Create a life you love with Gregg's "Crafting Your Life and Work course"

The Biggest Mistakes New Graduates Make

Dear new graduate: Congratulations and hats off to you! You’ve come a long way and reached a major milestone in your life.

Maybe you’ve been so busy finishing assignments and getting to graduation that you haven’t taken much time to think about what comes next. (If so, you’re not alone!)

With that in mind, here are some of the biggest mistakes new graduates make:

❌ Putting too much pressure on yourself to have it all figured out right away.

❌ Committing too early to a career path without vetting it deeply and remaining open to new and better possibilities.

❌ Not clarifying what’s important to you when it comes to work. (In addition to pay, for example, what about opportunities for learning and growth, a vibrant culture, chances to work with great people, or meaningful work?)

❌ Not doing nearly enough vetting of the organizations you’re considering working with (including their values and culture, your manager, and career path). (See my article, “How to Find a Great Organization to Work For.”)

❌ Accepting other people’s definition of success instead of defining it for yourself.

❌ Living someone else’s life.

❌ Defining yourself by comparison, as opposed to by your own core values and guiding lights.

❌ Defining self-worth by your accomplishments.

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.

❌ Spending your best years and trading your precious life energy on dubious things.

❌ Succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter to you.

❌ Not taking stock of your quality of life regularly.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-Socrates, ancient Greek philosopher

❌ Chasing status and prestige in your work because of how it will make you look in the eyes of others. (See my article, “The Powerful Pull of the Prestige Magnet.”)

“An easy way to pick the wrong career is to put your image above your interests and identity. A motivating job isn’t the one that makes you look important. It’s the one that makes you feel alive. Meaningful work isn’t about impressing others. It’s about expressing your values.” -Adam Grant, organizational psychologist

❌ Assuming that “climbing the ladder” is the point of work. (See my TEDx talk on LIFE entrepreneurship and “climbing mode” versus “discover mode.”)

❌ Viewing your career as a race against your peers. (See my article, “Feeling Behind? It May Be a Trap.”)

❌ Focusing too much on material comfort and financial gain and not enough on happiness, love, personal growth, and spiritual depth. (See my article, “Beware the Disease of More.”)

❌ Assuming that worldly success will fill you up.

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.

❌ Giving too much of yourself or your time away to unreasonable bosses or unacceptable circumstances.

Staying too long in a job that’s not a good fit or with a bad manager.

❌ Letting your life get overly full and cluttered, with not enough white space.

❌ Letting work consume too much of your life.

“…the problem isn’t how hard you’re working, it’s that you’re working on things that aren’t right for you.
Your goals and motivations aren’t harmonizing with your deepest truth.”

-Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity

❌ Not honoring your commitments to those you belong to.

❌ Losing touch with your close friends.

❌ Playing it safe in your career and not taking enough risks early on while you have more time, freedom, and flexibility—perhaps playing small out of fear.

“So many of us choose our paths in life out of fear disguised as practicality.”
-Jim Carrey, comedian and actor

❌ Thinking you’re done learning now that you have a degree.

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.

❌ Falling into bad habits that will cause you to waste a lot of time or drift away from your values.

❌ Not taking charge of your free time, perhaps because you’re so drained from work.

❌ Letting yourself become cynical and jaded. (See my article, “Guard Your Heart.”)

❌ Making decisions or taking actions that aren’t in line with your core values and top priorities.

❌ Not giving more of yourself to others.

❌ Neglecting opportunities for fun and adventure in your life.

❌ Not daring to put your own distinctive stamp on your workplace, community, and world.

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.

 

Conclusion

When it comes to navigating the early chapters of your career, it’s easy to focus on what other people expect of you and get lost in what our larger culture values. But it’s far better to get busy becoming who you really are.

It’s easy to get caught up in playing the short game instead of the long one—with a broader perspective on what’s important in life and what would be a life well lived.

Before you get too busy with the hustle and bustle of life and work, take the time to get to know yourself well—including your core values, strengths, passions, and vision of the good life. And learn to trust yourself as you craft a life you’ll be proud of.

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

 

Tools for You

Strengths Search

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

 

Related Articles & Resources

Postscript: Inspirations for New Graduates

  • “Big career decisions don’t come with a map, but all you need is a compass. In an unpredictable world, you can’t make a master plan. You can only gauge whether you’re on a meaningful path. The right next move is the one that brings you a step closer to living your core values.” -Adam Grant, professor
  • “One of the things is putting pressure on having that perfect solution lined up. While we should dream big, sometimes we need to make smaller moves and small experiments to build confidence and gather data and grow more organically in a new direction. In reality, what works is getting anchored in existing strengths and experiences and have a general feeling of success. There is no real way to know the answers up to the front of what to pursue next in our careers unless we’re running small tests and learning from them.” -Jenny Blake, author and podcaster
  • “One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it.” -David Brooks, The Second Mountain
  • “The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’ It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “…the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most. A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we (or others) feel we ought to do, and what we think we want to do. Our advice? Concentrate instead on who you are, and the rest will fall into place.” -Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger, Do What You Are
  • “Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” -Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)
  • “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” -Stephen R. Covey, educator and author
  • “Go to work for an organization or people you admire. It will turn you on. You ought to be happy where you are working. I always worry about people who say, ‘I’m going to do this for 10 years’ and ‘I’m going to do 10 more years of this.’ That’s a little like saving sex for your old age. Not a very good idea. Get right into what you enjoy.” -Warren Buffett, investor
  • “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple
  • “Shadow Career is the term used to describe people who go on an alternative path from their true dream because they’ve given up on themselves.” -Dr. Benjamin Hardy, Be Your Future Self Now
  • “I don’t have a problem with what you do, that’s your choice. What I have a problem with is you lying to yourself about why you’re doing the things you’re doing. You have a choice.” -Jerry Colonna, co-founder and CEO, Reboot
  • “In our time, we workers are being called to reexamine our work: how we do it; whom it is helping or hurting; what it is we do; and what we might be doing if we were to let go of our present work and follow a deeper call.” -Matthew Fox, Episcopal priest and theologian
  • “We spend far too much time at work for it not to have deep meaning.” -Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
  • “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.” -Victor Frankl, psychologist, author, and Holocaust survivor
  • “…God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, material, and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.” -Josemaria Escriva, Conversations
  • “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy. For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line.” -Alex Dias Ribeiro, former Formula 1 race-car driver
  • “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” -Mark (8:36)
  • “Discovering vocation doesn’t mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond your reach, but rather accepting the treasure that you have been given. But make no mistake about it, well-meaning people around you—friends, family work associates, and others—will push you to run someone else’s race.” -Nicholas Pearce, pastor and professor
  • “Today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “…I (like many others) felt a wrongness in the world, a wrongness that seeped through the cracks of my privileged, insulated childhood…. Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays…. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day.” -Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
  • “Your career is like a garden. It can hold an assortment of life’s energy that yields a bounty for you. You do not need to grow just one thing in your garden. You do not need to do just one thing in your career.” -Jennifer Ritchie Payette, author

Crafting Your Life and Work Course

Regain clarity, direction, and motivation for your next chapter, starting with a powerful foundation of self-awareness and commitment to your values and aspirations.

+++++++++++++++++

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

The Problem with Complacency

Complacency is one of the most dangerous and devious traps we can fall into. It lulls us into a false sense of comfort, blinding us to the risks we should be addressing and the growth we could be pursuing. Whether it’s our health, relationships, career, or leadership, complacency keeps us stuck instead of moving forward.

Examples abound. For instance, a worker might stay in a role she’s outgrown, missing out on more challenging and fulfilling opportunities. A manager may ignore early signs of conflict among team members, allowing tensions to escalate. A husband might stop expressing appreciation for his wife. Sure enough, she starts to feel unseen and undervalued.

 

The Signs of Complacency

When you’re complacent, you start to take things for granted and slip into routines that make life feel monotonous. You stick with what you know and slowly stop pushing yourself.

Are you taking the easy way?
Resisting change?
Avoiding risk?
Do you feel your drive dulling and your spark dimming?

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 Complacency

Over time, this will deflate your ambition and lead to drifting and settling in life. Comfort and satisfaction aren’t bad. They’re actually essential parts of a fulfilling life. But if you have too much of them, you may stop growing and dreaming. And you may no longer be in pursuit of what truly matters. Complacency can be a silent threat to your well-being, growth, and performance.

