Traps Archives

How to Be More Decisive in Your Life and Leadership

11/09/202308/15/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

“Should I stay or should I go?”
-the Clash

We make many decisions every day. Many are trivial, but some are consequential and taxing. Which career to pursue (or transition into). When to make a big move. Who to live with, work with, or hire. Whether to start a new venture.

To live and lead well, we must get good at making decisions.

On the leadership front, do we want leaders who wallow and waffle? Or leaders who move forward despite uncertainty; home in quickly on the key issues; actively gather input before deciding; involve others in decisions; invoke their experience, judgment, wisdom, and gut instinct; and remain calm under pressure?

There’s a lot at work with making good decisions. The neurological mechanics of decision-making are breathtaking. When we make decisions, we’re using the brain’s prefrontal cortex for what’s called “executive function.” We’re drawing upon an array of cognitive processes, including: attentional control; cognitive inhibition; working memory; cognitive flexibility; reasoning; problem-solving; differentiation between conflicting thoughts; value determinations (good, bad, better, best, worse, worst); prediction of outcomes; and more.

No wonder so many people sometimes struggle with indecisiveness—wavering between different courses of action and having trouble deciding and moving on—and its related problem of “analysis paralysis.”

Truth be told, getting good at decision-making isn’t easy. This isn’t a new challenge. Even Aristotle mused about the absurdity of the idea that “a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death.” Indecisiveness indeed.

The challenge can be even more complex with making decisions in organizations. As expected, there’s much room for improvement here as well. According to a McKinsey Global Survey, only 20 percent of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making. What’s more, a majority report that much of the time they devote to decision making is used ineffectively.

Clearly, we have work to do.

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.

The Problem with Indecisiveness

“Indecision may or may not be my problem.”
-Jimmy Buffett

Indecisiveness has many drawbacks—and sometimes costly and painful consequences. For example, indecisiveness can:

make an already difficult situation worse
create delays that have spillover effects, impeding important progress
cause frustration
reduce productivity, effectiveness, and credibility
inhibit innovation
bring about stress
lead to team and organizational stagnation, breakdowns, and failures
prevent us from realizing new opportunities

“Indecision is the greatest thief of opportunity.”
-Jim Rohn

When making decisions, we can experience “choice anxiety”: feeling distressed because we can’t seem to determine what’s right, with the fear of making the wrong decision shutting us down.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks about the “paradox of choice” and claims that the freedom to choose, while sounding nice, is actually one of the main roots of unhappiness today, in part because we live in such abundance. Choice overload leads to anxiety. We fear making the wrong choice or fear missing out on the “right” choice.

Schwartz cites an intriguing “jam study” in which a store gave one set of shoppers a range of six jams to consider, and another set of shoppers a range of 24 jams. In the end, shoppers were ten times more likely to purchase jam from a range of six jams than from the much larger set. 10x.

Choice overload can easily lead to not making a choice. We simply walk away. (See my article, “Choice Overload and Career Transitions.”)

Another big problem is second guessing—when we keep revisiting previous decisions and agonizing over whether we should change them. An unproductive and frustrating doom loop.

Causes of Indecisiveness

There are many causes of indecisiveness. Here are eleven of the leading causes:

personality (e.g., our levels of neuroticism and anxiety)
fear of making the wrong choice: we’d rather not decide than risk making the wrong decision, due to loss aversion
fears of failure or of rejection or loss of social status
lack of confidence
excessive risk aversion
lack of clarity about what we want or where we’re going
conflicts between our own preferences and the expectations of others
decision fatigue (a state of mental overload and depletion from making many decisions)
family or cultural conditioning (such as excessive punishment for making mistakes)
lack of accountability for indecisiveness
a history of perfectionism

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.

How to Be More Decisive

Thankfully, there are many things we can do to become more decisive. Note that decisiveness doesn’t mean making hasty, impulsive, or rash decisions. It means making decisions quickly, firmly, and effectively. Here are 22 tips and techniques for developing our decisiveness:

recognize that decisiveness isn’t a set trait, and that decision-making is a skill that can be practiced and developed
acknowledge that indecisiveness is a form of self-sabotage, only making things harder for ourselves and others
become clearer about what we want—including clarity about our personal purpose, core values, and vision of the good life
build our confidence (the good kind, which is earned through hard work and disciplined attention to growth and development), since this is a key factor in decisiveness
develop systems to make as many decisions as possible habitual, routine, or automatic—such as having a regular reading or workout routine at a certain time on certain days (this helps us avoid decision fatigue and frees up cognitive resources for other decisions)
increase our self-awareness so we know under what conditions we work and decide best (and worst)
recall that most decisions involve uncertainty, which tends to come with anxiety, and learn to expect and account for that
develop mechanisms for coping with anxiety and stress, since these contribute to indecisiveness
recognize the difference between fear and actual danger, noting that our fears are often exaggerated versus the actual dangers we face
recognize that being decisive isn’t about always being right (instead, it’s about being able to make clear decisions—even tough ones—quickly, firmly, and confidently despite uncertainty)
distinguish between irreversible and reversible decisions (Jeff Bezos wrote about this in his 2015 letter to shareholders with the distinction between one-way doors, where there’s no going back, and two-way doors in which you can simply “reopen the door and go back through.” He lamented that too many big companies use one-size-fits-all decision making, treating all decisions like one-way doors and in the process slowing everything down.)
get curious and investigate why we avoid making decisions
build our decisiveness and decision-making courage by working to make decisions more quickly and more boldly—and then take stock of how things turn out
start small and make less consequential decisions more quickly at first, building from there to bigger decisions
divide bigger decisions into smaller ones (or a series of steps) that are less intimidating and more manageable
summon more urgency into our lives, since time is precious and wasted time is a common regret
set deadlines for making decisions
“don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” as the expression goes. Look for the point where we have enough information to make a reasonable decision instead of waiting until we have nearly all possible information, variables, and scenarios accounted for. Focus on pursuing learning and growth instead of perfection when making decisions.
recognize that we can’t control our future and that we can’t make perfect decisions
use the “only option test”: imagine that only one of the two options were possible and then see how it feels; then imagine that the other option was the only possible one and see how it feels; then consider whether we have two good options, and it doesn’t really matter so much which one is chosen*
focus only on the most important things and don’t get caught up in the rest, thereby reducing the total number of decisions to make
pray on or sleep on important decisions, summoning deeper wisdom and grace

“If you were omniscient and had a time machine, you would know everything you need to know about the [the results of your decision], but the problem is that we don’t have either of those things, so we don’t have perfect information when we’re making a decision.”
-Annie Duke

The key isn’t just decisiveness. What we really want is skills in making good decisions. It’s about both decision-making quality and decisiveness. Surely it’s easier to be more decisive when we know we have a good decision-making process. So what does that look like?

How to Get Better at Making Decisions

A good decision flows from a good process for deciding. Here are several ways we can get better at making decisions:

look into whether there’s more information readily available that would be important for making a good decision—or not—and gauge whether we have enough of the right kind of information to decide
get input on decisions from trusted friends and colleagues
evaluate the likely impact of a decision before making it
invoke our intuitive sense (gut instincts) as well as our reason and logic when making important decisions
distance ourselves from the situation (e.g., project forward decades into the future and think about which choice will serve us the best over time)
view the issue from a different perspective (e.g., ask ourselves what we’d advise our best friend to do in the situation at hand)
look for innovation solutions such as creative combinations or trials* (example: when I was in graduate school, I did two different summer internships to get a feel for both opportunities—and learned that neither was a good fit for me)
get feedback and coaching or mentoring on decision-making

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.

Final Thoughts

One of the keys to decision-making and decisiveness is learning to trust ourselves more. Without self-trust, all of this can fall apart quickly. We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to apply ourselves consistently at getting better.

Once we make a decision, it’s important not to dwell and not to agonize. We must let go of the myth of the one perfect decision and focus more on making the best of the decisions we’ve made. Focus more on developing and using a good decision-making process instead of on whether any decision is “right” or “wrong,” and then trust in that process to serve us well over time.

Refuse to live in a state of regret: take full responsibility for our choices and move on. Make changes when needed. Give ourselves credit for doing our best.

Finally, consider this: If we can get good at making decisions and being decisive, it will help us with everything we do. There’s incredible leverage that comes from improving this. Wishing you well with it.

-Gregg

Reflection Questions

To what extent is indecisiveness causing you problems (and in which areas)?
What can you do to improve your decision-making process?
What will you do, starting today, to become better at making good decisions with urgency and resolve—at becoming more decisive?

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

“Choice Overload and Career Transitions”
“Getting Good at Overcoming Fear”
“The Perfectionism Trap–And How to Escape It”
“The Incredible Benefits of Being Action-Oriented”
“Why Self-Awareness Is So Important–And How to Develop It”

Resources on Decision-Making

Alliance for Decision Education
Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
“Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice” TED talk
Chip and Dan Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa, Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

Postscript: Quotations on Decisiveness and Decision-Making

“Indecisiveness is the number one reason for failure. Lack of ability to make a decision in a timely manner causes most people to fail with their projects and plans. Identify this challenge and decide to no longer let it be a setback from your success.” -Farshad Asl
“Be decisive. A wrong decision is generally less disastrous than indecision.” -Bernhard Langer
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” -Theodore Roosevelt
“Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide—undetectable yet deadly.” -Cherie Carter-Scott
“A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.” -Kilroy J. Oldster
“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.” -Anne Rice
“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” -Tony Robbins
“When you make the best decision you can at a particular time, it’s never worth looking back. Getting stuck in ‘I should have’ or ‘I could have’ is only a waste of precious time and energy.” -Dr. Carla Marie Manly
“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” -Tony Robbins

* Source: Erin Bunch, “Decisiveness Is a Learned Trait—Here Are 11 Tips To Master the Art of Decision-Making,” Well and Good, March 22, 2021.

