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Why You Should Do an Annual Life Review–And How

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You’re probably familiar with an annual performance review. According to SHRM, about 71% of organizations conduct them.

But not many people have done an annual life review.

In a way, that’s odd because of the importance of our quality of life.

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

Those who do such reviews they tend to call them different things. Some call it an “annual life review.” Others call it a “personal annual review.” A friend and colleague of mine calls it his “annual look.” He’s been doing it regularly since 1977, and he swears by it.

The idea is to look back on the year and evaluate what’s gone well and what hasn’t—and to look ahead and plan for the year to come.

 

14 Benefits of Doing an Annual Life Review

Why do this? An annual life review can help you:

  1. gain clarity about how things are going in your life
  2. spot patterns (even otherwise hidden ones) in your life
  3. break out of “drifting mode” and live more intentionally
  4. get unstuck (and avoid feeling like you’re helpless or trapped)
  5. feel motivated to go after important priorities (e.g., better work and relationships)
  6. set better goals—or recalibrate them when needed
  7. celebrate your progress and accomplishments
  8. be mindful of what you’re grateful for
  9. identify areas where you want or need to improve
  10. examine key drivers of your life like your habits and systems
  11. boost your confidence and sense of agency over your life
  12. spot and track changes and progress from year to year
  13. set you up for action and momentum in the year to come
  14. create opportunities for breakthroughs in your life (e.g., when you disrupt a negative pattern and step into a bigger life with more success, joy, and fulfillment)

Writer Matthias Frank suggests that doing such an annual review will be “your highest leverage activity all year long.”

“When you review your year as a whole, seemingly unrelated parts of your life come into focus at once,
enabling you to connect the dots.”
–Fadeka Adegbuyi, writer and content strategist

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 Conduct an Annual Life Review: Time & Place

So how does this work? It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Before diving in, you’re wise to choose an appropriate setting for this reflective work. Find a place where you can focus and engage in undisturbed deep work.

“Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours.”
-Jane Austen, English novelist

Why not choose an inspiring setting, one that uplifts you? (Sometimes, it’s helpful to get away from your usual places.)

It’s important to set aside an ample amount of time. For me, it usually takes 2-3 hours, or half a day at most. You can do it all at once or break it into chunks (e.g., an hour at a time), as you wish. Don’t rush it.

Key point: be totally honest. There’s no sense in holding back or exaggerating things in your annual life review. This is for you and you alone.

 

Annual Life Review Template: Topics to Address

Once you’ve determined the time and place, you’ll want to turn to the questions and topics you’ll want to address. Though some may want to improvise and do a stream-of-consciousness review, for many people it helps to have some structure—or at least some starter questions to kick things off.

Here’s a template of sorts, with five sections:

 

1. Highlights from This Past Year

Take a look back and capture the bright spots of your year. Look across a wide range of things here, from relationships, experiences, accomplishments, and awards to hobbies, passion projects, courses, and fun surprises. Any new skills developed or people served? Perhaps a reflection on how you enjoyed seeing loved ones or colleagues thrive? Even your favorite books or movies from the year, if you like. You may want to identify your top highlights or accomplishments so they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

When I do my annual life review, I start by listing things in chronological order as they occurred throughout the year. I go through my calendar from the start of the year to the finish and note the relevant things. (You can also go through your photos for the year and relive those memories.) I’m always amazed at how quickly I forget or discount good things, how fun it is to bring them back to my attention, and how powerful it is to see them together. The collection tells a story.

You can also break it up by month to make it more digestible, as shown below.

January
  •   
February
  •   
March
  •   
April
  •   
(Etc.)
  •   

 

2. Challenges from This Past Year

Next, look at the difficulties. What did you struggle with? Where did you fall down?

Sometimes it’s cathartic to list them out. Also, it can be empowering to see all the things you’ve overcome. Or just appreciate the fact that you’re still standing despite the challenges.

Be sure to give yourself grace. The point is not to expect a perfect year. After all, this is life, with all its alluring and aggravating ups and downs. Best to approach this process with curiosity, openness, and self-compassion—and to avoid judgment and negative self-talk.

 

3. Aspirations for Next Year

Next, write down your hopes and dreams for the year to come. Think broadly here. For example, consider addressing the following areas:

  • health
  • relationships
  • work
  • education
  • service
  • fun
  • financial
  • personal development

Consider not only new things you want to bring into your life but also existing things you want to improve. Identify the ones that matter most to you—the areas in which change would most improve your happiness, fulfillment, and well-being. Ask yourself this:

How can you make the next year a great one?

 

4. Gratitude and Joys

Now, turn your attention to the top things you’re grateful for from the year (or even in your whole life, if you wish) and what (or who) has brought you the most joy. This will be a fun one.

