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Are You Feeling Empty Inside?

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Article Summary: 

Many people feel empty inside, even if it’s hard to admit for some. This article contains the signs and causes of feeling empty—and what to do about it.

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The feeling may be virtually undetectable, but if we’d pause to notice we may discover an inner emptiness sometimes. A silent question about whether all we’re doing is really worth it.

We may be feeling hollow or numb, or living without passion or joy. Are we racing quickly but getting nowhere in a hurry?

“Part of the problem… is that everyone is in such a hurry…. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find these things are empty, too, and they keep running.” -Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

Such a feeling may be hard to admit. We may pride ourselves on being a go-getter, a producer. Maybe we’re a committed spouse or parent. Or a hard-charging professional or executive. But the feeling is what it is, regardless of whether we acknowledge or resist it.

We all feel empty sometimes. That’s common. The problem comes when it’s a persistent feeling that gnaws at us and that inhibits healthy relationships and our productive functioning in the world.

In our age of plenty, with grand technological advancements and material comforts for so many, many have warned about a crisis of meaning. The pandemic called the question about our relationship to work and our priorities.

 

The Signs of Feeling Empty

What are the signs of feeling empty inside? Here are eight of the most common signs:

  1. lacking motivation or enthusiasm for our life and work
  2. feeling disconnected from ourselves or our feelings
  3. feeling distant from others, with a tendency to withdraw from others or an inability to form close relationships
  4. feeling unfulfilled and purposeless
  5. lacking energy
  6. losing interest in activities that we once found enjoyable
  7. feeling like we’re a spectator to our life and not a full and active participant in it
  8. having a sense of dissatisfaction with our lives

Such feelings may get scrambled in cognitive dissonance because we don’t like to think of ourselves as the kind of person who has them. We may feel ashamed of such feelings, as if they’re beneath us, even though they’re natural and common.

We may also be trying to cover up feelings of emptiness with other things—things like entertainment, social media, gaming, overwork, shopping, gambling, food, sugar, alcohol, etc. (See my article, “Are We Numbing Our Lives Away?“) These, of course, are only temporary salves. They may work for a while, but then the emptiness returns.

At a deeper level, feeling empty can be a defense mechanism keeping us from re-experiencing trauma, or it can be a sign of depression. (If you suspect it may be one of these, check out the mental health and emotional support resources listed at the end of this article.)

Quality of Life Assessment

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

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Different Kinds of Emptiness

We should also distinguish between an inner emptiness stemming from disconnection and a kind of spiritual emptiness praised in Taoism and Zen Buddhism that allows us to free ourselves from unhealthy attachments to things like success, wealth, beauty, and certain desired outcomes. The idea is that even such good things can cause us suffering because they’re fleeting and beyond our control.

“Become totally empty / Quiet the restlessness of the mind /
Only then will you witness everything unfolding from emptiness”
-Lao Tzu (Laozi), ancient Chinese philosopher

We may want to empty ourselves of the illusion that painful things are permanent and fixed versus fluid and in flux.

We can also empty ourselves of our attachments to our thoughts. With mindfulness practice, we can merely observe our thoughts and let them come and go instead of conflating ourselves with our thoughts. (So it very much depends on the kind of emptiness we’re talking about, whether it’s an emptiness of distress or enlightenment.)

 

The Causes of Feeling Empty

There are many things that can cause the distressing feeling of emptiness. One of the most common causes is physical and mental exhaustion. This can come from many thing—often a combination of things—including insufficient sleep, poor self-care (e.g., neglecting regular exercise and movement and good nutrition and sleep habits), racing around to family activities, or a stressful job with a demanding boss. Such things can snowball into burnout.

In his wonderful little book, Let Your Life Speak, educator and author Parker Palmer describes a deeper form of burnout:

“Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess—the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
-Parker Palmer, educator and author

Feeling empty can also be caused by many other things, including:

  1. loneliness
  2. repressing our emotions
  3. losing ourselves in an all-consuming relationship that leaves precious little time for ourselves
  4. spending too much time on social media, streaming sites, or gaming
  5. feeling exhausted from mental rumination about painful thoughts and the associated negative self-talk
  6. suspecting that we may need a different job or career, or that we’re settling for something that’s just okay
  7. lack of clarity about our purpose, values, vision, or goals (see my related articles, “The Problem of Not Being Clear About Our Purpose” and “The Problem of Not Being Clear About Our Values”)
  8. losing touch with ourselves and our inner life
  9. living a divided life, with a lack of coherence between our inner and outer self, or living in ways that violate our core values or that don’t center us in our purpose
  10. lacking self-awareness (e.g., about our purpose, values, strengths, passions, and the traps we’re in)
  11. not having enough clarity about or movement toward our goals and dreams

At a deeper level, feeling emptiness can also come from experiencing trauma, with our mind and body wanting us to emotionally detach from the pain, thereby making us feel empty inside as we struggle to access our feelings.

According to Dr. Margaret Paul, psychologist and author, ultimately there’s only one root cause of feeling inner emptiness: a lack of love. She notes that it’s not a lack of someone else’s love, but rather a lack of love of ourselves, or what she calls “self-abandonment.” This often comes from an ego that draws the wrong conclusion from our experiences in the world, making us believe that we’re not worthy of love when in fact we are.

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

What to Do About It

Fortunately, there are many things we can do to address prolonged feelings of emptiness that inhibit our quality of life. Here are some practices and mindset shifts:

  1. stop ignoring the feeling of emptiness and acknowledge it, giving ourselves grace and not judging ourselves harshly for feeling that way, instead allowing the feelings to flow through us and then letting go
  2. resolve to identify and address the root causes of our pain and anxiety, since avoiding them only brings a temporary reprieve and ends up harming our emotional well-being over time
  3. notice when we feel empty and what we’re doing and with whom, so we can avoid these emptiness triggers
  4. reframe our mindset from a sense of dread that we’re flawed to a helpful signal that there’s something in our life that needs attention
  5. figure out what self-care practices work best for us and double down on those
  6. make a list of fun, engaging, and fulfilling activities and people and build them into our schedule
  7. reinvest in learning and growing (e.g., via courses, books, podcasts, TED talks, etc.)
  8. learn a new skill or develop a current skill further
  9. engage in a creative practice such as songwriting or dance
  10. limit our time on social media, email, streaming, gaming, etc.
  11. reach out to family, friends, and loved ones, or make new friends
  12. get clarity about our purpose and core values, then creatively building them into our life and work
  13. write down our goals, aspirations, and vision of the good life to give us a sense of where we’d like to go in our life
  14. seek people and situations that help us feel loved, supported, and whole (and avoid people and situations that make us feel empty)
  15. recruit an accountability partner to help us do things that fill us up or challenge us
  16. form a small group where we can be open and vulnerable and lean on each other for support
  17. establish a daily spiritual practice, such as prayer, worship, contemplation, reading, meditation, or yoga
  18. stop avoiding responsibility for our current situation
  19. get in the habit of journaling for self-expression and self-awareness or writing a gratitude journal (see also this list from Lifehack of 32 things to be grateful for)
  20. seek professional help from a therapist our counselor, if needed (see the resources listed at the end of this article)

The point is not to do all, or even most, of these things. Rather, the point is to start with one or two that seem most promising or intriguing and build from there, paying attention to what’s most helpful and what isn’t.