** Featured image: photo by Jon Taylor on Unsplash.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

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

How to Stop Catastrophizing–Managing Our Minds

03/11/202408/11/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

**“The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.”
-Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh**

Things have been tough in the last few years. Pandemic. Inflation. War.

Many are suffering mightily. Maybe you’ve been suffering too.

But are you complicit in your own suffering? Are you making things, as tough as they may be already, even worse?

One of the ways we do this is through “catastrophizing.”

Catastrophizing is a form of cognitive distortion, in which we assume the worst and blow things out of proportion. We imagine the worst possible outcome and generate an exceptionally negative expectation of future events.

When we’re catastrophizing, we see something concerning or bad and assume it’ll become a disaster. We believe our own horrendous forecast even when those thoughts have no basis in reality. Our catastrophizing brain becomes a breeding ground for stress and anxiety, starting a downward spiral.

When we’re catastrophizing, we’re also assuming that we won’t be able to cope with the predicted disaster when it materializes.

“One of the worst things anybody can do is assume. I think fools assume.
If people have really got it together, they never assume anything.
They believe, they work hard, and they prepare–but they don’t assume.“
-Mike Krzyzewski

Examples of Catastrophizing

Here are examples of catastrophizing:

“If my partner leaves me, I’ll be alone and unhappy for the rest of my life.”
“I’m hurting today. It’s going to get worse, and I’ll never get better.”
“If I fail this test, I’ll have to drop out of school. I’ll devastate my parents and become a failure.”
“I’m having a hard time with this challenge. I’m worthless. I may as well quit.”

Though it sounds extreme, catastrophizing can be common. Many psychologists believe that we’ve all done it sometimes.

Catastrophizing is related to anxiety, but there’s an important difference: anxiety can benefit us by causing us to take preventing measures. By contrast, catastrophizing has no redeeming value. It only makes us feel worse about phantom probabilities.

Catastrophizing is a bit like taking a microscope to our worst fears and viewing them at a scale a hundred times their actual size. The proportions are way off. So it shuts us down.

Sometimes catastrophizing joins forces with other nefarious thinking traps, such as:

Rumination: obsessive thinking about our distress (as opposed to its solutions)
Helplessness: feeling powerless when facing a negative situation

Causes of Catastrophizing

Why do we do catastrophize? There are many causes.

For starters, when we’re in a state of fear and/or anxiety, we’re more prone to catastrophizing. (See my article, “Getting Good at Overcoming Fear.”)

Also, our catastrophizing is often worse when we place extra importance on someone or something. When we value something greatly, like our relationship with a partner or our position in a social hierarchy, we can develop a hyped-up fear of losing it.

In addition, ambiguity can amp up the catastrophizing quotient. If, for example, we get a message from our spouse or boss that reads, “We need to talk,” it may cause our catastrophe circuits to go haywire.

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.

The Problem with Catastrophizing

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do,
but it doesn’t get you very far.”
– Jodi Picoult

There are big downsides to catastrophizing. At its worst, it can:

fill us with harmful (and unnecessary) emotions
take time and thought away from the actual situation we’re in (and its potential solutions)
amplify our self-doubt
lead to paralysis and inaction
give us the illusion that the worst case is our new normal
contribute to a victim mentality that gets us nowhere
prevent us from experiencing contentment and happiness
become a destructive lifelong habit unless we nip it in the bud

“Deal with your negative patterns before they become habits because habits are hard to break.”
-Germany Kent

12 Ways to Stop Catastrophizing

Thankfully, we don’t have to be passive victims of whatever thought-streams appear in our heads.

There are many things we can do to reduce or eliminate catastrophizing. Here are twelve of them:

acknowledge that bad things happen to all of us
recognize when we’re engaging in catastrophizing (mindfulness and meditation techniques can help make such awareness easier over time)
place our experiences into perspective
consider a range of possible outcomes—from positive to neutral to mildly negative ones and not just disasters

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.
-A.A. Milne, English poet and playwright

reframe thoughts from negative to positive ones (e.g., opportunities to learn and grow)
recall situations in which we’ve coped with and overcome negative events
lean on trusted relationships—and community—to provide support, encouragement, and perspective when needed
focus more on helping and serving others and less on how things are going for ourselves
think about the things we can control, letting go of things we can’t

“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

command ourselves to stop catastrophizing (some people actually benefit from speaking the words out loud, e.g., “Stop catastrophizing!”)
use positive affirmations (constructive statements that we repeat to ourselves to condition our brain for clarity and success)
engage in regular self-care practices, such as eating well, maintaining good sleep routines, exercising often, taking frequent breaks throughout the day, breathing deeply, enjoying hobbies, and getting out into nature

In the end, we all experience bad things in life. The key is to avoid making them worse by magnifying our negative thinking about them. Instead, why not take productive action to avoid or address them?

Reflection Questions

Have you been catastrophizing?
In what areas?
What will you start doing to turn your thoughts into allies instead of enemies?

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

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.

“The Mental Prisons We Build for Ourselves“
“Breaking the ‘Trance of Unworthiness‘”
“Getting Good at Overcoming Fear“
“The Power of Reframing to Change Our Outlook“

Postscript: Quotations on Catastrophizing

“Believing in negative thoughts is the single greatest obstruction to success.” -Charles F. Glassman
“I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance.” -Seth Godin
“Fear starts in the mind and it generates emotions. One fearful thought will lead to another if you let it. The way to keep that from happening is to not allow yourself to camp out in fear in your mind.” -Sadie Robertson, Live Fearless: A Call to Power, Passion, and Purpose

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development, life design, and leadership. 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 Complacency Trap

11/09/202307/28/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

One of the most insidious traps we can fall into in life and work is that of complacency—a state of easy contentment, with a lack of concern about or awareness of problems or risks. Complacency can prevent us from recognizing risks, trying harder, and making improvements.

Examples abound. We can be complacent about our health—or the health of our loved ones. Or complacent about our relationships. About our work, team, leadership, or organization. Complacent about our democracy and planet.

How to know when we’ve fallen into the complacency trap?

11 Signs of Complacency

When we’re complacent, we:

Take things for granted
Have too much routine, making things feel monotonous
Stick to what we know
Are too comfortable too often
Stay in our comfort zone
Start to “phone it in”
Stop learning and growing
Begin losing our ambition
Resist change
Avoid risk
Start taking the path of least resistance

Author Brendon Burchard warns us about “the comfortable life:

“…over time, in the comfortable life, something stirs within; maybe not a frustration but something in the sense of restlessness. That restlessness is a feeling or sense that maybe there is something more.”
-Brendon Burchard

The Problem with Complacency

There’s nothing wrong with comfort and satisfaction per se. These are good things, and we want them in our lives. The problem is when we have too much of them and lose our zest for life and our inner fire to go after our dreams.

Complacency can:

sap our motivation
lead to inaction when action is warranted
prevent us from making needed improvements
reduce our initiative and sense of hope
lead to mediocrity
rob us of future opportunities and benefits
derail our career
lead us to a “default life”

In their excellent new book, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging, Richard Leider and David Shapiro warn of living what they call a “default life”:

“Just floating along from one year to the next, accepting things as they present themselves without question or intention, is a surefire recipe for dissatisfaction and despair in later life. Living the default life is… living a life that isn’t really of our own choosing. It’s living a life that inevitably gives rise to questions like ‘Where did all the time go?’ ‘How did my life pass so quickly?’ and ‘Why did I squander my one precious opportunity for living?’”
-Richard Leider and David Shapiro

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.

What to Do About It

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to avoid or escape the complacency trap. Here’s a punch list:

Start acting with urgency. Like our time counts. Because it does.

Leverage deliberate agitation. Engage in what Tyler Hakes calls “deliberate agitation” (like shaking a snow globe). He writes:

“You let things settle into place just long enough and then shake them up. Watch to see if they fall into the same patterns or if something new and better emerges…. You deliberately and intentionally question things and change them before they become a problem. You remain vigilant in trying to improve so that way you don’t fall into the trap of complacency that leads to eventual failure.”
-Tyler Hakes

Dream big. We should think expansively about all we want to do in our lifetime in different areas—family, relationships, career, education, impact, travel, and more. When we do that, we feel the wondrous and mystical pull of our deepest aspirations.

Step out of our comfort zone. Too often, fear holds us back from venturing forth and risking ourselves. When we push ourselves, take risks, and dare to have adventures, our blood races and we start to feel awake and alive again.

Challenge ourselves to strive for a BHAG—a “big, hairy audacious goal.” This can be a life goal or a work goal, but a true BHAG should take our breath away with its audacity.

“…there is a difference between merely having a goal and becoming committed to a huge, daunting challenge—like a big mountain to climb…. Like the moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort—often creating immense team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them in the gut.”
-Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last

Calendarize time to work on the most important activities that will ensure we make progress on our top goals. That way, we can not only develop good and productive habits but also become the sort of person who consistently gets big stuff done.

Enlist an army of support. Consider recruiting an “accountability partner”—someone who can help keep us on track (such as a training buddy or someone willing to receive regular progress reports).