Here are 8 downsides of complacency, along with the deeper problems they cause:

1. Complacency can sap your motivation. When you become too comfortable, you stop feeling the urgency or desire to strive for more. Without motivation, you stop reaching for your potential and stagnate.

2. Complacency can lead to inaction when action is warranted. It lulls you into believing everything is fine, even when you need a change. As a result, you miss critical moments when decisive steps could make a difference.

3. Complacency can prevent you from making needed improvements. You may ignore areas where growth or progress is possible because you feel things are “good enough.” This mindset keeps you from evolving and advancing.

4. Complacency can dilute your initiative. You start to settle and no longer believe that better outcomes are possible or worth pursuing. Over time, it drains the life out of you as you lose more and more hope.

5. Complacency can lead to mediocre or poor performance. By not challenging yourself, you operate below your capabilities. You begin to accept average as your standard. In the process, you start losing your credibility and the respect of others (and yourself).

6. Complacency can lead to missed opportunities. You fail to prepare and position yourself for what’s ahead. You miss your window of opportunity. Exciting rewards elude you.

7. Complacency can derail your career. In fast-moving environments, staying still equates to falling behind. Without adaptation, you lose your edge and risk becoming irrelevant or overlooked. You become a casualty of change and disruption.

8. Complacency can lead to living by default, to not really choosing the life you’re living. Are you letting life happen to you instead of shaping it? This can lead to a sense of dissatisfaction and regret. To a life far from the one you really want.

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.

 

Conclusion

The complacency trap can quietly steal some of your most valuable assets—the drive to grow and achieve and the deep fulfillment that comes from putting yourself on the line and attempting hard things. It’s a subtle danger because it’s natural to seek peace and comfort.

But between passive ease and frantic striving lies something powerful—a place of purposeful living, meaningful action, and arousing adventure. That’s where you can thrive—pursuing what matters and making a difference while cherishing the time you’ve been given.

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

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What are you complacent about?
  2. How is it undermining you?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

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

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Complacency

  • “Never be passive about your life… ever, ever.” -Robert Egger, social entrepreneur and activist
  • “The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta, founder, Zen Habits
  • “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, writer
  • “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, Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old? The Path of Purposeful Aging
  • “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, activist and rights leader
  • “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, South African anti-apartheid activist and politician
  • “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
  • “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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

The Problem with Avoidance

Avoidance is a natural coping mechanism that can protect us from danger. But when it’s overused, as in putting off difficult tasks or dodging hard conversations, it can backfire and make things worse.

It’s a common phenomenon. A manager avoids dealing with a worker’s toxic behavior because it’s a high performer. A worker avoids asking for a raise because it’s uncomfortable. A husband ignores growing signs of his wife’s dissatisfaction. A wife settles for a lack of connection and intimacy. Both partners feel unappreciated but never express their needs.

When you’re in avoidance mode, you’re deliberately steering clear of thoughts, feelings, or situations that are unpleasant, difficult, or threatening. For now, you may be reducing your discomfort or anxiety, but you’re sure to pay a price for it down the road.

There are many things you might be avoiding. Conflict. Uncertainty. Difficult people. Uncomfortable emotions. Troubling health signs. Mounting debt and hard conversations about money.

Your avoidance may bring short-term relief, but over time it often causes more harm than good.

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

Here are some of the main repercussions of avoidance and why they matter.

Avoidance leaves the core problem unaddressed. Nothing actually gets resolved. The issue remains, often metastasizing.

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

Avoidance can aggravate anxiety. Why? Because delaying action usually invites further trouble. As you lose control, your anxiety rises.

“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

Your avoidance frustrates others. They may feel ignored or dismissed, and they’ll resent having to deal with the fallout alone.

Avoidance often invites new conflicts. When you sidestep things, unresolved issues tend to resurface in other areas. So, it can bring more tensions into relationships, including resentment.

Avoidance can generate a vicious circle. The more you avoid, the harder it becomes to face things. You end up reinforcing a bad habit while allowing negative consequences.

Avoidance can become a way of life. You can become the kind of person who avoids hard things. That will limit your growth and impair your capacity to deal with challenges. And this will drive good people away.

Avoidance undermines your confidence and sense of power and agency. You end up taking a passive role instead of intentionally and boldly crafting your life and work.

Avoidance feeds your fears. It gives them power over you and makes you defensive and overly cautious. A recipe for mediocrity, or worse.

“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, clinical psychologist

Avoidance can lead to numbing behaviors. Things like binge-watching, over-eating, over-working, or drinking. When doing things like this in excess, you’re taking refuge in distraction. Avoidance is a form of escapism.

Avoidance can inhibit your personal growth and prevent you from living up to your potential. When you duck challenges, you prevent yourself from developing problem-solving skills, emotional strength, and resilience.

Avoidance leads to complacency. Are you overly reliant on familiar routines? Falling into a rut?

Avoidance leads to missed opportunities. Difficult tasks, though often stressful, often lead to valuable experiences, connections, and surprising and substantial rewards.

Avoidance can lead to painful regret. Will you be haunted by “what ifs” in the future, and will you lament missed chances or unresolved problems? These can weigh heavily on you over time.

 

Conclusion

Though avoidance is natural, it often makes things worse. It fuels frustration, anxiety, conflict, and bad habits. Your confidence plummets, and your sense of agency dissipates.

What if you started addressing things head on, taking the bull by the horns? One decision, one action at a time, you can change the trajectory of your life.

Wishing you well with it, and let me know if I can help. (And for starters, check out my article, “How to Stop Avoiding Things: 17 Practices.”)
Gregg Vanourek

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

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What are you avoiding?
  2. How is it undermining you?
  3. What will you do about it, starting today?

 

Tools for 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.

 

Related Articles & Books

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

How to Practice Acceptance When Things Are Tough

These days, you may be feeling anxious or concerned. It’s no wonder, given how much uncertainty and strife we’re seeing regularly.

What’s on your mind? Is it concern about high prices or worry about trade wars? Political polarization and social divides? Immigration concerns? Misinformation and disinformation? Or mass shootings, mental health concerns, social justice issues, climate change? Extreme weather events like wildfires and hurricanes?

Last year, 77% of U.S. adults indicated the future of their nation as a significant source of stress in their lives, and 73% indicated the economy as such. The overall average level of stress among Americans in 2024 was 5 out of 10. Source: American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2024 poll. (1)

Around the world, people are most concerned about inflation, crime and violence, poverty and social inequality, unemployment, and financial/political corruption, according to the What Worries the World survey 2024. (2)

“Most people today live in relatively constant distress and anxiety.”
-Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence

No doubt, there’s plenty to be concerned about. But is your reaction to things helping in any way, or just making you miserable?

 

Radical Acceptance

A powerful way to break this downward spiral is through “radical acceptance,” which has been defined as “fully acknowledging reality as it is, without resistance or judgment.”

When practicing this form of acceptance, you focus on what you can control and let go of what you can’t.

“Acceptance means events can make it through you without resistance.”
-Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

Accepting reality as it is can prevent you from prolonging emotional reactions that only worsen the situation. By practicing radical acceptance, you can enhance your ability to handle distress. Essentially, you’re preventing your pain from turning into unnecessary suffering.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. Truth be told, it can be very challenging in practice, in part because of the way our brains are wired.

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.

 

What Acceptance Isn’t

In this context, acceptance isn’t the same as avoidance, complacency, settling, or inaction. It doesn’t mean that you throw up your arms and become passive. And no, you shouldn’t put your head in the sand or fiddle while Rome burns.

In life, action is essential. And you’ll still fight to uphold your values and honor your commitments.

But acceptance means that you’ll stop resisting reality. It means that you’ll focus on having a productive, compassionate, and nonjudgmental mindset. Why? Because it will benefit you and those around you.

 

Why You Should Practice Acceptance

Practicing acceptance can help you in many ways. For example, it has benefits on your:

  • mental and physical health (including your sleep quality and cardiovascular, digestive, and immune systems)
  • relationships
  • anxiety management
  • communication, coping, and problem-solving skills
  • conflict management
  • performance
  • wellbeing
  • happiness
“There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.”
-Tara Brach, psychologist, author, and meditation teacher

 

How to Practice Radical Acceptance

How does this work in practice? And how can you apply it, even when things are difficult?

Here are practical steps you can take to practice radical acceptance:

1. Focus on being an observer, not a judge or victim. See things as they are. Stop resisting reality, realizing that it’s futile to do so.

