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Are We Numbing Our Lives Away?

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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.

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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 on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) 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

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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 rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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 (see our Personal Values Exercise)
  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 (see my Strengths Search tool)
  5. passions: what we get lost in, consuming us with palpable emotion
  6. goals: what we want to accomplish (see my Goals Guide: Best Practices in Setting and Pursuing Goals)
  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

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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

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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 & Articles

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.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) 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 You Taking Shortcuts?

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Article Summary:

These days, we’re under a lot of pressure to move quickly, so it can be tempting to take shortcuts. But that can be a big mistake.

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These days, we’re under a lot of pressure to move quickly. Things are changing rapidly, so it’s tempting to jump on the fast track. Or try for a quick fix.

Facebook’s motto from a few years ago captured it well:

“Move fast and break things.”
Mark Zuckerberg speaking. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In today’s culture, people expect quick results. We live in an age of instant gratification. We’re used to swiping, and our attention span is shrinking rapidly to the duration of a TikTok reel.

It can be tempting to seek the easy way, the path of least resistance. People are looking for life hacks, time hacks, relationship hacks, and more.

Actually, it’s been going on for a while, but the time horizon keeps shrinking. The shortcuts are getting shorter.

“I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.”
-Queen lyrics from their song, “I Want It All”

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Types of Shortcuts

There are different kinds of shortcuts that are prevalent these days. For example, there are:

Health Shortcuts

It can be tempting to rely too much on pills and medications and neglect focusing on a healthy lifestyle with good and regular sleep, nutrition, exercise/movement, and self-care.

Ethical Shortcuts

We see people taking ethical shortcuts in many domains, including business, government, and sports. Think Bernie Madoff, Nixon, and Lance Armstrong. It doesn’t help that our brains are so good at rationalizing questionable behavior. I recall being the co-captain of a school soccer team and catching a player cutting corners on the team’s “Cooper test,” which required that all players run two miles through the campus in 12 minutes to be eligible to play on the varsity squad. It led to painful consequences for the player and the team.

“It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
-Warren Buffett, investor

Financial Shortcuts

Financial shortcuts are tempting, especially given all the financial pressures many of us face. We see these temptations at the individual level with “get rich quick” schemes and speculative “opportunities.” We also see it at the organizational level (think Enron) and even the industry level (think subprime mortgages) and country level (think about the Russian laundering and Malaysian embezzlement schemes).

Quality Shortcuts

It’s often a bad idea to take quality shortcuts, especially when it comes to things like health and safety, hiring, risk assessment, and customer service, as these shortcuts can come back to bite us. Just think of all the airplane and automobile disasters and recalls.

Educational Shortcuts

The temptations are great in schools too, from relying on Cliffs Notes summaries instead of the actual book to outright cheating. We also see it at the institutional level, with universities trying to game the rankings systems with tricks and techniques instead of the actual hard work of improving the educational experience for students.

Relationship Shortcuts

It can even be tempting to take shortcuts in relationships, especially given how uncomfortable many people are with being alone. When we first meet someone, we can hit the “fast forward” button and leap to overly optimistic assumptions about compatibility and fit based on things like chemistry, looks, attraction, status, and common interests. We can fool ourselves into believing this person is “the one.” By skipping the discovery phase of learning about each other’s story, core values, needs, issues, and aspirations we can invite real trouble down the road.

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

 

Spiritual Shortcuts

There are even spiritual shortcuts we can struggle with. A common case in point: cheating on our time in prayer or contemplation as we get busy with the affairs of the world and preoccupied with our own status in it.

Jack Kornfield, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher and author, warns about what he calls a “spiritual bypass.” He explains that if we have a solid spiritual practice (like meditation or prayer), or if we’ve had deep spiritual or transcendental experiences, we can falsely believe that we’re essentially done with our spiritual journey and its inner work. But then life tends to intervene with a challenge with our spouse, partner, children, or work, sometimes aggravating old wounds. In such cases, it’s easy to fall back into destructive behavior patterns and have to face the realization that we’re not fully whole or healed or okay, that we still have work to do. (See this short video with Jack Kornfield talking about the “spiritual bypass” problem.)

“Certain meditation can bring tremendous benefits to us.
But it’s also possible to use meditation as a spiritual bypass,
so that we can escape our difficulties by finding some peace and calm.
But later on—at work, with family, or in relationships—
old patterns and ways that we get caught up in begin to show themselves.”
-Jack Kornfield

Entrepreneurship Shortcuts

Given the speed that many startups need to operate with, with their search for a viable business model before they run out of cash, there are many temptations to take shortcuts in Startup Land. For example, entrepreneur and author Steve Blank warns about “organizational debt”: “all the people/culture compromises made to ‘just get it done’ in the early stages of a startup,” because things are so frenzied and chaotic.

He explains it by comparing it to “technical debt,” which is the accumulation of programming shortcuts made in haste by coders when time is short. Their shoddy code must eventually be refactored and cleaned up before it causes too many problems for customers or even brings the whole tech platform down. Blank notes that organizational debt is just like that but on the people side, when the startup skimps on things like onboarding, training, job descriptions, compensation, pay scales, HR budgets, communications, and more. Entrepreneurs may get away with it for a while, but such organizational debt, he says, “can turn a growing company into a chaotic nightmare” or even kill it.

In startups, given their unique context of extreme time pressure, resource constrains, uncertainty, and chaos, there’s also a temptation to take ethical shortcuts.