Ultimately, feeling empty may signal that we’re becoming more aware and conscious of what’s important in our lives—and the deeper experiences we may be missing. That can be a very good thing if we have the foresight and courage to do something about it.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you feeling empty inside?
  2. Is it an occasional feeling or something that’s been persistent and that has started to detract from your life and work?
  3. If the latter, what will you do about it?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

Take the Traps Test

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

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Postscript: Inspirations on Emptiness

  • “Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.” -George Eliot, English novelist
  • “Feeling empty is often a sign that you’re disconnected from something—whether that be your soul, a lack of meaning/purpose, or your emotions.” -Aletheia Luna, writer and educator
  • “You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” -Carl Sagan
  • “The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.” -Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
“I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be—an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others. We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves superior but because we have no sense of self at all. Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were…. as community is torn apart by various political and economic forces, more and more people suffer from the empty self syndrome.”
-Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

 

Resources for Mental Health and Crisis Prevention

Consult a mental health professional if you believe it may be depression or if your feelings are debilitating and not merely occasional. Here are some support resources:

Featured image source: Adobe Stock

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

Escaping the Trap of Our Ego

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Article Summary: 

Ego is a problem for all of us. It comes with many related problems, including selfishness, arrogance, self-importance, and mental suffering. How to escape the trap of our ego.

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There’s a long list of people who have famously been captured by their ego, from celebrities and CEOs to politicians and professional athletes. It’s a well known problem, and one that keeps causing mayhem.

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
-Proverbs 16:18

But this is a problem for all of us, not just the rich and famous. There’s a long list of related problems that come with an unhealthy attachment to our ego: selfishness, arrogance, condescension, self-importance, superiority, hyper-sensitivity, hyper-competitiveness, and corruption.

With ego traps, we see perfectionists, overachievers, and underachievers (our ego prefers us on the sidelines so we don’t run the risk of coming up short), as well as curmudgeons (who express disappointment or disgust every waking minute). It’s a parade of dysfunctions.

“Ego clouds and disrupts everything.”
-Jocko Willink in Extreme Ownership

 

How to Know When We’ve Been Captured by Ego

Our ego-driven thoughts are there to protect us and help us perform for others in a way that buttresses our chosen identity.

When we’ve been captured by our ego, we tend to bask in praise and let it go to our heads. We resist or ignore negative feedback or things we should consider improving. Our defense mechanisms kick in, placing us in a protective shell in which we’re not open to reality. We get caught up in defending an image of ourselves—an image of how we want to be seen to be.

When we’ve been captured by our ego, we tend to be or feel:

  • selfish
  • judgmental
  • critical of others
  • arrogant about our abilities and contributions
  • bad at listening
  • needy for attention, recognition, or praise
  • agitated
  • unwilling to admit our mistakes
  • resentful of things that happened in the past
  • worried about what may happen in the future

These feelings are all signs that our ego is doing a number on us.

“When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely….
when everybody loves me, I’m gonna be just about as happy as I can be.”
-The Counting Crows in their song, “Mr. Jones”

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

The Problem with Our Ego

Ego is one of the worst traps in our lives. It affects everything when it’s in charge of our thinking, from our happiness and quality of life to our relationships, work, and leadership. And it affects us all. It’s one of the great challenges of being human.

“There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.”
-Laurence J. Peter

At its worst, our ego does many things. It:

  • traps us in obsessive thought loops in which we ruminate on negative thoughts and feelings
  • leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with ourselves at the expense of our family, organization, community, or society
  • places us in a state of fear, in which we’re operating out of the more primitive parts of our brain and nervous system
  • hands control over our happiness and wellbeing to others and to circumstances beyond our control
  • hides our weaknesses and shortcomings, leading us to inaccurate self-assessments
  • makes us feel defensive when we receive negative feedback, in some cases causing us to “shoot the messenger,” thereby detracting from our ability to learn and improve
  • harms our relationships and leads to disconnection from others as we get so absorbed in our own career or image
  • prevents us from showing the vulnerability that leads to deeper human connection
  • inhibits our compassion
  • leads to more conflict (with each person’s ego needs escalating demands and resentments)
  • reduces trust in our family and teams
  • gets us stuck in harmful patterns of emotional reactivity to people and situations
  • causes us to focus excessively on material things and image or success
  • keeps us trapped in the past as we continue to litigate old sleights and harms
  • makes us feel inferior to others
  • makes us feel resentful when the idealized state of the world that our ego keeps unrealistically expecting never appears
  • pushes us into a “fixed mindset” (in which we believe our capabilities are set in stone), making us want to avoid challenges and risks
  • drains our energy and robs us of peace when things change (as they always do)
  • traps us in a logical fallacy of conditional happiness: “When I get or achieve X, then I’ll be happy” (see my article, “The Surprising Relationship between Success and Happiness”)
  • degrades our happiness and wellbeing
  • makes us feel perpetually unsatisfied, as it inevitably defaults to wanting and needing more attention and praise no matter how good things are in our lives
  • drives us to workaholism and all its attendant costs, including health and relationship problems
  • becomes a lifelong addiction in which go through our days just trying to protect and satisfy our fragile and insatiable ego
  • keeps us from connecting with God and living with grace from our heart and soul

Our ego craves attention. It desperately looks for situations in which it can receive recognition and praise or in which it can create conflict so it can feel agitated or superior.

“Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it.”
-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Our ego thrives on superficial comparisons in which we look good at the expense of others. It clings to an idealized image of reality and self so much so that, when change occurs, as it always does, the ego barrages us with negative thoughts and feelings, making us anxious and unhappy.

Our ego tells us lies about ourselves and others and, since these mischievous thoughts come from our own minds, we tend to take them as truth.

We may have a sense of this in the abstract, but there’s a real challenge at work in our daily experience: we’re often not aware when we’ve been hijacked by our ego. The master illusion is that our ego is ourself. We may get glimpses of the illusion when we invoke our deeper consciousness and observe the thought stream of our ego in action as a watcher of our own thoughts. (The question arises about who’s doing that watching? The answer, it follows, is our true self.)