Identify and remove barriers to change. When we’re stuck, it’s easy to become complacent. We’re good at acclimatizing ourselves to a new situation. So get to work on identifying the major obstacles to progress and how to overcome them.

Notch short-term wins on meaningful work to build momentum. Draw on what researchers call the “progress principle”:

“…of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work; of all the negative events, the single most powerful is the opposite of progress—setbacks in the work. We consider this to be a fundamental management principle: facilitating progress is the most effective way for managers to influence inner work life. Even when progress happens in small steps, a person’s sense of steady forward movement toward an important goal can make all the difference between a great day and a terrible one.”
-Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle

Take full responsibility. Be what my co-author, Christopher Gergen, and I call a “life entrepreneur.” We thrive when we take ownership of our life and recognize our agency—when we take our life back. Life entrepreneurs create opportunities for themselves. They bring their dreams to life. They intentionally craft a good life with good work.

Get clear on our personal purpose, values, and vision:

Our purpose is why we’re here. It’s what gives us a sense of meaning and significance—often by connecting with and serving others.
Our values are what’s most important to us—our core beliefs and principles that guide our decisions and behavior.
And our vision is what we aspire to achieve in the future—and what success looks and feels like for us.

Personal Values Exercise

Build vitality. We feel better and achieve more when we develop physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness. When we’re intentional about productive and energizing habits, rituals, and routines.

Let go of limiting beliefs. Too often, we’re our own worst enemy. We’ve placed ourselves in a mental prison of judgment, negativity, and rumination. We have the power to upgrade our mental operating system, which will help us break the chains of complacency.

Set and maintain high standards. We tend to rise or fall to the standards we set. We often do better with deadlines, accountability, and high standards of personal and professional excellence.

Related Traps

The complacency trap is common, and it can be deeply damaging. It’s also accompanied by several associated traps:

drifting through life
settling for “good enough” and accepting significantly less than what we want or deserve
avoiding hard situations, people, or truths
being indecisive
postponing happiness and deferring dreams

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.

Final Thoughts

The complacency trap can rob us of quality time and experiences as well as passion and achievement. It can be tricky because we do want satisfaction and serenity, and not a life of frenetic striving and hair-on-fire busyness and hustle.

Somewhere in between, there’s a healthy place of commitment and urgency to live and work purposefully, achieve worthy things, serve others, and cherish our days, not squandering our time in a cool cloud of complacency.

Reflection Questions

To what extent has complacency crept into some aspects of your life and work (or that of your friends, colleagues, or organization)?
What will you do to regain the clarity, motivation, resolve, and urgency to get out of this trap?

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

–Gregg Vanourek

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

“Taking Stock of Your Quality of Life“

Postscript: Quotations on Complacency

“Complacency keeps you living a comfortable life… not the life you desire. Challenge yourself to do something different. Then, notice the new charged quality of your life.” -Nina Amir
“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta
“Never be passive about your life… ever, ever.” -Robert Egger
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” -Benjamin E. Mays
“I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.” -Trent Reznor
“Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a drain in the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things it as they might be. ’Good enough’ becomes days today’s watchword and tomorrow’s standard.” -Alex and Brett Harris
“History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.” -Gerald R. Ford
“Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.” -Jim Rohn
“There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” -Nelson Mandela
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” -Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“Our best enemy is the one who challenges us, and so doing, teaches us to set out to discover our potentials, while our worst friend is the one who is numbing us and lulling us into complacency, always being consenting or acquiescent.” -Erik Pevernagie
“Success is not guaranteed, it’s temporary.” -Frank Sonnenberg
“As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.” -Robin Sharma
“By far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.” -John Kotter

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The Trap of Blaming Others

09/07/202306/29/2022 by Kelly Johnson

When things aren’t going your way, it may be tempting to deflect attention from your own role in things and blame others. Perhaps you’re blaming your spouse. Or boss. Perhaps you’re blaming a friend or colleague. Or the economy or inflation—or politicians, the media, or a rival political party. Your parents, or your circumstances.

Blaming may give you a feeling of satisfaction as you look outside for responsibility and wallow in the unfairness of it all. But that feeling is fleeting. In the meantime, you haven’t moved forward at all. In fact, you’ve moved backward.

**“No good comes from blame.” -Kate Summers**

Signs of Blaming

How to tell if you’re blaming others? When blaming, you’re likely:

holding others responsible for your own frustrations and problems
expecting others to change to suit your needs
showing defensiveness
causing emotional escalation with the person and issue at hand

**“It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.” -Dalai Lama**

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.

The Problem with Blaming Others

“Wherever you find a problem, you will usually find the finger-pointing of blame. Society is addicted to playing the victim.” – Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Though it may feel good in the moment, blaming comes with many problems:

Most importantly, it doesn’t work. You don’t move forward in any way, shape, or form when you’re blaming. (“The blame game is a waste of time. Any time you’re busy fixing blame, you’re wasting energy and not fixing the problem.” -Rick Warren)
It often backfires, making things worse.
Blaming robs you of your own agency.
It makes people defensive.
Blaming damages relationships. (People don’t like it at all when they’re the target of blaming.)
It reduces your productivity and effectiveness.
Blaming often entails lying—bending the truth to minimize or eliminate your own responsibility while exaggerating the fault of others. As such, it harms your credibility.
You suffer the most, not the person you’re blaming.
Blaming leads to escalation into bigger issues—especially when it’s unfair blame or blame that misses important contextual factors because you don’t have all the information you need.
You don’t learn from mistakes since you’re focused on the fault of others.
Blaming can lead to other negative emotions—such as anger, resentment, or even hatred or rage—which are even worse.
It can rob you of your potential influence on others.
Apparently, blaming can be contagious, leading others to fall into this trap as well in a downward spiral.

“Blame is fascinating—it shapes our lives. It can be a benign way of positioning ourselves, a gentle joust or banter, or it can be poisonous, hurtful, or devastating for its victims. It can tear apart marriages and fracture work relationships; it can disable major social programs; it can inflict damage on powerful corporations; it can bring down governments; it can start wars and justify genocides.” -Stephen Fineman, The Blame Business

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.

Why You Blame

It’s natural and common to play the blame game. But that doesn’t mean it will serve you well. Your brain my subconsciously leap to blaming by default. What’s going on here?

Blaming is an odd combination of defense mechanism and attack strategy. You’re defending your precious ego by attacking another person with the assignment of fault. It’s a way to avoid or release negative emotions.

Blaming preserves your self-esteem by helping you avoid responsibility for mistakes. You want to be right and win the argument to protect your fragile ego. By blaming others, you feel like you can escape guilt and responsibility.

Blaming is also a form of social comparison, allowing you to feel superior and gifted with greater social status, at least in the situation at hand.

Also, blaming can come with perfectionism, giving us a way to maintain our illusion of perfection as we find fault in others instead of ourselves.

How to Avoid the Blame Game

So far in this article, you’ve seen what blaming is, the signs of blaming in action, the many problems with it, and why we do it so much.

But you can’t stop there. You need to know what to do about it—and what to do instead. Here are six top tips for avoiding the blame game:

Stop ruminating on the problems at hand and turn your attention instead toward something more positive.
Practice empathy and try to understand the context, motivations, and feelings of the other person. Work to account for the other person’s perspective. Ask questions and explore their perspective.
Focus on finding a solution, not a scapegoat. In the end, that’s most important.
Instead of assigning all the blame to another person, try a “50-50” split instead: assume equal responsibility for the problem, or at least joint responsibility. Ultimately, the allocation of blame matter much less than resolving the issues well.
Focus on collaboration, not blame. Consider ways in which teaming up to address the issues may benefit you both and avoid unnecessary emotional potholes.
Take full responsibility for your life, choices, behaviors, and outcomes, even if there are outside factors present (as there always are). It’s a powerful practice that will serve you well.

Final Thoughts

Though blaming is common and natural, don’t trade in it. It’s a trap. Blaming gets you nowhere fast and will even take you backward and cause damage. By avoiding the tram of blaming, you can improve your mental state, quality of life, relationships, leadership, and effectiveness.

**“It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist**

Reflection Questions

Are you playing the blame game?
Is it serve you well—or harming you?
Which of the top tips for avoiding blame will you try, starting today?

Wishing you well with it.

–Gregg Vanourek

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you
Leadership Derailers Assessment to help you identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the Blame Trap

“When we blame, we give away our power.” -Greg Anderson
“To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents.” -Maya Angelou
“One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present. In doing so, we build the trust of those who are present.” -Stephen R. Covey
“You become a victim when you blame yourself or others for some problem or error.” -Jay Fiset, Reframe Your Blame, How to Be Personally Accountable
“A loss is not a failure until you make an excuse.” -Michael Jordan
“Blame is the demonstrated lack of self-respect choosing to deposit one’s negative actions onto others to reinforce one’s view of being of good, fair, and approved.” -Byron R. Pulsifer
“Stop the blame game. Stop! Stop looking out the window and look in the mirror!” -Eric Thomas
“Blame means shifting the responsibility for where you are onto someone or something else, rather than accepting responsibility for your role in the experience.” -Iyanla Vanzant

What Are You Avoiding?

10/07/202306/07/2022 by Kelly Johnson

Avoidance. We all do it, whether it’s keeping away from someone or not doing something. What are you avoiding?

Sometimes we change the subject when it drifts into awkward territory. Other times we talk around hard topics. Or we put off that tough task.