“Within entrepreneurial cultures, there’s often a feeling that
it’s OK to ignore or bend some regulation.
Sometimes regulations are legitimately outdated
or potentially too restrictive to let innovation flourish.
But the challenge for entrepreneurs is that
the line between appropriate and illicit is often quite murky.”
-Eugene Soltes, Harvard Business School Professor

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Clearly, there are many types of shortcuts—and many situations in which we’re tempted to take them.

So why do we take shortcuts, given their risks and downsides? We’ve already noted the cultural and organizational influences above, but we also take shortcuts when we’re in the grips of our ego or pride, or greed or ambition, or a desire for fame or glory.

Sometimes it works out. We can get lucky and get rich quick. Or succeed anyway despite skipping steps.

But many times, it doesn’t work out at all.

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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The Consequences of Shortcuts

“Short cuts make long delays.”
(Pippin warning Frodo in J.R.R. Tolkien’s, The Fellowship of the Ring)

Taking shortcuts can have grievous consequences: things like reputational damage, financial ruin, injury, or even death.

Plus, when we take shortcuts, we miss the learning and growth associated with the toil of the normal route. We miss the wisdom and character-building that can come from experience and setbacks, from having to re-evaluate or push through. And we can feel a deep sense of regret for the poor choices we made.

Entrepreneur and author Rajesh Setty notes that it’s “easy to miss that the ’real cost’ of taking a shortcut is way higher than the ’perceived cost’ of taking one,” and that the “real cost” of a shortcut is “the loss of an opportunity to become better for the future. If it is too good to be true, it probably is.”

Writer Thomas Oppong recommends avoiding shortcuts and taking “long cuts” instead, which he describes as “long-term and consistent routines, habits, behaviors, principles, and rules that help us become better versions of ourselves.” Such long cuts are things like longstanding habits of saving, investing, and healthy living.

 

Conclusion

Of course, avoiding shortcuts doesn’t mean being a slowpoke. It doesn’t mean being stubborn or foolish.

If there are genuine ways to save time and be more efficient, great. For example, we can often accelerate our move up the learning curve with a task or challenge by working with a mentor or coach and being open to learning from others, including small groups, so that we don’t waste time “reinventing the wheel.”

That’s all well and good. But we should be wary of the too-good-to-be-true shortcuts that can harm us, our relationships, and our future. In our age of speed and pressure, we should be thoughtful about which road to take.

“Slow and steady wins the race.” (proverb)

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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Reflection Questions

  1. Are you taking any shortcuts?
  2. In what areas?
  3. When you step back and reflect on it, is there a better way you might consider instead?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Shortcuts

  • “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” -Beverly Sills
  • “In life, most short cuts end up taking longer than taking the longer route.” -Suzy Kassem
  • “Every shortcut has a price usually greater than the reward.” -Bryant McGill
  • “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” -Mahatma Gandhi
  • “There are no shortcuts. The lazy will accomplish nothing in life. The human path of least resistance is the path to total failure and oblivion. You must always walk the hard path. The fewer the people on the path, the greater the glory. A genius is alone on his path.” -Thomas Stark
  • “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” -Benjamin Franklin
  • “The riskiest thing you can do is get greedy.” -Lance Armstrong
  • “If there were shortcuts, people smarter than you and me would have found them already. There aren’t. Sorry.” -Seth Godin
  • “Wisdom denotes the pursuing of the best ends by the best means.” -Frances Hutcheson
  • “Those that spend the most effort in search of shortcuts are often the most disappointed and the least successful.” -Seth Godin

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!

Do You Have Limiting Beliefs About Yourself?

by

Article Summary: 

Many of us have limiting beliefs that detract from our success and happiness. Here we address where they come from and how to change them.

+++

Do you have limiting beliefs about yourself that are holding you back? Chances are that you do, even if you’re highly capable and successful. Most people do, even if they’re not aware of it, and it’s a bigger problem than most people think.

Limiting beliefs are judgments about ourselves that restrict us in some way. They prevent us from achieving our aims and from becoming what we want. In essence, they’re stories we tell ourselves, and they ain’t pretty because they’re a form of negative self-talk and self-sabotage.

“Beliefs are the hidden scripts that run our lives.”
-Marie Forleo, entrepreneur

 

Examples of Limiting Beliefs

Our limiting beliefs generally tell us what we’re bad at or what we can’t do (or can’t do well). Beneath them are assumptions that there’s something wrong with us or that things are too difficult for us.

When we’re under their spell, we may believe that we are:

  • not worthy of love (perhaps the most debilitating limited belief of all)
  • damaged goods (because, for example, we’re out of a job or in a rut, or because our parents may be gone or divorced)
  • a failure
  • too busy or too old to do the thing we want (such as try a new career path, start dating again, learn a new skill, go back to school, start a venture, or pursue our dreams)
  • not smart, attractive, strong, or talented enough
  • not as good as our siblings, classmates, or colleagues (note the comparison trap)
  • not cut out to be a leader or entrepreneur
  • not creative, artistic, confident, our outgoing enough
  • bad at certain things (e.g., public speaking, writing, math, money, etc.)
  • too tall or too short
  • never going to be successful (or as successful as we hope)
  • not ready for what we need or want to do
  • stuck because things are beyond our control
  • lacking what it takes (e.g., knowledge, skills, experience, degree, credential)
  • too young to have influence
  • so far behind others that we’ll never catch up (as if life were a race)
  • fixed in our intelligence, abilities, and talents (what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset”)

Most of us have more than one limiting belief at work and, in some cases, several. These beliefs affect our choices and actions.