2. Remind yourself that you can’t always change your current reality. And that’s okay. It is what it is.

3. Notice when you’re resisting reality. Common clues include troubling emotions like irritability or resentment. Focus on letting go of that resistance—and your desire for control.

4. Look for patterns or circumstances in which you keep falling into this trap. Pay attention to what you resist and what causes you grief. For example, are you:

  • getting triggered by following the news too closely and letting it cloud your days, or by checking your social media accounts too often
  • avoiding conflict, hoping it will go away on its own
  • getting triggered by someone who annoys you
  • unrealistically expecting your boss to change his or her behavior
  • resisting responsibility by blaming others
  • avoiding the reality that you’re staying in a mediocre or unfulfilling job
  • not facing up to your health challenges or ignoring the need for diet and lifestyle changes

5. Live in the present moment. Let go of worries of the past and doubts about the future. Your life is right here, right now. You can’t change the past (although you can change how you view it). And much of what’s to come in the future is beyond your control. That’s okay. Focus on doing your best and acting rightly in the moment. That will set you up for your best chances of success.

6. Practice relaxation techniques such as meditation, deep breathing, or journaling (if it helps you). These practices can help you accept reality as it is with your whole self, including mind, body, and spirit.

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.

 

7. Allow uncomfortable emotions like frustration, disappointment, and sadness to arise within you. Avoid the temptation to resist or numb them. Doing so will only allow them to linger longer. Emotions are natural and unavoidable. You can’t stop them from arising. They generally last for only about 90 seconds, on average. If you don’t resist them, they’ll pass through you naturally. But if you do resist them, they’ll linger and keep reappearing. According to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist and author: (3)

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.
Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.
After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again.”

8. Direct your energy and attention to things you can control and what you’re grateful for. Avoid ruminating on what’s upsetting you and negative judgments about yourself and others. Acknowledge what you can’t control, knowing that resisting it will only cause you anxiety or suffering.

9. Reframe negative events. For example, think about all your skills and capabilities in overcoming challenges and all the times you’ve survived difficult things and been resilient. Consider that there may be valuable lessons or opportunities for growth in your adversity. (See my article, “The Power of Reframing to Change Our Outlook.”)

10. When you face challenging situations, focus only on being effective in addressing them. The alternative is being reactive, hurt, or wounded—none of which will help you with anything. To the contrary.

“You can’t control how you feel. But you can always choose how you act.”
-Mel Robbins, The 5 Second Rule

11. Focus on your own mindset and actions. Stop expecting others to change or act according to your wishes or expectations.

“The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is,
without needing to judge or change them in any way.”

-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

12. Consider whether your expectations are realistic and appropriate. Or are they setting you up for disappointment? For example, if you’re always expecting good things to happen to you, you may be inviting frustration and disappointment, because life always comes with ups and downs.

13. Remember that life can be okay—or even precious and rich—even when you’re feeling pain or discomfort. Try to place your current challenges or concerns in context and maintain perspective.

14. Don’t go it alone. Lean on your support system and recall that we’re all in this together.

15. Pray for greater acceptance. Keep the Serenity Prayer close by and refer to it often. Better yet, memorize it. (I have a copy of it hanging on my office wall.) It can help you avoid falling into bad habits and unproductive mindsets.

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

16. Practice these acceptance techniques over and over again. Acceptance isn’t just a decision. It’s also a mindset and a practice. You want it to become more automatic and habitual, and thus easier over time. Eventually, it will become a part of who you are and how to carry yourself in the world.

In the end, there’s hope, faith, strength, and resilience in this form of acceptance. You can stand in the storm and choose not to spiral down, even when things are hard. And you can soldier on without surrendering your spirit.

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

 

Tools for You

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Acceptance

  • “All the stress that we feel is caused by arguing with what is.” -Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life
  • “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…. When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.” –Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “Radical Acceptance is 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…. The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.” -Tara Brach, psychologist, author, and meditation teacher
  • “One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you—you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you.” –Michael Singer, Living Untethered
  • “The pain you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.” -Eckhart Tolle, author and spiritual teacher
  • “Life is not the way it’s supposed to be, it’s the way it is. The way you cope with that is what makes the difference.” -Virginia Satir, author, clinical social worker, and psychotherapist
  • “Accepting people as they are has the miraculous effect of helping them improve. Acceptance doesn’t prohibit growth; rather, it fosters it.” –Marianne Williamson, spiritual teacher and author

 

References

(1) The Harris Poll conducted the Stress in America 2024 survey online on behalf of the American Psychological Association in August 2024, with a nationally representative sample of 3,305 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. Also, 41% of U.S. adults reported that the state of the nation has made them consider moving to another country, 32% reported that the political climate has caused strain in their family, and 30% said they limit their time with family due to a difference in values.

(2) Source: The What Worries the World survey involved monthly samples of a panel of more than 20,000 adults in 29 countries. They’ve conducted the survey for more than a decade.

(3) Verduyn, P., & Lavrijsen, S. (2015). Which emotions last longest and why: The role of event importance and rumination. Motivation and Emotion, 39(1), 119–127. “Some emotions last longer than others…. some emotions have been found to persist for a long time whereas others tend to quickly fade away.” The researchers here investigated the duration of emotional experience, distinguishing it from mood. The participants were 233 high school students, with a mean age of 17.02 years. Researchers asked them to complete questionnaires on their experience with several emotions. The researchers noted several limitations of the study, including the possibility of retrospective bias (since students reported emotional episodes from the past) and the fact that it only included high school students.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

Unlock the Power of Progress

You probably have aspirations, and you know that to accomplish them you need to apply yourself and get going on relevant work. But you may also be looking, even if subconsciously, for a Hollywood-style breakthrough. A Eureka moment.

And that’s holding you back.

Researcher and Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues, including researcher Steven Kramer, spent nearly 15 years studying the psychological experiences and performance of people doing complex and creative work in organizations. They looked into workers’ emotions, moods, motivation levels, and perceptions of their work environment. The researchers studied what work they did and what events stood out for them. Their aim was to find what contributed most to the highest levels of creative output. (1)

Enter the “progress principle.”

 

Leveraging the Progress Principle

Question:

What sets your best days—your most productive, engaging, and fun ones—apart from your worst days?

When the researchers compared the best days of the workers with their worst days (specifically, their motivation levels, overall mood, and specific emotions), they found that progress in the work was the most common event triggering the best days. And relatedly, setbacks in the work were the most common event summoning the worst days.

Importantly, even minor progress on things could result in outsized positive effects. They found a clear “inner work life effect” related to progress and small wins.

The researchers could see workers enter a “progress loop,” with consistent progress on meaningful work creating a positive inner work life, which in turn drives performance.

“Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

 

The Progress Principle in Action

Working on a big, important project with a tight deadline? If you’re in a company, maybe it’s a product launch, marketing campaign, or a system upgrade. In a nonprofit, maybe it’s a fundraising campaign, big event, or recruitment drive. Or in a school district, maybe it’s a curriculum overhaul, technology integration, or implementation of safety protocols. In a government agency, maybe it’s a public health initiative or disaster recovery program. Maybe you’re working on a career change or writing a book.

Tip: Stop stressing over the deadline and focusing only on the final outcome. Instead, break the project into smaller tasks (e.g., researching, outlining, drafting, editing, presenting, improving, releasing, promoting). And when you complete a task, celebrate your progress.

Share updates with your colleagues. Feel the sense of achievement and watch how it motivates you to keep going while also helping you navigate setbacks.

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.

 

Implication for Managers: The Power of Progress in Action

How does this work for managers? Amabile and her associates found that facilitating progress, even including small wins, is the best way to motivate people on a daily basis

“The key to motivating performance is supporting progress in meaningful work.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Unfortunately, the managers they surveyed didn’t view that as high on their list of motivational tools. On the contrary: it was at the bottom of their list.

So, what can you do as a manager to boost motivation and create the conditions for productive, creative output by your team?

First, you can use what the researchers called “catalysts” and “nourishers.”

  • Catalysts are actions you take to support the work of your team. For example: setting clear goals, giving workers autonomy, providing adequate resources and time, helping, fostering the free exchange of ideas, facilitating learning from challenges and successes, and tracking and celebrating progress.
  • Nourishers are acts of support. For example: providing encouragement, emotional comfort, recognition, and respect. Helping people feel a sense of affiliation and belonging.

On the flipside, you can minimize what the researchers called “inhibitors” and “toxins.”

  • Inhibitors can range from not providing support (or enough of it) to your team to actually interfering with their work. As management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Most of what we call management consists of making it hard for people to get their work done.”
  • Toxins are things like discouragement, disregard for people’s emotions, and disrespect.