Avoidance is a coping mechanism. Sometimes it’s helpful. Like when we see a downed power line or a snake.

It’s an inheritance from our evolutionary biology. Our nervous system gives us powerful signals to avoid danger, thus increasing our chances of survival. Avoidance is natural.

“Truly, there is nothing more common, routine, and human than
avoiding discomfort, uncertainty, or the potential of ‘bad news.‘”
-Dave Ursillo, author

But this coping mechanism can be overused and become maladaptive. We avoid too many things, too often. Things end up getting worse, not better.

We avoid too many things, too often.
Things end up getting worse, not better.

There are two types: cognitive avoidance (when we divert our thoughts away from something, as when we’re in denial) and behavioral avoidance (when we move to keep away from something, or when we avoid acting, as with procrastination).

We often deploy both types of avoidance in difficult situations, and we’re not fully conscious that we’re doing so. It can become programmed behavior.

What We Avoid

There are many things that we tend to avoid, including:

uncomfortable thoughts or feelings
pain
discomfort
conflict
uncertainty
difficult people
hard realities (e.g., problematic health diagnosis, unwanted breakup, not meeting performance expectations)
challenging tasks
difficult conversations (e.g., about money, problems, a poor performance review, death)

Our avoidance may make things easier now, but over time things can fester, making them much worse over time.

Why We Avoid

We avoid certain people or things for many reasons, from biological to psychological and social. Here are some of the main reasons:

It feels easier to avoid certain things than to deal with them.
Sometimes avoiding something hard feels like a better choice than acting and possibly failing.
We feel afraid of certain things (like inadequacy, looking bad, imperfection, disappointment, shame, embarrassment, failure), so we avoid them.
When we avoid someone troubling or something difficult, we sometimes believe we can avoid the stress and anxiety associated with it.

Most of these reasons and beliefs don’t hold up under scrutiny.

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.

The Problem with Avoidance

“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape conflict,
and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering.”
-Brendon Burchard, best-selling author

Here are some of the main problems with avoidance. It:

leaves the core problem(s) unaddressed
can aggravate anxiety because we’ve allowed things to deteriorate further
can be very frustrating to others (e.g., spouse or partner), and make things worse for them too
leads to new conflicts
becomes a vicious circle, leading to more avoidance and attendant problems
can become a way of life, a bad habit pattern
undermines us by taking away our power and agency
can feed and validate the fears that we were trying to avoid, making it self-defeating
may lead to numbing behaviors like drinking, overeating, over-exercising, binge-watching, overwork, and more

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist

How to Stop Avoiding

So what to do about it?

First, note that, in some situations (like the end of an important relationship or work project), we do in fact need time and space to heal. It’s not avoidance to give ourselves room for that.

Here are 14 strategies for how we can reduce or stop maladaptive avoidance:

Recognize our avoidance behaviors—but without beating ourselves up over them
Seek their root causes (continue asking why until there’s no deeper why)
Engage in relaxation and self-care activities such as deep breathing, meditation, yoga, gardening, art, or journaling
Get support from a friend, mentor, therapist, small group, and/or coach
Process emotions by talking them through with someone or journaling
Divide the problem into smaller, more manageable chunks
Start with an easy task to get momentum and small wins
Give ourselves motivations, such as rewards for accomplishing tasks
Reframe a situation to note the positives and avoid focusing only on the negatives
Change our inner monologue, quieting the negative self-talk
Practice communication skills, including assertive self-advocacy and what author Susan Scott calls “fierce conversations“
Set deadlines and goals to commit to action by a certain time
Build action and proactivity habits, training our brain and helping us become a “doer” (see my article on “The Incredible Benefits of Being Action-Oriented“ and books like The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits)
Recognize that doing something we’ve been avoiding can feel amazing, giving us a sense of agency, accomplishment, momentum, and confidence

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.

Final Thoughts

We’ve seen here that avoidance, while natural, can make things much worse. It can lead to frustration, anxiety, new conflicts, bad habits, numbing behaviors, and a loss of confidence and agency.

Much better, then, to work at recognizing our avoidance tendencies and systematically eliminating them. The problems won’t go away on their own, so why not deal with them directly?

Reflection Questions

What have you been avoiding lately?
Are there deeper issues underlying your avoidance?
Which of the 14 strategies for reducing or stopping avoidance will you try?

Wishing you well with it!

–Gregg Vanourek

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

“Taking Stock of Your Quality of Life“
“Getting Good at Asking for Help“

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoidance and Action

“Avoidance coping causes anxiety to snowball because when people use avoidance coping they typically end up experiencing more of the very thing they were trying to escape.” -Alice Boyes, PhD, author, The Anxiety Toolkit
“It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.” -Dr. Harriet Lerner
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” -Amelia Earhart
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” -Meister Eckhart
“Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” -Napoleon Hill

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The Perfectionism Trap—And How to Escape It

06/28/202302/24/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Perfectionism is a big problem today among ambitious professionals—and increasingly among young people in general. It’s also widely misunderstood, and even misappropriated as a badge of honor by some.

Let’s break it down. First, what is it?

Perfectionism entails striving to be flawless. It typically includes overly critical self-evaluations and excessive concerns about negative evaluations from others.

Perfectionism entails striving for unrealistic or even unattainable goals, followed by disappointment when we fail to achieve them. That’s followed by cognitive dissonance from misalignment between perfect self-identity and imperfect performance. For a perfectionist, low performance automatically means low self-worth.

Fundamentally, the assumption behind perfectionism is that the only route to self-acceptance and peace is flawlessness. It’s less about a desire for self-improvement and much more about seeking acceptance and approval. It entails conflating our identity and worth with our performance and accomplishments.

Signs of Perfectionism

Perfectionism is common. There are many signs of it that we can see all around us if we look:

Having unrealistic standards or expectations
Striving to be flawless
Fixating on mistakes
Being overly critical of yourself and not feeling good enough
Judging others excessively
Having low self-esteem and self-identifying as a loser
Being overly cautious and feeling afraid to fail
Wanting to control situations to avoid negative judgment
Feeling defensive about feedback
Being prone to blame ourselves, even when we’re not at fault
Feeling pushed toward goals by a fear of missing them, versus being pulled toward the prospect of reaching them
Focusing exclusively on results, while not being able to enjoy the process of trying, learning, and growing

Perfectionists can be consumed with self-monitoring and carefully managing their impressions—and sometimes with rumination and self-recrimination. They’re especially sensitive even to the potential for negative (or even not positive enough) judgment by others and for rejection.

Perfectionism is a problem because perfection is an impossible standard
for those of us who don’t wear a cape.

Perfectionists are under a regular barrage of self-imposed pressure. They put up a front of flawlessness and purity in part to hide their flaws. In some cases, they’re prone to all-or-nothing thinking, in which only perfection is acceptable. Otherwise, they remove themselves entirely from the situation.

We should be clear about the downsides of perfectionism while also being understanding of its causes and compassionate about the suffering that comes with it. According to the research, many perfectionists learned this mindset in their formative years, with conditional acceptance from parents or other guardians: I love you when you behave as I expect, and I don’t when you don’t.

This conditional giving and taking of love and acceptance can be quite painful, and even traumatic, for children. Some parents withhold affection or abandon their children (emotionally or physically). Others control their children. These behaviors can instill perfectionist beliefs and tendencies.

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.

Perfectionism on the Rise

According to recent research, perfectionism is increasing among young people, and an estimated 25 to 30 percent of children and adolescents are prone to perfectionism. It’s not surprising in our age of social media and influencers—and the impossible comparisons they tee up.

In a meta-analysis of perfectionism rates among more than 40,000 college students from 1989 to 2016 (the first such study of its kind), researchers found significant increases among recent undergraduates in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. The rates doubled, from 9 to 18 percent, over that period.

“On average,” said Andrew Hill (one of the researchers), “young people are more perfectionistic than they used to be,” and “the belief that other people expect you to be perfect has increased the most.”

Researcher Brene Brown suggests that perfectionism isn’t a binary matter in which we either have it or we don’t. Rather, she suggests that we all fall on a continuum of perfectionistic tendencies, ranging from occasional and situational bouts of it to “compulsive, chronic, and debilitating” versions of it. Ouch.

The Consequences of Perfectionism

“Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.”
-Anne Wilson Schaef

How does it affect us? Turns out, it can be quite debilitating.

In a nutshell, perfectionism leads to lower achievement along with more stress. A double whammy.

Perfectionism inhibits our work.
It harms our relationships.
Perfectionism causes needless suffering.

Even worse, there’s a negative spiral at work. Perfectionists will face a new or challenging situation and hear all sorts of psychological alarm bells. There will be a fear of failing and looking bad. In trying something new, they’ll see that they’re not good at it from the start (which is true for nearly all of us), leading them to quit. So they rarely stick with new things. They prefer their comfort zone. This “life paralysis” entails missing an array of opportunities due to their fear of falling short.

“To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”
-George Leonard, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

Given their tendency to fall short of their impossible standards, they can also start to develop an impression of themselves as failures, spinning a negative tale about their past that comes to haunt them going forward.

Perfectionism can reduce not only productivity but also creativity, inspiration, and joy. Insidiously, it can lead to procrastination, with people postponing tasks due to the potential negative judgment that can come from falling short. This “perfectionism-procrastination loop” as it’s called can lead to reduced productivity and missed deadlines, as perfectionists focus too much on unimportant details and lose sight of the big picture.