We may have a limiting belief that we can’t leave a bad job or bad marriage because we’ve put too much time into it already and we won’t be able to get a better situation in the future. Or a limiting belief that we can’t quit law school or medical school because our parents won’t approve. Or that we can’t leave a prestigious or well-paying career to pursue something more meaningful, because we’ll lose respect. (See my article, “The Trap of Caring Too Much about What Other People Think.”)

Often, there are logical leaps we take with these limiting beliefs. If we embarrassed ourselves once in a high school assembly, we adopt the premature belief that we’re terrible at public speaking. If we got a bad grade in a tenth-grade writing class, we conclude that we’re a bad writer.

“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”
-Richard Bach, writer

These leaps may be understandable emotionally, but they fall short logically. There are all sorts of possibilities at work in such situations. First, nobody starts out being good at anything. Maybe we were having a bad day when the assembly took place. Or the writing teacher was off base. Plus, we can all learn, develop, and grow into new skills and abilities if we apply ourselves diligently and systematically.

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Where Limiting Beliefs Come From

Where do our limiting beliefs come from? Many sources, it turns out, including our:

  • parents and our childhood (including well-meaning but ultimately harmful praise only for things like our intelligence, looks, talent, or performance and not our effort, focus, resilience, and improvement)
  • peers and their comments and judgments about us (which we often blow out of proportion)
  • past experiences (and the false lessons we can extract from them)
  • teachers
  • coaches
  • mentors
  • society and its common assumptions about what constitutes success
  • the media, movies, celebrities, influencers, and social media (with their incomplete and misleading portrayals of what life is like for people)

Together, these can mix into a toxic cocktail of harmful notions about ourselves.

 

The Effects of Limiting Beliefs

How do our limiting beliefs affect us? They can have profound and lasting effects on our life, work, relationships, and leadership.

Here are ten of the most common effects of limiting beliefs:

  1. lead us to doubt ourselves
  2. lower our confidence
  3. keep us from doing important things (such as going for a dream job or asking someone out)
  4. inhibit our creativity
  5. cause us to reject good options or lose opportunities because we feel we’re unworthy or incapable
  6. keep us in a state of fear, stress, anxiety, or shame
  7. prevent us from approaching or reaching our potential
  8. keep us from achieving success 
  9. reduce our happiness and wellbeing
  10. prevent us from crafting the life we want

When we’re at the mercy of our limiting beliefs, we feel mostly weak, undeserving, unworthy, or incompetent, or just not good enough. And we fail to access our strengths, gifts, resilience, and better angels. Those effects can compound over time into a black hole of negativity that won’t let any of our light escape.

“Every belief has a consequence. Long term, your beliefs determine your destiny.”
-Marie Forleo, entrepreneur

Strengths Search

We all have core strengths–the things in which we most excel. Take this self-assessment to determine your core strengths so you can integrate them more into your life and work.

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Why Limiting Beliefs Are So Hard to Overcome

Limiting beliefs can be tricky because they’re loaded with emotions, fear, and anxiety. They hijack our brains, moving our cognitive activity away from our more prefrontal cortex (where we do our most advanced thinking) and down into our more reactive limbic system.

Limiting beliefs are often subconscious and deeply engrained in our psyche. Although they originate in our minds, we actualize them through our behavior and habits, creating a vicious cycle.

It gets worse. In some cases, our unconscious minds may prefer limiting beliefs over the effort and uncertainty of trying to change them because at least the beliefs familiar, which can provide comfort of sorts. This part of our brain prefers to stick with the “devil we know” versus the stress, pressure, risk, and uncertainty of something new and different (even if the latter may turn out to be much better). If our amygdala values survival above all else, why not stick with what we know and avoid the fear state that comes with change? It craves certainty and familiarity, even when those states lead to complacency and mediocrity.

Our brains are wired to conserve energy and protect us from pain and danger. This can lead to some lazy default behaviors such as staying in our comfort zone and avoiding risk.

Sometimes we’ve had a limiting belief for so long that it feels like it’s beyond questioning or reproach. It feels like it’s an aspect of reality itself, as opposed to the dubious doling of self-sabotage that it is. It can feel like the truth, even though it’s a despicable lie.

 

How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

“When you change a belief, you change everything…. All beliefs are a choice and choices can be changed….
You always have more power than you think. Your mind is the most extraordinary tool you have to shape your reality.” -Marie Forleo, entrepreneur

Now that we’ve seen what limiting beliefs are, where they come from, and why they’re so hard to overcome, the next question is: What can we do about them? How can we overcome our limiting beliefs?

Here are the most effective ways to begin overcoming our limiting beliefs:

Understand that all results begin with beliefs, because our beliefs turn into thoughts that drive our actions.

Imagine how much more we could accomplish and how much more happiness and fulfillment we could have if we transformed our limiting beliefs into beliefs that supported us.

Begin noticing the tone of our beliefs—and whether they’re positive or negative, whether they’re supportive or harmful. We need to get better at listening to the negative thoughts in our head, paying attention to our negative self-talk. Notice whether our beliefs are driven by excuses, blaming, or victimhood, versus taking full responsibility and being creative, resourceful, and solution oriented. Be vigilant and keep watching out for cases where we may have unconscious limiting beliefs.

Identify the source of our limiting beliefs, if possible (e.g., comments from a parent, teacher, or boss, or a bad experience).

Recognize that it’s our unconscious brain that’s holding on to the limiting beliefs, not our conscious mind. With that realization, we can change our perception and then our behavior.

