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The Trap of Self-Doubt—And How to Overcome It

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The Trap of Self-Doubt—And How to Overcome It by Gregg Vanourek

We’ve all experienced self-doubt. We’ve felt uncertain about ourselves and our place in the world. Or we’ve questioned our capabilities and potential.

Any time we make a major mistake, we risk losing confidence. We may stop trusting ourselves as we feel wounded.

Self-doubt shows up as a voice in our head:

What if I make a mistake?
Or look like a fool?
What will people think of me?

At the root of self-doubt is fear—fear of failure or judgment. Sometimes we lose faith in ourselves.

 

Signs of Self-Doubt in Action

How to know if we struggle with self-doubt? When we’re experiencing it, we’re probably doing one or more of the following:

  • feeling unsure about our capacity to address a challenge we’re facing
  • often believing we’re not good enough
  • being our own worst critic
  • holding back and playing it safe to avoid risking failure
  • frequently wondering what’s wrong with us
  • engaging in overachieving (which can be a sign we’re working extra hard to avoid mistakes or failures)
  • experiencing “imposter syndrome” (the fear of being viewed as a fraud or undeserving of our successes)
  • having a hard time accepting compliments or giving ourselves credit
  • people-pleasing to gain acceptance with others
  • seeking reassurance excessively
  • continually trying new self-improvement projects but never feeling adequate or satisfied

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Where Self-Doubt Comes From

Self-doubt can come from many sources. For many of us, it begins in childhood. It can come from our parents, especially if we felt like we had to keep trying to prove ourselves and earn love through compliance or deeds—or if our parents criticized us excessively or were disapproving or distant. Self-doubt can also arise from frequent comparisons with siblings during childhood—or from overprotective parents, leaving us feeling like we’re not able to handle things ourselves.

There may also be others beyond parents—possibly teachers, coaches, mentors, or friends—who inadvertently contributed to our self-doubt. It can also originate from big failures or setbacks that we’ve experienced, or from abuse or trauma.

 

The Cost of Self-Doubt in Our Lives

Unfortunately, self-doubt exacts a steep price in our lives. It affects our happiness, relationships, work performance, and more. For example, self-doubt can:

  • lower our motivation
  • generate stress and anxiety
  • cause us pain and despair
  • sap our confidence
  • diminish our resilience
  • lead to procrastination
  • foster indecisiveness
  • lead to feeling overwhelmed
  • inhibit our creativity
  • make us unwilling or unable to take needed risks or pursue new opportunities
  • lower our growth potential
  • prevent us from serving others more effectively
  • cause us to reject good options or lose opportunities because we feel we’re unworthy or incapable/
  • prevent us from doing important things (such as going for a dream job or asking someone out)
  • keep us from being our best and achieving excellence and success
  • lead to a sense of malaise, unhappiness, or a life filled with regret

When we’re riddled with self-doubt, we don’t advocate on our behalf or ask tough questions. We don’t raise our hand, and we don’t negotiate as strongly about that pay raise. When we doubt ourselves, we don’t fight back or set boundaries. We hold back.

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How to Overcome Self-Doubt

Given the enormous price we can pay for carrying self-doubt around with us, it’s well worth addressing it systematically and immediately.

There are many things we can do to overcome self-doubt, including:

  • recall that having doubts is universal and that most people have a negativity bias and are their own harshest critic
  • identify the source of our doubts, if possible (e.g., comments from a parent, or a bad experience)
  • write down our positive qualities and accomplishments—and keep them in mind
  • avoid comparing ourselves with others
  • view ourselves through the perspective of someone who’s aware of our strengths—or ask them for feedback on our positive qualities and contributions
  • tune out negative feedback that isn’t accurate—and take accurate feedback as a challenge to improve
  • change our self-talk from negative to positive
  • know and build on our strengths (the things in which we excel)
  • develop ourselves systematically through intentional learning and personal development
  • challenge our doubts regularly (e.g., when we’re doubting our capacities, ask ourselves what if the opposite were true—that we were highly capable)
  • shift our focus from our doubts to our vision for what we’re trying to accomplish—and for whom, such as someone we’re motivated to fight for
  • surround ourselves with people who believe in us, support us, embolden us, and bring out our best—including family, friends, colleagues, coaches, mentors, and small groups (while avoiding people who tear us down)
  • work at building our courage and confidence
  • focus more on areas of our capability and less on areas of weakness
  • forgive ourselves for our mistakes and work on healing our wounds and letting go of old mental baggage that’s weighing us down
  • give ourselves permission to be imperfect, since we all have issues and faults
  • ask ourselves what we’d be doing now if we were committed and brave—and then start taking action in that direction
  • imagine ourselves being successful in taking effective action
  • build momentum by taking action* and making progress on meaningful work and goals (do this daily)
  • take stock of the things we’ll miss out on if we don’t go for them
  • gain clarity about our purpose and values to provide motivational fuel for achieving and honoring them
  • love, connect with, and serve others (that will demonstrate to ourselves and others that we care and contribute)
  • face our fears and in the process build a sense of capability and courage
  • speak up and advocate for ourselves more, in the process re-branding ourselves as champions of our needs and interests
  • imagine how much happier we’d be and how much more we could accomplish if we transformed our doubts into beliefs
  • understand that all results begin with beliefs, because our beliefs turn into thoughts that drive our actions
  • allow our progress and successes to inform our identity and be integrated into our heart (too often, we diminish our accomplishments)
  • engage in consistent self-care practices, especially including exercise, since movement improves our mood and brain function
  • cultivate gratitude for what we have instead of focusing on doubts and fears
  • use an “alter ego” that gives us a sense of agency and power, like Beyonce’s Sasha Fierce, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, or Eminem’s Slim Shady
  • use affirmations (or mantras) to reassert and repeat our positive qualities and aspirations (e.g., “I am enough,” “I am capable,” “I got this”)—ideally with a daily affirmation practice
  • keep a journal in which we allow ourselves to express our feelings openly, including not only doubts and concerns but also victories and celebrations

Though the list above is long, we only need to pick a few that resonate most and get started, then review and adjust. Action and progress will bring energy and motivation.

 

Overcoming Self-Doubt Isn’t about Arrogance and Conceit

Let’s be clear: overcoming self-doubt isn’t about becoming arrogant and conceited. Of course, it’s good to be aware of our weaknesses. Otherwise, we won’t be able to work on and hopefully overcome them. Humility is a virtue—and an important one.

Some degree of self-criticism can also serve as motivational fuel, inspiring us to work harder and improve. And some measure of self-doubt can be a virtue—helping us confront reality and earn wisdom the hard way.

But if we focus too much on our weaknesses, we lose sight of what we can actually do.

“For many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn’t take much—
just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument,
making a mistake at work—to make us feel that we are not okay….
When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency,
we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness.”
-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

 

Conclusion: The Benefits of Addressing Self-Doubt

The benefits of overcoming self-doubt are remarkable. When we feel confident, we act differently. And these new actions can lead to wildly different outcomes. When we overcome self-doubt, we can become more decisive, easygoing, successful, and joyful. We can start shedding each doubt like it’s a crusty old snakeskin.

As we progress, we should watch out for falling back into well-worn patterns of self-doubt. We should be mindful and vigilant, checking to see if we’re able to maintain our newfound self-trust and confidence even when we make mistakes or experienced setbacks—or when we’re treated poorly by others.

In the end, self-trust—faith in our ability to cope with challenges—is what we want and need. When we take action in the face of our doubts, especially bold and decisive action, we dilute their potency and replace them with agency. If we can build on that cycle, it takes on a life of its own and changes everything.

The truth is that we’re highly capable and resilient—and that we always have been.

“You always had the power, my dear.
You just had to learn it for yourself.
You’ve had it all along.”
-Glinda the Good Witch to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
Image source: Adobe Stock

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you wrestling with self-doubt?
  2. How is it affecting your wellbeing, enjoyment of life, and performance?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?
“And when you get lost,
in the stormy moonless night,
may you trust, deeply trust,
as sage, ageless guide,
the true beautiful you.”
-Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence

 

Tools for You

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles

 

Recommended Videos

“…it was regaining my belief in myself that gave me power to change the direction in my life….
I’m living proof that a person’s past does not have to define their future.”
-Dr. B.J. Davis in his TEDx talk, “How to Eliminate Self-Doubt”

Postscript: Inspirations on Overcoming Self-Doubt

  • “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” -William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”
  • “It’s not who you are that holds you back—it’s who you think you are not.” -Eric Thomas (a.k.a., ET, the Hip Hop Preacher)
  • “Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your handbrake on.” -Maxwell Maltz
  • “Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.” -Louise L. Hay
  • “I don’t have to get rid of the fear, I just have to dance with it.” -Tony Robbins
  • “All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors.” -Nisargadatta Maharaj
  • “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.” -Samuel Johnson
  • “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” -Richard Bach
  • “If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.” -Cicero
  • “The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief.” -David J. Schwartz
  • “In order to change ourselves, we must first believe we can.” -Marie Forleo
  • “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” -Abraham Maslow
  • “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” -Les Brown
  • “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” -Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.” -Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

* According to Dr. Margie Warrell, Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, “As research has found and experience has taught me, every time you take action in the presence of your doubts you dilute their power and amplify your own. Only when you dare to do the very thing you doubt you can do, will you realize how little you ever needed to doubt yourself to begin with.” Tony Robbins mapped out what he called the “success cycle,” in which we begin with potential, then take action, which gets results, which builds our belief in ourselves.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Self-Deception: Why We Do It and How to Stop It

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Self-Deception: Why We Do It and How to Stop It by Gregg Vanourek

Article Summary:

What self-deception is, including examples and signs of it, where it comes from, its high costs (as well as some benefits), how it degrades our leadership, and what to do about it.

+++

We all do it. We engage in self-deception—hiding the truth from ourselves about our true feelings, motives, or circumstances. When we’re deceiving ourselves, we’re denying evidence, logic, or reality and rationalizing choices or behaviors to serve a false narrative. We’re not seeing or viewing things accurately. Our self-deception can be conscious or unconscious, controlled or automatic, acute or chronic.

“You can fool yourself, you know. You’d think it’s impossible, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing of all.”
-Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

Self-deception is often a defense mechanism used for self-protection, and it can be used for self-enhancement. But it often becomes a form of self-sabotage and betrayal because it denies reality. When we deceive ourselves, we become our own enemy posing as a friend. Self-deception can involve denial of hard truths, minimization of painful matters, or projection of fault onto others.

“We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.”
-Mark Twain

 

Examples of Self-Deception in Action

Self-deception is tricky because we’re often not aware of it when we’re doing it. (That’s how good we are at it.)

But if we took the time to look for it earnestly, we’d likely find many examples of it in our lives. For example, we may be pretending we still like a job or career when we don’t anymore or concealing our disappointment in ourselves for giving up on our dreams and goals.

Other examples of self-deception in action:

  • a dreamer who keeps postponing big plans with excuses about not having enough time or it not being the right time to start
  • a young single who keeps reading way too much into casual acts by a romantic interest
  • a spouse who keeps focusing on his partner’s faults and ignoring his own issues
  • a worker who spins self-serving tales about why others are getting raises and promotions
  • a person whose wishful thinking about credit-card debt or college loans starts to cause big problems
  • a spouse who looks the other way when there’s clear evidence of infidelity or violence, or a spouse who rationalizes his or her own deception
  • an addict who believes her addictions are under control*

What are we hiding from ourselves?
What truths are we running from?

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.

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Five Signs of Self-Deception

Though it can be hard to detect, there are signs of self-deception in action. For example, we’re probably deceiving ourselves when we:

  1. keep making excuses for ourselves or others
  2. can’t accept responsibility for things
  3. keep blaming others
  4. keep avoiding unpleasant realities
  5. feel defensive or threatened when people challenge us

Our self-deception usually comes with a fair amount of discomfort and anxiety, in part because of the cognitive dissonance we experience when we do it. (Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort we feel when we hold conflict believes, values, or attitudes or when there’s a disconnect between what we believe and how we behave.)

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
-Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist

 

Where Our Self-Deception Comes From

Where does our self-deception come from? It has many potential origins. For example, it can come from:

  • our upbringing or culture programming (seeing instances of self-deception from our parents or others)
  • lacking confidence (lying to ourselves to compensate for insecurity)
  • fear of judgment from others (deceiving ourselves with stories and rationalizations that prevent us from facing that harsh music)
  • wanting to please others (rationalizing the downplaying of our own needs so we can stay in their good graces)
  • wanting to impress others (kidding ourselves into believing we’re better than we are while downplaying our flaws)
  • wanting to avoid painful thoughts or experiences (e.g., after we’ve endured hardship or trauma)
  • preferring the convenience of an easy delusion over a hard truth

We may engage in self-deception out of anxiety, neediness, desire, or other powerful emotions. As humans, we have emotional attachments to many beliefs, some of which may be irrational. Our self-deception can serve as a coping mechanism for strong feelings of shame about our actions, feelings, or habits.