Perfectionism can have perverse unintended consequences. Though perfectionists are aiming to avoid social rejection by appearing flawless, sometimes they come across as aloof and inauthentic, thereby leading to social disconnection, the very thing they wanted to avoid in the first place. It can lead to estrangement or alienation from others as well as from our authentic self.

It gets worse. According to a meta-analysis of 284 studies and other research, perfectionism is correlated with anxiety, substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, clinical depression, self-harm, and suicide. In the research, it’s linked with psychological distress and low self-esteem, as well as with fear of failure (see my article on “Getting Good at Overcoming Fear”) and workaholism.

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.

Badge of Honor?

These days, perfectionism is widely misunderstood. Unfortunately, some people wear the perfectionist label as a badge of honor, perhaps to diminish the downsides while highlighting the benefits, such as attention to quality and detail. But it’s not a badge of honor.

Here we must distinguish between perfection (which is impossible in human pursuits) and perfectionism, and between the pursuit of excellence (which is positive) and perfectionism (which can be quite harmful).

Perfectionism ≠ the pursuit of excellence. That’s a myth.
Perfectionism ≠ striving to be your best. A rationalization.
Perfectionism is maladaptive and self-destructive. There’s much research on that.

“Perfectionism isn’t about high standards. It’s about unrealistic standards.”
-Professor Andrew Hill, York St. John University

It’s even a standard answer to the dreaded job interview question of “What are your weaknesses?” or “What are your worst traits?” Many people answer that they’re perfectionists, hoping that the interviewer will take it as a positive since it shows they’re so committed to high standards and to details.

“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
-Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

What to Do About It

We know it’s common and that it operates on a spectrum. So what to do about it? Here are nine research-based tips:

Practice “self-compassion”: extending kindness and understanding to ourselves when encountering setbacks or failures, recognizing these are universal.
Engage in positive self-talk: an inner voice that focuses more on potential and growth and less on critique and deficit.
Learn to value the importance of process more, versus an exclusive focus on results (many of which are not fully in our control).
Adopt a growth mindset (belief that our intelligence, abilities, and talents can be developed), instead of a fixed mindset (belief that our intelligence, abilities, and talents are static and cannot be changed).
Develop what Brene Brown calls “shame resilience”: an “ability to recognize shame when we experience it, and move through it in a constructive way that allows us to maintain authenticity and grow from our experiences.”
Practice mindfulness: a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and environment, ideally through a gentle, nurturing, and nonjudgmental lens.
Use a checklist for discrete tasks, instead of focusing on an amorphous (and impossible) standard of perfection, allowing you to see the progress you’re making along the way. Enjoy the feeling of progress, and ideally see it visually on a progress board.
Monitor progress by using a regular review (weekly or another interval) to show steps forward and give you some psychological distance from the current distress associated with feeling unworthy.
Unpack your past successes and revisit the processes you used to make progress and overcome obstacles, while also remembering that there were no guarantees of success along the way. This should help you get good at overcoming fear.

The “Gifts of Imperfection”

No doubt perfectionism is a formidable foe, and a powerful inhibitor of our wellbeing. I like how Brene Brown flips the script and talks about the “gifts of imperfection.” That’s right: the gifts.

She notes that our imperfections make us human. And they can bring us unexpected benefits, such as courage (to be who we truly are even when we fear judgment or disappointment), compassion (to see that everyone has their own struggles), and connection (to recognize our shared humanity and see ourselves in the real stories of others, with their messy ups and downs).

Reflection Questions

Are you falling into some of the traps of perfectionism? (Or your friends and colleagues?)
How is it showing up in your life and work?
Which of the nine perfectionism trap busters noted above are you game to try?

Let me know how it goes. I wish you well with it.

–Gregg

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our community. Sign up now and get Gregg Vanourek’s monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you
Leadership Derailers Assessment to help you identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness

“The Mental Prisons We Build for Ourselves”
“Breaking the Trance of Unworthiness”
“Getting Good at Overcoming Fear”

Postscript: Quotations on Perfectionism

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen
“There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.” -Shannon L. Alder
“At its root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success.” -Michael Law
“Perfectionism doesn’t believe in practice shots. It doesn’t believe in improvement. Perfectionism has never heard that anything worth doing is worth doing badly—and that if we allow ourselves to do something badly we might in time become quite good at it. Perfectionism measures our beginner’s work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn’t know how to say, ‘Good try,’ or ‘Job well done.’” -Julia Cameron, Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance

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Are You Living a Divided Life?

02/13/202402/16/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

The young woman in a corporate job whose true love is animals. Unless she makes a change, she’s looking at a long slog in her career.

A young college graduate on the business track who discovers he has no real interest in any of the business functions. He’s fascinated by medicine but feels trapped because of the costs of switching over.

The frustrated executive in a family business, itching to get out and be creative, entrepreneurial, impactful, and generous. What will he do?

Many of us are leading what author and educator Parker Palmer calls a “divided life”—a life in which we’re separated from our whole, true self.

Divided lives are common, for many reasons. Many of us were so busy doing things in our formative years that we never took much time to stop and think about who we are and what we really want to do in the world. A costly mistake, but one that we can rectify.

We’re under subtle but powerful pressure from family, friends, and mentors, feeling the heavy weight of outside expectations on our shoulders. Our school systems give us siloed education in disparate fields, making it hard for us to do the necessary sensemaking and wayfinding for choosing a career path wisely.

And so we end up leading a divided life.

The Problem of a Divided Life

Palmer lists the signs that we may be living a divided life:

“We refuse to invest ourselves in our work…
We make our living at jobs that violate our basic values…
We remain in settings or relationships that steadily kill off our spirit.
We conceal our true identities for fear of being criticized, shunned, or attacked….
We sense that something is missing in our lives and search the world for it, not understanding that what is missing is us.
We feel fraudulent, even invisible, because we are not in the world as who we really are.”

With a divided life, we sense incongruity between our inner world and our outer one. We feel inauthentic. We miss out on “the life-giving energies of true self.” Palmer notes from experience (including bouts with deep, debilitating depression) that when we violate our true self, it resists us and holds our life in check… “until we honor its truth.”

It’s painful and shameful, because it feels like living a lie, since we’re not honoring our nature.

There is another way.

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.

The Alternative: Wholeness

Wholeness means staying faithful to ourselves. It means growing into what Palmer calls our “authentic selfhood,” regardless of whether it conforms to the expectations of others or pattern-maps to the conventional model of success.

Wholeness means choosing our own definition of success and blazing our own path in life. Not easy, surely, but bound to bring adventure and satisfaction, even for trying.

Wholeness means showing up in the world as we truly are, not as some hologram designed to please others.

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

Wholeness by Other Names

Palmer isn’t the only one to see the power of wholeness.

Brene Brown writes about a close cousin to it, about being “wholehearted”:

“Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”
-Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

For Brown, a key aspect of wholeheartedness is authenticity, which she defines as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.”

It sounds much easier than it is. That’s why she talks about the “audacity of authenticity.”

In our book, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and I noted the importance of “authentic integrity”: integration of all aspects of our lives in a way that coheres with our true nature. It means living in alignment with our core identity, including our purpose, values, strengths, and aspirations.

“I just felt like I’ve lived a life that was true to itself…. Anybody who’s ever hung out in an ‘old man bar’—you know what I’m talking about—sees what happens when you don’t let that part of yourself do its thing.”
–Mary Cutrufello, musician and songwriter, in our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview

Author and former CEO Bill George calls it “true north”: the internal compass that guides us successfully through life.

Personal Values Exercise

A Shadow Side

Being whole isn’t the same as being perfect. Sometimes we’re broken—or feel broken. We have flaws and hang-ups that can get us into trouble.

Being whole means embracing our whole selves, even the parts we don’t like. We’re all a work in progress.

“Accepting your shadow side is an essential part of being authentic.”
-Bill George, best-selling author and former CEO

The Gifts of Imperfection

In a world awash in perfectionism, Brene Brown flips the script and talks about the “gifts of imperfection.” She notes that our imperfections are part of what makes us human, and they can bring us unexpected gifts, including courage, compassion, and connection:

Courage to be who we truly are even when we fear judgment or disappointment from others.
Compassion to see that everyone has their own struggles, leading us first to suffer with them in spirit and then to want to help them.
Connection when we recognize our shared humanity and see ourselves in the true stories of others, including their heartaches and foibles.

Notably, these three gifts are important components of wholeheartedness.

“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”
-Brené Brown

Living in the modern world in many ways pulls us away from wholeness. In some ways, it’s easier to live a divided life, and to avoid the vulnerability and struggle that can accompany authenticity and imperfection.

But at what cost in the end? What life will our future self be glad we crafted?

Reflection Questions

Are you honoring your nature, or holding back?
Have you been upholding your values?
Are you investing yourself in your work, or phoning it in?
Do you let yourself be fully seen, including your flaws?
Are you clear about your purpose, values, and aspirations for your life?
Do you feel whole?

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.

Postscript: Quotations on Divided Lives and Whole Lives

“…there can be no greater suffering than living a lifelong lie…. in the end what will matter most is knowing that we stayed true to ourselves.” -Parker Palmer, educator and author
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
“Bring your whole self to work. I don’t believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.” -Sheryl Sandberg, tech executive, philanthropist, and writer
“I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.” -Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything

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Why Happiness Is the Wrong Goal

10/02/202301/05/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Let’s face it. We’re obsessed with happiness:

Am I happy?
I just want to be happy.
I want my kids to be happy.
Why doesn’t my job make me happy?
Why doesn’t my relationship make me happy?