Flip our beliefs from unconscious and limiting to conscious and affirming so they don’t continue on autopilot without our awareness, and so they lift us up instead of holding us down.

Reframe the limiting beliefs. A simple way to reframe a limiting belief is to add “yet” to it. For example:

  • The limiting belief, “I can’t do this,” becomes, “I can’t do this yet” (or “I haven’t yet figured out how to make this work”).
  • The limiting belief, “I’ve never led anyone before and I don’t know what I’m doing,” becomes, “I’ve helped lots of people figure things out and I have good people skills and lots of valuable experience to draw upon.”
  • The limiting belief, “I’m not good enough to manage this project well,” becomes, “I’m committed, hard-working, and capable, and I have what it takes to figure this out.”

Choose one limiting belief to begin working on.

Write down our limiting beliefs about that topic area, also noting how they’re holding us back.

Then, interrogate the limiting belief. What if it’s not true?

Assess the accuracy of our limiting belief(s) by gathering data, from ourselves and others.

Challenge our limiting beliefs constantly.

Prove our limiting beliefs wrong by taking courageous actions that refute the phantom belief and its underlying assumptions. Crush our loathsome limiting beliefs with our incredible capabilities and awesomeness.

Create new beliefs that are beneficial, in doing so changing our self-talk so that it’s positive or supportive.

Strengthen our new beliefs via positive actions that reinforce the new beliefs. (Also consider affirmations and/or visualization.)

Develop a mantra that counters each major limiting belief, replacing it with something better. Examples: “Born ready.” “You got this.” “Everything is figureoutable.” (credit to Marie Forleo for this one)

Seek help from a coach, mentor, or small group that’s supportive and committed to our best interests.

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

 

Summary

Limiting beliefs are judgments about ourselves that restrict us in some way, a nefarious form of self-sabotage. They’re hard to overcome because they’re overloaded with emotions, they hijack our brains, and they’re often subconscious.

We have the power to overcome our limiting beliefs, especially by bringing them into our conscious awareness, interrogating and reframing them, and adopting new beliefs that support instead of sabotaging us.

Sometimes, overcoming our limiting beliefs is a prerequisite for crafting a good life.

“You begin to fly when you let go of self-limiting beliefs
and allow your mind and aspirations to rise to greater heights.”
-Brian Tracy

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What limiting beliefs do you have?
  2. How are they holding you back?
  3. What will you do about them, starting today, and which one will you address first?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

The trap of limiting beliefs doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s related to several of the other common traps of living. Here are several articles addressing related traps:

 

Additional Resources

Apollos Hester talking about motivation

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Beliefs

  • “No matter what you’re facing, you have what it takes to figure anything out and become the person you’re meant to be.” -Marie Forleo
  • “The size of your success is determined by the size of your belief.” -David J. Schwartz
  • “Since a leader cannot rise above his thinking, he must assault his limiting beliefs daily through reading, listening, and associating.” -Orrin Woodward
  • “In order to change ourselves, we must first believe we can.” -Marie Forleo
  • “Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.” -Mary Kay Ash
  • “I’m not interested in your limiting beliefs; I’m interested in what makes you limitless.” -Brendon Burchard
  • “Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.” -Mignon McLaughlin
  • “If you accept a limiting belief, then it will become a truth for you.” -Louise Hay
  • “Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.” -Tony Robbins
  • “Courage is your natural setting. You do not need to become courageous, but rather peel back the layers of self-protective, limiting beliefs that keep you small.” -Vironika Tugaleva
  • “Do the uncomfortable. Become comfortable with these acts. Prove to yourself that your limiting beliefs die a quick death if you will simply do what you feel uncomfortable doing.” -Darren Rowse
  • “It’s the repetition of affirmation that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.” -Muhammad Ali

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, & TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) 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 You Pretending to Be Something You’re Not?

by

Article Summary: 

One of the traps we can fall into in life is pretending to be someone or something we’re not. This article addresses why we do it, its consequences, and how to stop doing it so much.

 +++ 

One of the traps we can fall into in life is pretending to be someone or something we’re not. We may wear a mask for others, adopt a persona, or impersonate someone we think is more appealing.

There are many reasons why we do this. It’s quite common.

But it can lead to big problems down the road.

 

Examples of Pretending in Action

What does it look like in practice? It can mean:

  • pretending to be like those around us so we can fit in
  • conforming to the expectations of others by pretending to be or like something
  • pretending we like our job when we don’t
  • hiding our true selves because we’re afraid of judgment or rejection by others
  • pretending to be someone we think our spouse or partner wants
  • hiding our mistakes or weaknesses and pretending to be perfect
  • faking something and deceiving someone to get what we want
  • wearing a mask as a coping mechanism for dealing with insecurity (including our propensity for negative self-talk and the “trance of unworthiness”)
  • acting like we don’t feel anger, resentment, hostility, sadness, or regret
  • feigning indifference to something that hurts us deeply
  • curating a perfect social media image
  • concealing our sadness or disappointment that we’ve given up on ourselves or our dreams

When we do these things, we have an innate, intuitive sense that we’re treading in dangerous territory. We feel a disconnect or a guilty conscience.

We’re all familiar with the sayings over the ages urging us to be authentic and true:

“To thine own self be true.” -Shakespeare
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” -Oscar Wilde
“March to the beat of your own drummer.”
“Know yourself, be yourself, love yourself.”

Is it as simple as that? Perhaps not. There’s some complexity here. For example, what is our “true self,” exactly? Is it always knowable, coherent, and consistent? Might it change over time?