On the plus side, self-deception can make us feel better about ourselves and help us maintain our confidence in the face of challenges and setbacks. But it can also help us avoid taking responsibility for our actions.

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.

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The High Costs of Self-Deception

Self-deception isn’t only a matter of mental games we play. Unfortunately, its consequences are all too real. For example, self-deception can:

  • make it harder to grow and develop because we’re not seeing our flaws clearly
  • detract from our mental and emotional clarity
  • cause us to lose sight of who we really are and what’s real because we’ve been deceiving ourselves so long
  • aggravate our worry and anxiety because it leads to letting things deteriorate further
  • lead to numbing behaviors like binge-watching, overwork, drinking, overeating, and more
  • make us feel like a fraud
  • make us feel exhausted from all the mental gymnastics of lying to ourselves and trying to cover it up
  • lead to inaccurate judgments and poor decisions, since we’re going off of faulty data
  • make us feel shame and guilt
  • lead us to deceiving others often, not just ourselves
  • weaken our relationships
  • diminish our power and agency in directing our lives effectively
  • keep us trapped in bad or even dangerous habits, situations, or relationships
  • become a vicious circle and way of life, a bad habit pattern that keeps harming us in many areas
“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
-Philip K. Dick, writer

In short, it can become a downward spiral leading to further self-deception and a host of other problems in our lives, many of which are quite serious. And the longer we do it, the more we believe the lies.

When we deceive ourselves, we start losing trust in ourselves. We no longer accept and trust ourselves or feel that we have a sense of control in our life.

“Some people spend their entire life in self-deception or denial,
but the situations or circumstances that we are denying will usually get worse with time.”
-Terri Cole, Licensed Clinical Social Worker

According to researchers, when we’re not authentic, it makes us feel immoral and impure. According to Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino and her colleagues in their paper, “The Moral Value of Authenticity”:

“When participants recalled a time that they behaved inauthentically, rather than authentically, they felt more impure and less moral…. When people behave in ways that are inconsistent with their own sense of self, they feel morally tainted and engage in behaviors to compensate for these feelings.”

 

Are There Benefits of Self-Deception?

With all these costs associated with self-deception, it begs the question of why it exists at all. It turns out that there are some benefits of self-deception—in the right circumstances and amount. For example, according to some researchers, self-deception may:

  • help protect us as a coping mechanism or even survival tactic against painful or even intolerable emotions (e.g., after we’ve experienced trauma)
  • help us with our motivation when facing challenging situations
  • reduce cognitive load (the amount of information we can hold at one time in our brain’s working memory) in some circumstances, thus helping to conserve cognitive resources**

In addition, in a 1979 study, researchers noted that depressed people tend to assess their strong and weak points and recall negative criticisms more realistically (with less self-deception), while nondepressed people typically view themselves favorably and underestimate how often others judge them unfavorably. It makes sense that, if self-deception leads to more favorable self-assessments, that can lead to positive feelings that contribute to wellbeing.

In the end, though, many acts of self-deception will end up harming us in the long run if we let them continue.

“Everyone self-deceives, but that doesn’t make it harmless. At high levels, it is associated with poor mental health. At moderate levels, it can temporarily protect the self-deceiver from bad feelings but still presents a barrier to the deep well-being that comes from living with integrity. To be really happy, we must learn to be completely honest with ourselves.” -Arthur Brooks, “Quit Lying to Yourself,” The Atlantic

 

How Self-Deception Affects Our Leadership

In the workplace, self-deception can inhibit our effectiveness and degrade our leadership. For example, it can:

  • limit our growth and potential since we’re not facing up to our weaknesses
  • prevent us from seeing beyond our own opinions and priorities
  • lead to unethical decisions and behaviors, including justifying poor behavior, such as intimidation, harassment, or bullying
  • inhibit our leadership effectiveness and thus organizational productivity
  • lead to crises because we’re in denial about problems and our own role in them
“If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: Never lie to yourself!”
–Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has developed a theory of “self-deception in the service of deception”—a dangerous loop in which people like deceptive and toxic leaders can be so good at deceiving themselves about things that it makes them more effective in deceiving others, because they don’t show the telltale signs of lying. They’re so good at lying to themselves that it makes them adept at lying to others and remaining somehow credible to them.

“…if a liar can deceive himself into believing he is telling the truth, he will be far more effective in convincing others.”
-Daniel Kriegman, Robert Trivers, and Malcom Slavin

Trivers calls this “hiding the truth from yourself to hide it more deeply from others,” and he notes that it can lead to “predatory deception” and exploitation. (It’s noteworthy that self-deception plays a major role in medical conditions such as narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder.)

It doesn’t stop there. In the Arbinger Institute’s book, Leadership and Self-Deception, the authors write, “Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions…. Of all the problems in organizations, self-deception is the most common, and the most damaging.”

The authors point out that that self-deception can lead to treating people like objects because we view their needs as less important than our own, inflating our own virtues and other people’s faults, and a vicious cycle of mutual blame and mistreatment.

They also point out that it’s contagious. The more self-deception occurs, the more it will spread to others.

So what can leaders do to mitigate the negative effects of self-deception? A few things: First, be wary of praise, noting that most people are suckers for praise and that it can distort our perceptions and inflate our ego. Second, be open to tough feedback, especially when we find ourselves resisting it. Third, solicit feedback proactively and regularly, including structured and confidential 360-degree feedback.

“We’re all liars…Entrepreneurs are particularly good at lying to themselves.
Entrepreneurs are the most delusional of all.”
-Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz, Lean Analytics

 

What to Do About It

Though self-deception is a common and vexing problem, there are many things we can do to address it:

  • be on the lookout for examples of it in our own life so we can begin to address it
  • commit to being fully honest with ourselves and “fierce with reality,” as educator Parker Palmer advises
  • engage in regular self-reflection and build self-awareness so that we have a clear sense of who we are, what motivates us, and what trips us up
  • work to understand the root causes that led us to start deceiving ourselves
  • reflect on our fears and where they come from and how they show up in our lives
  • work on our self-acceptance, especially on accepting our flaws
  • develop our confidence so that we truly believe that we’re enough (and thus don’t need to lie to ourselves)
  • remain open to changing our mind about things as we obtain new information or perspectives
  • seek help with being honest with ourselves from trusted friends and colleagues or a coach or mentor
  • when we find ourselves blaming others, shift our focus from the faults of others to ideas about how we can help them
  • journal openly and freely, with stream-of-consciousness observations and reflections (the privacy of our journaling may help us be more fully honest with ourselves)

 

Conclusion: The Benefits of Being Totally Honest with Ourselves

The work of moving from self-deception to fierce acceptance of truth and reality may not be easy, but it’s well worth it. In the process, we’ll start trusting ourselves again and develop our self-acceptance as well as our authenticity.

Meanwhile, we can develop our emotional intelligence, connect more genuinely with others, set a good example by being honest and self-aware, and get better results in our chosen endeavors.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you engaging in self-deception—and in which areas?
  2. How is it holding you back?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

 

Tools for You

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles and Traps

 

Appendix: Self-Deception and Cognitive Biases

Research from psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and many others has shown that we have many cognitive biases—systematic errors in thinking that influence how we make decisions—which can lead to distorted perceptions and faulty judgments. Cognitive biases manifest automatically and unconsciously over a wide range of our reasoning. Researchers have identified at least 58 cognitive biases and heuristics (the process by which we use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions).

Examples of cognitive biases related to self-deception include:

  • Confirmation bias: our tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs or hypotheses.
  • Overconfidence bias: our tendency to overestimate our abilities.
  • Illusion of control: overestimating our ability to control events.
  • Optimism bias: our tendency to overestimate favorable outcomes.
  • Planning fallacy: our tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and to overestimate their benefits.
  • Positive illusion: our unrealistically favorable attitudes towards ourselves or those close to us.
  • Competition neglect: ignoring the likelihood of other entrepreneurs or competitors undertaking the same venture.
  • “Dunning–Kruger effect”: when people with low ability at a certain task overestimate their ability.

According to researchers, we tend to overestimate our positive attributes (e.g., intelligence, competence, attractiveness) and underestimate our negative ones (e.g., character flaws, mistakes). Some telling examples of self-deception and biases in action:

  • The vast majority of us consider ourselves above average.
  • Only 2% of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average; 70% report they’re above average.
  • 25% of people believe they’re in the top 1% in their ability to get along with others.
  • 94% of college professors say they’re doing above-average work.
  • For certain types of questions, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.

Sources: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch (Crown Business, 2010) and Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Penguin, 2016). Peter Borkenau and Anette Liebler, “Convergence of Stranger Ratings of Personality and Intelligence with Self-Ratings, Partner Ratings, and Measured Intelligence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993), 546-553. David Dunning et al., “Flawed Self-Assessment,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5 (2004).

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Self-Deception

  • “All humans have self-deceptions.” -Harry C. Triandis, professor emeritus, University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana
  • “To thine own self be true…. Thou canst not then be false to any man.” -Polonius to his son Laertes in “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare
  • “The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.” -Hannah More
  • “No one wants to be seen as a liar. Liars are considered untrustworthy at best and immoral at worst. And yet, we are perfectly content to lie to ourselves all the time.” -Arthur Brooks, “Quit Lying to Yourself,” The Atlantic
  • “Dishonesty is a trait that most of us have no problem pointing out in others. We feel a sense of anger, disgust, and mistrust towards those who try to deceive us…. Secretly, it feels good to point the finger at others because it makes us feel morally righteous. But here’s the truth: at the end of the day, most of us fail to see that we also lie—to ourselves—frequently…. Deception is such a despicable quality that we would rather disown it than face it honestly.” -Aletheia
  • “Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.” -Sigmund Freud
  • “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, ‘You just blew your entire life. You never dealt with yourself,’ and I don’t want that to happen.” -Caitlyn Jenner
  • “…the ultimate self-help strategy, the one practice that could end all your suffering and get you all the way to happiness. Stop lying.” -Martha Beck in The Way of Integrity
  • “Our lives only improve when we are willing to take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” -Walter Anderson
  • “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
  • “The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.” -Derek Landy, Death Bringer
  • “We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There’s not enough room in a man’s head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.” -Mark Lawrence, Prince of Fools
  • “Life out here is hard. We all try to get through the best way we can. But trust me, there’s not a single person here who isn’t lying to themselves about something.” -Jane Harper, The Lost Man
  • “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • “You can never be true to others, if you keep on lying to yourself.” -Gift Gugu Mona
  • “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” -Thomas Jefferson

* Researchers have observed that drug and alcohol addicts exhibit higher scores of self-deception. Martínez-González JM, Vilar López R, Becoña Iglesias E, Verdejo-García A. Self-deception as a mechanism for the maintenance of drug addiction. Psicothema. 2016; 28(1): 13-9.

** “Cognitive and emotional dissonance are difficult to hold. Self-deception allows us to hold onto this sense of coherence, even though it means we leave out some parts of the truth of who we are and live under some form of illusion.” -Ling Lam, PhD, licensed marriage and family therapist

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Trap of Living Someone Else’s Life

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The Trap of Living Someone Else’s Life

As if life weren’t hard enough sometimes, we all have to navigate the challenge of reconciling our own preferences for living with the influences and expectations of those around us. We have a powerful desire to be free and unencumbered but also a deep-seated desire to be connected and appreciated.

When these desires conflict, we can end up living someone else’s life—chasing the goals and dreams of others instead of our own.

Many people are deeply influenced by the expectations of their parents—or of teachers, coaches, mentors, or peers:

Be a lawyer.
Or consultant.
Run the family business.
Choose the career that pays the most.
Climb the ladder.
(Regardless of who we are and what we want.)

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things IF it’s a good fit for us. That’s the catch. What if they’re not a good fit?

Too often, we don’t run the numbers. Will it be worth it to go along with what someone else wants for our life when we’re the one who has to put in the 90,000 hours or so of lifetime work in that field?

There are many factors we can consider in our work choices: role, title, salary, bonus, team, location, commute, culture, reputation, values fit, growth and promotion opportunities, and more. Early in life, we tend to overweight the extrinsic factors of approval and status and underweight the intrinsic ones. Meanwhile, the intrinsic factors tend to grow in importance over time for most people. If we’re not careful, this complex set of factors can make us feel trapped in a life not of our liking.

 

Signs of Living Someone Else’s Life

How to know if we’re living someone else’s life? It’s hard because, if we’re doing it, we’ve probably gotten good at lying to ourselves. And that’s one of the hardest habits to break.