 

5. Themes and Lessons Learned

Finally, look for themes or patterns. For example, were relationships the drivers of the highs and lows? Have you struggled to set boundaries with people in a way that’s dragging you down in multiple areas? Are you avoiding dealing with important matters?

What lessons have you learned this year? Are there take-aways that you can carry forward?

“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences,
and failing to achieve anything useful.”
–Margaret J. Wheatley, writer and teacher

(Note: In the five sections above, you can address both personal and professional matters together, if applicable, or you can separate them out. The key is to find what works best for you.)

 

Going Deeper on Your Annual Life Review: Extra Credit

If you want to go deeper with your annual life review, here are more things you can do that can be extremely valuable for the insights they provide:

 

Quality of Life Assessment

Evaluate your quality of life in key areas. This will help you identify your strongest areas and the areas that need work so you can act accordingly. For example, maybe you’re pleased with how things are going with your relationships and education but want to work on your health and finances? (Or vice versa.) (See my Quality of Life Assessment.)

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

 

Traps Test: Common Traps of Living

What are the things that are inhibiting your happiness and quality of life? Are you struggling with negative self-talk? Self-doubt? Overthinking? Comparing yourself to others? Settling for an okay experience of life instead of fighting for a great one? (See my Traps Test.)

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

 

Purpose Alignment Review

Is there a disconnect between the way you’re living and your purpose—your true reason for being? Or are they aligned? (See my article, “How to Discover Your Purpose.”)

“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

 

Values Alignment Review

Are you building your life and time around what’s most important to you and upholding your deeply held beliefs? Or are you being pulled off course on these fronts? Are you honoring your core values? (See my Personal Values Exercise.)

“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

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

 

Vision Alignment Review

Are you living in accordance with or working toward a bold and vivid picture of a better future? In pursuit of your dream of a good life? (See my article, “How to Craft a Vision of the Good Life.”)

(The good life is) “living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work—on purpose.”
–Richard Leider and David Shapiro

 

Strengths Alignment Review

To what extent are you using your core strengths—the things you’re really good at—in your life and work? (See my Strengths Search.)

“Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction.”
–Gay Hendricks, psychologist and author

Strengths Search

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

Find Your Strengths

 

Passions Alignment Review

How prominent are the things that consume you with palpable emotion in your life—the things you love doing and that you find yourself circling back to? (See my Passion Probe.)

“Allow yourself to be silently guided by that which you love the most.”
-Rumi, 13th century poet and Sufi mystic

Passion Probe

Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.

Find Your Passion

 

Goals Alignment Review

Are you not only clear about the desired results you’d like to achieve but also organizing your life and time accordingly? (See my Goals Guide: Best Practices in Setting and Pursuing Goals, and my Goal-Setting Template.)

“Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.”
–Brian Tracy, author and speaker

Power Tip: Share your annual life review with someone you trust. Better yet, exchange reviews with that person and talk them through together. It’s a great way to get to know someone on a deeper level. And it can also help you take action on things going forward—an accountability partnership of sorts.

 

Call to Action

Doing an annual life review can bring more clarity and energy into your life. It can set you up for more action and momentum as you look to thrive in the new year.

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

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Reflection and Annual Life Reviews

  • “There is one art of which people should be masters—the art of reflection.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, philosopher, and theologian
  • “Before forging head-first into the future, take time to reflect on the past.” -Fadeka Adegbuyi, writer and content strategist
  • “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” -Peter Drucker, consultant, author, and expert on management and innovation
  • “I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully … What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.” –Alan Lightman, physicist, educator, and writer
  • “In reflecting upon the year, do your best to examine and question, not dwell. You may have fallen short of your goals or experienced challenges that made for a hard year, but chances are you accomplished more than you think you did. No matter what you unearth in your annual review, you will have learned more about yourself and what you want in life and that counts for a lot. Reflect on the year gone by so you can move forward with renewed energy and optimism for all that’s to come.” -Fadeka Adegbuyi

 

Appendix: Other Approaches to an Annual Life Review

Of course, there are many different ways to do a life review, ranging from quite simple and straightforward to more detailed and complex. Below are two more examples.

Author James Clear keeps it simple. He calls it his “Annual Review,” and each year he addresses three simple but powerful questions:

What went well this year?
What didn’t go so well this year?
What did I learn this year?

(In 2017, he changed the third question from “What am I working toward?” to “What did I learn this year?”)