In their article, “The Enigma of Being Yourself,” Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno and Mark R. Leary write: “the human personality invariably contains myriad personality dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible even though they are genuine aspects of the person’s psychological make-up…. People are genuinely multifaceted.”

The poet Walt Whitman, writing long ago, seems to agree: “Very well,” he wrote, “then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Jongman-Sereno and Leary also note that our ability to adapt our behavior to meet the demands of different situations is, within limits, generally positive and important for our psychological wellbeing and social relationships. We’re also asked to play a role sometimes—whether at home, at work, or in a community group—and that’s okay.

But it’s one thing to walk around making small accommodations to smooth things out a bit and another thing altogether to walk around wearing a mask and pretending to be something very different from what we are. When we do that, it has consequences.

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The Consequences of Pretending

When we hide who we really are behind a mask and adopt a counterfeit persona, there can be a price to pay. It can result in:

  • putting barriers between us and the people who are important to us, including family, friends, and colleagues
  • forgetting who we truly are because we’ve been disguising ourselves to others for so long
  • feeling like we’re a fraud (see also “impostor syndrome”)
  • feeling exhausted from acting, pretending, and pleasing (which can all lead to lack of energy and motivation)
  • creating a sense of aloofness in which people get the sense that we’re inaccessible
  • continuing a nefarious pattern of avoiding deeper issues and kicking the can further down the road

This can become a downward spiral, leading to even more insecurity and anxiety than what provoked us to wear a mask in the first place.

It’s frustrating for people when they notice we’re hiding parts of ourselves. Its puts a barrier between us.

Don’t be fooled by me.
Don’t be fooled by the face I wear for I wear a mask, I wear a thousand masks,
Masks that I’m afraid to take off, and none of them is me.
Pretending is an art that’s second nature with me, but don’t be fooled,
for God’s sake don’t be fooled.
Charles Finn in his poem, “Please Hear What I’m Not Saying”

Let’s note here that it’s not just difficult for the insecure people among us. This can be difficult for everyone, including leaders, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and high achievers. Sometimes, more so, due to all the pressures and expectations imposed on them.

“That age-old advice to ‘be yourself’ is deceptively simple. Being yourself is a lifetime’s work of discovery and courage, stepping out from behind your fear of not being good enough.” -Claire Law

Crafting Your Life and Work Course

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How to Stop Pretending So Much

Being authentic and true can be difficult because, when we put down the mask and dare to be ourselves in front of others, we feel raw, exposed, naked, and vulnerable. We feel like we can die from disapproval, rejection, or belittling.

“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself.
I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.”
-Chip Conley, author, entrepreneur, and founder, Modern Elder Academy

But we don’t die. We may suffer some adverse consequences, although usually our fears are way overblown. Overall, we tend to thrive when we lean in to being ourselves more fully, openly, and unapologetically.

How to go about it? Here are some of the things we can do to help us stop pretending so much:

  • know ourselves so well and deeply that we feel a sense of clarity and comfort about our true nature and begin to feel more comfortable in our own skin (a lifelong process)
  • accept our flaws (what about Brene Brown calls the “gifts of imperfection”)
  • engage in systematic personal development to build on our strengths, interests, and aspirations and feel the joy of growth and progress
  • develop the courage to let some people go (e.g., people who are judgmental, controlling, or always worrying or negative)
  • notice that things usually turned out better than we expected when we were afraid of failure, judgment, or rejection
  • develop our confidence and truly believe that we’re enough
  • remove our mask as much as possible in front of those we love the most, deepening connection and building our capacity to be real in front of others
  • dig down into the root causes that led us to want to avoid being ourselves
  • take an occasional break from the heavy responsibilities of being ourselves (“The energy required to maintain your identity is probably greater than you realize, and finding a way to relinquish it regularly can help you recharge.” -David Brooks)

Yes, there are many things we can do, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

“Being true to who you really are can be one of the hardest things to do in life.”
-Carlii Lyon, Australian executive

 

The Benefits of Being Ourselves

When we start putting the mask down more often, we’re doing two important things, according to researchers.

First, we’re developing our self-acceptance—our acceptance of all our attributes, whether positive or negative.

Second, we’re developing our authenticity—the degree to which our behavior is congruent with our attitudes, beliefs, and values. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown defines authenticity as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” She notes that it requires audacity to be authentic.

What are the results of developing our self-acceptance and authenticity? There are many benefits, according to researchers, including:

  • improving wellbeing
  • feeling free
  • building confidence
  • developing better relationships
  • boosting work performance
  • protecting our mood in the face of setbacks
  • building our mental strength
  • cultivating a sense of peace
  • feeling less compulsive and anxious
  • lowering the barriers we’ve placed between ourselves and others
  • developing our capacity to distance ourselves from outside expectations and extrinsic motivations
  • avoiding one of the most common and difficult regrets—the regret of living our lives by the lights of others instead of by our own guiding lights
“Studies have even shown that feelings of authenticity can go hand in hand with numerous psychological and social benefits: higher self-esteem, greater well-being, better romantic relationships, and enhanced work performance.”
-Jennifer Beer, “The Inconvenient Truth about Your ‘Authentic’ Self,” Scientific American, March 2020

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you wearing a mask in front of others and pretending to be someone or something you’re not?
  2. What will you do, starting today, to lean in to being yourself more fully, openly, and unapologetically?