But the signs are revealing. If we’re living someone else’s life, we may be:

  1. Living the success script of others.
  2. Marrying someone to please or accommodate our parents.
  3. Lacking enthusiasm and motivation for our current path.
  4. Feeling like our life is passing us by.
  5. Envying people who have summoned the courage and conviction to travel their own authentic path in life (what we call “life entrepreneurs”).
  6. Judging others harshly about their situation or choices when deep down we know we’re numbing our own pain and regret.

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.

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Where It Comes From

While some people have no problem with the pressure of living someone else’s life because they naturally revel in their individuality, others struggle mightily with it because of the way they’re wired or the way they were raised. Or both.

Feeling obliged to chase the goals and dreams of others can come from many sources. Here are some of the most common and powerful ones:

Parents and childhood programming. There’s no question that some parents lead us into this trap, albeit with good intentions (or at least ignorance of the pain and suffering they may be causing). Some parents deal with their own disappointment and regret by trying to live vicariously through their children. They view their children’s behavior and choices as a reflection of their own success, worth, and parenting. Some are competitive about their parenting and focus on outdoing their friends and neighbors. Others use their children’s accomplishments as validation of their own success. Usually, there’s a mixed bag of motivations, ranging from genuine desire for their kids’ happiness to willful ignoring of toxic pressure and manipulation. Too often, parents forget (or don’t fully realize or won’t admit) that their children are different from them.

“Some parents see their children as extensions of themselves,
rather than as separate people with their own hopes and dreams.”
-Dr. Brad Bushman, professor, Ohio State University

Insecurity. Maybe we’re not confident about our own ability to choose a good career, or to take a harder path and pull it off. Maybe we feel unworthy. Or maybe we feel lacking in comparison to others—or compared to where we’d like to be or where we think others expect us to be.

People-pleasing. Maybe we’re accustomed to putting others’ needs ahead of our own. This “disease to please” is common, and it can induce us to live for others to avoid risking the disapproval of others or the discomfort of fighting for what we want. We may have a strong sense that our parents will be disappointed if we don’t do what they want us to do. (Note that our parents may have felt similar pressures from their parents, and so on.) This is a sticky wicket because we love our parents and don’t want to disappoint them, but we also want to make our own choices and be happy.

Panic choices. Due to all the pressure we face, it’s easy to panic and choose quickly or even flippantly. Sometimes we default to the path of least resistance while downplaying our deepest desires.

The lack of a compelling alternative. Think of the college student who has always earned good grades. She gets lots of praise and encouragement about climbing the corporate ladder and becoming an executive, with its great compensation and prestige. She wonders if it’s a good fit for her, and yet she’s not sure how else she can make a living. She’s not yet clear on who she is, what she loves to do, and what she wants. When we place that uncertainty up against the clear and direct expectations of loved ones, which side is likely to concede defeat?

 

Why It’s Hard to Avoid This Trap

Most of us grew up seeking the approval of our parents and striving to demonstrate our worth. And we were rewarded when we met their expectations. That can set up some longstanding habits that are hard to break.

Feeling like we’re disappointing people we care about or love can be one of the most difficult feelings we have. It takes courage to resist pressure from those we love and to be who we are. Meanwhile, the fear and doubt that come with breaking free are daunting.

Meanwhile, we see carefully curated versions of our friends’ lives on their social media feeds, not to mention countless ads, all with subtle and not-so-subtle hints about how we should live.

“Discovering vocation doesn’t mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond your reach,
but rather accepting the treasure that you have been given. But make no mistake about it,
well-meaning people around you—friends, family, work associates, and others—will push you to run someone else’s race.”
-Dr. Nicholas Pearce, professor, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

Since the switching costs of changing our career or degree can be high, it can make us reluctant to abandon our current path even when it’s sub-optimal. So, we grind it out.

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.

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The Problem with Living Someone Else’s Life

Decisions about work and marriage are among the most consequential in our lifetime, so the dangers of outsourcing these decisions to others are grave. We can lose big parts of ourselves when we go along with what others want for us, the ones that are precious and fragile. It can be our creative side, our idealistic side, the part of us that comes through in our passions, values, and convictions.

Sometimes when we’re chasing others’ goals and dreams, we’re basing our decisions not on actual pressure to do something but on our assumptions about what people want for us. And it’s possible that we’ve been misreading the situation, sometimes badly, yet never summoned the courage to have the conversation directly.

When we get older, we’re often surprised to discover how little it matters what other people thought way back when. Influences that can seem huge or even overwhelming at one point later turn out to be blips in the larger scheme of things.

Sometimes the expectations of others are a terrible guide for deciding what’s right for us. In many cases, parents or others are projecting their own values and preferences onto us and not seeing the full picture of how different we are and how distinct our context is.

The biggest problem of chasing others’ goals and dreams is that we’re very likely to regret it. After years of work as a palliative nurse caring for people in the final weeks and days of their lives, Bronnie Ware identified the “top regrets of the dying.” The biggest regret she discovered was this:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

 

What to Do About It

If we’ve fallen into the trap of living someone else’s life or at risk of it, what can we do? Fortunately, there are many things we can do to address it:

Consider the bigger picture of our lives and the limited time we have to live them. Bear in mind that we may value our parents’ (or peers’) opinions now more than we will later in life—and that we’ll likely be more satisfied with our choices if we follow our own guiding lights instead of those of others. As we remember that we all die, we can imagine our final days of life and how we’ll feel about chasing others’ goals and dreams instead of our own. (See my article, “What Reflecting on Death Can Teach Us about Living.”)

Question any beliefs about what we should do with our lives because of what others think. We may have been flying on autopilot with those beliefs for a long time. What would happen if we took the controls back? Where would we fly?

Notice when we’re deferring to others and their views about what to do. Catch ourselves in the act of following instead of leading our lives. Reflect on why we’re doing it and whether those reasons will stand up to scrutiny in our distant future—or even now.

Know ourselves. Sometimes the problem is that we don’t know well enough who we are and what we want. These aren’t always easy to discern, especially when someone has been pushing an identity onto us. We can begin by working to clarify the following:

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.

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It’s important to write these down. The act of writing them down not only helps with clarity but can also provide a form of accountability if we have the foresight to revisit it periodically (and to share it with trusted friends and colleagues). (Consider also taking a Traps Test and Quality of Life Assessment.)

Spend time alone and cultivate an inner life in which we tap into our deeper wisdom. Spending time alone and reflecting on the arc of our lives opens space for self-discovery and pattern-mapping, as well as distance from others.

Cultivate self-acceptance: Appreciate what we have and do well while shutting down our inner critic. Replace the negative self-talk with positive self-talk, focusing on our capabilities and accomplishments.

Embrace our uniqueness as part of our identity. Revel in our idiosyncrasies. Be bolder in expressing our true nature and feel the joy and relief of returning home to ourselves.

Learn about and experiment with different career paths and figure out what suits us well. Too often, we get caught up in “climbing mode”—striving to move up the ladder of success, focusing on achievement and advancement—when what we really need is to go deep into “discover mode”—learning about who we are and what we can do in the world (e.g., our values, strengths, passions, aspirations). (See my TEDx talk for more on this.) Start with small steps and be open and curious. There are many ways to run such low-cost probes, including internships, job rotations or shadowing, consulting projects, crowdfunding campaigns, board service, life design interviews, volunteering, and more.

Build up our courage—the courage we’ll need to resist the expectations and pressures from others. Recall that our fears (of disappointing people or of failing at our chosen endeavors) are probably overblown and that many of the best things in life are on the other side of those fears. (See my article, “Getting Good at Overcoming Fear.”) When we make big choices like marriage and career choices, ask ourselves who it’s for and whether we’re being unduly influenced by others.

Spend less time with people who are trying to control or direct us according to their whims and preferences. Terminate the toxic in our life and reduce exposure to unhelpful influences, at least for a period of time that allows us to change our trajectory. In the larger scheme of things, the costs associated with that are well worth it. As we do this, it will be easier to separate our decision about what we’ll do with our lives from our relationship with important people in our lives. Those are two different things, and that decision is ours and ours alone. Realize that it’s impossible to please everyone—and that pleasing others isn’t the point. Far from it.

“It is crucial to understand that loving people and following their scripts prepared for you are not the same thing….
If you make yourself unhappy because you are not living your life,
that has nothing to do with expressing love.
If someone requires this from you—unfortunately, this person does not care about you.”
-Alexandra Ruzycka, filmmaker and writer

Don’t play the victim and blame others. Would we rather be happy with our own life or have someone to blame for making us feel miserable? The choice is ours. And it’s our life, not theirs.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s selfish to do what we want with our life. It’s our life, and we must accept full responsibility for it. Doing so isn’t selfish. Far from it. It’s simply accepting the mantle of adulthood and its accompanying responsibility—a natural progression.

Find someone who’s done a good job of living their own life despite pressures to do otherwise and ask them to share how they went about it. Sometimes it’s helpful to learn from others who have been on a similar journey with comparable influences and pressures.

 

Conclusion

In the end, the reckoning we’ll face for our choices will be ours to bear on our own. Our parents and peers have their own choices to make. We’re more likely to find happiness when we blaze our own path in life by our own guiding lights. And we’re more likely to feel good about betting on ourselves. Our life is ours. Our time is now. What are we doing with it?

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you living someone else’s life—chasing the goals and dreams of others?
  2. How is it affecting your happiness and quality of life?
  3. What will you do about it, starting now?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Living Someone Else’s Life

  • “…surely we can do better than having to look back on our lives and regret that we lived by someone else’s priorities.” -Greg McKeown, writer
  • “It’s better to fail trying to do what you really care about than to succeed at something else.” -Mark Albion
  • “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” -Steve Jobs, entrepreneur
  • “…to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life—the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.” -Hunter S. Thompson, writer
  • “But there is something that’s a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That’s what it means to become an adult…. You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about.” -William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep
  • “Our deepest calling is to grow into our authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be.” -Parker Palmer, author and educator
  • “One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.” -Shannon L. Alder
  • “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, University of California at San Francisco
  • “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
  • “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” -Greg McKeown
  • “You can never find happiness living someone else’s life.” -Marshall Goldsmith
  • “The first step toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to choose to deploy yourself.” -Warren Bennis
  • “I was driven by the expectation that I needed some type of profession. [I was also] driven by parental expectations and by looking at my peers.” -Warren Brown, entrepreneur
  • “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” -Joseph Campbell
  • “…too many of us cling fiercely to imaginary limits we have set for ourselves or accepted from others….” -Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek in LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives
  • “…there is an anointing on your life not to be someone else. You are anointed to be you.” -Joel Osteen, preacher

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

People-Pleasing: Why We Do It and How to Stop It

by
People-Pleasing: Why We Do It and How to Stop It

We all do it sometimes. We put others’ needs ahead of our own. It’s called people-pleasing: having an excessive focus on making others happy at the expense of our own wants and needs. It’s been called “the disease to please.”

We use it to avoid risking the disapproval of others or the discomfort of standing up for what we want. It’s a form of self-neglect as we seek validation from others.

People-pleasing is related to what social psychologists call “sociotropy,” the tendency to place an inordinate value on relationships over personal independence. It often comes with a strong need for social acceptance.

People-pleasing is common. According to a 2022 YouGov poll of a thousand U.S. adult citizens, 49% self-identified as people-pleasers, with 56% of women and 42% of men describing themselves this way.

And it isn’t all bad. Far from it. If we take pleasure in doing things for others, that’s great, and there are real benefits to it. By valuing people, we foster connections. People see that we care and understand their needs. We’re good at getting along with others. We work hard. We’re a nice person who’s empathetic and intuitive.

There are evolutionary reasons behind people-pleasing. We all want to be appreciated and loved. We all adapt our behavior somewhat to make things go more smoothly when we’re with others.

The problem is when we take it too far—when we do it so much that we lose ourselves in others and neglect our own wants and needs.

One danger is that our brains are good at rationalizing it. Since it often involves helping others, we justify our people-pleasing and refuse to account for its many costs.

Of course, we don’t want to move too far in the other direction. Do we want to be people-displeasers? People-antagonizers? People-annoyers? (Yes, some are down for that.) If everything is all about us and what we want, and we never do anything to help others, that can be even worse.

 

Signs of People-Pleasing

There are many signs of people-pleasing. When we’re people-pleasing, we tend to:

  1. find it hard to say no
  2. agree to something we don’t want to do
  3. accept projects with unrealistic deadlines
  4. take on more than we can handle because we don’t want to disappoint someone
  5. shift our own plans and schedules to accommodate others’ needs
  6. have trouble setting boundaries between our work and personal time
  7. take responsibility for making people feel better if they’re upset
  8. try to help people even when they’re not asking for it
  9. apologize for things that aren’t our fault
  10. have a hard time asking for help
  11. show people warmth even when it’s not warranted
  12. flatter people even when we don’t like them
  13. want to appear perfect
  14. go out of our way to avoid conflict
  15. feel miserable when we’ve upset or disappointed someone
  16. disregard our own feelings because we don’t want to jeopardize our relationship
  17. hold our opinion back to maintain harmony
  18. seek frequent reassurance
  19. have a hard time directing people (e.g., children or employees) to do things
  20. get overscheduled and overburdened often

In short, we’d rather have our own needs go unmet than disappoint someone. When we’re a people-pleaser, we’re often the overworked one in our workplace (more so than others). It’s not a fun place to be.