These inhibitors and toxins lead to negative feedback loops—the reverse of the progress loop. They destroy motivation and productivity.

Of course, even good managers can sometimes fall short with their behavior, not least because they’re overwhelmed and under pressure.

 

Managing Setbacks

You’re bound to experience challenges in your work sometimes. As a manager, it’s essential that you manage setbacks in your team proactively.

Amabile and her colleagues found that “Small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect on inner work life.” Indeed, negative events can have a more powerful impact than positive events. So, managers are wise to address frictions, hassles, and setbacks directly and quickly—and to view this as an essential part of their job.

“If you want to foster great inner work life, focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks. Why? Because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than one progress incident.” -Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

In business schools and management books, the focus is on managing people and organizations. Seems like it makes sense, but this research points to an important reframe:

When you focus on managing progress, you’re better able to manage people—and even teams and organizations.
“…the most important implication of the progress principle is this: By supporting people and their daily progress in meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term performance, which enhances inner work life even more…. Knowing what serves to catalyze and nourish progress—and what does the opposite—turns out to be the key to effectively managing people and their work.
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Leadership Derailers Assessment

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

 

The Power of Momentum

This research resonates with the concept of momentum in physics, which is “mass in motion” (the product of the mass of something and its velocity). Think of a big 18-wheeler barreling down the highway. Massive momentum.

Some key points about momentum:

Gaining momentum through consistent, purposeful action fuels motivation, while procrastination slows momentum and saps motivation.

Ask yourself this:

What can you do now to build momentum toward something that matters?

If you have goals you want to achieve and a clear vision of a successful future you’re moving toward, are you taking enough action now and every day to create and build momentum toward your desired ends?

 

The Flywheel Effect

Author Jim Collins famously described this as a “flywheel” in his book, Good to Great.

He described a massive metal disk, weighing thousands of pounds, mounted on an axle. Naturally, it takes great effort to get it to move at first. But if you keep pushing consistently, it begins to move, ever so slowly. Then a bit faster. At some point, after disciplined work and sweat equity over time, there’s a breakthrough:

“The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn… whoosh!… its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.”

 Eventually, you generate an “almost unstoppable momentum.” The flywheel effect.

“Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.” -Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

Collins notes that the good-to-great transformations in their massive research set didn’t happen in one fell swoop with a single grand program, defining action, or miracle moment. Instead, it took a quiet, deliberate, and cumulative process. Turning the flywheel.

Collins describes it as an organic evolutionary process, a pattern of buildup via an accumulation of consistent steps. The pattern: “disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action.” He cites executives in their own words from the companies they studied:

  • “a series of incremental changes”
  • “an evolution”
  • “very deliberate”
  • “evolutionary… building success upon success”

For this kind of business success, effort and action alone aren’t enough. According to Collins, it also requires “an underlying, compelling logic of momentum.” One might say it’s a powerful combination of a powerful business model with an effective strategy that’s well executed consistently over time. When it works right, he says that doing A almost inevitably leads to B, which inexorably leads to C and then D in a reinforcing loop. Round and round the flywheel.

For it to work, you must discover what your flywheel is in your current context (e.g., market and industry conditions). You don’t have to be a pioneer, first mover, or even unique to make it work. But you do need a clear and deep understanding of your flywheel, along with supreme execution of it over a lengthy period of time.

The flipside of the flywheel effect is what he calls the “doom loop.” It’s when organizations start with one thing, then stop and change course. They lurch back and forth impatiently, perhaps even desperately, seeking the big breakthrough that never comes. It leads only to decline and frustration.

Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

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.

 

The Power of Compounding

These principles and practices of progress, momentum, and flywheels have echoes in the financial world, with the phenomenon of compounding and compound interest: Savvy savers earn interest both on the money they save and on the interest they earn. Over time, such compounding can lead to spectacular results—huge rewards for wise, patient, and disciplined savers.

Benjamin Franklin noted this centuries ago:

“Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.”

The phenomenon is so powerful that it’s been called “the eighth wonder of the world,” a quotation often attributed to Albert Einstein.

“Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.” -John C. Bogle, investor and philanthropist
Source: Wikipedia

 

Conclusion

There are many benefits that come from using the progress principle and its related practices. The advantages include greater motivation, effectiveness, satisfaction, resilience, and confidence. And big results.

It’s also an antidote to the common traps of overthinking, worrying, and rumination—as well as indecision and inertia.

Unlocking the power of progress and small wins can lead to big changes. Why not get started with it, today?

Wishing you well with it.
-Gregg

 

Reflection & Action Questions

  1. Are you leveraging the progress principle in your life and work?
  2. Are you managing your setbacks proactively?
  3. Have you discovered the flywheel that will generate powerful momentum for you?
  4. What more will you do on these fronts, starting today?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Progress and Small Wins

  • “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” -Robert J. Collier, publisher
  • “You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.” -Brian Tracy, author and speaker
  • “Tiny victories are like gems scattered on your journey, notice them.” -Emma Xu
  • “The great victory, which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed.” -Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “’the progress principle’: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.” -Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
  • “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” -Charles Duhigg, author
  • “Track your small wins to motivate big accomplishments.” -Teresa Amabile, researcher
  • “The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path. In this way, habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.” -James Clear, author

(1) Their research methodology included end-of-day email surveys sent to 26 project teams from seven companies, comprising 12,000 diary entries from 238 people. (Source: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011.) The idea behind the progress principle and small wins has resonance with other ideas and frameworks, including agile software development (which often includes breaking product development work into small increments, including sprints and rapid iterations) and innovation approaches like lean startup methodology, including its focus on “minimum viable products.” Entrepreneur and author Peter Sims advocates making “little bets.”

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

Avoid These New Year’s Resolution Pitfalls

New year’s resolutions are famously difficult to achieve. So much so that they’re the butt of jokes.

“May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.”
-Joey Adams, comedian

It would be funnier if the stakes weren’t so high. If it weren’t our lives, health, and relationships at issue.

There are many reasons for the low success rate. For starters, fuzzy thinking. Case in point: we rarely distinguish between resolutions, goals, and habits.

  • Resolutions are firm decisions to do or not to do something (i.e., deciding something with determination).
  • Goals are the desired results you hope to achieve. They’re the object of our ambition and effort.
  • Habits are the things you do often and regularly.

Next, there are many problems with the way we set resolutions. And there are issues with the way we go about trying to achieve them. No wonder the results tend to disappoint.

“Behavior change is hard. No doubt about it.”
James Clear, writer

Take the Traps Test

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

 

12 New Year’s Resolutions Pitfalls to Avoid

Below are 12 new year’s resolutions pitfalls to avoid. As you read them, think about whether you want to change your current resolutions.

1. Having too many resolutions. This is probably the most common trap. When you have too many resolutions, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, placing the whole enterprise at risk. The problem is that it’s unrealistic, given the larger context of your many other responsibilities and challenges. And it will dilute your efforts. Avoid the trap of trying to change everything at once. It will stack the odds against you. Stanford University behavior scientist Dr. B.J. Fogg recommends focusing on a maximum of three habits at a time (and shrinking them down to what he calls “tiny habits”).

…if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.”
John DoerrMeasure What Matters

2. Not identifying and focusing on the most important resolution. Here, look to what’s called “keystone habits”: ones on which others depend or that have important secondary benefits. Examples: walking daily, exercising regularly, having a healthy and consistent sleep routine. Case in point: if you exercise regularly, it probably helps you eat and sleep better, plus you may have higher energy levels, better focus, and great confidence, not to mention the direct health benefits (e.g., muscle strength, endurance, cardiovascular fitness).

3. Being unrealistic with your resolutions. Don’t set yourself up for failure by aiming for the sky. Bear in mind that small changes can add up to something big when you’re consistent and stick with them over time. Think of the magic of compound interest.

4. Being too vague. Examples of vague resolutions: Get healthy. Sleep better. Be a better person. Save more money. Lose weight. Study more. Learn Spanish. Better to get granular and specific. Examples of specific resolutions:

  • Read a book a month.
  • Save 15% of every paycheck so you’re on track for a downpayment on a new home.
  • Increase average daily step count from 9,000 currently to 10,000.

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.

 

5. Adopting other people’s resolutions due to social pressure. This is often a function of caring too much about what other people think or the comparison trap. When setting resolutions, look to your core values and tap into your heart, not your ego or excessive materialism.