We tend to view happiness as the point of life.

Sounds reasonable. But it turns out to be counterproductive.

Happiness is the wrong goal.

To understand why and how, let’s back up and examine what we’re talking about.

There are many ways to think about happiness. We often think of it as feeling contentment or pleasure. But there’s more to it.

An excellent definition comes from happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky (also a psychology professor):

Happiness: “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being,
combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
-Sonja Lyubomirsky, happiness researcher

Here we see that happiness can include two important elements:

the current experience of positive emotions like pleasure and joy
an overall sense of life satisfaction, with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose

In the U.S., we have a long tradition of reverence for happiness. Even the Declaration of Independence noted our unalienable right not only to life and liberty but also to “the pursuit of happiness.”

This isn’t only an American phenomenon. The World Happiness Report has been published for a decade now. The United Kingdom began measuring national wellbeing ten years ago, following the Kingdom of Bhutan in Asia, which had already been measuring not only gross domestic product but also “gross national happiness.”

The Larger Context of Happiness

One of the challenges with achieving happiness is that there’s a lot to it. It comes with many associated feelings and related notions, including: circumstances (positive or negative), contentment, flourishing, fulfillment, joy, life satisfaction, meaning, mood, quality of life, self-actualization, self-evaluation, success, and wellbeing. Phew!

To understand happiness, we also need to think about unpleasant feelings like sadness, disappointment, anxiety, depression, neuroticism, rumination, and more. That brings up the related issues of adversity, adaptation, and resilience. Clearly, happiness isn’t just about beaches, butterflies, and rainbows.

What’s more, how we think about happiness has changed dramatically over time. Nowadays, we seem to have lost important ideas from ancient times. Enter “eudaimonia.”

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.

Eudaimonia—A Deeper Form of Happiness

Many ancient Greek philosophers focused on what they called “eudaimonia.” It’s commonly translated as “happiness” (and sometimes as “wellbeing” or “human flourishing”), but the roots of the word literally mean the condition of “good spirit.”

What they meant by eudaimonia goes well beyond our modern notion of happiness. They meant happiness through virtuous action, habits of moral excellence, and a full flourishing of self in the world. For Aristotle, eudaimonia was the term for the highest human good. It included fulfillment of human nature in an excellent way. He wrote that eudaimonia entails “doing and living well.” In other words, living a good life.

Here we encounter an important difference: eudaimonia is about habits and actions, whereas the way we think about happiness today is about feelings and mental states. This is actually a long-running debate between the hedonistic tradition (seeking pleasant experiences and avoiding unpleasant ones) and the eudaimonic tradition (living life in a full and deeply satisfying way, in accordance with virtue and excellence).

To the ancients in the eudaimonic tradition, a good life is the quest of a lifetime. It’s something you work toward every day, through your actions, mindsets, and relationships. Today, must of that seems lost.

Stoicism and Happiness

In Stoic philosophy, achieving eudaimonia requires the practice of virtue (rightful action in the world).

The idea is that we can only flourish by living an ethical life, practicing certain virtues (like courage, wisdom, justice, and moderation), and living in accordance with nature. Through right thinking and virtuous action, we can become emotionally resilient to negative events and misfortune.

We can develop self-control and mental strength to overcome harmful emotions that result from errors of judgment. This can help us be free from unproductive emotions like anger and envy.

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.

Buddhism and Happiness

Buddhism focuses on liberation from suffering, including overcoming craving and helping us accept life’s irrefutable truths. It encourages compassion, loving kindness, and a desire for the welfare of all beings.

Buddhist practice includes cultivation of attention and fostering a state of awareness, nonstriving, and detachment (or nonattachment).

A higher aspiration is nirvana, a state of everlasting peace through the release of worldly suffering.

Clearly, there are many paths and practices, old and new, related to happiness.

Happiness in Difficult Circumstances

While some view happiness as a pleasant state free from suffering, pain, or negative circumstances, a closer look reveals that happiness can sometimes depend on such things.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to recognize the value of difficulties in life, including suffering and unhappiness, since things of great worth can sometimes only be earned through difficulty and struggle.

A 2012 study by Jonathan Adler and Hal Hershfield found that mixed emotional experience (that is, concurrent positive and negative emotional experience, like happiness and sadness) is associated with and precedes improvements in psychological wellbeing.

The issue here is whether to express or suppress negative emotions (like sadness or grief) when things are difficult. One model (called a “co-activation model”) recommends “taking the good with the bad”: “when experiencing the loss of a loved one, allowing positive memories to be experienced alongside sadness could potentially lead to a healthier bereavement process.”

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
-Kahlil Gibran

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes about the “adversity hypothesis,” which holds that people need adversity and setbacks to reach the heights of personal development, strength, and fulfillment.

Most people have heard about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but not as many know about “post-traumatic growth”: positive psychological change after struggling with stressful and challenging circumstances. This can occur when we cope well with adversity and turn it into something valuable (such as life lessons, wisdom, or serenity).

Adversity can strengthen relationships by invoking vulnerability and opening our hearts to each other. And it can lead to feelings of love, connection, and gratitude for the help and caring provided. Haidt notes that it can also reorder our priorities (away from the future and toward the present, and away from ourselves and toward others).

It turns out that happiness isn’t about having positive experiences and circumstances and avoiding negative ones (though it’s hard to fault people for striving for that).

Are we really going to cede our happiness to the fickle Fates and precarious fortune, according to whether things happen to be going well in our life?

Some of the things that bring us deeper happiness, wellbeing, and an overall sense of life satisfaction include adversity, pain, and suffering, as long as they include avenues of deeper meaning or connection.

The Wrong Goal, The Right Goal

Happiness is the wrong goal. And so is success. And wealth. Beauty. Fame. Power. Prestige. Comfort. Pleasure.

These aren’t bad. They’re just destined to disappoint. They won’t make us happy.

A better goal, I think, is to live a good life. A life of vitality, connection, and contribution, as Jonathan Fields advises in his book, How to Live a Good Life.

A life of purpose, close relationships, and serving others. How about a life in which we learn, grow, and develop integrity, wisdom, and resilience?

A life of joy and savoring. How about a life of caring and action in the world to make things better, with others?

What does a good life mean for you?

Personal Values Exercise

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

Postscript: Quotations on Happiness

“You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren’t happy in one place, chances are you won’t be happy anyplace.” -Ernie Banks
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.” -William Feather
“Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self.” -Erich Fromm
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” -Mahatma Gandhi
“Many people have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” -Helen Keller
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” -John Milton (from Paradise Lost)
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.” -James Oppenheim
“A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.” -Eckhart Tolle
“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” -Dennis Waitley

Definitions of Key Terms

Happiness: “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” -Sonja Lyubomirsky
Subjective wellbeing: how we experience and evaluate the quality of our lives, including frequent positive affect (the extent to which we experience positive moods), infrequent negative affect, and cognitive evaluations such as life satisfaction. Sometimes distinctions are made between different types (e.g., mental, physical, economic, and emotional wellbeing).
Life satisfaction: how we feel about our lives overall and our future. It’s a measure of wellbeing assessed in terms of mood, satisfaction (with relationships and achieved goals), and our perceived ability to cope with the challenges of daily life. Here, researchers note the difference between “affective happiness” (felt in our momentary emotions) and “evaluative happiness” (our sense of our entire life).

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Breaking the “Trance of Unworthiness”

10/19/202311/09/2021 by Gregg Vanourek

Many of us are walking around in a “trance of unworthiness.” It’s a gnawing feeling that we’re deeply flawed. It tells us we’re not worthy of love, happiness, success, or approval. And it follows us around like a shadow.

When I first encountered this provocative term from psychologist and author Tara Brach, it felt like a revelation to me, because I’ve seen it in so many of my colleagues, clients, and students. And because I’ve felt it at times too. Brach describes it as “fear or shame—a feeling of being flawed, unacceptable, not enough. Who I am is not okay.”

“Who I am is not okay.”

Brach tells the story of a dying mother sharing a searing secret with her daughter:

“You know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. What a waste.”
-a dying mother, told to her daughter (from Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance)

The Sources of Low Self-Worth

Feelings of low self-worth (unworthiness) are surprisingly common—and quite destructive. Where do they come from?

According to the research, the sources of low self-worth include the following:

Disapproving or overly critical parents or other authority figures (like teachers or coaches), often accompanied by intense pressure for achievement
Uninvolved, distant, or preoccupied parents or other caregivers
Frequent comparisons to siblings during childhood, leading to feelings of inferiority
Excessive praise by parents for performance or abilities (vs. effort and process)
Too much unhealthy conflict in the home (note: many children absorb those negative emotions and attribute the conflicts to their own faults or failures)
Childhood experiences with taunting, bullying, or ostracism
Overprotective parents, leaving children unprepared for challenges
School setbacks or failures, leading children to feel flawed or stupid
Societal expectations and pressures, including unrealistic portrayals of life and beauty from social media
Trauma and abuse

“Why do we hold on so tightly to our belief in our own deficiency?
Why are we so loyal to our suffering, so addicted to our self-judgment?”
-Tara Brach

Clearly, there are many triggers of the trance. Next, we need to know the consequences of the trance of unworthiness. How does it affect our lives, and what can we do about it?