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

Take the Test

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Authenticity

  • “To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -e.e. cummings
  • “…psychological suffering always comes from internal splits between what your encultured mind believes and what feels deeply true to you.” -Martha Beck in The Way of Integrity
  • “Live with total integrity. Be transparent, honest, and authentic. Do not ever waiver from this; white lies and false smiles quickly snowball into a life lived out of alignment. It is better to be yourself and risk having people not like you than to suffer the stress and tension that comes from pretending to be someone you’re not, or professing to like something that you don’t. I promise you: Pretending will rob you of joy.” -Dr. Christine Carter, sociologist (advice to her children)
  • “The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world… life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.” -Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations
  • “We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.” -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
  • “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen
  • “Being true to the person you were created to be means accepting your faults as well as using your strengths. Accepting your shadow side is an essential part of being authentic. The problem comes when people are so eager to win the approval of others that they try to cover their shortcomings and sacrifice their authenticity to gain the respect and admiration of their associates…. Many leaders—men in particular—fear having their weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed. So they create distance from employees and a sense of aloofness. Instead of being authentic, they are creating a persona for themselves.” -Bill George, Authentic Leadership
  • “…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, The Way of Integrity
  • “Now as adults, we realize that to live with courage, purpose, and connection—to be the person who we long to be—we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.” -Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
  • “Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward and Undivided Life
  • “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
  • “I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule—Never lie to yourself.” -Paulo Coelho
  • “Why fit in—when you were born to stand out?” -Dr. Seuss

Personal Values Exercise

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Final Note: The Good Forms of Pretending

One final note. As we address the dangers of pretending to be someone or something we’re not, we should be careful not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” as the saying goes. Here are several forms of “pretending” that are quite different from that trap, and that have important benefits:

1. Self-Distancing

When we’re “self-distancing,” we’re viewing our own experience from the perspective of an observer. According to the research, self-distancing can:

  • help us overcome difficult emotions and reduce stress and anxiety
  • help us reduce emotional reactivity
  • reduce our heart rate and blood pressure
  • help us see things more objectively and with greater perspective
  • promote wise reasoning about conflicts and how to approach them
  • foster humility, empathy, and open-mindedness

2. Alter Ego

Many people think about things from the perspective of a hero or mentor, even pretending that they’ve assumed that identity. Most of us can relate to this, starting from childhood. As a child, maybe we pretended to be Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, or Dora the Explorer. If we wanted to be an entrepreneur, maybe we channeled Steve Jobs. If we wanted to be a media maven or overcome trauma, maybe Oprah Winfrey. If we’re Christian, we may ask, “What would Jesus do?” And so on with different religions or influences.

3. Visualization

Many people, and most famously athletes, use visualization to boost performance. With visualization, we mentally pretend we’re doing something, simulating it in our mind, forming a mental image of the things we want or the actions we need to take. This helps the brain form neural connections. It can be powerful, especially when it’s followed by action, including extensive, deliberate practice.

4. Maskenfreihet

The German word, “maskenfreiheit,” means “mask freedom” or “the freedom that comes from wearing masks.” Many people enjoy going to a masquerade or a costume party, with not only the creativity and fun but also the release from being ourselves.

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

The Trap of Losing Yourself

by

These days, will all the pressures and pushes we feel, it can be easy to lose ourselves. We get consumed by events or other people’s priorities, surrendering our agency or initiative.

We can lose ourselves so much that we hardly recognize ourselves. Or let our own values, priorities, and aspirations fall by the wayside.

We can become accustomed to suppressing our needs, desires, or feelings. Or lose sight of who we really are and what we want in life. We can stop investing in our learning and growth, stop pursuing our dreams and passions, or neglect our inner life so much that it fades and withers.

Losing ourselves is a common trap these days, but imperative that we address it, because it robs our lives of meaning and joy.

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When Warren Lost Himself

When Warren Brown chose the legal profession, he probably thought he had found himself—or at least his place in the world.

He had chosen law school, he says, because “I was driven by the expectation that I needed some type of profession… driven by parental expectations and by looking at my peers.”

Warren was successful in the eyes of many, and he had the opportunity to impact many through his work for a government agency.

Down the road, Warren found himself at a Tibetan Freedom Festival listening to a band. He was struck by the lyrics in the song, “Karma Police,” by Radiohead:

“For a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself.”

For Warren, these words hit deep. Out of the blue, his inner voice started interrogating him with provocative questions:

Are you there? Are you happy? Are you you?

His answers to those questions were illuminating:

Yes. No. No.

 Yes, he was there—finally starting to listen again to his inner voice.

But no, he wasn’t happy.

And no, he wasn’t feeling like himself anymore.

The next question that came up was equally surprising:

Are you ready?

Ready? For what?

For Warren, the answer turned out to be baking, a lifelong passion. He realized that for the preceding year he “had been waiting for something to happen, and it never did. I was tired of waiting.”

Warren was ready. The realization that he wasn’t happy and that he had lost himself set him on a new path in which he became what we call a “life entrepreneur”—someone who intentionally and creatively designs his life by integrating his life and work with purpose and passion.

Warren pursued his passion with gusto, and it led him to all sorts of interesting and unexpected places and roles, including founder of the CakeLove bakeries and Love Café, cable TV host, cookbook creator, and more.

 

How We Lose Ourselves

There are several different ways we can lose ourselves. Here we note seven of the most common ways:

 

1. We can lose ourselves in work and busyness.

The trap here is subsuming ourselves to the needs of our organization, the demands of our manager, or the expectations of our role (and the way we can obsess over it).