“The more that we choose our goals based on our values and principles,
the more we enter into a positive cycle of energy, success, and satisfaction.”
-Neil Farber, Canadian contemporary artist

6. Not writing your resolutions down. Ideally, place reminders in conspicuous places (e.g., Post-Its on your desk, reminders on your phone, notes on your fridge or bathroom mirror). And move them around. Otherwise, you’ll stop noticing them.

7. Expecting instant results. In most cases, that’s… NOT. GONNA. HAPPEN. Better to play the long game and work diligently and systematically toward something positive instead of expecting quick wins.

8. Not making a clear, specific, and realistic plan for how you’ll make it happen. To achieve your resolutions, it will help if you have good habits and an environment conducive to success. How likely are you to eat well if your cabinet is full of junk food? Will you really be able to focus more and complete that big project if you’re getting notifications, texts, and emails every five seconds? What are the odds of letting go of negative self-talk, victimhood, and blaming if you’re hanging with negative, judgmental people? Eliminating unhelpful triggers is huge.

“Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.”
-James Clear, Atomic Habits

9. Not creatively devising ways to make pursuing your resolutions more enjoyable. Are there any resolution activities that you can do with a friend? Can you do the work in a cozy or fun setting? At a good time when you can focus? Can you find ways to employ your strengths and passions when pursuing your resolutions?

Strengths Search

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

 

10. Going it alone. You’re much more likely to achieve your resolutions if you make them social. Get a workout buddy. Recruit an accountability partner. Plus, it’s more fun this way. A double win!

11. Not planning for challenges. Avoid wasting too much time in dreaming mode (which can sap your motivation) and spend more time in mitigation mode (to make sure you’re prepared for the adversity that’s bound to arise). Be vigilant. Commit to getting back on track right away if or when you hit a roadblock.

12. Not tracking and celebrating your progress. Use a daily log to track your progress. As the saying goes, you don’t get what you don’t measure. Reward yourself for successful completion of milestones along the way.

“…the process of working toward a goal, participating in a valued and challenging activity, is as important to well-being as its attainment…. Working toward a meaningful life goal is one of the most important strategies for becoming lastingly happier.” Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Riverside

How of Happiness

 

Conclusion

Truth be told, having a new year is an epic gift. You’re here. Alive and kicking. Your world is awash in possibility. What will you do to honor that precious gift?

“New year—a new chapter, new verse, or just the same old story?
Ultimately we write it. The choice is ours.”

-Alex Morritt, writer

Wishing you well with it. Let me know if I can help.
Gregg Vanourek

 

Reflection Questions

  1. How are things going with your new year’s resolutions?
  2. What changes will you make, starting today?

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

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

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on New Year’s Resolutions

  • “And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet
  • “There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner.”-G.K. Chesterton, English writer and philosopher
  • “We all get the exact same 365 days. The only difference is what we do with them.” -Hillary DePiano, playwright
  • “Make only one resolution: your chances of success are greater when you channel energy into changing just one aspect of your behavior.” –Richard Wiseman, professor of psychology, University of Hertfordshire
  • “Goals are fuel in the furnace of achievement.” –Brian Tracy, Canadian-American author and speaker
  • “If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.” -Andrew Carnegie, Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist
  • “New Year’s resolutions failing doesn’t even seem like an accident anymore; it feels as much a part of the tradition as resolutions in the first place. The worst part is how quickly it happens. You join a gym, and for the first week, you’re there every day. By the second week, the gym is just something you wave at on your way to get a burrito.” –Eric Barker, “New Research Reveals 8 Secrets that Will Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Succeed”

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

Can We Find Peace in the Face of Death?

Article Summary 

What is it we fear in death? Most of us use denial as a big part of our strategy, but are there better ways to break free from the fear? Here we inquire into its root causes and look at some perspectives to (mostly) liberate ourselves from this fear—and find peace. (Guest blog by Niccolas Albiz.)

++++++

You know how it is: You have some spreadsheet work to do so you fill the background silence with YouTube videos or some music. Today it just so happened that the fates had lined up three consecutive videos that all touched upon the concept of death and mortality.

It was just one of those days for YouTube, I guess. So now here I am, needing to write down my thoughts.

 

A Quest to Escape Aging

It started with Dr. Chris Raynor’s commentary on Bryan Johnson. Bryan Johnson is a tech entrepreneur who spends about $2 million a year trying to slow down and even reverse his own aging. All driven by the fear of dying and trying to reach an escape velocity beyond aging.

The comments on YouTube videos often fascinate me. They show how broadly cleverness is distributed. The comment that did it for me here was this:

Bryan Johnson made it clear… that this is all stemming from his fear of death and his resources to make his attempt. Rather than throwing millions or billions at stopping his biological clock, a good therapist could talk him through his fear.”

You can’t blame anyone for fearing death. Some of my deepest held values started with the realization of death, and the existential dread that it caused in me. Now, if this fear has such a hold on you that it’s leading you down a path of rash decisions, then a therapist might be the way to go.

Yet, why does it seem so unreasonable and excessive to me to spend $2 million per year on rejuvenation treatments? It seems obsessive, manic even, to use such drastic measures to avoid death.

But why? Is it just my kneejerk reaction to something pioneering and that seems to fly in the face of nature? Or is there something to it?

Dealing with death is something that’s common to us all. Everyone should have tools to deal with it. Mostly we apply good ol’ denial. It seems like a fragile tactic though, an eggshell defense. But since our memories and focus are so easily directed to more immediate concerns, it’s somehow still a robust part of any person’s strategy.

Is denial a robust strategy in handling the existential dread of death and accessing its impetus for conscious living? Could it be for some? Is it for most, or are most of us who apply denial walking through life at below our potential for vigor?

Death is no doubt a powerful thing, not just in its finality but as a tormentor. The values that were awoken in me from when I first brushed up against death and mortality are my strongest drivers to this day. (After lots of reflection, I find I am driven by meaning, vitality, and compassion.)

As a child, I cried myself to sleep for two weeks when I first grasped the idea of death. It started when my mother explained what the zombies in Michael Jackson’s music video “Thriller” were.

The concept of death plagued me, but after two weeks, the tears were all used up. Left in their place was just an aching confusion and, over time, the deep desire to then at least live life with vitality and do something meaningful with it.

So, I understand Bryan Johnson’s desperation. But there’s something in his approach that freaked me out.

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.

 

A Violent Brush with Death

I continued with my spreadsheets, got another cup of tea, and went to the bathroom. (Tea again.) The second video I watched as I returned to my work was an interview with novelist Salman Rushdie. He’s an incredible writer. Reading him has given me endless joy.

This interview, though, was not about his fiction but about the incident where an assailant stabbed him with a knife when he was giving a lecture in Chautauqua, New York. Rushdie recounts lying down bleeding on the stage and having a moment to orient himself in the chaos.

He says that what scared and pained him wasn’t death but rather that he was there ALL ALONE. He felt alone in a big room full of strangers.

In my mind, it took me here:

“Huh… loneliness… I wonder what we actually fear in death.
Is it the same for everyone? Why does it have such a hold on us?”

Is it loneliness specifically? Some people don’t mind being alone, and actually prefer their own company over that of too many others. Is it that loneliness implies the lack of being loved by someone close? (Remember the auditorium was full of people.)

  • Is it the missed opportunity to do more?
  • The fear of being forgotten?
  • A longing for more experiences?
  • That we fear for people we’re responsible for? (Unlikely to be the only reason, simply because many fear death before they have responsibility for others.)
  • Is it that we fear for the world and want a hand in helping it back on track?
  • That we have things to do and take care of? (However trivial, elderly people often name this as a concern from what I understand.)
  • The desire to be loved?
  • A fear that we won’t matter to others in the future?
  • The fear of meaninglessness?
  • That we wish to be remembered and have a legacy somehow?
  • Some irrational fear seeded by a zombie movie?
  • Or something else?

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.

 

Living Beyond Ego

The third video was Annaka & Sam Harris talking about their work and meditation. They were making the case that there’s reason to see the ego as a constructed tool/illusion. (Timestamp: 32:05.)

This is, some days, the most difficult thought to hold in my mind, but sometimes also the most inspiring. If there’s nothing special about me, and I’m one small part of a much larger “everything else,” then the death I fear loses its fangs to a certain extent.

This idea, put forth by Sam and Annaka, is on the farther end of the ego and consciousness discussion. If we, however, simply hold the thought that the focus on ourselves and our death is misguided, and that instead we should look at the world and its survival, cultivation, and improvement (an “other-centric perspective”), then death looks very different.

