let things settle into place just long enough and then shake them up. Watch to see if they fall into the same patterns or if something new and better emerges…. You deliberately and intentionally question things and change them before they become a problem. You remain vigilant in trying to improve so that way you don’t fall into the trap of complacency that leads to eventual failure.” -Tyler Hakes
3. Dream big. Think expansively about all you want to do in your lifetime in different areas, from family, relationships, and work to education, service, travel, and more. When you do that, you start to feel the powerful pull of your deepest aspirations.
4. Step out of your comfort zone. Has fear held you back from venturing forth and risking yourself? When you push yourself, take risks, and dare to have adventures, your blood races. You start to feel awake and alive again.
5. Strive for a BHAG—a “big, hairy audacious goal.” It can be a life goal or a work goal, but a true BHAG should take your breath away with how bold it is and how amazing it would be if you could make it happen.
“…there is a difference between merely having a goal and becoming committed to a huge, daunting challenge—like a big mountain to climb…. Like the moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort…. people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them in the gut.”
-Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last
6. Build your top priorities and most important activities into your calendar. Doing so will ensure you make progress on your top goals. That way, you can not only develop good and productive habits but also become the sort of person who consistently gets big stuff done.
7. Enlist support. Consider recruiting an “accountability partner”—someone who can help keep you on track (such as a training buddy or someone you can send regular progress reports to).
8. Identify and remove barriers to change. When you’re stuck, it’s easy to become complacent and acclimatize yourself to the new situation. Why not get to work instead on identifying the major obstacles to progress and how to overcome them?
9. Notch short-term wins on meaningful work to build momentum. Draw on what researchers call the “progress principle”:
“…of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work; of all the negative events, the single most powerful is the opposite of progress—setbacks in the work. We consider this to be a fundamental management principle: facilitating progress is the most effective way for managers to influence inner work life. Even when progress happens in small steps, a person’s sense of steady forward movement toward an important goal can make all the difference between a great day and a terrible one.”
-Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle
10. Take full responsibility for everything in your life. Be what my co-author, Christopher Gergen, and I call a “LIFE entrepreneur.” You’re much more likely to thrive when you take ownership of your life and recognize your agency—when you take your life back. LIFE entrepreneurs go out and create opportunities for themselves. They intentionally craft a good life with good work, and they bring their dreams to life.
#11. Get clear on your personal purpose, values, and vision:
Your purpose is why you’re here. It’s what gives you a sense of meaning and significance—often by connecting with and serving others.
Your values are what’s most important to you—your core beliefs and principles that guide your decisions and behavior.
And your vision is what you aspire to achieve in the future—and what success looks and feels like for you.
12. Cultivate vitality. You’ll feel better and perform at a higher level when you develop physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness. Being intentional about productive and energizing habits will pay big dividends.
13. Let go of limiting beliefs. Ever been your own worst enemy? Have you locked yourself in a mental prison of judgment, negativity, and rumination? Never forget that you always retain the power to upgrade your thoughts, and it can help you avoid the trap of complacency.
14. Set and maintain high standards. You tend to rise or fall to the standards you set. Why not leverage deadlines, accountability, and high standards to propel you forward?
Related Traps & Articles
Complacency is common, and it can be deeply damaging. It also tends to come with several associated traps:
Are you letting the complacency trap rob you of quality time and experiences? Of achievement and passion?
It’s tricky because you probably want satisfaction and serenity, and not a life of frenetic striving or perpetual busyness.
Somewhere in between the extremes, there’s a healthy place of urgency to live intentionally, achieve important things, serve others, and cherish your days, not squandering your time in a cloud of complacency.
Wishing you well with it—and let me know if I can help.
Reflection Questions
To what extent has complacency crept into some aspects of your life and work (or your family or organization)?
What will you do to regain the motivation and urgency to escape this trap?
“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta, author
“Complacency keeps you living a comfortable life… not the life you desire. Challenge yourself to do something different. Then, notice the new charged quality of your life.” -Nina Amir, author and coach
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” -Benjamin E. Mays, minister
“I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.” -Trent Reznor, musician and singer-songwriter
“History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.” -Gerald R. Ford, former U.S. president
“By far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.” -John Kotter, founder of Kotter International and Harvard Business School Professor
“Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” -Jim Rohn, author and entrepreneur
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” -Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
What are the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time? What are the things you love so much that you’re willing to suffer for them? Those are your passions.
You probably have passions in different domains of your life. Are you passionate about your work—or at least parts of it? Do you talk often about what you like about your work, or find yourself working extra hours even when you don’t have to? Are you building your passions into your days and weeks?
14 Benefits of Building Your Passions into Your Life and Work
There are many powerful benefits to building passions into your life and work. For example, doing so will:
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
Of course, there’s also a flip side to this: there’s much lost when you don’t have passion for what you’re doing. In that case, you’re much more likely to lack enthusiasm and “phone it in.” Over time, this can put you on a downward trajectory.
To what extent are you building your passions into your life and work? What more could you do?
Tools for You
Passion Probe Tool to help you find the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time
Strengths Search Tool to help you identify your core strengths and integrate them more into your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
“If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up every day and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you want to learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.” -Warren Buffett, legendary investor
“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist
“Paul and I, we never thought that we would make much money out of the thing. We just loved writing software.” -Bill Gates, co-founder, Microsoft
“I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.” -Stephen King, writer
(1) Mark Allen Morris, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover,” PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2003.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