“The corporate world loves people who are pleasers,
because we’re the ones who are always willing to take on any assignment.”
-Susan Schmitt Winchester, corporate HR executive and author

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.

Take the Test

 

Where People-Pleasing Comes From

Where does it come from? If we’re going to be able to do something about it, first we need to understand it.

Beneath our people-pleasing lies a strong desire or need to be liked. We may have learned from childhood that the needs of others come first. Psychologists note that some children use people-pleasing as a coping mechanism to connect with parents who only give love under certain conditions or with parents who are strict disciplinarians or unpredictable. It’s also baked into some cultures and some people’s mistaken views about what it means to be a good woman, wife, mother, caregiver, worker, or friend, among other things.

A common source of people-pleasing is insecurity. If we struggle with validating our own needs and desires, we may seek external validation. We may feel that our own needs are unimportant—or unworthy of respect and love.

Often, it’s the manifestation of a deeper issue such as insecurity or a history of maltreatment that we haven’t yet processed fully. When we’re pleasing, we’re trying to gain acceptance and affiliation by helping, flattering, or saving others. We may worry that fighting for our own needs will drive others away.

People-pleasing often comes with perfectionism, including a strong desire for control over how others perceive us. Finally, people-pleasing tendencies can come from childhood trauma or abuse. We may naturally use pleasing others to help us feel safe and secure.

Common themes underlying all these sources are fear and anxiety.

“People-pleasing is an anxiety response…. (when we’re doing it) what we’re really saying is
‘I’m anxious about something. I’m anxious about not being liked. I’m anxious about being rejected.
Or I’m anxious that I’m not going to get what I want.’
People-pleasing is a manifestation of anxiety.”
-Natalie Lue, author

 

The Problem with People-Pleasing

Though it can have some benefits, as noted above, it also comes with many costs. For example, people-pleasing can lead to:

  • stress
  • anxiety
  • overwhelm
  • exhaustion
  • burnout
  • taking on tasks that others should do
  • downplaying our own ideas and inner wisdom
  • having people take us for granted
  • becoming dependent on external validation
  • having dysfunctional relationships in which people end up liking us for the wrong reasons
  • diminished authenticity, connection, and intimacy in our relationships
  • reduced visibility by others into how overstretched we are because we hide it so well
  • others becoming dependent on us
  • feeling inauthentic because we’re not living life on our own terms
  • losing our own sense of identity
  • lower motivation and confidence
  • feelings of frustration, anger, resentment, and bitterness
  • pain and regret (in some cases because we’ve used people-pleasing as an excuse not to pursue our dreams)

People-pleasing sometimes relies on assumptions about what others want, but often those assumptions are wrong. We can spend a lot of time and effort people-pleasing only to miss the mark.

In the end, people-pleasing inhibits our happiness, connection, and freedom. It can even lead to financial loss, physical jeopardy, or eating disorders (e.g., matching the group’s eating habits to make others feel comfortable).

Left unaddressed, people-pleasing can become a way of life as the whims of others determine our choices and trajectory.

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.

Take the Assessment

 

How People-Pleasing Can Degrade Our Leadership

People-pleasing also has big implications in the workplace. Many leaders struggle with people-pleasing. For example, in two different surveys, 79-91% of pastors admitted to people-pleasing tendencies.

It can make us overloaded with work, pull us away from our most important work as we place others’ needs ahead of our own, and prevent us from learning to delegate and developing the capacities of our team.

People-pleasing can harm our credibility and integrity, our two most important leadership assets. People can sense it when we’re sugarcoating things, and they get frustrated when we’re not clear about what’s going wrong or what needs to change. They will also suffer if they only receive positive feedback, without actual things they can improve going forward.

People-pleasing can inhibit our leadership effectiveness when we get so invested in maintaining a positive rapport with our team that we fail to instill accountability and uphold the results imperative. Workers can take advantage of people-pleasing leaders by playing to their need to be liked and getting them to change their minds after meetings. This only causes frustration among other workers who are fighting hard to get good results the right way.

With people-pleasing, we can portray a false image of friendliness that may come back to haunt us when we need to take tougher action. It can make us avoid taking charge and lead us to tolerate poor performance or bad behavior. Part of the job of leadership is conveying difficult messages clearly and firmly, such as when performance isn’t up to snuff. But people-pleasing leaders tend to send mixed signals. Sometimes leaders need to bring the hard edge of leadership, the “steel.”

In short, people-pleasing can cause big problems for leaders, including indecisiveness, lack of direction and accountability, poor results, and attrition.

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

Take the Assessment

 

What to Do About It

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to escape the trap of people-pleasing. The first set of things has to do with our mindset, and the second with our behavior.

Starting with mindset, we can begin by recognizing that it’s healthy and normal to set boundaries and say no—and that we’re not responsible for how others feel. Self-worth and confidence come from within, not from others. People-pleasing isn’t heroic or noble. It’s not the same thing as kindness.

And we should understand that people-pleasing actually harms relationships because it degrades authenticity and integrity. Recognize that we can’t please everyone and that people-pleasers are often taken advantage of.

We should work at noticing when we’re engaging in people-pleasing (and tempted to)—as well as all its downsides. Meanwhile, we shouldn’t judge ourselves harshly for people-pleasing. We all have work to do in some areas. It’s also important to reflect on how we developed people-pleasing tendencies.

Where does it come from and is it serving us well or harming us?

The second set of things concerns our behavior. Here there are several actions we can take:

1. Buy time. When asked to do something, don’t answer right away. Take a pause. Check in with our emotions. Is the request bringing up overwhelm, resentment, or guilt if we say no? Our immediate urge to agree to all requests is the thing that’s been getting us into trouble. Ask for time to consider it. Let them know we’ll get back to them within a few days. That will give us time to process it, consider it in the context of our other obligations, and craft an appropriate response.

2. Scrutinize the request and the person it’s coming from. Consider whether the person may be taking advantage of us. Recall that healthy relationships are reciprocal, with both people giving and taking. Pay attention to whether we want to help or not. Think before committing.

3. Get clarity on our own purpose, core values, aspirations, and goals. Be clear about the things we want to say yes to—and which things fall out of that zone. Think of all the great things we’re missing out on when we’re neglecting our own wants and needs and doing all the things others want instead.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—
pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically—to say ’no’ to other things.
And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”
-Stephen R. Covey, author

4. Time-block. Block out times in our calendar that are off-limits to outside requests because they’re preserved for our own priorities. Those become an automatic no except in extraordinary circumstances.

5. Practice saying no. Don’t assume that people will be hurt if we don’t agree to a request. It’s possible that they didn’t expect us to agree and that they respect us for guarding our time. Most people get that we all have to say no sometimes. The key is in how we go about it and whether we say no with firmness and grace. (Tip: keep track of our “yes: no ratio” so we can gauge how we’re doing on this front.)

6. Build our confidence and assertiveness. Contrary to popular option, these aren’t set in stone. We can develop them. (See my article, “How to Build Confidence in Yourself and Your Leadership.”)

7. Seek help from a mentor, coach, or therapist. Note that it’s not easy to shift out of longstanding habits like this, and it’s likely to take time. Sometimes our people-pleasing is unconscious, and for some it has become like second nature. Start small.

8. Repeat our approaches for overcoming people-pleasing again and again. Develop new habits and repeat them often, thus rewiring our brain and re-setting others’ expectations.

 

Conclusion

In the end, we have a choice about whether to live out of a fear of not being liked or out of a conviction that our own wants and needs are important and worth pursuing. Will we find a healthy balance between honoring our own needs and serving others, or will we subsume our needs to those of others?

If we don’t get this right, we’re likely to regret it. But if we summon the courage to be who we are and to fight for what we want and need, we’ll end up with more authenticity, joy, and fulfillment.

Wishing you well with it.
–Gregg

 

 

 

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you people-pleasing?
  2. How is it affecting your well-being, quality of life, and leadership?
  3. What will you do, starting today, to address it?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles, Books, and Videos

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Overcoming People-Pleasing

  • “Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” -Lao Tzu
  • “People-pleasing comes from an underlying emotion of fear.” -Salma Hindy, Canadian engineer and comedian
  • “…anytime we’re doing something that is more about influencing what others think of us than it is about authentically expressing ourselves… we end up out of integrity with ourselves.” -Christine Carter
  • “Keep this question in mind: If I was no longer people-pleasing and abandoning myself and my needs, what would I be doing, thinking, and feeling?” -Maria Sosa
  • “The first step toward change is to refuse to be deployed by others and to choose to deploy yourself.” -Warren Bennis, leadership author
  • “When you are saying no authentically, you can also say yes authentically. You are doing things that are really in integrity with who you are, your values, and how you want to feel instead of doing them out of obligation or for some hidden agenda.” -Natalie Lue, author
  • “We owe it to ourselves to stop (people-pleasing), because we are meant for more.” -Salma Hindy, Canadian engineer and comedian
  • “A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” -Mahatma Gandhi

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

What to Do About Overthinking, Rumination, and Worrying

by
What to Do About Overthinking, Rumination, and Worrying

One of the common traps of living affecting so many of us these days is overthinking—excessively analyzing something or dwelling on possibilities and second-guessing ourselves. We think about some things—mostly bad things—too much and for too long.

It can be mentally replaying awkward conversations or embarrassing moments repeatedly. That time we got dumped by our childhood crush. Or worrying about an upcoming presentation or interview. Putting off asking for a promotion or raise because we’re overthinking. Our thoughts spiral out of control when our boss mentions out of the blue that we need to talk.

I’ve fallen into this trap many times. I remember cringing repeatedly at my lame attempts to woo a girl in school that ended in flames of humiliation and self-flagellation. I recall jogging around a lake over and over again for months wondering if I should leave a job before finally stopping in my tracks and realizing that the prevalence of that question was a clear answer. Yet I struggled for months.

Overthinking is common. According to researcher Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, 73 percent of people aged 25 to 35 admitted to overthinking at some point in their lives. She also found that overthinking is more common among women than men, but common among both.

When author Jon Acuff and Dr. Michael C. Peasley of Middle Tennessee State University studied overthinking, they asked 10,000 people if they struggle with overthinking. The result? 99.5% of respondents said “yes.” What’s more 73% reported that it made them feel inadequate, and 52% noted that it left them feeling drained.

There are two prevalent forms of overthinking: ruminating and worrying.

 

Type 1: Rumination

One common form of overthinking is rumination, in which we engage in involuntary, compulsive thinking. We get stuck in negative thought loops and uncomfortable emotions.

Rumination tends to involve repetitive thinking about negative past events, problems, or concerns. With rumination, our thoughts can become so overwhelming and excessive that we can’t stop them.

It’s a dominant symptom of anxiety and depression, and it’s also habit-forming since we’re laying down neural pathways in our brains when we do it.

“This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction.
What characterizes an addiction?
Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop.
It seems stronger than you.”
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

 

Type 2: Worrying

Another common form of overthinking is worrying. When we’re worrying, we’re experiencing discomfort with uncertainty, leading to anxiety and stress. We’re constantly wondering, “What if…?”

Worrying involves fear and anxiety from anticipating that we may experience something negative or harmful. When we worry, sometimes we fixate on small details and lose sight of the big picture (such as a low probability of a bad event and a high probability that we’ll be able to deal with it just fine if it occurs).

Sometimes worrying can take over, making us lose control of our thoughts. It can lead to procrastination, numbing ourselves via distractions, or excessively seeking constant reassurances from others.

“To think too much is a disease.”
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

Signs of Overthinking

Beyond the examples of rumination and worrying noted above, overthinking can include the following:

  • having trouble shutting off our thoughts at night (or other times)
  • criticizing ourselves excessively for something we did in the recent past
  • having so many thoughts and not knowing where to start
  • cycling through possible scenarios in our minds
  • fearing that we’re not enough and that others will judge us harshly or reject us
  • frequently wondering what others are thinking of us
  • assuming the worst and imagining terrible outcomes (i.e., catastrophizing)
  • telling ourselves we can’t do things and bombarding ourselves with negative self-talk
  • getting caught up in “analysis paralysis” and not moving forward on things
  • fearing that we’ll never get better or that our situation won’t improve

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.

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Where It Comes From

Overthinking in all its forms, including rumination and worrying, comes from many sources. It can come from trying to control a situation, trying to get more clarity about what to do next, or trying to predict what will happen to reduce our anxiety. A common underlying theme is discomfort with uncertainty.