(My Annual Review) “will give me a chance to take stock of what went well and what could have gone better, while also giving me a moment to enjoy the progress I’ve made over the past 12 months.
But it’s not just about looking back. A good Annual Review is also about looking toward the future and thinking about how the life I’m living now is building toward a bigger mission. Basically, my Annual Review forces me to look at my actions over the past 12 months and ask, ‘Are my choices helping me live the life I want to live?’”
-James Clear, “My 2013 Annual Review”

By contrast, executive coach Steve Schlafman uses a more comprehensive approach with the following topics:

  • Noting Your Key Moments & Milestones
  • Reflecting on & Examining Key Topics:
    • Success & Growth (e.g., biggest successes, how you grew, good habits, new skills, biggest obstacles you overcame, best decisions, risks and rewards)
    • Failure & Falling Short (e.g., biggest failures, goals you didn’t reach, bad habits, worst decisions)
    • People & Relationships (e.g., healthy new relationships, most impactful relationship, ones you value most)
    • Lessons & Themes (e.g., top lessons learned, peak moments, worst moments, short summary of the year, what you’re most thankful for)
  • Assessing Your Life in Key Areas (i.e., health, family/friends, love, money, career, spirituality, personal growth, fun, technology, environment)
  • Planning for the New Year in Key Areas:
    • Goals & Growth (e.g., three big goals for the year, new skills to develop, a superpower you plan to use to achieve your goals, how you want to be different by the end of the year, who you want to become)
    • Moving On (e.g., what you want or need to stop doing)
    • Habits & Behaviors (e.g., habits you’ll start, stop, and continue)
    • Fears & Obstacles (e.g., how you’ll face your fears, obstacles you’ll address)
    • Relationships (e.g., who warrants more attention, who you want a new relationship with, who you’ll help)
    • Next Steps & Planning (e.g., next steps you’ll take toward your goals, resources needed, who you’ll ask for help, how to create early wins, how to evaluate progress)

Think about which format works best for you. And feel free to design your own, either from scratch or by building on, combining, or tweaking the approaches above. The key thing is to do something that will help you reflect, plan, and take action.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

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

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

Are You Getting Complacent? 17 Signs

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Is complacency creeping up on you, like it does to so many of us? Are you getting overly comfortable with things? Sliding into a state of easy contentment? Blissfully unaware of your life traps or leadership derailers? Showing the signs of complacency?

Complacency can prevent you from doing the things you really want to do in life.

There are many areas in which you can become complacent. For example:

  • Health and vitality (both physical and mental)
  • Relationships with your spouse or partner (if applicable), family, and/or friends
  • Work (potentially including not just paid work but also family caregiving, household management, and volunteering)
  • Education and learning
  • Service (contributions to family, friends, classmates, colleagues, community, and/or causes or places)
  • Activities (e.g., play, fun, hobbies, travel, free time, vacations)
  • Financial (e.g., income, assets, security, savings, investments, wealth-building, etc.)
  • Personal core (including things like happiness, fulfillment, gratitude, authentic alignment, and religion or spirituality)

(Consider using my Quality of Life Assessment to evaluate where you stand in these areas.)

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 know if you’ve fallen into the complacency trap? Here are 17 indicators.

 

17 Signs of Complacency

When you’re complacent, you tend to:

  1. Take things for granted
  2. Have so much routine that things feel boring or monotonous
  3. Start losing your ambition and initiative
  4. Stick to what you know instead of pushing yourself sometimes
  5. Stay in your comfort zone
  6. Start to “phone it in” at work or in relationships (e.g., poor communication or minimal effort)
  7. See a decline in your work output and/or quality
  8. Stop learning and growing
  9. Resist change or trying new things
  10. Avoid risk
  11. Resist input or feedback
  12. Miss opportunities
  13. Take the path of least resistance
  14. Put off more difficult tasks
  15. Stay in a job that isn’t challenging
  16. Give up on your aspirations and dreams
  17. Start to feel apathetic

 

The Downsides of Complacency

Comfort and satisfaction aren’t inherently bad. They’re good, up to a point.

The issue arises when you become too comfortable and complacent, losing the motivation and passion to embrace challenges and chase your dreams.

Complacency drains your drive and leads to inaction when you should be taking steps forward. It prevents necessary improvements, reduces initiative, and diminishes your sense of hope. Over time, it fosters mediocrity, closes windows of opportunity, and stalls personal growth and career progress.

You’re wise to address complacency when it arises and bring back a sense of urgency to your life and work.

“Never be passive about your life…  ever, ever.”
-Robert Egger, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Related Articles

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you seeing signs of complacency in your life, work, or relationships?
  2. What steps will you take to regain the drive and urgency to escape this trap?

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Signs of Complacency and Urgency

  • “Complacency keeps you living a comfortable life… not the life you desire. Challenge yourself to do something different. Then, notice the new charged quality of your life.” -Nina Amir, author and coach
  • “The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta, author
  • “The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” -Benjamin E. Mays, Baptist minister and civil rights leader
  • “By far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.” -John Kotter, professor, author, and thought leader in business, leadership, and organizational change

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

Sign Up Now

 

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

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

The Power of Authentic Alignment in Your Life

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Article Summary: 

Many of us lack authentic alignment in our life and work. We don’t have a good fit between who we are and how we live. On the problem with lacking authentic alignment, why it happens, and what to do about it.