This ongoing lack of awareness means that the ego has a firm grip on our psyche nearly all the time, and it explains why it’s so rare for us to escape that grip. Even as we consider whether our ego is a problem, our ego secretly kicks into denial mode and tells us that, while it may be a problem for others, for us it’s not a big deal.

Addressing our ego is also tricky because of the cognitive dissonance that comes from knowing that having confidence is good for us. We want to avoid being a wallflower and getting stepped on, but humility doesn’t mean insecurity, just as confidence doesn’t mean arrogance.

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Take the Assessment

 

How Ego Degrades Our Leadership

Ego is one of the great killers of effective leadership.

“The ego is seductive, the kiss of death to true leadership…. For too many leaders, their ego is their worst enemy.”
-Bob and Gregg Vanourek, “Your Ego Is Not Your Amigo”

Our ego takes us away from a focus on our team and our purpose, instead swapping in a focus on how we appear to others. It gets us so focused on managing our image that we’re not accomplishing nearly as much as we could if we just focused on getting the job done.

People can sense it when we’re in it only for ourselves and not a loyal member of the team committed to the shared purpose.

They can also sense it when we’re full of ourselves and breathing our own vapors, assigning ourselves all the credit and neglecting all the contributions of others through the organization. They can see it when we’re unwilling to admit it when we’re wrong, causing us to lose our credibility, one of the most valuable assets for any leader.

“Arrogant leadership is toxic to an organization. It looks like strength but is a debilitating weakness.”
-Ira Chaleff

When we’re hijacked by our ego, we unconsciously hire people who are like us to please our delicate ego, or people who are agreeable and will let our ego get away with its self-absorbed shenanigans. This leads to a weaker team without the diversity of thought, skills, and experience to make breakthroughs and without the will and wisdom to speak truth to power.

Dr. George Watts and Laurie Blazek also point out that it leads to teams that are immature, hyper-competitive, dishonest, political, and dysfunctional. They note five ego traps of leaders, depending on a person’s foundational personality traits:

  1. The need to be superior, based on a fear of not receiving the status we feel entitled to
  2. The need to be admired, based on a fear of not receiving the recognition we feel we deserve
  3. The need to be liked, based on a fear of not being included as much as we want
  4. The need to be correct, based on a fear of being judged for making a mistake and being viewed as less than perfect
  5. The need to win, based on a fear of not succeeding or coming out ahead
“Unchecked egos are the most destructive force in business.” -Bo Peabody, entrepreneur and venture capitalist

Ego also threatens to ruin or degrade our experience with big challenges and transitions such as a job change, layoff, empty nest, or retirement, when we’re too attached to our role or position. (See my related article, “Is Your Identity Wrapped Up Too Much in Your Work?”)

“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.”
-Colin Powell

Leadership Derailers Assessment

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

Take the Assessment

 

How to Get Beyond Ego

Clearly, there are big downsides to having our thoughts captured by our ego. So how do we escape this trap? It turns out that there are many things we can do to get beyond our ego, from simple practices to mindset changes. We can:

  1. recognize that the ego is a false and misleading identity that causes us suffering because we grow overly attached to it
  2. develop our self-awareness so that we can notice more often when our ego is hijacking our thoughts and see ourselves and our behavior with greater accuracy and clarity
  3. develop the courage to be imperfect and vulnerable, embracing the “audacity of authenticity” and replacing perfectionism with healthy striving, as Brené Brown recommends
  4. stop comparing ourselves to others and focus on contributing to others instead
  5. stop thinking about ourselves so much, since it’s a recipe for unhappiness, and start thinking more about other people, a cause, or God
  6. give credit to others and learn to enjoy recognizing their efforts and contributions
  7. submit to a committed relationship with our spouse, family, community, and/or faith, recognizing the emptiness of focusing on individual material success
  8. recall that success, wealth, and fame are fickle, that they can change in a heartbeat, and they’re not the point of life or the source of our lasting happiness and fulfillment
  9. keep learning new things and exposing ourselves to people and experiences outside our zone of expertise
  10. get deeply immersed in something (e.g., a challenge or sport or performance) and focus on developing mastery to get out of our own head
  11. solicit feedback and get good at receiving it openly, without resistance or rationalizations
  12. develop a keen focus on the work itself and the process of doing it—perhaps even leading to a sense of flow—instead of a focus on the potential results and how we may look or feel if we achieve them
  13. become a servant of a higher purpose that contributes to the lives of others instead of focusing on advancing our own interests or agenda
  14. join a small group and share openly with each other, developing trust and camaraderie so group members can call each other out when egos get inflated
  15. stop complaining, since it only fuels the ego with negativity and pulls us out of the present moment and into resentments about the past*
  16. think about what we’re grateful for
  17. engage in what researchers call “self-distancing,” in which we view ourselves from the perspective of an outsider or imagining that we’re observing ourselves from a distance (researchers have found that people who do this recover more quickly from negative feelings and reduce their anxiety about future concerns)
  18. stop identifying with things and ideas, instead allowing ourselves to remain free and present in the moment
  19. find sanctuary—a place or practice of peace, quiet, and tranquility that restores our heart and soul (e.g., in nature or a house of worship)
  20. contemplate the vastness of the universe, putting our small egos in perspective
  21. realize that our mental suffering will continue as long as we’re captive to our ego

 

Conclusion

Our ego can be a mega-trap in our lives, secretly running a mental script that doesn’t serve us and that takes us away from a life we’d want to live. It causes pain, anxiety, and anguish, over and over again on a nefarious loop.

When we get beyond our ego, it can have profound effects on our experience of life. We can be and feel calm, accepting, forgiving, selfless, peaceful, trusting, serene, still, and complete.

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Is your mental script captured by ego most of the time?
  2. How is it impacting the quality of your life?
  3. What will you do, starting today, to get out of this trap?