Those who are motivated by achievement, prestige, or perfectionism can be more prone to overthinking. According to neuroscientist Sanam Hafeez, “Perfectionists and overachievers have tendencies to overthink because the fear of failing and the need to be perfect take over, which leads to replaying or criticizing decisions and mistakes.”

Overthinking can also be a habit picked up from our childhood—something we learned from having to deal with tough situations such as over-controlling parents. It can come from trying to reduce feelings of helplessness or grasping for comfort. We convince ourselves that there may be a solution to the problem if only we keep thinking it through.

In addition, overthinking can come from urges to procrastinate or avoid decisions. In essence, we’re convincing ourselves that we can’t make a decision because we haven’t analyzed it enough yet, and that allows us to avoid blame for being wrong.

Finally, it can come from stresses or trauma, which causes our brains to get stuck in a state of hyper-vigilance as a defense mechanism.

 

Overthinking and Leaders

Overthinking can be a big problem for leaders. Many leaders must make hundreds of decisions a day, a stressful burden. Some leaders can get lost in deliberation so much that it inhibits decision-making and necessary action.

In her book, Trust Yourself, Melody Wilding talks about “sensitive strivers,” high achievers who think and feel more deeply. Studies show, she notes, that they have more active brain circuitry and chemicals in neural areas related to mental processing, and that they comprise about 15-20% of the population.

How do followers respond to leaders who overthink? Summarizing research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Professor Zakary Tormala noted that “people seem to be less drawn to and less open to being influenced by individuals who overthink small decisions or ‘underthink’ big ones.” What people want, according to the researchers, is an appropriate level of “thought calibration” that adjusts the level of thinking to the significance of the decision at hand.

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

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The Problem with Overthinking

Unfortunately, overthinking and its manifestations can get us into trouble in many areas. For example, it can:

  1. lead to mental fatigue and burnout and make us feel drained
  2. elevate our stress levels
  3. disturb our sleep
  4. harm our health, potentially including suppressed immune functioning and increased incidence of coronary problems, according to medical professionals
  5. increase our risk of mental health problems, substance abuse, or suicide
  6. lead to avoidance
  7. impede our ability to make decisions
  8. lead to inaction
  9. cloud our judgment
  10. waste our time
  11. reduce our productivity
  12. interfere with our problem-solving, since we end up dwelling on problems instead of solving them
“If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it.
If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it.”
-Dalai Lama
  1. crowd out our heart, intuition, and inner wisdom, as we overindulge in cerebral thinking and analysis
  2. inhibit our creativity
  3. harm our relationships by driving people away, causing new problems like loneliness or isolation
  4. sap our sense of agency and control in our lives
  5. prevent us from achieving our dreams

In the end, our overthinking gets us nowhere, because our mind keeps coming up with new questions and concerns. Often, we’re overthinking about things that we have no control over, a true waste of time and energy. And we’re imagining worst-case scenarios that rarely come to fruition.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
-Seneca, ancient Roman philosopher

We tend to engage in negative thoughts when we’re overthinking, not positive ones. Researchers have found that we have a negativity bias, a tendency to register negative stimuli more readily and to dwell on them. As humans, we weight negative events more heavily than positive ones.

“We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up,
and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking,
we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past,
of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, author, and teacher

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.

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What to Do About Overthinking

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to address our overthinking. Below are dozens of simple practices from which we can choose.

Catch ourselves in the act of overthinking. If we can bring this mischievous habit into our awareness, then we can begin reprogramming our brains with more enjoyable and productive ways of thinking. Author Melody Wilding recommends using a pattern interruption technique such as silently saying “stop” when we start overthinking, visualizing our worries floating away, or flicking a rubber band on our wrist when we catch ourselves overthinking.

Recognize that a key to success in life is taking more action more often. One of the biggest mistakes we make in our lives is having a thought-to-action ratio that’s way off kilter and top-heavy toward thought, weighing us down in anxiety and inaction. Change our focus from problems and worries to solutions and actions.

“The antidote to overthinking isn’t more thinking—the antidote is action.
You don’t think your way out of overthinking. You act your way out.”
–Jon Acuff, Soundtracks

Decide to become a person of action instead of an overthinker. Enjoy getting lost in doing things. Try it for a while and note the differences across domains of our lives, from energy and momentum to confidence and results.

Recognize that our thoughts are like a dial, not a switch. This insight from David Thomas, author and Director of Family Counseling at Daystar in Nashville, teaches us that we can’t switch off our thoughts, but we can turn the volume down on rumination and negative thoughts—especially via actions.

Practice making quick decisions. Start with small things and count down from three: “three, two, one… choose.” Then go with it. Get used to a faster decision cycle and note the results. Develop decision processes and criteria, such as prioritizing our core values when making important decisions.

Determine what’s creating fear in us. Get better at recognizing how many of our fears are false phantoms, much like the childhood monsters we feared lurking under our beds. And get better at overcoming our fears.

Focus intensely on something. Listen to music and focus intently on something in it, like the lyrics or the guitar line. Or study a drawing or painting and examine the shapes, lines, colors, and proportions.

Learn what our overthinking triggers are and avoid them. They could be certain social media accounts, news sites, or sticky situations with certain people.

Give ourselves a time budget for how long we’re allowed to think about something. Then choose to move on after that. Our overactive minds may be satisfied with a fixed allotment of thinking time. (Some people call this “worry time” and report that it’s comforting to them.)

Develop our confidence and learn to trust ourselves more. Learn to trust that things will probably be okay and work to overcome any instances of “impostor syndrome.”

Determine the things that we do have control over and focus on them. If we’re worried about an important upcoming meeting, we can do a great job preparing for the meeting and then make sure we get a good night’s rest and arrive early to set up. Then we can be satisfied that we’ve done our job.

Get better at letting things go. Recognize that we’re probably placing way more weight on things than the situation warrants. While we may be beating ourselves up over a situation, it’s likely that others hardly noticed our part in it or just moved on. People think way less of us than we imagine.

Change our thoughts into questions. For example, we can shift a thought from “I can’t believe I said that” to “What could I say differently next time?” We can change a thought from “I don’t have close friends” to “What should I do to be a better friend?”

Get some exercise. This leads to the removal of stress hormones and comes with so many benefits, including better brain health, greater muscle and bone strength, reduction in the incidence of disease, better mood, greater energy levels, and more.

Get out into nature. Our brains become calmer and sharper after we spend time in nature, according to researchers. We can hike in the woods or do some gardening, giving our minds a chance to enjoy the break and focus on pleasant sights and activities.

Try relaxation techniques. Examples include taking deep breaths or doing yoga. The research is clear that such simple acts can dial down the mental noise in our heads.

Do things that interest us and that occupy our attention. Engage in fun activities and hobbies. These can bring relaxation, contentment, and satisfaction into our lives and reduce our stress—and even better if we do them with others.

Connect to our senses. Try the “54321 grounding method,” in which we take deep breaths and become aware of our surroundings and then look for five things we can see, four things we can touch, three things we can hear, two things we can smell, and one thing we can taste. Simple exercises like this can help stop the drumbeat of our thoughts.

Journal. It’s cathartic to write our thoughts down. Writing our thoughts down can stop us from ruminating. It can restore a sense of control as we gain insights and discern patterns. Journaling doesn’t have to be formal or structured. We can do a simple brain dump and just write down our thoughts as they arise.

Help others with small acts of service or simple acts of kindness. This is a great way to add more meaning and connection in our lives while also getting us out of our own heads.

Lean into positive relationships. By being with others, we can engage and connect, have fun, support each other, and silence our mental gremlins.

Replay happy memories. Instead of feeding into worries or concerns, relive good times and happy memories. Talk with an old friend or flip through a cherished photo album.

Find sanctuary. These are places or practices of peace that reconnect us with our heart. (See our article, “Renewing Yourself Amidst the Chaos.”)

Go out on adventures. Adventure makes us feel more fully awake, alive, and free. It fuels us with the energy and excitement of exploration. And it takes our minds off the mundane. It’s hard to ruminate when we’re climbing a mountain or trekking in new areas. (See my article, “Why We Want Adventure in Our Lives—And How to Get It.”)

Bring awe back into our lives. Awe is a powerful emotion and a marker for life at its grandest. It gives us an experience of vastness and mystery. How much can we worry when we’re gazing at the cosmos, studying the intricacies of a spider web, or experiencing a great performance? (See my article, “The Power of Awe in Our Lives.”)

Engage in prayer, worship, or spiritual contemplation. By doing so, we can rise above the immediate concerns of our overactive mind and tap into something larger than ourselves with reverence, gratitude, and wonder.

Meditate. According to researchers, meditation can calm our sympathetic nervous system and decrease our anxiety, stress, and emotional reactivity. Meanwhile, it can help with our focus and overall well-being.

“If you want to conquer overthinking, bring your mind to the
present moment and reconnect it with the immediate world.”
-Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

Talk to a friend—or a professional therapist or counselor. Part of the value here is getting things off our chest, which can reduce our propensity to keep thinking about them, not to mention learning new coping skills.

Clearly, there are many things we can do to address our overthinking. The point isn’t that we must do all of them. We should experiment with the ones that are instinctively most appealing and determine which ones work the best for us.

Let’s also note here what doesn’t work in trying to overcome overthinking. We know from research that we can’t just tell ourselves not to have certain thoughts. That can lead to more thoughts on the subject at hand. For example, if we’re told not to think of a pink elephant, our brains will do the opposite and think about it. Instead, we need to replace negative thoughts with different and better ones.

 

Conclusion

These days, we ask a lot of our minds. We shock them with breaking news alerts and crises around the world. We feed them with email, social media, digital entertainment, and all manner of stimuli.

If the quality of our lives is influenced deeply by the quality of our thoughts, isn’t it worth addressing our negative thinking patterns like overthinking, rumination, and worrying? How much more peace, joy, and impact might we have if we were to restore a healthier balance between our head and our heart?

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you struggling with overthinking, rumination, or worrying?
  2. How is it affecting your mental health, well-being, performance, and happiness?
  3. What will you do to tame your overthinking dragons?

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles

 

Related Books

  • Jon Acuff, Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking
  • Eckart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • Melody Wilding, Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work
  • Jennie Allen, Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts
  • Nick Trenton, Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present
  • Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Women Who Think Too Much

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Overthinking

  • “While you were overthinking, you missed everything worth feeling.” -Nitya Prakash
  • “Overthinking steals time, creativity, and productivity by making you listen to broken soundtracks. Do you know what happens when you listen to new ones? You give your dreams more time, creativity, and productivity.” -Jon Acuff, Soundtracks
  • “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie
  • “Good days start with good thoughts.” -Jon Acuff, Soundtracks
“A crowded mind
Leaves no space
For a peaceful heart.”
-Christine Evangelou, writer

 

Appendix: Support Resources

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Are We Numbing Our Lives Away?

by
Are We Numbing Our Lives Away? by Gregg Vanourek

One of the most insidious traps that we can fall into these days is numbing—escaping from our thoughts and feelings by doing other things. When we do this, we’re taking the edge off feelings that cause us pain or discomfort. We’re anesthetizing difficult emotions. The problem is compounded by the fact that many families and cultures teach people, either explicitly or implicitly, to suppress their feelings.

We can numb not only with things like alcohol, drugs, or smoking but also with binge-watching shows or doom-scrolling social media. Our numbing might be excessive work and busyness or constant emailing and texting.

“…one of the most universal numbing strategies is what I call crazy-busy….
We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that
if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Our numbing can entail shopping, gambling, eating, or sex—or even excessive exercising or cleaning. Some of these, like exercise, can be healthy in moderation but become problematic when done excessively.

Increasingly, we’re seeing what I call “power-numbing”—engaging in several numbing behaviors at the same time, such as drinking, texting, and scrolling while binge-watching. (My friend Renae Jacob calls it “multi-vicing.”)

The point isn’t that we have to stop doing all these things. Some can be done in moderation or even often. The key is choosing which behaviors serve us and not letting ourselves unconsciously numb swaths of our life away. The point isn’t to deprive ourselves of pleasures but rather to stop escaping from our lives.

A key consideration is the severity of the behavior in question. Our numbing behaviors can range from mild or moderate to severe, and at the further end of that spectrum lies addiction.

 

Addiction and Numbing

In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher Brene Brown describes addiction as “chronically and compulsively numbing and taking the edge off of feelings.”

According to researchers, having an addiction disorder entails losing our ability to choose freely whether to stop or continue a behavior. An addiction leads to adverse consequences when we engage in it, such as problems with our life or work roles, financial loss, emotional trauma, dangerous situations, or bodily injury or impairment. Meanwhile, when we stop the behavior abruptly, it often leads to irritability, anxiety, feelings of helplessness or hopelessness, or depression.

In essence, addiction is an attempt to use shortcuts to feeling good, but it doesn’t work. Many factors can fuel addictions, including trauma, addictive medications, genetic disposition, sexual and gender stresses, and related disorders that coincide with the addiction.