How about I just cut to the chase:

What do I think plagues people about death?

MEANING seems to be the key concept when it comes to what we actually act on and strive for. We don’t act in a way to maximize pleasure but rather to maximize our satisfaction with our view of our lives (as Daniel Kahneman puts it).

The lack of a greater meaning for me to contribute to would mean that death poses an existential threat by making my life feel as if it’s pointless. So, WITH a greater meaning we now have something greater to care for than our own existence, something greater to serve. Whether that’s a cause, ideal, or group, it’s still something else. We die, but LIFE continues.

If my primary concern extends to me alone, then I’m doomed to be disappointed by how the story ends. But when I can shift my focus to my love of the world, people in general, and the beauty and wonder of it all, then I gain peace.

My death becomes a lot less threatening. In making myself peripheral, I gain peace. And meaning. Death still scares me, but not at all as much—and for different reasons.

It seems to me that ego (my focus on me) and love (compassion, to be precise) exist on a sort of spectrum. Strengthening one means weakening the other.

So the more I fall into the trap of focusing on my ego, or even just me, my experiences, and the things I have going on, the less I focus on my love of the world and what it needs.

I resonate with the Stoic idea (and Ryan Holiday’s phrasing), “Ego is the enemy.” But this trap of ego is easy to fall into, particularly when your phone and TV stick their tendrils into you.

So, I find these activities to be simple but effective…

  1. Reading fiction. When reading, I get sucked in by the beauty of other people’s experiences. I’m pulled out of my own drama, which I live in otherwise.
  2. Wishing people happiness. Chade-Meng Tan introduced me to the idea of looking at two strangers as you walk or commute to work every day (my version) and thinking, “I wish for you to be happy.” This trains a certain kind intention as the spontaneous response to seeing someone.
  3. “Three good things.” Every day after lunch or before bed, I list three things that have been good with my day. This helps me appreciate the beauty of things and focus less on myself.

So, here are my questions for you:

Have you ever thought about death?
What does it bring up for you?
What’s the root of that feeling?
Can changing the focus away from your self help?

 

+++++++++++++++

This is a guest blog by Niccolas Albiz. Niccolas is a sustainability and socio-technical change consultant. He works in Sweden with demonstration projects aimed at eradicating mobility poverty and CO2 emissions in rural areas by means of autonomous vehicles.

Niccolas Albiz, photo by Otto Norin

 

Videos Referenced

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

This is a guest post by Niccolas Albiz on Gregg Vanourek’s blog.

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

 

 

Getting to the Root Causes of Things: Why and How

A brilliant but troubled young man from a tough neighborhood in south Boston is working as a janitor at an elite technical university. Despite his incredible potential, he plans to stick around with his childhood buddies and not use his gifts. His therapist comes from the same neighborhood and is fascinated by the smug young prodigy.

Sound familiar? It’s the plot of the acclaimed film, “Good Will Hunting,” of course, starring Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, and Minnie Driver. And it’s also a case study in root causes.

In their first session, Will shocked his therapist, Dr. Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams, with cutting observations about him based on his painting on the wall. When they met a few days later at the park, Sean told Will that, while he’s brilliant, he’s just a kid. Though he knows an astonishing amount of facts and figures, he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Will hasn’t traveled outside of Boston. He hasn’t yet experienced the things of the world that bring you deep wisdom, or real love with a partner.

Sean sees that, though Will has incredible intellectual abilities feeding his crass self-assurance, he’s really just lost and afraid. Sean asks him:

“You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some f*ckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.”

Will, perhaps for the first time in his life, had the tables turned on him. Later, in an emotional exchange in Sean’s office, they trade stories of their violent fathers. Will recently broke up with his girlfriend and suspects that Sean will give him some textbook theories about attachment disorder or fear of abandonment.

But Sean does something surprising. He drops Will’s psych file on the desk and says, “It’s not your fault.”

Will says he knows that. But Sean keeps repeating it, over and over. Until it finally cracks Will’s heart open and the pain comes streaming through—and healing.

They’d finally gotten to the root of it.

 

What Are You Struggling With?

Think about whether there are any recurring patterns or challenges in your life. (If so, welcome to the human race. You’re not alone.) Common ones include feeling stuck in your career and struggling with things like money, body image, self-doubt, or toxic relationships.

Have you, like Sean and Will, gotten to the root of it?

When you’re passed over for a promotion, your first response might be to blame your ungrateful manager. Upon further reflection, though, you might realize that you’re deflecting responsibility. Without understanding and addressing the root cause, you’re stuck spinning unhelpful stories and playing the victim.

Are your financial woes really about your stingy boss or your mindset, habits, and choices?
Are your health problems really about your stressful job or about your numbing of deeper issues?

Difficult issues, for sure, but how long will they go on if you’re not addressing them at the right level?

When your yard has weeds, do you mow over them, or do you get down in the dirt and grab them by the root?

You may notice that many of the traps of living—the things that inhibit our happiness and quality of life—come with common root causes. Examples:

  • Having a victim mentality often stems from difficult experiences or trauma, leading you to feel powerless and believe that other people or outside circumstances dictate the terms of your life.
  • Blaming often originates in fear of vulnerability or failure. You may have learned to deflect responsibility as a coping mechanism to protect your self-image or avoid the irritation of accountability.
  • People-pleasing often stems from a desire for approval and acceptance, perhaps caused by early experiences of conditional love or approval. Maybe you internalized the message that your worth depends on meeting others’ expectations.
  • Workaholism can come from a need for achievement, perhaps driven by difficult or embarrassing situations early in life. Parental, peer, or societal pressures that equate success with achievement can fuel it. Your excessive work may be a means to gain control or validation.

Take the Traps Test

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

 

9 Tips to Help You Discover Root Causes

Here are nine things you can do when engaging in root cause analysis:

1. Use the “five whys” questioning technique to get beyond surface-level symptoms and drill down to root causes. When you encounter a problem, ask “Why?” five times. That inquiry can help take you down to the underlying issue. (See the “Practice” section below for more on this.)

2. Recognize that, while it may be tempting to externalize the problem and shift the blame, the root cause is often internal. Keep your focus on how and why things have happened instead of on who’s causing you difficulty. That way, you’ll focus on things you can control and avoid going down the rabbit holes of blaming and victimhood. Consider whether the root cause has to do with your mindset, beliefs, choices, attitudes, or habits.

3. Think about several challenges you’ve experienced and see if there’s a pattern. Sometimes, by looking at a series of things, you can trace them back to a common denominator. For example, it could be a fear of looking bad or of failing.

4. Challenge your limiting beliefs. Identify your limiting beliefs and then dig deeper into the assumptions behind them and consider where they come from. For example, if you believe you’re damaged goods, a failure, or not worthy of love, think about whether you somehow got the message that you need to act a certain way or achieve at a certain level to be a good person.

5. Note that while getting to the root cause is ideal, sometimes you may need immediate relief. In some cases, it’s helpful to address acute problems to give yourself more running room.

6. Note that there may be multiple root causes. Sometimes, there’s a confluence of factors causing you pain. If you’re experiencing anxiety, for example, it may stem from life events, personality traits, peer pressure, cultural influences, childhood upbringing and parenting approaches, genetic factors, and/or brain chemistry imbalances.

7. Don’t do this alone. Seek help from trusted friends and colleagues, a small, supportive group, or a therapist. That will help you identify blind spots, bring in fresh perspectives, and challenge your assumptions.

8. Look for ways to prevent the root causes from coming up in the future. For example, getting to the bottom of why you feel stuck in your career can help you identify key issues, such as a lack of clear and compelling career goals, insufficient skill development, and fear of change. Perhaps your lack of clarity stems from not taking the time to reflect on your core values, strengths, passions, and aspirations. And maybe your lack of skill development stems from complacency or an overfull schedule.

9. Also look for the root causes of your victories and successes, not just your defeats and failures. Doing so can help you continue having good results and also port those approaches to other areas of your life.

 

Conclusion

Engaging in root cause analysis is vital to success and wellbeing. By understanding the underlying factors that contribute to your struggles, you can implement targeted approaches to address them, leading to better outcomes. This proactive approach can enhance your self-awareness and your personal and professional growth. By committing to this reflective process, you can finally unshackle yourself from the things that have been holding you back.

Quality of Life Assessment

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

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Do you have recurring problems or challenges that are holding you back?
  2. Have you identified their root causes?
  3. What more will you do, starting today?