The Consequences of Low Self-Worth

The effects of low self-worth can range from mild to devastating, potentially including:

Unhappiness
Stress
Anxiety
Emotional distress
Lowered resilience in the face of adversity
Substance abuse
Separation from others—a lack of deep connection with people you care about
Lower salaries, in part due to a lower inclination to negotiate for better compensation
Stifling your potential for growth
Preventing you from pursuing new opportunities, including lower rates of entrepreneurship
Suicide

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.

The Signs of the Unworthiness Trance

How can we know if we’re susceptible to the trance of unworthiness? Here are some common signs:

Recurring feeling that something’s wrong with you, including what Brach calls “the habit of feeling insufficient”
Overly active inner critic and negative self talk
Perfectionism
Numbing behaviors, including addictions (to food, work, alcohol, drugs, etc.)
Perpetual busyness, constant multitasking, and frenzied action
Preoccupation with achievement, obsession with success, or status addiction
Avoidance of vulnerability and self-disclosure
Chronic sense of “shame” (“the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging,” as defined by Brene Brown)

A “divided life” (“a life in which our words and actions conceal or even contradict truths we hold dear inwardly,” as described by author and educator Parker Palmer from the Center for Courage and Renewal)
Restless and perpetual pursuit of self-improvement, fueled by angst of feeling not good enough
Badgering yourself for mistakes you’ve made
Excessive fault-finding in others, to distract from your own pain or flaws
Excessive sensitivity to criticism, even when it’s constructive
Difficulty accepting positive feedback
Playing it safe to avoid risk or failure
Reluctance to ask for what you want or need, and to accept help
People-pleasing
Self-hatred

When we’re under this trance, we walk around wondering the following:

What’s wrong with me?

This leads to a related concept: “impostor syndrome.”

Impostor Syndrome

In 1978, researchers Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes identified a phenomenon called “impostor syndrome” (also called “perceived fraudulence”). It “involves feelings of self-doubt and personal incompetence that persist despite one’s education, experience, and accomplishments.”

Impostor syndrome is a belief that you’re undeserving of your achievements or the esteem you may have. You feel like a fraud who’s about to be revealed. You feel like a phony—and that you don’t belong where you are.

Impostor syndrome is common. Researchers estimate that about 70 percent of adults may experience it at least once during their lives, and they note that it’s more common among women—and specifically women of color—but also relevant to men.

According to Dr. Valerie Young, a researcher who studies impostor syndrome, there are five types of impostors:

The perfectionist: feeling a need to be (or appear) perfect
The natural genius: feeling embarrassed if something doesn’t come easily to you, arising from a belief that competent people can handle anything easily
The rugged individualist or soloist: feeling that you should be able to handle everything on your own and that, if you can’t, it’s a sign of a deep flaw
The expert: feeling like a failure when you don’t know the answer or how to do something
The superhero: feeling that you need to be able to succeed across all domains in your life and work

These feelings are clearly self-defeating. We need to get better at crafting mental narratives that are positive and productive, as opposed to the negative and destructive scripts that have hijacked our brains. Enter the work of Shirzad Chamine on what he calls “positive intelligence.”

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.

“Positive Intelligence”

Chamine notes how we’re sabotaging ourselves with our thoughts.

“Most people today live in relatively constant distress and anxiety. This is related to a low-grade but perpetual fight-or-flight response… in reaction to the challenges of life, both personal and professional.”
-Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence

Chamine identified nine “saboteurs,” which are “automatic and habitual mind patterns” that limit our ability to function effectively. The “master saboteur,” as he calls it, is the “Judge”: finding fault with self, others, or circumstances. The Judge sabotages us all, he says.

Other relevant saboteurs include the “Pleaser” (flattering, rescuing, or pleasing others to gain acceptance) and the “Hyper-achiever” (depending on achievement for self-acceptance).

What to Do About It

Given how common and destructive these phenomena (including the trance of unworthiness, impostor syndrome, and our mental saboteurs) are, what can we do to flip the script and fill our heads with more forgiving and productive narratives?

Much, it turns out. Here are nine techniques for changing our mental narrative:

The “audacity of authenticity” (described by Brown as “letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are” and “cultivating the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable”).
Avoiding the comparison trap, our destructive tendency to compare ourselves to others and judge our worth by how we stack up on superficial metrics
“Radical acceptance” (described by Brach as “clearly recognizing what we are feeling in the present moment and regarding that experience with compassion”). Brach notes that it’s “the gateway to healing wounds and spiritual transformation. When we can meet our experience with Radical Acceptance, we discover the wholeness, wisdom, and love that are our deepest nature.”
Viewing imperfections as gifts, because they connect us more deeply, as Brene Brown notes. People don’t feel deep connections with robots and superheroes. Rather, they form bonds with people when they discover shared humanity and risk vulnerability together.
Challenging our self-doubts and examining the sources of our feelings of unworthiness, recognizing that they’re common and often induced by childhood or other life experiences. We’re not alone in having such thoughts but we must learn to interrogate them.
Forgiving ourselves and healing our wounds. (“We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.” -Charlotte Joko Beck)
Cultivating contentment, gratitude, and joy. Having a gratitude practice can increase our sense of wellbeing. We can savor what we have, enjoy the little things in life (which often turn out to be the big things, as the saying goes), and find pockets of joy both in the everyday and not just the sublime.
Meditation and mindfulness, including the practice of observing and labeling negative self-judgments when they arise—and then letting them go.
Giving ourselves grace, acknowledging that nobody’s perfect and that the point of life is not to try to appear perfect or successful to others. Sometimes it’s good enough to know that we’re still here and willing to try another day.

The trance of unworthiness is insidious. Its presence in our lives can go unnoticed for years, or even decades, because it operates subconsciously. Its negative effects, while gradual, can accumulate mightily over time, compounding into a mental black hole. It’s time to break the trance.

Reflection Questions

To what extent have you and your loved ones fallen into the trance of unworthiness?
What do you think are the root causes?
Which of the techniques above will you try (or have you tried)?
Are you doing enough to stop self-sabotaging and start a more productive mental script?

Personal Values Exercise

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

Postscript: Quotations

“Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.” -Louise L. Hay
“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.” -Maxwell Maltz
“Most bad behavior comes from insecurity.” -Debra Winger
“Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.” -Parker Palmer
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” -Lucille Ball
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” -William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”
“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.” -Suzy Kassem
“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.” -Amy Bloom
“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.” -Mark Twain
“I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” -Carl Jung
“All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors.” -Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen
“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.” -Madeleine L’Engle
“Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.” -Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

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Getting Good at Overcoming Fear

06/15/202310/26/2021 by Gregg Vanourek

Fear. A terrible feeling. Something to avoid.

Right?

Not so fast.

Fear can actually be turned into a powerful asset and opportunity, if understood and addressed properly. Can we get good at overcoming fear?

First, what is it? Fear is a feeling of distress or dread caused by a sense of impending danger or pain. It’s a powerful, primitive emotion. A warning that we need to pay attention.

We need fear to survive, and it has served us well through the ages. But it can also be one of the biggest obstacles in our lives.

We can go through our whole lives trying to avoid the things we’re afraid of, dramatically altering our experience of life.

In that sense, fear is like a force field keeping us in our comfort zone.

How strong is its hold over us?
What lies beyond our fears?
How do we find out?

What Are We Afraid Of?

First, let’s understand what we’re afraid of.

Of course, some people have a phobia (an extreme or irrational fear or aversion of something), such as fear of the dark, heights, flying, spiders, and snakes.

But here, we’re focused on the everyday fears in our lives, work, and social settings that hold us back. It turns out, we have many such fears, including a fear of:

abandonment or loneliness
change
commitment
conflict
losing control
death
embarrassment (including fear of looking bad, and of public speaking)
failing
getting hurt

inadequacy, or being judged as not being good enough, or being blamed
missing out (FOMO)
making mistakes
pain
regret
rejection
losing status
trusting others (and being taken advantage of)
uncertainty and unknowns

Entrepreneur and author Ruth Soukup notes that our fears often come not only with negative traits but also positive ones. For example, if we’re afraid of making mistakes, it can lead to procrastination and perfectionism but also high-quality work that’s well organized and error-free. If we fear being judged, it can lead to people-pleasing and failing to set boundaries but also to being a team player who’s thoughtful and fun to be around.

The story is complex. Fear has a ghastly reputation, but it turns out that it isn’t all bad. Far from it. To accept that key insight, first we need to understand what it is, how it works, and why it exists.

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.

Fear Is a Physiological Phenomenon

Fear isn’t something only for cowards. It’s part of being human. Fear is universal. We all experience it.

Fear is hardwired into our neurobiology, starting in the part of our brain called the amygdala. The feeling of fear is a state of high arousal designed to protect us from harm. It’s a survival response that has evolved over the ages.

When we’re afraid, we become hyper-alert. Our nervous system sets a cascading fear response into motion: our breathing accelerates, and our heart rate and blood pressure rise. Also, our body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline—sometimes in a flood. Our pupils dilate. Blood flows into our limbs so that we can respond aggressively to a threat by fighting or fleeing.

With all these physical and chemical reactions, we experience impairment of the cerebral cortex, the part of our brain that handles reasoning, judgment, sensation, perception, memory, creative association, and voluntary physical movement. As a result, we don’t think as clearly, and it’s harder to make good decisions. We become preoccupied with the threat.

If left unchecked, fear can become debilitating. It can prevent us from functioning at our best—or even 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.