Unfortunately, addictions are common, and they can lead to other addictions as well. According to the Addiction Center, nearly 21 million Americans have at least one addiction, yet only 10% of them receive treatment.

The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics reports the following about addiction in the U.S.:

  • Of the nearly 140 million people 12 and older who drink alcohol, more than 20% of them suffer from alcohol abuse or addiction
  • 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or addiction
  • Drug abuse and addiction cost more than $700 billion annually in healthcare expenses, crime-related costs, and lost workplace productivity
  • About half of individuals with a diagnosed mental illness will also struggle with substance abuse at some point in their lives, and vice versa
“…statistics dictate that there are very few people who haven’t been affected by addiction.
I believe we all numb our feelings. We may not do it compulsively or chronically,
which is addiction, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t numb our sense of vulnerability.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

The problem isn’t confined to substance abuse. Many people are addicted to work. Technology is also a big culprit these days, with giant tech companies creating addictive products and big-data algorithms adept at capturing our attention and rewiring our brains. Think of how quickly we’ve handed over huge chunks of our days—and thus our lives—to devices and screens.

When it comes to smartphones, according to Zippia Research in 2022:

  • The average American spends 5 hours and 24 minutes on their mobile device daily
  • Americans check their phones 96 times per day, on average (once every ten minutes)
  • 47% of people believe they’re addicted to their phones
  • 71% of people admit to checking their phone within the first ten minutes of waking up
“Imagine walking into a control room with a bunch of people hunched over a desk with little dials, and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today…. Right now it’s as if all of our technology is basically only asking our lizard brain what’s the best way to impulsively get you to do the next tiniest thing with your time, instead of asking: in your life, what would be time well spent for you?”
-Tristan Harris, Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology

According to recent research on binge-watching:

  • 73% of Americans admit to binge-watching video content
  • The average binge lasts three hours and eight minutes
  • 90% of millennials and members of Generation Z binge-watch
  • 70% of Americans aged between 30 and 44 often binge-watch TV shows or films
  • 26% of those aged 18 to 29 binge-watch TV every day

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.

Take the Test

 

Why We Numb

Numbing behaviors are essentially avoidance mechanisms. There are many factors behind our numbing impulses. Here are 12 common factors:

  1. pain
  2. anxiety
  3. disconnection from others—and its related feelings of loneliness and isolation
  4. feelings of unworthiness
  5. discomfort with uncertainty
  6. stress caused by competing demands on our time
  7. feelings of emptiness
  8. the hurt from feeling unseen
  9. disappointment at ourselves for not being able to handle everything perfectly
  10. the sense that we’re living a life in which we’re not true to ourselves
  11. trauma
  12. abuse

Beneath the discomfort that we’re escaping are fears—fears of failing or struggling or looking bad or feeling unworthy.

We can also have urges to numb if we have a deadening job that’s boring, monotonous, and lacking opportunities for autonomy and initiative—or if our work lacks purpose, connection, or opportunities for development and recognition.

 

The Problem with Numbing

Numbing is a short-term defense mechanism that can end up making things worse for us. It can lead to financial and health problems as well as fights with loved ones or broken relationships (sometimes because we lash out at others when our pain finally surfaces after being repressed).

When we numb, we may feel flat, both physically and emotionally, and become distant or detached from others, perhaps preferring isolation, which can lead to loneliness and despair. We may lose interest in activities we used to enjoy and stop being present in our own lives. Numbing can also diminish our motivation and creativity.

An unintended side effect of our numbing is that it works in both directions. Numbing difficult emotions such as pain and sorrow also numbs our experiences of happiness and joy.

“We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Also, we may need more and more of the numbing behavior to feel good, setting us up for trouble down the road.

We may not notice that there are also indirect “opportunity costs” of our numbing behaviors—the value of what we could have been doing if we weren’t numbing. Instead of working excessively or binge-watching, what if we were connecting more with loved ones, reading a great book, learning a new language or musical instrument, getting our hands dirty with gardening, visiting new places, gazing at the stars, or reveling in the richness of being alive?

“When we numb, we walk away from ourselves.”
-Andrea Owen, How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t

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.

Take the Assessment

 

What to Do About It

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to reduce our numbing behaviors and mitigate their impacts. Here are many useful approaches:

Recognize that our bodies are trying to speak to us through our emotions. Our emotions can serve an important role as signals or warnings, but only if we pay attention to them. But numbing deprives us of the chance to do so.

Realize that we started numbing for a reason—and reflect to discover what that reason was. Are we feeling overwhelmed at work, or conflicted between our home and work roles, or powerless to help someone we care about?

Notice our numbing behaviors. Be curious about what thoughts and feelings lead to an urge to numb:

Why? Where is it coming from? What are we trying to avoid? What lesson or insight might it hold for us?

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown recommends asking if the numbing behavior (e.g., drinking, overworking, etc.) stops us from being emotionally honest, feeling like we’re enough, setting boundaries, and connecting with others. Consider whether we’re using it to escape from our lives.

Name the feelings that cause us to want to numb (e.g., overwhelm, shame, loneliness, despair). Sometimes getting clarity and understanding can open the door not only to relief but also to important insights and hope for improvement.

Take time to feel what we’re feeling—what author Andrea Owen calls “controlled emoting”—and accept our feelings as worthy. Learn how to feel our feelings instead of numbing or dismissing them. Accept ourselves fully without judging ourselves and thinking we’re bad when we have certain thoughts.

Sit with our pain, leaning into it. Connect with it and acknowledge it instead of fleeing it. Though many of us were taught to avoid or suppress emotional pain, that only makes things worse. Our pain is there for a reason, and we can handle it better when we allow ourselves to feel and process it and then, eventually, to let it go as it moves through us.

Talk about our feelings with a trusted friend or trained counselor or therapist. Choose one who can listen attentively and empathetically without trying to fix us. (See the end of this article for a list of support resources.)

Trust that we’ll be okay. Recall all we’ve experienced and overcome in the past.

Take a break from our go-to numbing behaviors, such as social media or streaming shows.

Leo Babauta, founder of Zen Habits, recommends setting a “practice container” to address numbing with the following steps:

Choose to do something productive instead of numbing. Go for a walk to clear our head or try journaling. Choose something we enjoy and that adds value to our lives.

Recognize that the addiction wants us to isolate from others. That’s the worst thing we can do. Numbing behaviors tend to thrive in secrecy, so we must bring them to light.

Pray for help in facing and healing our pain, particularly with chronic numbing behaviors or addictions that feel overwhelming. (For those struggling with addiction, consider support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous—and see more below—and their guiding principles such as the 12 Steps.)

Serve others, even in small ways. Contributing to others can take us out of a wallowing self-focus and give us a chance to feel good about helping people, even via small acts of support or kindness.

 

Conclusion

As humans, we all feel pain and discomfort, so it’s understandable that we’re tempted to escape it via numbing. We need to learn, though, that too much numbing makes things worse, not better.

Avoiding gets us nowhere.
Anesthetizing is a temporary salve.
Escaping doesn’t help at all.

Better instead to turn and face the discomfort, listen to what it’s telling us, and do something about it—ideally, with help from others. Going it alone isn’t wise, so we need to get better at asking for help and letting people experience the satisfaction of helping us.

The alternative to numbing is experiencing life more fully and addressing the inevitable challenges we face head-on.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you numbing with screens, work, substances, or other escapes from your thoughts and feelings?
  2. What’s driving those behaviors?
  3. How will you start to break the cycle?

 

Tools for You

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles

 

Related Resources

Brene Brown Gifts of Imperfection

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Overcoming Numbing

  • “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.” -Brene Brown
  • “I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can’t feel anymore.” -John Bradshaw
  • “We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.” -Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are
  • “When you’re in survival mode, you numb yourself.” -Clemantine Wamariya
  • “I learned to be with myself rather than avoiding myself with limiting habits; I started to be aware of my feelings more, rather than numb them.” -Judith Wright
  • “I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.” -Audre Lorde
  • “She goes from one addiction to another. All are ways for her to not feel her feelings.” -Ellen Burstyn, American actress
  • “The priority of any addict is to anaesthetize the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.” -Russell Brand
  • “Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.” -Johann Hari
  • “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.” -Benjamin Alire Sáenz
  • “What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” -Alice Miller
  • “At first, addiction is maintained by pleasure, but the intensity of the pleasure gradually diminishes and the addiction is then maintained by the avoidance of pain.” -Frank Tallis
  • “Drugs take you to hell, disguised as heaven.” -Donald Lyn Frost
  • “Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You’re like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you’ll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal.” -Anne Clendening
  • “Addiction is the only prison where the locks are on the inside.” -unknown
  • “Remember just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.” -Robert Downey, Jr.
  • “Never underestimate a recovering addict. We fight for our lives every day in ways most people will never understand.” -unknown
  • “…almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong…. A core part of addiction… is about not being able to bear to be present in your life…. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” -Johann Hari in his 2015 TED talk
  • “Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to—alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person—you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain. That is why, after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up being the biggest step of your life. Tip toe if you must, but take the step.” -Naeem Callaway

 

Appendix: Support Resources

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Taking Stock of Your Quality of Life

by
Taking Stock of Your Quality of Life

When it comes to our health, we don’t think twice about going to the doctor for a check-up or for an annual physical.

In school, we take exams. At work, we have performance reviews.

In business, we have audits. In stores, we take inventory.

In sports, we do a post-game review. In the military, an after-action review. In medicine, a post-mortem.

So what do we do when it comes to the quality of our lives?

For most of us, nothing at all.

Huh?

What could matter more than the quality of our lives?
And yet we leave it unaddressed and unassessed.

Strange.

Thousands of years ago, Socrates wrote that “An unexamined life is not worth living.” And in the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau urged:

“Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.”

Intuitively, we get this.

And yet.

Most of us spend way more time evaluating our projects and games than we do our lives.

Too busy for this? Think again.

How can we know whether we’re on track? How can we expect to make needed changes if we don’t first take the time to identify our pain points?

“The busier you are, the more intentional you must be.”
-Michael Hyatt

Enter the quality of life assessment.

 

Quality of Life Assessment

My Quality of Life Assessment is short and simple, and it focuses on ten important areas of our lives:

  1. Personal Core
  2. Health
  3. Spouse or Partner* (if applicable)
  4. Family
  5. Friends
  6. Education
  7. Work* (if applicable)
  8. Service
  9. Activities
  10. Financial

* Note that work can include parenting, household management, family caregiving, and/or volunteering.

“Every day we have decisions to make about how we want to live….
We must take charge of how we spend our days….
Otherwise, we may one day wake up to find ourselves brilliantly situated for a life we do not want.”
-Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek in LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives

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.

Take the Assessment

 

Four Keys to the Quality of Life Assessment

There are four keys to taking the Quality of Life Assessment:

 

1. Be honest with yourself.

With ten areas of life assessed, there will always be tradeoffs. The point is not to expect high scores in all areas at all times. Our lives have natural ups and downs. If we don’t like some scores, it’s not a time to beat ourselves up. (We do enough of that already.) The good news is that, with clarity about pain points, we’ve now brought them into our awareness (versus ignoring them or pretending they’ll magically go away). We should give ourselves grace even while committing to taking action.

“If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: never lie to yourself.”
-Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist

2. Place it in perspective.

With our full schedules, we may be tempted to crank out the assessment and then focus only on the lowest scores and attack those areas. That’s a fine start, but it risks losing sight of the larger story. First, there may be things to celebrate in the results—either because the scores are high or because they’ve improved. Even some middling scores are worthy of celebration if they’re hard-earned or if the circumstances are challenging. We should remember to be grateful for what we do have and proud of what we have accomplished even as we look to improve. With our negativity bias and propensity for negative self-talk and rumination, we shouldn’t turn this into an exercise in cruel self-judgment. (Self-compassion works much better.)

As we look at both the scores and the overall picture, we should view it in the context of the current chapter of our lives, what we want, and what’s required of us—and then choose one or two areas to work on at a time so we don’t get overwhelmed. (Too often, we take on too much, only adding to our anxiety and setting us up for problems.)

 

3. Share and discuss our assessment with others.

The assessment and its attendant reflection process can be a solo activity but it’s so much richer when shared with others. We may feel a bit vulnerable about revealing our scores to others, but there’s an opportunity for real connection in the sharing process—not to mention new ideas, inspiration, support, and/or accountability from our collaborators. Discussing the assessment can be a great thing to do with our spouse or partner, children, and/or friends or colleagues—or in a small group. (The online tool comes with email forwarding functionality, so you can send it to others directly.)

 

4. Revisit it periodically.

This process is most valuable when it’s done periodically. Different people will prefer a different frequency. For some, it can be monthly or quarterly; for others, semi-annually or annually. There’s of course no right answer, except that it comes down to personal preference—and that the key is doing it consistently. (The online tool comes with a reminder option: we can set it up to remind us to consider taking the assessment again in the future.)