In some cases, we end up worshipping our work (and all its trappings, such as wealth, status, and prestige), subsuming our lives to our work. Without enough white space in our lives, we can lose ourselves. And we can lose ourselves in work, busyness, and workaholism.

 

2. We can lose ourselves in addiction to success or admiration.

The desperate pursuit of success—often fueled by our fragile or wounded ego or by our desire to please demanding parents—can take us away from ourselves. As we get caught up in our desired image, or in the prestige we seek, we can drift away from our core, from who we really are and what we value.

We can get so caught up in the chase that we compromise our authenticity or values on the way to the top. And we can get so driven that we lose sight of the people we love or the things that capture our hearts. We can lose our artistry and uniqueness. Or we can become success robots, dutifully following social programming instead of pursuing our calling.

“As we become more obsessed with succeeding… we lose touch with our souls and disappear into our roles. The child with a harmless after-school secret becomes the masked and armored adult—at considerable cost to self, to others, and to the world at large.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

 

3. We can lose ourselves in trying to please others and be liked

We all want others to like us (except for sociopaths). It’s part of our hardwiring, because there’s safety and comfort in groups, in belonging. But when taken too far, it becomes “people pleasing.”

We get stretched thin and lose track of our own needs, aspirations, and health. It’s exhausting to be in perpetual pursuit of the favorable opinions of others, especially when the reality is that most of those people are likely caught up in their own challenges and concerns.

“Don’t lose yourself trying to be everything to everyone.”
-Tony Gaskins

 

4. We can lose ourselves in trying to be perfect.

The perfectionism trap is a common one. When caught up in it, we’re overly critical of ourselves and preoccupied with looking good to others. We assume that flawlessness is the only route to peace, but we’re actually waging war on ourselves because that standard is impossible to reach.

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5. We can lose ourselves by accepting the cultural programming we received as children.

Mindlessly accepting the worldview of our parents or the paradigm of our peers can also lead to losing ourselves. It’s easy to lead our lives around notions engrained in us early on, such as:

  • Life is a competition.
  • Life is a zero-sum game.
  • Everything in the world is winner-take-all.
  • We can’t trust anyone.
  • Life is struggle, and we must fight and grind constantly.
  • We must keep pushing and never stop to rest.
  • We’re worthless.
  • We are not worthy of love and respect.
  • We’re only as good as our achievements.
  • We deserve the bad things that happen to us.
  • Money is everything.
  • Success is everything.

There may be kernels of truth in some of these notions, but we’re all different and on different paths in different times and places. We’re wise to question those ideas and develop our own worldview based on our own experience and intuition.

 

6. We can lose ourselves when we follow the default option in front of us.

We should ask ourselves a question before jumping into a new project or assignment:

Do we really want it?

We should be wary of the call of the conventional path, the pull of the prestige magnet, the inclination toward conformity, the trap of caring too much what others think, and the Siren call of contorting ourselves to meet the expectations of others.

For example, must passionate and gifted teachers accept a promotion to school administration because others think they’d be crazy not to? Should we all go for the next standard career advancement, regardless of its fit with who we are and what we want or its suitability for the season of life we’re in?

 

7. We can lose ourselves in a relationship.

We’re so afraid of loneliness—with its longing and its stigma—that we can subsume ourselves to the needs or whims of another.

When we do so, we effectively become a passenger on someone else’s ship.

 

When Losing Ourselves Is a Good Thing

It’s important to be clear and precise here. While losing ourselves can be a painful trap to fall into, there are certain versions of losing ourselves that are good.

When talking about the trap of losing ourselves, we’re not talking about losing ourselves in:

And we’re not talking about the normal adjustments and compromises we can and should make in a healthy relationship, with its natural give-and-take.

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Reflection Questions

  1. Are you losing yourself—in work and busyness, addiction to success, pleasing others, trying to be or appear perfect, accepting your cultural programming, following default options, or a relationship?
  2. What will you do, starting today, to bring more of yourself back into your life—to be you unapologetically?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Traps

The trap of losing ourselves is related to several of the other common traps of living, including:

 

Postscript: Inspirations

  • “…the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me—and ended up empty.” -Haruki Murakami
  • “When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” -Eckhart Tolle
  • “There is vitality, a life force, energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” -Jonathan Fields, How to Live a Good Life
  • “Once you don’t have freedom and you’re obliged to do many things you don’t want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be—and you can lose yourself.” -Ingrid Betancourt
  • “It’s great if you can help others, but seriously don’t lose yourself in the process!” -Karen Gibbs
  • “Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself.” -Albert Camus
  • “Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.” -Emily McDowell

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development & leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) 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 Neglecting Our Inner Life

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These days with our full schedules and device addictions, it can be easy to neglect our inner life. We can get caught up in activities and busyness while losing touch with ourselves.

That’s a big mistake—and likely to lead to major problems down the road.

There are many different ways we can think about and experience an inner life. It can be a sense of inner guidance, an inner voice, inner wisdom, or having a rich inner world. For some, it can involve feeling a sense of our innermost being—or the feeling that “This is the real me.” It can mean being in touch with our intuition or our spirit or soul.

Different people will have different experiences with it. The question, though, is whether we experience it at all.

For many people these days, the answer is no.