Reframing Fear

Clearly, it’s important for us to learn how to manage fear to avoid situations where it debilitates us. This leads us to two key insights:

1. Fear is often a paper tiger.

The fear of what may happen is often worse than the reality of what actually happens, or what may. It’s a bit like a movie playing in our head—coming from a man in the projection room at the back of a theater.

A fierce tiger appears on our mental screen. The animal seems powerful, with menacing fangs and a terrible roar. Our skin crawls. The hair on our arms stands up. But the tiger, in most cases, is only a scared cat with its own fears.

We experience a raging physiological thunderstorm of fear as if it’s the truth and based in reality. In fact, it’s only an anticipatory reaction to a perceived threat designed to get us ready for combat or avoidance. In the swirl of the storm, we have a hard time distinguishing between what’s real and what’s only possible. Fear is the step in between.

Often the alarm system is overly vigilant and too quick to escalate the alert levels. It gets carried away. We become accustomed to fleeing at the first alert. The synapses in our brain lay an escape path of backward movement: Retreat. Withdrawal. Over time, this becomes habitual and unconscious. We just do it. We avoid. Or we run. So we never move forward in the areas holding us back.

2. Fear signals an opportunity for breakthroughs when we’re able to see it clearly.

It’s a protective layer serving as a boundary between stasis and transcendence. Most people approach the layer and then turn and run.

But learning how to sit with it is the master maneuver. We must learn to recognize that the tiger is a paper one. Because then we can go forward instead of turning back. And that’s where the good stuff is: the challenge, the learning, the development.

Personal Values Exercise

Overcoming Fear: How to Manage Our Fears

So how to do this? How to proceed anyway despite this onslaught of biochemical alerts? Here are 12 steps to help you get good at overcoming fear:

Spend time with your fears. Study them. Write about them. Get comfortable with them.
Get gradual exposures to your fears. (That’s what Navy SEALs and NASA astronauts do.)
Prepare for high-pressure events that tend to trigger your fear alert system. By doing so, you will lower the chance of running into problems and feeling out of control. Practice and role-play in challenging situations. Place yourself in settings that challenge you and see how you can survive, learn, and grow. It helps to have a growth mindset.
Visualize success. Paint a mental picture of overcoming obstacles and achieving your objectives.
Gather information to reduce the fear of the unknown. Fear often shrinks or disappears in the face of facts and scrutiny.
Name the fear and analyze it rationally, including whether there’s a deeper fear behind the immediate fear. (For example, a fear of making a mistake in a presentation can be amplified by an underlying fear of being rejected by the group, or not being valued by others.) Understand it. Embrace it. Use it as fuel for determined action.
Recall that the fear is usually much worse than the things we’re actually afraid of. Get in the habit of comparing actual outcomes to the worst-case scenarios your amygdala is freaking out about. Note that your amygdala only comprises about 0.3% of your brain’s volume. Don’t let the 0.3% wag the 99.7%.
Try not to panic. The goal is not to be fearless, as that’s virtually impossible biologically, but rather to learn how to manage your fear and still function effectively. Deep breathing can help calm your mind and body.
Have a deeper why—a purpose worth wrestling your fear for. (For example, you may face a great challenge at work with a project or initiative that will test your self-worth and resilience but you wisely attach it to your role as a provider in your family and how you can be a role model for your children.)
Gain perspective and look at the fear in the larger context. (For example, although it may hurt your pride and sense of social standing if you fail on a project, you know that you’ve built up a lot of credibility over the years through your competence and diligence—and that there will likely be many more opportunities to try again in the future.)
Face the fear and move through it (not away from it). Give yourself experience with confronting and overcoming your fears. This will help build your fear resilience muscles. You’ll start to become a brave person—through your decisions, habits, intellect, and force of will.
Ask for help. You don’t have to do it alone. We all need help sometimes! (By the way, showing vulnerability by asking for help builds connection.)

In the end, recall that fear is part of being human. It has served us well over the ages, but it also holds us back. If we can learn to “punch fear in the face,” as Jon Acuff put it, we can do so much more of what’s important in life. Be bolder. And get good at overcoming your fears. Your future self will thank you for it.

Reflection Questions on Overcoming Fear

Which fears are holding you back?
How long have they kept you fenced in?
What opportunities lie on the other side of those fears?
What will you do about it?

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment so you can discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Personal Values Exercise to help you clarify what’s most important to you

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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“Should I stay or should I go?” -the Clash

Quality of Life Assessment

The Problem with Indecisiveness

“Indecision may or may not be my problem.” -Jimmy Buffett

“Indecision is the greatest thief of opportunity.” -Jim Rohn

Causes of Indecisiveness

Personal Values Exercise

How to Be More Decisive

“If you were omniscient and had a time machine, you would know everything you need to know about the [the results of your decision], but the problem is that we don’t have either of those things, so we don’t have perfect information when we’re making a decision.” -Annie Duke

How to Get Better at Making Decisions

Take the Traps Test

Final Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Articles

Resources on Decision-Making

Postscript: Quotations on Decisiveness and Decision-Making

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

“The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.” -Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh

“One of the worst things anybody can do is assume. I think fools assume. If people have really got it together, they never assume anything. They believe, they work hard, and they prepare–but they don’t assume.“ -Mike Krzyzewski

Examples of Catastrophizing

Causes of Catastrophizing

Take the Traps Test

The Problem with Catastrophizing

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” – Jodi Picoult

“Deal with your negative patterns before they become habits because habits are hard to break.” -Germany Kent

12 Ways to Stop Catastrophizing

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?” “Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought. Piglet was comforted by this. -A.A. Milne, English poet and playwright

“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

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment

Related Articles

Postscript: Quotations on Catastrophizing

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

11 Signs of Complacency

“…over time, in the comfortable life, something stirs within; maybe not a frustration but something in the sense of restlessness. That restlessness is a feeling or sense that maybe there is something more.” -Brendon Burchard

The Problem with Complacency

Quality of Life Assessment

What to Do About It

Personal Values Exercise

Related Traps

Take the Traps Test

Final Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Article

Postscript: Quotations on Complacency

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

“No good comes from blame.” -Kate Summers

Signs of Blaming

“It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.” -Dalai Lama

Quality of Life Assessment

The Problem with Blaming Others

“Wherever you find a problem, you will usually find the finger-pointing of blame. Society is addicted to playing the victim.” – Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Take the Traps Test

Why You Blame

How to Avoid the Blame Game

Final Thoughts

“It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist

Reflection Questions

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Tools for You

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the Blame Trap

“Truly, there is nothing more common, routine, and human than avoiding discomfort, uncertainty, or the potential of ‘bad news.‘” -Dave Ursillo, author

We avoid too many things, too often. Things end up getting worse, not better.

What We Avoid

Why We Avoid

Take the Traps Test

The Problem with Avoidance

“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape conflict, and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering.” -Brendon Burchard, best-selling author

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.” -Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist

How to Stop Avoiding

Quality of Life Assessment

Final Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Articles

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoidance and Action

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

“Should I stay or should I go?”
-the Clash

“Indecision may or may not be my problem.”
-Jimmy Buffett

“Indecision is the greatest thief of opportunity.”
-Jim Rohn

“If you were omniscient and had a time machine, you would know everything you need to know about the [the results of your decision], but the problem is that we don’t have either of those things, so we don’t have perfect information when we’re making a decision.”
-Annie Duke

**“The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.”
-Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh**

“One of the worst things anybody can do is assume. I think fools assume.
If people have really got it together, they never assume anything.
They believe, they work hard, and they prepare–but they don’t assume.“
-Mike Krzyzewski

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do,
but it doesn’t get you very far.”
– Jodi Picoult

“Deal with your negative patterns before they become habits because habits are hard to break.”
-Germany Kent

“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought.
Piglet was comforted by this.
-A.A. Milne, English poet and playwright

“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

“…over time, in the comfortable life, something stirs within; maybe not a frustration but something in the sense of restlessness. That restlessness is a feeling or sense that maybe there is something more.”
-Brendon Burchard

**“No good comes from blame.” -Kate Summers**

**“It is far more useful to be aware of a single shortcoming in ourselves than it is to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.” -Dalai Lama**

**“It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist**

“Truly, there is nothing more common, routine, and human than
avoiding discomfort, uncertainty, or the potential of ‘bad news.‘”
-Dave Ursillo, author

We avoid too many things, too often.
Things end up getting worse, not better.

“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape conflict,
and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering.”
-Brendon Burchard, best-selling author

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist

Perfectionism is a problem because perfection is an impossible standard
for those of us who don’t wear a cape.

“Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.”
-Anne Wilson Schaef

Perfectionism inhibits our work.
It harms our relationships.
Perfectionism causes needless suffering.

“To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”
-George Leonard, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

Perfectionism ≠ the pursuit of excellence. That’s a myth.
Perfectionism ≠ striving to be your best. A rationalization.
Perfectionism is maladaptive and self-destructive. There’s much research on that.

“Perfectionism isn’t about high standards. It’s about unrealistic standards.”
-Professor Andrew Hill, York St. John University

“Accepting your shadow side is an essential part of being authentic.”
-Bill George, best-selling author and former CEO

“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”
-Brené Brown

Am I happy?
I just want to be happy.
I want my kids to be happy.
Why doesn’t my job make me happy?
Why doesn’t my relationship make me happy?

Happiness: “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being,
combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
-Sonja Lyubomirsky, happiness researcher

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
-Kahlil Gibran