For the review process, we can also go further and set goals for each area—or only for the one or two improvement areas that we want to work on. We can also calendarize activities in each area—or, again, only in the improvement areas that we want to work on—so that actions arising from the review show up in our schedule. That way, we’ll keep this process front-and-center in our lives.

The point, of course, is not to take the assessment and be done with it. Rather, it’s to take the assessment (on a regular cadence), discuss it with trusted friends and colleagues who have our best interests at heart, and then decide what changes we want to make and get on with making them happen. It’s not rocket science, but it does require insight, motivation, commitment, and action.

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.

Take the Assessment

 

Conclusion

We’ve seen the value of assessments in so many different areas—from health and work to sports and finances—so why not extend the practice to our lives? It’s possible that, with just a short amount of time and thought, we can identify the areas that are going well (and celebrate them) as well as note the areas that need work. Our future selves are likely to thank us for it.

“Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down.
We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the frantic way we live
that it’s important we take at least this one collective sigh and stop,
take stock, and acknowledge our place in time before diving back into the melee.”
-Hillary DePiano, New Year’s Thieve

 

Reflection Questions

  • Have you checked in about your quality of life recently?
  • What’s stopping you from taking a quick snapshot?

Wishing you well with this review process. Let me know if I can help.
–Gregg

Gregg Vanourek and his dog

 

 

 

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on the Importance of Taking Stock

  • “How will you measure your life?” -Clayton Christensen
  • “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau
  • “Being too busy, which can seem necessary and unavoidable, can become a habit so entrenched that it leads you to postpone or cut short what really matters to you, making you a slave to a lifestyle you don’t like but can’t escape. You can be so busy that you don’t even take the time to decide what actually does matter most to you, let alone make the time to do it.” -Dr. Edward Hallowell in Crazy Busy
  • “Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” -Clayton Christensen
“It is all too easy to speed through life with our eyes focused only on the road ahead.
The challenge is scanning the horizon from time to time to determine where we are headed.
To stay on track, we need to take regular stock of our decisions and actions.
Reflection keeps us focused on the right priorities and accountable to our vision and goals.
To hold ourselves accountable, we should adopt a regular routine of checking progress against our goals,
ensuring that our actions reflect our priorities…. It helps to set regular check-in times.”
-Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives

Note: For aggregate data on how people rate their lives, see Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

How to Overcome Feelings of Helplessness

by
overcome feelings of helplessness

As much as we may hate to admit it, we all feel helpless sometimes. Unable to do anything to help ourselves. Powerless in the face of negative events.

Failure appears inevitable. Our efforts seem pointless. We’re like Sisyphus rolling the giant boulder up the hill, over and over again.

There are of course degrees of helplessness, ranging from the occasional feeling of overwhelm or uncertainty about what to do to something more deep and lasting.

Though it may seem foreign and rare, a feeling of helplessness can show up in many instances of our life and work. Maybe our board or manager sets our performance targets consistently too high, thus setting us up for failure. Or our boss keeps rejecting our ideas. Maybe we’re fighting hard for something at work but keep getting shot down. Or we don’t like our job but feel stuck and unable to make a change.

Maybe we’re doing poorly on our exams even after studying hard, wondering if there’s any point to trying. Or we’re stuck on a team with someone who consistently drops the ball and refuses to change. Or we’re feeling discouraged about losing weight given prior attempts that didn’t work out or last.

Maybe we’re parents making no headway in limiting our teenager’s screen time. Or we have a sick child and no clear treatment plan.

Maybe we look at the news of the day—from weather disasters and climate change to war, poverty, and disease—and feel helpless in the face of it all. Or we live in an economically depressed area with chronic poverty and crime, leading generations of people into chasms of resignation and despair.

Perhaps we’re the friend of someone addicted to drugs who’s spiraling down and won’t accept help, or the spouse of someone with dementia that’s steadily worsening. Maybe someone we know has been paralyzed by a stroke. Or we’re the spouse of a controlling or violent partner, not sure what can be done.

Clearly, feelings of happiness can hit us in life even if we’re not generally prone to them. As painful as helplessness may be, it’s part of the human condition. We even begin our lives as helpless newborns.

Sometimes, feeling helpless can be a form of catastrophizing, in which we take a challenge in front of us and mentally morph it into something we’re incapable of overcoming.

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.

Take the Test

 

Different Types of Helplessness

Here, we should distinguish between actually being helpless (as in the case of a newborn, or a turtle flipped over onto its shell) and feeling helpless. We can feel helpless without actually being helpless.

Such feelings of helplessness often begin in childhood, depending on how we were treated and raised (including potential neglect or abuse), and can also come from periods of stress or trauma.

Which brings us to what researchers call “learned helplessness.” It’s when we’ve experienced a stressful event repeatedly, leading us to believe that we’re incapable of doing anything about it even though that may not be true. It’s a well-researched phenomenon that’s been studied in both animals and humans since the 1960s.

“Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows
from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.”
-Dr. Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
An example of learned helplessness
An example of learned helplessness

In this state, we fail to respond to adversity, even though it turns out that we could actually help ourselves if we stuck with it and kept trying. Even when there are possible solutions, our sense of futility prevents us from looking for them.

Note that learned helplessness doesn’t always generalize across all situations and settings, according to researchers. In other words, we can feel helpless about some things and hopeful about others. Some people never give up, regardless of what they face, while others are much more prone to feeling helpless and throwing in the towel.

One of the main drivers of learned helplessness is our explanatory style for events in our lives—and whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic. When faced with adversity, people with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to assume automatically that the cause of trouble is permanent, pervasive, and personal (what’s been called the “3 Ps of cognitive distortions”):

  1. permanent: when we view something negative as perpetual and unchangeable, not something temporary.
  2. pervasive: when we view the adversity as omnipresent and inescapable, not something specific to this particular situation.
  3. personal: when we view bad things as our own fault (e.g., because we feel worthless and unlovable), not the result of outside factors.

According to psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman, who began groundbreaking research on learned helplessness back in the 1960s, “While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.” In his book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, he writes, “Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again. For them, defeat is a challenge, a mere setback on the road to inevitable victory. They see defeat as temporary and specific, not pervasive.”

By contrast, he notes that “Pessimists wallow in defeat, which they see as permanent and pervasive. They become depressed and stay helpless for very long periods. A setback is a defeat. And a defeat in one battle is the loss of the war. They don’t begin to try again for weeks or months, and if they try, the slightest new setback throws them back into a helpless state.”

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.

Take the Exercise

 

The Downsides of Helplessness

Unfortunately, such feelings of helplessness can impact every aspect of our lives, from our physical and mental health to our relationships and performance at work.

In terms of our mental health, helplessness can:

  • make us feel overwhelmed
  • suck up our mental and emotional energy, leaving us with less strength and will to work on solutions to our problems
  • prevent us from experiencing contentment and happiness
  • increase the risk of anxiety and depression
  • lead to frustration and even violence if we can’t find productive outlets for our fears and frustrations

When it comes to our physical health, helplessness can:

  • harm our sleep
  • lead to more frequent physical illness

In our life and work, helplessness can:

  • reduce our confidence and motivation
  • lead us to avoid challenges
  • make it harder for us to handle stressful situations
  • make us feel like a victim and resort to blaming others
  • reduce our interest in activities we previously enjoyed
  • make us want to withdraw from friends, family, and colleagues
  • cause us to lower our expectations for what we can achieve
  • lead to avoiding decisions
  • lead to procrastination, giving up, and self-pity
  • prevent us from taking full responsibility for our lives—and from taking necessary actions
  • harm our performance, starting a negative cycle in which we feel bad about failure and then do even worse in the future
  • become a default mindset that downgrades most aspects of our lives

 

The Real-World Dangers of Helplessness

In a famous study conducted by psychologists Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin, two very different interventions were given to the residents of two different floors in a nursing home. On one floor, the staff gave residents plants in their rooms and the opportunity to attend a movie screening every week, but the residents had no choice over these matters. By contrast, the staff gave residents on the other floor a choice of plants, the responsibility for watering them, and the decision of which night to watch the films.

Researchers measured differences between the residents over time. Their findings? More than a year later, the residents who had more control were happier and more active and alert, as rated by nurses and residents, than those who had less control. They also had better health and half as many deaths in the period studied.

After reviewing an array of research on and examples of these matters in different cases, the researchers noted that “feelings of helplessness and hopelessness… may contribute to psychological withdrawal, disease, and death.”*

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

Take the Assessment

 

What to Do About It

Given these substantial downsides and real-world implications, the stakes are high. So how do we transform our mindset from feeling helpless into feeling powerful, strong, capable, and resourceful? The good news, according to Dr. Seligman and others, is that we can “immunize” people against learned helplessness—and help them move out of that unhappy state.

Here are several strategies, tactics, and mindset shifts from the research literature:

Focus on what we can control, instead of the things we can’t, and work on identifying and accepting the things that are outside our control.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”
-the “Serenity Prayer”
The Serenity Prayer
The Serenity Prayer

Recall situations in which we’ve overcome challenges. It may be that we’re more resilient than we think—especially when we have a deeper why—a clear purpose and set of core values—to motivate us.

Get “small wins” with simple mini-bursts of productivity on simple things (e.g., cross things off a short to-do list) to get some momentum.

Catalog our strengths—including our knowledge, skills, talents, and abilities—and brainstorm how we might use them to overcome our current predicament.

Change our self-talk by analyzing and questioning our beliefs, disputing the idea that we’re helpless. For example, we can ask whether the belief about helplessness is true, whether there may be an alternative explanation for the source of our pain, and whether our current beliefs are useful to us (or harmful). Along these lines, Dr. Seligman recommends using the “ABCDE model:”

  • Adversity: identify a specific hardship we’re currently facing that makes us feel helpless.
  • Belief: note the beliefs we have when facing that adversity.
  • Consequences: note the usual effects caused by having those beliefs about being helpless.
  • Dispute: challenge those unproductive beliefs by interrogating their accuracy and completeness. (Are they true? Can we be sure? What other explanations might there be?)
  • Energization: enjoy the jolt we feel when we successfully dispute harmful beliefs that previously made us feel helpless.

Recall that our thoughts aren’t always accurate (far from it) and sometimes mislead us, getting us into trouble. When thinking, we tend to subconsciously use heuristics (mental shortcuts, for the sake of efficiency, given the amount of energy our brain consumes) and rationalizations. Our thinking is also subject to cognitive biases, which are systematic errors in our thinking that occur when we’re processing and interpreting information. We can also have a faulty memory, skewed perception, or a problem with our attention.

Reframe our thinking from helplessness to curiosity about what it might take to be able to address the issues at hand, in the process becoming a detective and/or a learner.

Set realistic goals and identify steps we can take to start making progress on them, with a commitment to track progress and make needed adjustments along the way.

Engage in regular self-care practices, such as:

  • Exercise, since it helps regulate the chemicals in our brain in ways that boost our mood and motivation as well as our strength and stamina.
  • Good sleep habits.
  • Good eating and nutrition habits.
  • Grounding and relaxation practices (e.g., yoga, meditation, or deep breathing).
  • Avoidance of harmful ways of coping, such as numbing behaviors and substance abuse.

Recognize the patterns of when we feel helpless and recall the kinds of things that help us break these downward spirals.

Make a list of people we can count on and reach out to them, leaning on trusted relationships—and community—to provide support, encouragement, and perspective.

Reach out to a therapist, counselor, or support hotline when needed. Options include:

Though we all feel helpless sometimes, we should distinguish between being helpless and feeling helpless, recognizing that sometimes we’ve placed ourselves in a mental prison and just sat there, when all the while the bars weren’t locked.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you facing any challenges that make you feel helpless?
  2. In what areas?
  3. Which of the approaches listed above will you try in an effort to break the cycle?

 

Related Articles:

 

Tools for You

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Postscript: Inspirations on Overcoming Helplessness

  • “…an individual’s sense of personal control determines his fate.” -Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
  • “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” -Maya Angelou
  • “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” -Albert Einstein
  • “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” -Babe Ruth
  • “Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.” -Martha Nussbaum
  • “Helplessness is answered many ways, but one of them is violence.” -Sam Shepard
  • “Self-pity is our worst enemy, and if we yield to it we never do anything wise in the world.” -Helen Keller
  • “Our online news feeds aggregate all of the world’s pain and cruelty, dragging our brains into a kind of learned helplessness. Technology that provides us with near-complete knowledge without a commensurate level of agency isn’t humane.” -Tristan Harris

 

Related Terms and Mindsets from the Research Literature

  • “agency”: our capacity to influence our functioning and the course of our life’s events by our actions—and the feelings of autonomy, control, and freedom that come with it.
  • “learned optimism”: the process by which we learn to recognize and challenge pessimistic thoughts in order to develop more positive behaviors.
  • “locus of control”: whether we view control as something we have inside of us (an internal locus of control) or something that exists beyond us, as in others, luck or fate (an external locus of control).
  • “self-efficacy”: our belief in our ability to complete tasks, achieve goals, overcome challenges, and succeed.