 

Related Articles

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Quotations on Ego

  • “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.” -Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
  • “There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people’s lives. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we don’t like, 3) put up with colleagues and bosses we despise, 4) never pursue our dreams, 5) neglect our children, and 6) eventually fill our hearts with regret.” -Sam Dogen, the “Financial Samurai”
  • “You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world…. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like…. Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.” -Paul Graham, “How to Do What You Love”
  • “Self-image is constructed by the ego. It gives you a facade that you can show the world, but it also turns into a shield behind which you hide…. real change requires a relaxed attitude. Sadly, most people extend untold energy in protecting their self-image, defending it from attacks both real and imagined.” -Deepak Chopra, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
  • “The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self.” -Wayne Dyer
  • “The bigger your heart, the more you love, the more you control your life. The bigger your ego, the more you’re scared, the more others control your life.” -Maxime Lagacé
  • “We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” -Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
  • “As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truly be at ease; you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “Don’t confuse confidence with arrogance. Arrogance is being full of yourself, feeling you’re always right, and believing your accomplishments or abilities make you better than other people. People often believe arrogance is excessive confidence, but it’s really a lack of confidence. Arrogant people are insecure, and often repel others. Truly confident people feel good about themselves and attract others to them.” -Christie Hartman
  • “Arrogance is a self-defense tactic to disguise insecurities.” -Caroll Michels
  • “Conceit is God’s gift to little men.” -Bruce Barton
  • “Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.” -John Ruskin
  • “…the ego needs problems, conflict, and ‘enemies’ to strengthen the sense of separateness on which its identity depends.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
  • “…the ego-self is like a small, comfortable hut, while what the soul offers is a vast landscape with an infinite horizon.” -Deepak Chopra, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
  • “The ego doesn’t know your only opportunity for being at peace is now.” -Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher and author
  • “When the ego dies, the soul awakes.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
  • “The ego, for all its claims to running everyday life, has a glaring defect. Its vision of life is unworkable. What it promises as a completely fulfilling life is an illusion…. When you become aware of this defect, the result is fatal for the ego. It can’t compete with the soul’s vision of fulfillment…. The difference between a prisoner captive in his cell and you or me is that we have voluntarily chosen to live inside our boundaries. The part of our selves that made this choice is the ego.” -Deepak Chopra, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul
  • “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” -C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

* Note that refraining from complaining can be very difficult to pull off. Consider starting small, e.g., by trying to not complain for a whole day, and then a week, or start a complaining fund in which you drop a dollar into a jar every time you complain.

** Featured image source: Adobe Stock.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

The Problem with Not Being Clear about Our Values

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The Problem with Not Being Clear about Our Values

Article Summary:

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

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

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

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

 

The Costs of Lacking Clarity on Our Values

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

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

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

Lacking clarity about our values reduces or weakens our:

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

It also makes it easier for:

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

The Benefits of Knowing Our Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

The benefits are truly compelling.

former CEO and chair American Express

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Conclusion

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

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

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

 

Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Values

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

 

Sources

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

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

The Problem with Not Being Clear about Our Purpose

by

Article Summary: 

Not being clear about our purpose harms us in many ways, affecting our quality of life, relationships, work, leadership, and more.

+++

Many of us have a general sense of what we want in life but haven’t taken that further into a clear sense of purpose—of our deeper why.

Of all the personal and leadership development practices, purpose tends to be the most difficult for many, in part because of all the myths and misconceptions about purpose. Some people feel what’s been called “purpose anxiety”: distress from not knowing our purpose in life or from not living it.

Our purpose is why we’re here, our reason for being. It’s related to but not the same as our values, vision, and passions.

Purpose is important because it gives us a sense of meaning and coherence in our lives, as well as a connection to something larger than ourselves. And it’s hard to live our purpose if we don’t know what it is.

 

The Problem with Lacking Clarity about Purpose

What are the impacts of not knowing our purpose—or from lacking clarity about it? There are many, and some are severe.

When we’re not clear about our purpose, we can suffer from:

  • anxiety
  • stress
  • frustration
  • loss of hope
  • lack of a sense of coherence in our lives
  • lack of fulfillment
  • lack of joy
  • less engagement with family, neighbors, friends, colleagues, and community
  • lower resilience
  • burnout
  • depression
“If we lack purpose, we lose connection with our true nature and become externally driven, generating discontent or even angst. Because purpose can be so elusive, we often duck the big question and look for ways to bury that discontent, most often through ‘busyness,’ distraction, or worse.” -Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives

When we lack clarity about purpose:

  • It can negatively impact our physical health. Researchers have linked purpose to better sleep, fewer heart attacks and strokes, longer life span, and a lower risk of dementia. (See the section below on purpose and health.)
  • We feel that our lives lack a sense of meaning and significance.
  • Our goals and actions can be haphazard, lacking focus and direction.
  • We can lose our motivation to work hard or persist through adversity because there’s no animating aim driving our actions.
  • We can lack a sense of progress because we don’t know what our ultimate aims are.
  • It can keep us from growing because we lack the clarity and motivation that comes from a deep and meaningful why.
  • We can feel that success is unachievable because our efforts seem aimless and scattershot, without lasting redeeming value.
  • We start living from the outside in, conforming to the desires or expectations of others instead of living by our own guiding lights.
  • We tend to turn inward and “cocoon” instead of reaching out to others, causing disconnection and loneliness, two of the leading causes of unhappiness.

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Not being clear about our purpose harms us in many ways, affecting our quality of life, relationships, work, leadership, and more.

Of course, the flip side is that knowing our purpose and living it comes with many benefits.

“When we are clear about our purpose, or at least working toward it, our lives come together in powerful ways.” -Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs

For example, McKinsey research during the pandemic found that people who say they’re “living their purpose at work” reported levels of wellbeing five times higher and engagement levels four times higher than people who say they’re not doing so.

According to a recent McKinsey report, purpose can be an important contributor to worker experience, which is linked with employee engagement, organizational commitment, and feelings of wellbeing. Also, those who experience congruence between their purpose and their job are more productive and more likely to outperform their peers.

One CEO cited in that report noted that articulating his purpose helped make him a more observant and empathetic leader:

“I believe I’m more honest with myself and faster to recognize if I might be doing something that’s motivated by my own vanity, fear, or pleasure. I know I’m more open to feedback and criticism. I spend less time talking about weekend or vacation plans and more time exploring what motivates, frustrates, or scares people—the things that really matter. I make faster connections with people now.”

 

Conclusion

When we’re clear about our purpose and building it into our daily lives, we feel authentic, energized, awake, and alive. The key is not just knowing our purpose but living it—intentionally building it into the fabric of our days.

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles

 

Tools for You

 

 Postscript: Inspirations on Purpose

  • “Many of us are starved for coherence in our lives…. The most effective people know how to carry out daily activities while keeping their eye on a longer-range vision and purpose they want to center their lives around. Purpose has a way of ordering time and energies around itself….” -Richard Leider, writer and expert on purpose
  • “Purpose is adaptive, in an evolutionary sense. It helps both individuals and the species to survive.” -Jeremy Adam Smith, Greater Good Science Center
  • “You might do a hundred other things, but if you fail to do the one thing for which you were sent it will be as if you had done nothing.” -Rumi, 13th century poet and Sufi mystic

 

Appendix: Purpose and Health

Research in different domains has found powerful connections between purpose and health. For example:

Longevity: A study of more than 79,000 Japanese people found that those with a strong connection to their sense of purpose tended to live longer. According to researchers in a 2014 study, “having a purpose in life appeared to widely buffer against mortality risk across the adult years.”