 

Indications We’re Neglecting Our Inner Life

When we’re neglecting our inner life, we may:

  • feel a disconnect between our mind, body, and soul, or an odd sense of distance from our own feelings and body
  • experience frequent fatigue, anxiety, or stress, sometimes without an apparent reason
  • find ourselves avoiding difficult emotional issues through coping behaviors such as overwork and chronic busyness
  • feel obsessed with producing and performing while feeling divided, empty, or unworthy inside
  • have trouble accessing our intuition and inner voice or gut feelings
  • feel out of tune with ourselves
  • sense that we’re betraying our nature or values

Often, we experience several of these downsides simultaneously. It can be disconcerting—and even debilitating. Meanwhile, we’re also missing out on the many benefits of having a rich inner life.

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The Benefits of Having an Inner Life

When we have a robust inner life, it comes with many benefits. It can help us feel:

Calm
Clear
Peaceful
Patient
Still
Accepting
Nonjudgmental
Connected
Forgiving
Compassionate
Fully aware
Generous
Whole
Brave
Joyful
Reverent
Loving

With a rich inner life, we can also experience self-compassion and self-trust, feel more comfortable making tough decisions, and be more open to powerful experiences of flow. Having a full inner life can give us experiences of joy and awe.

“The magic of the inner world has no equal. It can be like a musical symphony of indescribable beauty where you become immersed in every chord and feel every note. You begin to realize your inner world is with you all the time—a core of indescribable Sacred Silence, surrounding you, interpenetrating you and others. We waste our time with small things that are at best a distraction, while the inner world waits for us to enter, waits to impart understanding and embody wisdom in action.” -Barry Bowden

Personal Values Exercise

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How to Cultivate an Inner Life

Since it’s hard to maintain an inner life these days, we’re wise to develop practices that make it conducive for us to cultivate it.

Here are some of the top cultivation practices:

  • Praying
  • Meditating (including observing our thoughts and feelings without judgment and accepting them as they are, or centering our awareness in our heart or elsewhere in our body)
  • Experiencing nature—even just walking and being present to the sights and sounds around us—and savoring it
  • Reading that engages our heart and soul
  • Listening deeply to music and experiencing it in our heart and body
  • Creating things (via writing, music, art, film, dance, etc.)
  • Being in community with others where we feel each other’s presence, engage in deep dialogue with trust and vulnerability, and avoid judging or trying to fix each other. (Parker Palmer makes an important point: “inner work, though it’s a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along by community.”)
  • Serving others without expecting anything in return—and feeling more whole as we do so
  • Being fully present with someone in their suffering (being there with and for them) without trying to fix or save them
  • Stop trying to force an inner life, and instead let it emerge, by listening to our inner voice more (as the old Quaker saying goes, “Let your life speak”) and having “a conversation with our own soul,” as Parker Palmer advises

It can help a lot to develop routines and rituals around such centering practices (e.g., a morning routine of meditation and reading, or an evening ritual of reflection and prayer).

 

Leaders and Their Inner Life

Cultivating an inner life isn’t just for monks and sages. It’s also for leaders, entrepreneurs, parents, and working professionals. According to James Kouzes and Barry Posner in A Leader’s Legacy, “Leadership development is first and foremost self-development. Becoming a leader begins with an exploration of the inner territory as we search to find our own authentic voice. Leaders must decide on what matters in life, before they can live a life that matters.”

Warren Bennis quote

“Listening to the inner voice—trusting the inner voice—
is one of the most important lessons of leadership.”
-Warren Bennis, leadership scholar

Also, an inner life isn’t just for adults: it’s also for children and teens. Having an inner life is part of the human experience, if only we learn how to tap into it.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What’s the state of your inner life?
  2. What are the practices that work best for you in cultivating an inner life? Can you design more of them into your days?
  3. Which new centering practices will you try?

Wishing you well with it, and please let me know if I can help.

–Gregg Vanourek

Gregg Vanourek and his dog

 

Tools for You

 

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Postscript: Inspirations on the Inner Life

  • “It is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material and institutions and other people instead of dealing with our own souls. We like to talk about the outer world as if it were infinitely complex and demanding, but it is a cakewalk compared to the labyrinth of our inner lives!” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “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
  • “Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness…. we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly.” -Shakti Gawain
  • “Everyone has a calling, which is the small, unsettling voice from deep within our souls, an inner urge, which hounds us to live out our purpose in a certain way. A calling is a concern of the spirit.” -Dave Wondra
  • “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about…. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “Whenever you experience stress of any kind, look into yourself and ask, ‘In what way am I compromising my innermost values in this situation?’” -Brian Tracy
  • “I once thought that I could make any decisions, whether professional or personal, by using decision trees, game theory, and optimization. Over time, I’ve changed my mind. For the big decisions in life, you need to reach a deeper region of consciousness. Making decisions then becomes not so much about ‘deciding’ as about letting an inner wisdom emerge. This approach to decision making requires time, patience, and another key ingredient: courage. It takes courage to listen to your inner wisdom. But once you hear that wisdom, making a decision becomes fairly easy.” -Brian Arthur
  • “What is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
  • “There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, and yet you go door to door asking for crusts. Knock on your inner door. No other.” -Rumi
  • “The inner man wants something that the visible man doesn’t want, and we are at war with ourselves.” -Carl Jung
  • “Our bodies are designed to ‘speak’ to us via our physical sensations, symptoms, intuition, cravings, moods, and emotions.” -Kem Egel, licensed therapist
  • “The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.” -Parker Palmer, from Let Your Life Speak
  • “In everyone’s life, at some time, an inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” -Stephen R. Covey

Crafting Your Life and Work Course

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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Crafting Your Life & Work online course, take his Traps Test (Common Traps of Living), or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

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