* Source: Langer, E. J., & Rodin, J. (1976). The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(2), 191–198.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Problem with Not Being Clear about Our Values

by
The Problem with Not Being Clear about Our Values

Article Summary:

Many of us get into trouble when we start living and leading in ways that conflict with our values. That usually starts with not knowing what our core values are.

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Our values are what’s most important to us. What we believe and stand for. Our convictions about what’s most important in life.

“Your core values are the deeply held beliefs that authentically describe your soul.”
-John C. Maxwell

Many of us get into trouble when we start living and leading in ways that conflict with our values. First, we must know what our core values are.

 

The Costs of Lacking Clarity on Our Values

Lacking clarity about our core values can get us into trouble in many areas.

For example, lacking clarity about our core values makes it harder to:

  • be decisive and make decisions, including good decisions about career and work
  • determine our top priorities
  • be assertive about what we stand for
  • maintain clarity and poise during challenges
  • identify misalignments in our lives (such as when we’re overinvesting in our work and underinvesting in our relationships)
  • discover our purpose
  • bring more meaning and significance into our lives
“Perhaps the most significant thing a person can know about himself
is to understand his own system of values.
Almost every thing we do is a reflection
of our own personal value system.”
-Jacques Fresco

Lacking clarity about our values reduces or weakens our:

  • character
  • confidence
  • motivation
  • willpower to persist through challenges
  • stress resilience
  • satisfaction at work
  • performance at work
  • leadership effectiveness

It also makes it easier for:

    • us to lose focus on things that matter most
    • our negative self-talk to hijack our inner dialogue
    • us to make poor choices in choosing a life partner (due to a major values misalignment)

Lacking clarity about our values makes it less likely that we’ll:

    • be fully authentic
    • make needed improvements in our lives (e.g., healthier eating or more exercise)
    • move forward in realizing our potential
    • maintain our happiness and quality of life

Finally, it makes it more likely that we’ll:

  • make big mistakes that lead to major regrets
  • do something unethical and illegal, perhaps damaging our reputation and career

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.

Take the Test

 

The Benefits of Knowing Our Values

Naturally, there’s a flipside to all the costs listed above. There are many powerful benefits that come from knowing our values.

A big one is that our core values, along with our purpose, can serve as a sort of safe harbor in our lives—a place to return to amidst the storms and chaos.

“A highly developed values system is like a compass.
It serves as a guide to point you in
the right direction when you are lost.”
-Idowu Koyenika

Our values can help us continue living in integrity even when times are tough, providing an important source of comfort and solace.

Our core values can also serve as a catalyst of motivation, keeping us inspired and moving forward in a state of empowerment. They can point us toward an exciting vision that resonates with who we are and what we want at the core.

Finally, according to University of Pennsylvania researchers, encouraging new workers to express their personal values at work was linked to them significantly outperforming peers, being more satisfied at work, and higher retention.

The benefits are truly compelling.

former CEO and chair American Express

(For guidance on how to discover your values, see my related article, “How to Discover Your Core Values.”)

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.

Take the Exercise

 

Conclusion

Discovering our core values and living by them can improve all dimensions of our life and work.

The key, of course, is not just knowing our core values or writing them down.

The key is living them—building them into the fabric of our lives. Using them to guide our decisions, actions, priorities, and allocation of time and energy—and as a guide to crafting a good life.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Do you know your core values?
  2. To what extent are you honoring and upholding them lately?
  3. What more could you do to clarify or re-examine your values and integrate them into your life and work?

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Values

  • “When making a decision, big or small, choose in favor of your values. Your values will always point you to the life that holds the most meaning and happiness.” -Rob Kaiser
  • “Focus not on doing less or doing more, but on doing what you value.” -Gretchen Rubin
  • “Life is good when you live from your roots. Your values are a critical source of energy, enthusiasm, and direction. Work is meaningful and fun when it’s an expression of your true core.” -Shoshana Zuboff
  • “Core values serve as a lighthouse when the fog of life seems to leave you wandering in circles.” -J. Loren Norris
  • “Personal leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.” -Stephen R. Covey
  • “A clear purpose will unite you as you move forward, values will guide your behavior, and goals will focus your energy.” -Ken Blanchard
  • “When values, thoughts, feelings, and actions are in alignment, a person becomes focused and character is strengthened.” -John C. Maxwell
  • “The more that we choose our goals based on our values and principles, the more we enter into a positive cycle of energy, success, and satisfaction.” -Neil Farber

 

Sources

  • Creswell, J.D. et al., “Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses,” Psychological Science. 2005 Nov; 16 (11): 846-51.
  • Daniel M. Cable, Francesca Gino, and Bradley R. Staats, “Breaking them in or eliciting their best? Reframing socialization around newcomers’ authentic self-expression,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 1, pp. 1–36, February 8, 2013.
  • Hitlin, S. (2003). Values as the core of personal identity: Drawing links between two theories of self. Social Psychology Quarterly, 66(2), 118.
  • Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values? Journal of Social Issues, 50(4), 19–45.
  • Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a universal psychological structure of human values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 550–562.
  • Meg Selig, “9 Surprising Superpowers of Knowing Your Core Values,” Psychology Today, November 27, 2018.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Problem with Lacking Clarity in Your Life

by

Article Summary: 

Many people aren’t clear about what they want and where they’re going. Lacking clarity is one of the most damaging traps we can fall into.

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Do you know who you are?
What you want?
Where you’re going and why?

We may have a vague sense of these things but no real clarity. We lack a clear vision that pulls us forward toward its sweet and compelling destination.

Meanwhile, we keep our heads down and stay busy as a form of avoidance. Sometimes this situation continues for a very long time, placing us in an extended state of drifting.

Lacking clarity is one of the most damaging traps we can fall into. Why? Because lacking clarity affects everything, including our quality of life, relationships, work, leadership, and dreams. And because having clarity is a superpower. Life is so much better and richer when we have a clear vision of a better future, anticipation about what it will feel like when we realize it, and conviction about what’s important and meaningful.

 

What We Should Get Clear About

Okay, so clarity is important, but clarity about what? Here are the ten most important things we should get clear about:

  1. purpose: why we’re here; our reason for being
  2. values: the things that are most important to us; what we believe and stand for
  3. vision: what success looks like—a mental picture of what we want to be, do, and contribute in life and with whom
  4. strengths: what we’re good at, including our knowledge, skills, and talents
  5. passions: what we get lost in, consuming us with palpable emotion
  6. goals: what we want to accomplish
  7. priorities: the relative importance of our top aims
  8. strategies: how we’ll achieve our vision and goals and what we’ll focus on given our available time and resources
  9. capabilities: what knowledge and skills we need to develop to realize our vision
  10. service: who we seek to impact and how

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.

Take the Exercise

 

 

Signs We’re Lacking Clarity

There’s a big price to pay when we don’t have enough clarity about these things. When we lack clarity, we tend to:

  • suffer from anxiety, stress, self-doubt, indecision, and frustration
  • struggle with knowing where to begin
  • question ourselves and our actions
  • procrastinate
  • begin projects without finishing them
  • struggle with minor decision-making
  • feel like we need advice from others before making most decisions
  • feel overwhelmed and burned out
  • agree to too many things
  • feel confused and uncertain about what to do next
  • be more prone to distraction and disorganization
  • keep comparing ourselves with others
  • put in inconsistent effort
  • remain too busy and frazzled to think about and work toward a better future
  • see a decline in motivation and performance
“Lack of clarity is the primary reason for failure in business and personal life.”
-Brian Tracy

 

Benefits of Clarity

On the flip side, there are many powerful benefits that flow from having clarity in our lives. For example, having greater clarity:

  • eliminates distractions and helps us focus
  • helps us establish a definitive direction
  • makes it easier to identify actions to take and prioritize them
  • helps us overcome fear and doubt
  • makes it easier for others to help and support us because they have better insights into what we want
  • allows us to put our energy into what we want
  • helps us get things done
  • makes it easier to say no to things that don’t matter to us
  • helps us manage challenges more effectively
  • reduces feelings of overwhelm and helps us manage stress more effectively
  • helps us make better decisions and reduces decision fatigue
  • allows us to set and enforce boundaries
  • helps us save money since we avoid spending it on things that don’t matter
  • helps us feel contentment and happiness
  • provides the serenity that comes from knowing what matters most
  • leads to healthier relationships
  • boosts our confidence
  • facilitates better performance
“…compared with their peers, high performers have more clarity on who they are, what they want, how to get it, and what they find meaningful and fulfilling.”
-Brendon Burchard, writer and speaker

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.

Take the Assessment

 

How to Get More Clarity

Given all the compelling benefits of achieving greater clarity, the question then becomes how to go about it. What can we do to bring more clarity to our lives? Here are 16 actions we can take:

  1. Eliminate distractions, clear out clutter, and create more white space in our lives. This makes room for self-awareness, pattern-mapping, and new insights.
  2. Do one thing at a time.
  3. Take more action more often. Many people assume they need clarity before acting, but sometimes clarity comes from taking action. Act, assess, learn, and adjust. Then repeat.
  4. Reflect after acting. Step back periodically to see how things are going. What’s emerging and what’s getting in the way?
  5. Talk to others. Share what we’re unclear about and ask for their input. They may be able to see things we can’t from their vantage point. (Consider doing this in small groups.)
  6. Develop a clear vision of what life will be like when we’re living the life we want. Start by defining what success looks like in different areas, including family, relationships, health, work, education, community, and more.
  7. Spend more time thinking about our desired future. Also, engage in planning and actions that move us toward that future. Best to schedule time for it on our calendar.
  8. Journal about what’s going on and what isn’t clear yet. Write freely and let thoughts appear uninhibited.
  9. Start acting like the person we want to become. Bring our desired future into our present.
  10. Turn our purpose, values, and vision into a daily mantra or affirmation.* This will help embed them into our consciousness and build them into the fabric of our days.
  11. Ask what we would do if we had less time. By doing so, we force tough choices about what to focus on.
  12. Reduce exposure to negative influences. They extract a tax on our energy and attention. And they pull us away from our own priorities.
  13. Engage in regular centering activities. Take breaks and go for walks. Try deep breathing or meditation.
  14. Follow a regular, daily routine. Be sure that it includes time for quiet reflection.
  15. Make time for systematic self-care. Don’t neglect good habits of nutrition, hydration, movement, and sleep.
  16. Work with a coach or mentor. Focus on getting more clarity on purpose, values, vision, strengths, passions, goals, priorities, strategies, capabilities, and service opportunities.

 

Related Traps

Lack of clarity is common, and it can be pernicious, affecting so much of how we think and what we do. It’s also accompanied by several associated traps:

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.

Take the Test

 

Achieving clarity about who we are, what we want, and where we’re going can be very challenging. But lacking clarity leads to drifting and settling. And having clarity is a superpower that adds energy and richness to all we do.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent are you clear about who you are, what you want, and where you’re going?
  2. What more will you do, starting today, to achieve greater clarity in your life and work?

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Clarity

  • “Clarity precedes success.” -Robin Sharma
  • “Clarity is essential. Knowing exactly what you want builds your self-confidence immeasurably.” -Brian Tracy
  • “Clarity is the child of careful thought and mindful experimentation.” -Brendon Burchard
  • “Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you—the first time around.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur and author
  • “It is essential to know yourself before you decide what work you want to do.” -Stephen R. Covey, leadership author
  • “People often complain about lack of time when lack of direction is the real problem.” -Zig Ziglar
  • “Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.” -Cal Newport
  • “It’s a lack of clarity that creates chaos and frustration. Those emotions are poison to any living goal.” -Steve Maraboli
  • “Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.” -Don Herold
  • “…as your inner world becomes more orderly and clear, your actions in the outer world should follow suit.” -Deepak Chopra, spiritual teacher and writer
  • “Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” -Carl Jung
  • “Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening…. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen.” -Diane von Furstenberg
  • “The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” -Niccolo Machiavelli
  • “…the world’s wisdom traditions offer a valuable secret. They teach that the unsettled mind comes about through one thing only: losing sight of who we really are…. The answer lies in finding out who you really are—a conscious agent who can choose, at any time, to live from the level of the true self.” -Deepak Chopra
  • “We want luminosity—the sense of possibility and promise we feel when we absolutely know that all is well and that we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing, right here, right now. We reach luminosity through a different quality of action—clarity, focus, ease, and grace in action.” -Maria Nemeth
  • “Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more—more unseen forms become manifest to him.” -Rumi

* Brendon Burchard recommends choosing three aspirational words that describe our desired future self (e.g., “kind, loving, joyful”) and making them a daily smartphone alarm to keep them top-of-mind.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!