Heart disease: A 2008 study of Japanese men found that a lower level of purpose was associated with cardiovascular disease, and another study found that “purpose is a possible protective factor against near-future myocardial infarction among those with coronary heart disease.”

Stroke: Researchers found that people who say they have a sense of purpose are 22 percent less likely to exhibit risk factors for stroke compared to those who say they don’t—and 52 percent less likely to have experienced a stroke.

Alzheimer’s disease: Neuropsychologist Dr. Patricia Boyle found that people with a low sense of life purpose were 2.4 times more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

 

References

  • Boyle, P.A., Buchman, A.S., Wilson, R.S., Yu, L., Schneider, J.A., Bennett, D.A. (2012). Effect of purpose in life on the relation between Alzheimer disease pathologic changes on cognitive function in advanced age. Archives of General Psychiatry; 69(5): 499-505.
  • Boyle, P., Buchman, A., Barnes, L., Bennett, D. (2010). Effect of a purpose in life on risk of incident Alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment in community-dwelling older persons. Archives of General Psychiatry; 67(3): 304–310.
  • Naina Dhingra, Jonathan Emmett, Andrew Samo, and Bill Schaninger. (2020). Igniting individual purpose in times of crisis. McKinsey Quarterly.
  • Hill PL, Turiano NA. (2014). Purpose in life as a predictor of mortality across adulthood. Psychological science. 25(7): 1482-1486.
  • Koizumi, M., Ito, H., Kaneko, Y., Motohashi, Y. (2008). Effect of having a sense of purpose in life on the risk of death from cardiovascular diseases. Journal of Epidemiology; 18(5): 191-6.
  • Rainey, L. (2014). The search for purpose in life: An exploration of purpose, the search process, and purpose anxiety. University of Pennsylvania Master’s Thesis.
  • Schaefer SM, Morozink Boylan J, van Reekum CM, Lapate RC, Norris CJ, et al. (2013) Purpose in Life Predicts Better Emotional Recovery from Negative Stimuli. PLOS ONE 8(11).

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

The Problem with Lacking Clarity in Your Life

by

Article Summary: 

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

+++

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

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

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

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

 

What We Should Get Clear About

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

 

Signs We’re Lacking Clarity

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

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

 

Benefits of Clarity

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Take the Assessment

 

How to Get More Clarity

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

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

 

Related Traps

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

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

 

Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Clarity

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

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

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

How to Discover Your Purpose

by

Article Summary: 

Many people struggle with finding their purpose. It can be intimidating and confusing. Where to begin? This article clarifies what purpose is and how to discover it.

+++

Why are you here? (On the planet, that is.) What’s your purpose?

Do you know? Have you thought much about it? Are you living your purpose?

Note that we’re asking here about your purpose in life, not the purpose or meaning of life generally. Asking about your purpose is a practical matter, not a philosophical one.

Many people struggle with purpose. According to a New York Times article, only about a quarter of Americans have a clear sense of purpose. In a Harvard Business Review article, Nick Craig and Scott Snook noted, “we’ve found that fewer than 20 percent of leaders have a strong sense of their own individual purpose. Even fewer can distill their purpose into a concrete statement.” According to an Edward Jones report, 31 percent of new retirees say they’ve struggled to find a sense of purpose in retirement.

A lack of purpose is behind much of the pain and suffering in the world today, including many of our mental health challenges. We can have many good things in our life, including a nice family, a good career, and friends and experiences to enjoy, but we can still feel like something is missing. Often, it’s purpose that’s missing. Lack of purpose is also one of the drivers of the “Great Resignation” and a big driver of disengagement at work.

“The drive to be more purposeful explains much of the momentum
behind the massive exodus from mainstream corporate life.”
-Aaron Hurst, writer

 

What Is Purpose?

Part of the problem is confusion about what purpose is (and isn’t). Purpose often gets conflated with things like passion, meaning, and calling. (See my article, “The Most Common Myths about Purpose.”)

Our purpose is why we’re here, our reason for being. William Damon, a Stanford University professor and author of The Path to Purpose, defines purpose as “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond self.” Note that purpose takes us beyond ourselves, to something greater.

Author Richard Leider distinguishes between two kinds of purpose:

  1. “BIG P” Purpose (a noble cause or something we can dedicate our life to).
  2. “little p” purpose (the day-to-day choices of how we can contribute to others). Note that “little p” actions are just as worthy, and they can compound over time into something powerful.

 

Purpose vs. Passion

Purpose and passion are connected but not equivalent. While purpose is why we’re here, a passion is a compelling or powerful feeling. Our passions are those things that consume us with palpable emotions, the things we love so much that we’re willing to suffer for them. Those are important, but they don’t usually take us all the way to knowing our reason for being.

 

Purpose vs. Meaning

While purpose and meaning are related, they’re not the same. Meaning is a broader concept. According to Dr. Michael Steger of Colorado State University, “Meaning in life refers to the feeling that people have that their lives and experience make sense and matter.” He notes that “Purpose is one facet of a meaningful life.” According to Steger and his fellow researcher, Frank Martela from Aalto University, there are three general facets associated with meaning in life: purpose, coherence, and significance. See the image below.

Image source: Derek Hagen, Money Health Solutions, LLC, “Money and Meaning,” https://www.moneyhealthsolutions.com/post/money-and-meaning Used with permission.
“…when people say that their lives have meaning, it’s because three conditions have been satisfied: they evaluate their lives as significant and worthwhile—as part of something bigger; they believe their lives make sense;
and they feel their lives are driven by a sense of purpose.”
-Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning

 

Purpose vs. Calling

There’s also confusion about the difference between purpose and calling. While purpose is why we’re here, a calling has been defined as “a strong urge toward a particular way of life or career” (Oxford Dictionary), and also as “a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action, especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence” (Merriam-Webster). So, if we have a clear purpose, it can flow naturally into a calling as a way to express it in the world.

“Everyone has a calling, which is the small, unsettling voice from deep within our souls, an inner urge, which hounds us to live out our purpose in a certain way. A calling is a concern of the spirit.
Since a calling implies that someone calls, my belief is that the caller is God.”
-Dave Wondra

 

The Benefits of Purpose

There are many benefits to knowing and living our purpose. It can be incredible powerful, flowing through everything we do and how we show up in the world. When we know and live our purpose, it gives us the following:

When we have a clear sense of purpose, we can reduce our anxiety and stress (which are fueled by uncertainty and aimlessness) and also focus our efforts in the right areas, boosting our performance, earnings, and impact. Our purpose can also help us clarify which goals to pursue and make us more likely to accomplish those goals.