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Root Causes

  • “When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo, author
  • “Negative thinking is subtle and deceptive. It wears many faces and hides behind the mask of excuses. It is important to strip away the mask and discover the real, root emotion.” -Robert H. Schuller, pastor
  • “We lack emotional connection even when we are surrounded by other people. This feeling of being profoundly alone is the root cause of unhappiness in the human race. It is the root cause of addictions. It is the root cause of suicide. It is the root cause of acts of terror. And it is the root of the dysfunction in the way society is structured.” -Teal Swan, author

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

Practice: Using “Five Whys” to Identify the Root Cause

In the 1930s, Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda developed a questioning technique known as the “five whys” method to improve manufacturing processes as part of the Toyota Production System. With this now-famous and widely used method, workers ask why at least five times when they encounter a problem, helping them discover and address the root cause of the problem instead of addressing surface-level symptoms.

Here’s how it works: When you encounter a problem, ask why it’s occurring, and then answer that. Then ask why again, and answer that. And so on, five times.

The idea is to encourage people to go deep enough and not stop too soon. But in reality, five isn’t a magic number, and the deeper why questioning process can end with any number of whys. But five is a good proxy for going deep.

Here’s an example:

  1. Why does Alicia feel stuck in her career? Because she hasn’t taken on any new responsibilities lately.
  2. Why? Because her current workload feels overwhelming.
  3. Why? Because she spends a lot of time people-pleasing and managing tasks that could be delegated.
  4. Why? Because she worries that her team members might not complete them to her standards.
  5. Why? Because she has perfectionistic tendencies and control issues.

Another example:

  1. Why isn’t our new product selling well? Because customers aren’t making repeat purchases.
  2. Why? Because they’re dissatisfied with the product’s performance.
  3. Why? Because it doesn’t meet their expectations set by our marketing claims.
  4. Why? Because they overhyped the product and didn’t do sufficient testing before launch.
  5. Why? Because there was pressure to launch too quickly due to the upcoming board meeting.

 

Appendix: Examples of Getting to the Root Causes of Things

Example: Missing Motivation. Marcus is unhappy with his job. His motivation disappeared years ago. Lately, he finds himself procrastinating and missing deadlines, which never used to happen. It’s leading to guilt and stress. Unbeknownst to him, what’s really going on beneath it all is that Marcus resents feeling undervalued. Two years ago, he was coldly overlooked for a well-deserved promotion and felt humiliated. Today, he’s filled with frustration and self-doubt—and thinking about resigning.

Example: Careening Career. Maria has been in the same work role for years but feels unfulfilled. And resentful. Despite her years of experience, she avoids seeking new opportunities because she fears she won’t be taken seriously. A previous boss dismissed her ideas callously, causing her to doubt her abilities. Today, she remains stuck in a position that bores her, feeling frustrated and trapped.

Example: Lost Leadership. When Catherine discovers that her team is missing its quarterly sales goals, she implements stricter sales quotas and adds daily check-ins. What she’s missing is that her team lacks confidence when selling because they don’t fully understand the new product’s features and functionality, and they don’t feel comfortable coming to her. Unbeknownst to her, Catherine’s task-driven approach comes across as cold and uncaring.

Example: Rocky Relationship. Cynthia and Thomas have been arguing a lot lately. They’ve been fighting about all sorts of things—the dishes, the kids, the budget, the yard. And things are escalating quickly to shouting storms. They’re frustrated and caught in a cycle of mutual blame. And they’re too busy finding fault with each other to step back and notice that, for a long time, Cynthia has felt unappreciated despite doing more around the house, and Tom feels unsupported in his stressful career.

Example: Nonprofit Nosedive. A nonprofit organization is experiencing a severe drop in participation at its events. In response, they’re ramping up their marketing efforts and changing their event formats. What they’re missing is that many families in the new demographic they’re targeting don’t have access to reliable transportation.

Example: Startup Struggles. An app development startup has a talented and dedicated team, but they’ve been missing important milestones lately—a shock to all. While they continue to blame individuals, the real problem is a lack of defined roles within the team, coupled with poor communication. Without clarity, their efforts are often redundant. Meanwhile, projects fall behind, clients get frustrated, and team members lose their enthusiasm.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

The Hazards of Advice

Article Summary: 

Advice is common, and we tend to assume it’s helpful, but there are many hazards of advice that we fail to account for. 18 risks and flaws that come with advice.

++++++

Advice. It’s all around you. You may be drowning in it.

“You should do XYZ.”
“You need to get started on ABC, pronto.”

It comes from everywhere. From family, friends, colleagues, managers.

In most cases, their intent is good. They’re trying to help.

But many people don’t pay nearly enough attention to the negative unintended consequences of doling out advice. Sometimes advice does more harm than good.

Do you give unsolicited advice?
Are you, like so many of us, great at dishing out advice but terrible at taking it in?*
Have you ever shared a frustration with someone, really just wanting to vent about it, only to be on the receiving end of a tirade of advice from them?

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 Advice: 18 Risks and Flaws

Most people think of advice as helpful, and in some cases it is. But in many cases it misses the mark or even causes unexpected problems.

Yet, the advice train keeps rolling, in part because people haven’t taken the time to consider its downsides.

Here are 18 risks and flaws that come with advice:

1. While giving advice can feel great to the giver, receiving it can feel awful. Have you ever felt smothered by advice? Does it sometimes feel intrusive? It can put you on the defensive and make you feel put down or judged.

2. Giving advice can signal to the other person that you lack faith in their abilities. It can send the subtle message—even if unintended—that they need you or can’t get by on their own.

“It’s so counterproductive to think you can solve anyone else’s issues, because what it says is that they are not capable. It’s about the worst thing you can do for another human being.”
Karin Weber, author and life coach

3. Giving advice can undermine the other person’s confidence. Over time, that can impair their ability to address their own issues going forward.

4. Giving advice can create a cycle of dependency. It may feel good to have all the answers and be needed when people seek your advice. But you may be creating dependency on your expertise. They may start coming to you more and more. Meanwhile, you’re inadvertently preventing them from learning how to address things on their own.

5. Giving advice can be more about our own need to be helpful or to be seen as an expert or hero than about the other person’s needs. For many, giving advice can feel gratifying. It can make you feel smarter. Important and accomplished. Ask this: How much of it is really about you and your ego or control?

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.

 

6. Advice often comes at the wrong time. In many cases, people go out looking for advice at precisely the times they’re least able to receive it—the times when they’re down, confused, or frustrated. Similarly, when you see someone struggling, you may jump in with advice without even considering their receptivity to it.

“To rush in with success formulas when someone is emotionally low or fatigued or under a lot of pressure
is comparable to trying to teach a drowning man to swim.”

-Stephen R. Covey, Primary Greatness

7. The actual value of advice is rarely put to the test. Giving advice is easy not only because it’s quick and cost-free but also because you don’t have to stick around and implement it—and suffer the consequences if things don’t go as planned. Most people have no clue about the success or failure rate of their advice. (How could they?) And they probably overestimate their success rate by wide margins. (More on that in a coming article.) Many times, you never find out what happened after you gave your advice. What’s more, you don’t know if things worked out because of or in spite of your advice (versus other possible factors). In truth, there are many variables at play, so it’s overly simplistic to think it’s the advice that made all the difference.

8. Your advice may work for you but that doesn’t mean it will work for them. When you’re giving advice, you’re doing so from your current perspective, from your levels of consciousness and awareness. You’re doing so from a certain level of understanding and experience. You come with your own history, outlook, strengths, weaknesses, personality, passions, and predispositions. Maybe your advice would work brilliantly for you, but it’s unrealistic for them, with their personality, skills, and background.

9. Context is essential, and often it’s incomplete or flawed. Sometimes, the person seeking or getting advice hasn’t done a good job of explaining the context and the core problem, setting the stage for incomplete or faulty advice. Or you jump in without a deep dive on the situation and all the players and factors.

“There are reasons why your ideas are often not that great. To start with, you don’t have the full picture. You’ve got a few facts, a delightful collection of baggage, a robust serving of opinion, and an ocean of assumption. You think you understand what’s happening. Your brain is designed to find patterns and make connections that reassure you that you know what’s going on. Trust me, you don’t. What you’ve got is one part truth and about six parts conjecture.”
-Michael Bungay Stanier, The Advice Trap

10. People asking you for advice may not have a good sense of what you really know well and what you don’t. They may have unrealistic expectations about the things you can speak about with authority. Many young entrepreneurs, for example, are hungry for advice as they build their new venture. Makes sense. When they approach a seasoned entrepreneur, they can have questions about a hundred things. Hiring. Onboarding. Tech platforms. Stock options. Cap tables. Seed rounds. Product launches. Sales. Pricing. Strategy. Business models. Customer development. Leadership. Culture-building. A.I. Can most entrepreneurs, even if successful, address all these issues with authority and conviction, tailored to all the markets and industries of the advice-seeking young founders?