“When we are clear about our purpose, or at least working toward it, our lives come together in powerful ways.”
-Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives

We can also feel a strong relational and spiritual connection, a sense that we’re linked with others, part of the larger scheme of things, and in tune with nature, life, and God.

Finally, those who have lived purposefully tend to experience fewer regrets in life, helping them face and accept death with equanimity.

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

How to Discover Our Purpose

So how to discover our purpose? Here are things we can do to help us discover our purpose:

  1. reflect on what kinds of people or groups we feel called to serve and what kinds of issues we feel called to address
  2. notice what energizes us (and what drains us) and what brings us joy
  3. observe what we’re doing when we’re making a difference in someone’s life and loving the process of doing it
  4. reflect on when we’ve felt the most fulfilled, noting what we were doing (and with whom and where and how), then finding patterns across those experiences
  5. ask what we have a fierce commitment to and what we’re willing to sacrifice for because it’s so viscerally important to us (e.g., family, friends, work, colleagues, community, cause), then reflect on how it might inform our reason for being
  6. notice what kinds of pain and suffering (yours or others’) affects us most (what Umair Haque calls our “zone of heartbreak”) and consider ways to turn that hurt into healing or growth
  7. develop our self-awareness, our ability to see ourselves clearly and understand our feelings, motives, desires, and character
  8. mine our story (our personal history), write it down, tell it to others, and find the themes that animate our lives, including what we loved doing when we were young and the meaning we’ve derived from the pivotal moments and adversity we’ve faced
“Purpose often arises from curiosity about your own life. What obstacles have you encountered? What strengths helped you to overcome them? How did other people help you? How did your strengths help make life better for others?”
-Jeremy Adam Smith, Greater Good Science Center
  1. read books and articles that feel meaningful to you (researchers have found links between reading things like fiction, poetry, and the Bible and having a stronger sense of purpose)
  2. take a holistic view of our life—thinking about our family, relationships, work, learning, community, beliefs, impact, and more—and noting what’s most important
  3. discover our strengths—the things we’re good at
  4. get clarity on our passions—what we love to do and what consumes us with palpable emotion
  5. pay attention to what we’re doing when we love our work
  6. clarify our personal values and consider instances in which we’ve honored or upheld them and what that suggests about our purpose
  7. try different things (experiences, projects, jobs, careers) and gauge whether they feel meaningful or not
  8. engage more often in “discover mode” (learning about who we are and what we can do in the world) and less in “climbing mode” (focusing so much on advancing up the ladder of success)
  9. take time each evening to reflect on the day that just passed and note the activities or situations that felt most purposeful
  10. think about our “ideal self” (the person we want to be, versus the person we are now) and what that person would be doing—and with and for whom
  11. connect the dots between the needs we see in the world and our strengths, passions, and values
  12. ask those who know us best to share the themes that make us who we are
  13. work with a mentor, coach, or small group to help us uncover our purpose
  14. ask ourselves what our older self or a wise mentor would advise us to focus more on
  15. preserve enough white space and margin in our lives so that clarity can emerge
  16. sit and get quiet with solitude and sanctuary so we’re better able to hear our inner voice
  17. engage in an iterative process of action and reflection, of trying things and then reflecting on their meaning and significance
  18. ask ourselves repeatedly what our purpose is (why we get up in the morning) and listen to what comes up
  19. engage in spiritual seeking, such as prayer, worship, contemplation, yoga, or pilgrimage, in the process seeking clarity about why we’re here
  20. project forward to the end of our lives and consider what we want our legacy to be, what we’d want said about us in a eulogy, or what we’d want to do differently if we had another chance at life (the deathbed test)
  21. consider what life is asking of us now and see if meaningful ideas emerge
  22. connect with experiences of awe, since they can help us feel connected to things larger than ourselves
  23. maintain a sense of gratitude (researchers have found connections between gratitude and our propensity to contribute to others, a key aspect of purpose)
  24. keep serving others (researchers have found connections between things like volunteering or donating to charities and having a greater sense of purpose)

In the process of uncovering our purpose, it’s important to slough off the layers of expectations put upon us by others, including parents, peers, teachers, coaches, colleagues, or society. We need to stop caring so much about what other people think and lean into being ourselves more openly and fully.

“Purpose reveals itself when we stop being afraid and start being ourselves.”
-Richard Leider, “An Incomplete Manifesto for Purpose”

 

The Universal Purpose

It’s worth noting that discovering purpose is one of the most challenging personal development practices for many people. It can take time to unfold, like a fine wine.

So, what to do in the meantime? Should we sit on the sidelines and await clarity via revelation? Or “monk out” in a remote mountain cave?

Absolutely not. We must stay engaged with the world. Purpose isn’t about navel-gazing. It’s about knowing our reason for being and bringing it to the world via helping others.

Richard Leider suggests that, beyond our individual purpose, there’s also a universal purpose that animates us all:

“The universal purpose is to grow and give.”
-Richard Leider

So, if we’re not yet clear on our personal purpose, we can keep growing and giving. When we do that, good things are bound to happen.

“If there’s just one habit you can create to help you find your purpose, it would be helping others.”
-Amy Morin

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Examples of Personal Purpose Statements

Sometimes it’s helpful to see examples of purpose statements for inspiration and context. My own purpose is “to help people lead good lives.” For me, that means helping people lead lives of integrity, service, and purpose—and re-connecting them with what truly matters. I’m most keen on helping people develop their own conception of the good life and then bring it to life.

Here are some other purpose statements:

  • “To love God and serve others.” –Bob Vanourek (my father and co-author)
  • “To inspire and empower people to live their highest vision in the context of love and joy.” -Jack Canfield
  • “To wake you up and have you find that you are home.” -Nick Craig
  • “To help others unlock the power of purpose.” -Richard Leider “Big P” purpose
  • “To make a difference in one person’s life every single day.” -Richard Leider “little p” purpose
  • “To be a teacher. And to be known for inspiring my students to be more than they thought they could be.” -Oprah Winfrey

 

Conclusion

In the end, purpose is something we should be doing and not just thinking about. We should be infusing more and more of our home and work life with purpose.

The key is not knowing our purpose but living it. That also means focusing on things that are purposeful and avoiding things that aren’t as purposeful. It takes insight, persistence, and flexibility to figure out how to translate our purpose into effective action in the world.

Discovering our purpose doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to quit our job, change our career, or otherwise alter our lives dramatically. Often, we can creatively find ways to infuse our life and work with more purpose right where we are. (See, for example, Professor Amy Wrzesniewski’s work on “job crafting.”) Other times, big changes may be warranted.

Discovering our purpose and living it is the work of a lifetime, and it’s incredibly rich and rewarding—especially when we connect it with our core values, vision of the good life, strengths, and passions. Wishing you well with it, and please let me know if I can help.

Gregg Vanourek and his dog

 

 

 

 

–Gregg

“You may be moved in a direction
You do not understand,
Away from the safe, the familiar,
Towards a vision that is blurry,
Yet still pounds against
The doors of your dreams,
Screams for recognition,
Petitions for understanding,
Whispers for acceptance.
Out towards distant possibilities,
You are propelled by a fire,
You will never fully comprehend,
But cannot extinguish.”
-Susan Rogers Norton, “Destiny”

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Do you know your purpose?
  2. Are you living it?
  3. What more will you do to clarify your purpose and build your life around it?

 

Tools for You

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Related Articles

 

More Sources on Purpose

  • Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
  • Richard Leider, The Power of Purpose
  • Emily Esfahani Smith, The Power of Meaning
  • Hill PL, Turiano NA, Mroczek DK, Burrow AL. The value of a purposeful life: Sense of purpose predicts greater income and net worth. Journal of Research in Personality.
  • Khullar D. Finding Purpose for a Good Life. But Also a Healthy One. New York Times. The Upshot. Jan. 1, 2018.
  • Morin, A, 7 Tips for Finding Your Purpose in Life. VeryWell Mind. July 12, 2020.
  • Musich S, Wang SS, Kraemer S, Hawkins K, Wicker E. Purpose in Life and Positive Health Outcomes Among Older Adults. Popul Health Manag.
  • Schippers MC, Ziegler N. Life Crafting as a Way to Find Purpose and Meaning in Life. Front Psychol.,
  • Smith, Jeremy Adam. “How to Find Your Purpose in Life,” Greater Good Science Center, January 10, 2018.

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Purpose

  • “If we lack purpose, we lose connection with our true nature and become externally driven, generating discontent or even angst. Because purpose can be so elusive, we often duck the big question and look for ways to bury that discontent, most often through ‘busyness,’ distraction, or worse…. What does life want from us? In the end, the task is not finding our purpose but uncovering it—not propelling ourselves toward a more successful life, but rather getting out of the way of the good life that wants to live through us.” -Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives
  • “Purpose is that deepest dimension within us—our central core. It is the quality we choose to shape our lives around. Purpose is already within us waiting to be discovered.” -Richard Leider
  • “I believe that we are put on this earth to live our soul’s purpose. To me, that means using our unique gifts and talents to make a positive impact in the world and help create the world we want to see…. We are all born with an inner compass that tells us whether or not we’re on the right path to finding our true purpose. That compass is our JOY.” -Jack Canfield
  • “Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life…. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.” -Victor Frankl
  • “Purpose is adaptive, in an evolutionary sense. It helps both individuals and the species to survive.” -Jeremy Adam Smith, Greater Good Science Center
  • “Purpose is the recognition of the presence of the sacred within us and the choice of work that is consistent with that presence. Purpose defines our contribution to life. It may find expression through family, community, relationship, work, and spiritual activities.” -Richard Leider, The Power of Purpose
  • “You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments—whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life’s work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans.” -John W. Gardner
  • “Purpose is a universal need, not a luxury for those with financial wealth…. Money often conflicts with finding purpose, as it creates a false substitute for defining success…. You can find purpose in any job. It is all in how you approach it.” -Aaron Hurst
  • “The most fortunate people on earth are those who have found a calling that’s bigger than they are—that moves them and fills their lives with constant passion, aliveness, and growth.” -Richard Leider
  • “The difference between success and failure—between a life of fulfillment and a life of frustration—is how well you manage the challenge of making meaning in your life…. Learning to make meaning from our life stories may be the most indispensable but least understood skill of our time.” -Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions
  • “If you can find a way to use your signature strengths at work often, and you also see your work as contributing to the greater good, you have a calling.” -Martin Seligman
  • “People don’t choose their calling, it chooses them.” -Richard Leider
  • “You might do a hundred other things, but if you fail to do the one thing for which you were sent it will be as if you had done nothing.” -Rumi

* Researchers have linked purpose to better sleep, fewer heart attacks and strokes, longer life span, and a lower risk of dementia and premature death.

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

The Most Common Myths about Purpose

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Article Summary: 

Many people struggle with knowing their purpose. It can be confusing, unclear, and intimidating. Here we bust the most common myths about purpose.

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Of all the top personal development practices, discovering our personal purpose can be among the most challenging for many of us.

It begins with confusion about what purpose is. Our purpose is why we’re here, our reason for being. William Damon, a Stanford University professor and author of The Path to Purpose, defines purpose as “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond self.”

Discovering purpose is also hard because there are many myths and misconceptions about what purpose is.

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Myths about Purpose

Here are the most common and damaging myths about purpose:

 

Purpose is the same as passion.

People often use the words “purpose” and “passion” interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing. They’re connected but not equivalent. While purpose is why we’re here, a passion is a compelling or powerful feeling or emotion. (This gets tricky because we obviously feel passionate about our purpose.) In our book, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and I noted that passions are those things that consume us with palpable emotions. What are the things we love so much that we’re willing to suffer for them? Those are great, but they don’t get us all the way down to our reason for being.

My purpose must be completely original.

We need to stop putting so much pressure on ourselves when it comes to our purpose. There’s no competition for originality. The key is authenticity: have we landed on a sense of purpose that is real and true to us, that speaks to our essence?

 

Purpose is a luxury reserved for the select few, for the affluent and privileged.

Because it can be so hard and take so long, it’s tempting to conclude that purpose must not be for us. We can dismiss it as something reserved for the elite, or the fortunate, and not for us. But purpose is universally available. A hunger for purpose and meaning is built into human nature, and it’s accessible to us all, especially via connection with and service to others.

“Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.”
-Viktor Frankl

 

Purpose is abstract, theoretical, and impractical.

It can be easy to dismiss purpose as something that’s impractical. The notion of knowing our purpose can feel quite distant and philosophical. But in truth, purpose is utterly practical. It means infusing our actions with a deeper meaning informed by a highly motivating gift of clarity about fundamental aims. W. Clement Stone observed that “Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.” In other words, the path to achievement and success starts with purpose.

“The difference between success and failure—between a life of fulfillment and a life of frustration—is how well you manage the challenge of making meaning in your life.”
-Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions

 

My purpose should come to me in a revelation.

The notion that our purpose will come to us fully formed and crystal clear is unrealistic. Our sense of purpose can be messy and take time to unfold. We get a sense of purpose as we live our lives and make mistakes, observing over time periods when we feel “on-purpose” or “off-purpose.”

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
-Marcel Proust

 

Purpose is all about me and what I need and want for my life.