11. Nobody wants to tell someone their baby is ugly. If someone comes to you seeking advice about their new idea (e.g., for a startup or a new approach), they’re unknowingly making it exceedingly awkward for you to give forthright input. Why? Because we humans are wired to avoid conflict and have difficult conversations. You might be tempted to place negative feedback in a “sandwich” of positives (as is commonly recommended), but that risks having the recipient miss the “meat” of what they really need to hear.

12. Most advice is woefully incomplete. Think about common advice you’ve heard a hundred times: Follow your passion. Find your purpose. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Go the extra mile. Drink a lot of water. Network. Meditate. Be grateful. Don’t go to bed angry. Etc. Etc. True, in many cases. Even helpful. But wretchedly oversimplified and missing essential elements. For example, how do you discover your passion? Do you have just one? What is purpose, and how do you find it? What to do after diversifying? And so on.

13. Advice can easily become overwhelming. All the aspects and steps may be clear to you, because you’ve been in a similar situation before. But it may all be new, daunting, and even confounding to them.

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.

 

14. Giving advice can put distance in relationships. People may stop sharing concerns or problems with you because they know you’ll be too quick to jump in with your thoughts on what they need to do.

15. Advice can lead to resentment, which can poison relationships. Have you ever given advice and then felt frustrated that the person didn’t do what you said? In your mind, it may be perfectly clear and settled that they’ll go out and dutifully do exactly what you said. But maybe they had reservations about your advice based on their own experiences? Maybe they weren’t comfortable handling things your way, given their personality or values? Perhaps they got vastly different advice from someone else they trust? Maybe they didn’t know how to follow through on what you said or lost their motivation? Or something changed in the interim? When people don’t follow your advice, do you take it personally and get agitated? That can damage the relationship, and it’s often a sign that it’s become more about you than them.

16. Recall that “I was only trying to help” is often a cop-out (even when your intentions are in fact pure). True help often requires a smarter and more nuanced approach than dishing out advice. It may be easy to hide behind the “only trying to help” rationalization, but that doesn’t wash away your sins or address all the risks and flaws of giving advice.

“’I was only trying to help’ sounds like a positive statement born of caring,
but how often does it mask unwelcome intrusion?”

-Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect

17. Advice can shut them down. Sometimes, while the advice giver gets on a roll with ideas and solutions, it can cause the person receiving advice to become passive. The exchange becomes one-sided. Worse, it can silence their inner voice and take them away from their deeper wisdom by engaging their self-consciousness and ego, with status games suddenly afoot. According to Professor Richard Boyatzis of Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, when people hear critical feedback, they tend to experience strong negative emotion, inhibiting their access to certain neural circuits in their brain and invoking “cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment.”

18. Advice is often a poor substitute for what’s really needed. Do they need to be told what to do? Fixed? Or do they need to be seen and heard, to be witnessed? Often, what people really need is connection, solidarity, and support—and to tap into their own brilliance and power.

 

Conclusion

Of course, advice isn’t all bad. Sometimes it really helps. In many cases, you might be missing something important that another person can bring to the table with advice.

Yes, it’s folly to try to go it alone. And yes, we sometimes need help and input from others. But often, the last thing people need is the kind of advice we’re all awash in.

When it comes to advice, we can and must do better.

(This article is first in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead” and “How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases.”)

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you giving this kind of unsolicited or one-sided advice too often?
  2. Have you stopped to notice that it may not be as helpful as you think and that it may come with more risks and flaws than you’re accounting for?
  3. What other kinds of exchanges might be more helpful?

 

Tools for You

Strengths Search

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

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Quotations on Advice

  • “A good example has twice the value of good advice.” -Albert Schweitzer, physician, philosopher, and humanitarian
  • “…some people walk around giving unsolicited advice. The assumption is that they’re right, others are wrong, others need correcting, and the act of doling out advice is like a gift from above. More often, though, it trounces on people’s feelings and makes things worse. People don’t want to be fixed. They want to feel supported and valued as they go through their own journey, including wins, losses, and learnings. We all want to be the heroes of our own story.” -Gregg Vanourek, “How to Give Feedback—A Communication Superpower
  • “…all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine.” -Hunter S. Thompson (Thompson was 22 years old when he wrote this letter to his friend Hume Logan in response to a request for life advice)
  • “One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to ‘fix’ it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless…. In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “Anyone who tries to force-feed you advice isn’t likely to be a competent soul guide.” -Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to True Self
  • “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.” -Parker Palmer, “The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice”

* Admittedly, part of the problem is that some people are promiscuous about soliciting advice. Sometimes, they have an ulterior motive. What they really want is for you to do something for them (go to bat for them at work or introduce them to an important person), and they’re using your vanity as a way in (e.g., making you feel smart and important by nodding breathlessly as you dispense your brilliant advice).

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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

How to Stop Caring Too Much about What Others Think

As a human, you’re naturally social. You’re wired to consider how others perceive you. This makes sense, since relationships are key to your well-being.

But this can be a big trap for you. When you’re overly worried about others’ opinions, you might make choices that harm you in the long run. You might avoid the short-term pain of disapproval in exchange for the long-term loss of missing out on better things.

This focus can lead you away from your true self, from your deepest desires, pushing you toward what others want or expect. In the process, you might lose yourself while seeking approval or trying to please others.

These are common traps—and with painful consequences.

When you let outside expectations drive you, it can lead to several problems. For example, you may struggle to communicate openly during disagreements. Setting boundaries becomes a challenge. You may start to work too much and become overwhelmed. Or you might begin to shy away from pursuits that genuinely interest you. You might miss potential opportunities as you focus more on meeting others’ expectations and less on following your own path.

Take the Traps Test

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

 

How to Stop Caring Too Much about What Others Think: 10 Practices

So, what can you do to break this cycle? Here are ten practices for avoiding this common trap:

1. Increase Self-Awareness: Pay attention to your instincts and inner voice.

2. Define Your Personal Fundamentals: Clarify your personal purpose, core values, and vision of the good life to understand what truly matters to you.

3. Embrace Self-Acceptance: Value your strengths and achievements, while silencing your inner critic.

4. Set High Standards for What You’ll Spend Time On: Take time to evaluate new tasks and requests, ensuring they align with your standards.

5. Gain Perspective: Consider how much others’ opinions will matter in the short and long term versus your own convictions.

6. Experiment with Disapproval: See what it feels like to experience disapproval and assess its true significance (that is, whether it’s really as bad as you originally feared).

7. Boost Your Confidence: You might view confidence as an innate trait, but in truth it’s something you can build systematically by improving and developing mastery.

8. Earn Respect: Understand that setting boundaries and staying true to your goals can earn you respect.

9. Surround Yourself with People Who Accept You As You Are: Avoid people who are constantly trying to change you to fit their preferences. And be sure to return the favor by accepting your family, friends, and colleagues as they are.

10. Enjoy the Freedom of Being Your True Self: Anticipate the power of getting over this common stumbling block and basking in the release from worrying about what others think. Enjoy the peace that comes from trusting yourself.

 

Tools for 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.

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations to Help You Stop Caring Too Much about What Others Think

  • “The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what other people think.” -C. JoyBell C., writer
  • “The most freeing experience of my life thus far has been to… be unapologetically myself, and to stand in my own light.” -Hannah Rose, therapist and writer
  • “Being dependent on approval—so dependent that we barter away all our time, energy, and personal preferences to get it—ruins lives.” -Dr. Martha Beck, Harvard-trained sociologist, coach, and author
  • “I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, entrepreneur and author
  • “So long as you’re still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.” -Neale Donald Walsch, author
  • “Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.” -Janet Wojcicki, professor, Univ. of California at San Francisco
  • “The problem comes when people are so eager to win the approval of others that they try to cover their shortcomings and sacrifice their authenticity to gain the respect and admiration of their associates.” -Bill George, CEO and leadership author
  • “Listen to your heart above all other voices.” -Martha Kagan

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

+++++++++++++++++

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