To some, the notion of discovering our purpose sounds like navel-gazing. To know our purpose, we must “monk out” and become a hermit in a cave thinking deep thoughts. And then when we figure it out, we’ll be happy and successful. But all this is backwards. We look inside to uncover our purpose so that we can look outside and actualize it in the world, with contributions to others based on real connections and a heart to serve. Purpose always comes back to others and to something larger than ourselves.

“You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments—whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life’s work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans.”
-John W. Gardner, public official and political reformer

 

Purpose is “out there” for us to go find.

Yes and no. We discover a sense of purpose within by bumping up against the world and getting a sense of what feels empty to us versus what fills us up with energy and meaning. And as we begin to discover it, and to feel it deep in our bones, the whole point is to take it out into the world, to actualize it. In truth, purpose is discovered with and realized through both reflection and action in the world.

When we go looking to find our purpose, it can elude us. Purpose is less something that we find and more something that we uncover by peeling off layers of expectation and obligation until we get to the root of who we are and what (or who) calls to us. Also, the point isn’t finding our purpose. It’s living it. The point is living a life that lights us up and beings good things to those around us.

“Purpose is that deepest dimension within us—our central core. It is the quality we choose to shape our lives around. Purpose is already within us waiting to be discovered.”
–Richard Leider, author and expert on purpose

 

I have just one purpose—or a purpose can only be manifested in one way.

Oh, the pressure. What’s my one purpose that will answer everything? The poet Walt Whitman once wrote, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” And so it can be with purpose. While some may find purpose in ONE THING, others may find it in many different things, from family and relationships to work and hobbies. There are likely to be patterns and themes connecting them, but purpose doesn’t have to be one dimensional.

 

Purpose has to be big and bold (e.g., saving the world).

This isn’t a competition. Purpose is measured less in size and boldness and more in depth, truth, and commitment. Author Richard Leider distinguishes between a “BIG P” Purpose (a noble cause or something you can dedicate your life to) and a “little p” purpose (the day-to-day choices of how you can contribute to others). For example, his own BIG P purpose is to help others unlock the power of purpose, and his little p purpose is to make a difference in one person’s life every single day. Note that little p purposeful actions are just as worthy and valuable, but on a smaller scale, and they can compound over time into something remarkable.

 

My purpose will never change.

Some people may have the experience of an unchanging purpose that remains consistent over time. But many of us go through chapters and seasons in life, and new layers of purpose get revealed in that flow of time. We change in our circumstances and outlook, so our experience with purpose can evolve, for example, becoming clearer, deeper, and richer. It may be there was a deeper underlying purpose there all along, but we change in our ability to see and experience it.

 

My purpose will manifest in the one “perfect job” that I must find.

For most of us mere mortals, there is no one perfect job. We can have a great job, but change is inevitable. The key is continually infusing our work with meaning and contribution and making adjustments along the way. We can infuse any job with purpose, excellence, and contribution.

 

Once I find my purpose, I’ll be done and can move on.

Even if we’ve done the hard work of discovering our purpose (which few people take the time to do), there’s still further richness ahead of us. Most importantly, we must diligently infuse our life and work with that purpose. And we’re wise to continue revisiting that purpose through different chapters and seasons of life, such as school, early career, marriage, children, midlife, etc.

 

My purpose can be revealed to me by a wise elder, mentor, or friend.

There’s no doubt that a wise elder, mentor, or friend can help us discover our purpose. For example, they can ask probing questions that help us shatter our illusions. Or they can help us acknowledge when we’ve lost our way or are in a trap. They can help us see things about ourselves that we’re missing. But in the end, our purpose is our own, and it’s up to us to realize and experience it in its authentic depth as only we can.

Take the Traps Test

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Only some types of work are capable of being purposeful.

Some people self-select out of purpose on the assumption that only some types of work are purposeful. Purpose, they reason, is only the domain of activists, changemakers, and healers and not the domain, for example, of bankers, plumbers, and technicians. Extensive research from Yale School of Management Professor Amy Wrzesniewski and her colleagues has demonstrated otherwise. They’ve found three main ways people relate to their work:

  1. Job orientation, with work as a means to an end
  2. Career orientation, with a focus on advancement, success, and prestige
  3. Calling orientation, with work as integral to our life and identity

According to their research, any job can become a career or calling, any calling can become a job or career, and any career can become a job or calling. Much depends on how we craft our tasks, relationships, and thinking about our work—what Professor Wrzesniewski calls “job crafting.”

“You can find purpose in any job. It is all in how you approach it.”
-Aaron Hurst, The Purpose Economy

 

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, there are many myths about purpose. Discovering purpose is hard enough on its own without having to break through these myths and misconceptions.

While purpose is powerful, of course it’s not enough in and of itself to bring us a happy, successful, and fulfilling life. We also need other critical foundational elements, such as values, vision, strengths, passions, relationships, and more.

But purpose is one of the essential elements of crafting a good life with good work. We’re wise to uncover our purpose and build our lives around it.

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”
-John W. Gardner, public official and political reformer

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Have any of these myths inhibited you from exploring or committing to your purpose?
  2. Which myths are the most common obstacles to purpose?
  3. What will you do to further explore or actualize your purpose?

 

Tools for You

 

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

Are You Taking Shortcuts?

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Article Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Types of Shortcuts

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

Health Shortcuts

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

Ethical Shortcuts

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

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

Financial Shortcuts

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

Quality Shortcuts

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

Educational Shortcuts

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

Relationship Shortcuts

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Spiritual Shortcuts

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship Shortcuts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

The Consequences of Shortcuts

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding Shortcuts

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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

Do You Have Limiting Beliefs About Yourself?

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Article Summary: 

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

+++

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

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

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

 

Examples of Limiting Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

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Where Limiting Beliefs Come From

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

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

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

 

The Effects of Limiting Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Why Limiting Beliefs Are So Hard to Overcome

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

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

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

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

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

 

How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose one limiting belief to begin working on.

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

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

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

Challenge our limiting beliefs constantly.

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Summary

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

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

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

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

 

Questions for Reflection

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

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

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

 

Additional Resources

Apollos Hester talking about motivation

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Beliefs

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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

Are You Pretending to Be Something You’re Not?

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Article Summary: 

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

 +++ 

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

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

But it can lead to big problems down the road.

 

Examples of Pretending in Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Take the Assessment

 

The Consequences of Pretending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How to Stop Pretending So Much

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Benefits of Being Ourselves

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

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

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

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

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

 

Related Traps

Of course, the trap of pretending to be someone or something we’re not doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s related to several of the other common traps of living, including:

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

Personal Values Exercise

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

Take the Exercise

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Authenticity

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

 

Final Note: The Good Forms of Pretending

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

1. Self-Distancing

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

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

2. Alter Ego

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

3. Visualization

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

4. Maskenfreihet

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

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