+++

Are you being true to yourself? Is there a good fit between how you live and who you really are? In other words, do you have authentic alignment in your life?

If you’re living in authentic alignment (1), there’s a good match between your inner world of your thoughts, hopes, and dreams and the outer world of what you’re doing with your life. There’s coherence between your core values, beliefs, priorities, and actions. With authentic alignment, you’re more likely to have not only physical but also mental, emotional, and even spiritual health and wellness.

There’s great power in the integrity of what author Kevin Cashman calls “total congruence” between who you are and what you do. As well as in the wholeness of what educator and author Parker Palmer calls “an undivided life.”

“A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.”
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ancient Roman Stoic philosopher

 

The Problem of Lacking Authentic Alignment in Your Life

There are many instances in which we can see the problem with misalignment. If your car tires are out of alignment, for example, you can have poor handling, uneven tire wear, reduced fuel efficiency, and suspension problems. What happens when the players on a team are all over the place instead of acting as a disciplined unit? How will it go if a married couple isn’t on the same page about children and finances? What happens to organizations when they’re not aligned?

There’s also a cost to lacking authentic alignment in your life. When it’s missing, you tend to:

  • spend a lot of time doing things you don’t really want to do
  • feel inauthentic, like a fraud
  • fall into the trap of people-pleasing
  • feel stuck in your life or work
  • feel sad or disappointed that you’ve given up on yourself or your dreams
  • risk forgetting who you truly are because you’ve been pretending to be something you’re not for so long
  • be disconnected or cut off from yourself, making you feel off kilter
  • suspect that you’re going through the motions of life
  • be anxious, frustrated, or overwhelmed more often
  • feel lethargic or exhausted

What’s more, misalignment undermines your ability to do good work and perform at your highest levels.

“…there can be no greater suffering than living a lifelong lie….
in the end what will matter most is knowing that we stayed true to ourselves.”
-Parker Palmer, educator and writer

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Why We Do It

Lacking authentic alignment is common. But why? There are many factors that can disrupt the rhythm of marching to the beat of your own drummer, as the expression goes. For example, you may drift away from your core because you:

Sometimes, an external shock can create misalignment. It can be moving to a new community, losing a job, having a health crisis, or losing a loved one.

 

Benefits of Authentic Alignment

When you’re playing your own tune in life, it can bring you many benefits, including:

  • a sense of wellness, including inner peace and harmony
  • more freedom
  • more balance in your life
  • a sense of gratitude
  • more joy
  • a sense of fulfillment

When you have authentic alignment, you’re more likely to feel content and secure. You’re better able to move on and let go of things that aren’t good for you. And you’re able to tap into your inner voice and intuition.

With authentic alignment, you’re also better at setting boundaries and bolder in doing the things you really want to do. You’re likely to develop and maintain better relationships because you’re no longer hiding yourself. People will get to know the real you as you show up in the world with more honesty and vulnerability, in turn fostering connection and intimacy. You’ll tend to attract people who are a better fit for you in things like friendships or romantic relationships.

When you have authentic alignment, you don’t fret about wasting time because you’re intentionally engaging in good things in your life. This can help you move from a vexing sense of doubt about whether you’re living well to a sense of clarity, satisfaction, and serenity.

Living in authentic alignment can bring you a sense of profound satisfaction, with no need to keep chasing things because you already feel whole. Finally, it can help you avoid the common regret of living your life according to other people’s expectations instead of a life true to yourself.

“Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration” (since their realization came too late)…. “It is a pity that being who we truly are requires so much courage, but it does. It takes enormous courage at times.”
-Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

 

How to Create and Maintain Authentic Alignment

How to go about creating more authentic alignment in your life? Here are 14 approaches:

1. Develop your self-awareness. Know yourself so well and deeply that you feel a sense of clarity and comfort about who you are and what makes you tick, helping you feel more comfortable in your own skin.

2. Strip away your ego, pride, and ambition. Set aside the expectations of others. Tap into your heart instead of your ego.

3. Remove your mask in front of those you love the most, deepening connection. Stop pretending to be something you’re not. Let them see the real you and invite them to reciprocate.

4. Explore the root causes that led you to want to avoid being yourself. Perhaps it was outside expectations? Or fear of judgment or failure? Fear of rejection, or of being hurt? Afraid to be seen for who you truly are? Sometimes, your life may be overly full, cluttered with too many commitments and too much “busyness.”

5. Return to your center by finding or creating sanctuary in your life. Sanctuary is a place or practice of peace in which you can leave the distractions, interruptions, and chaos behind and be present in silent, deep reflection. It could be a quiet room at home, a place of worship, or a quiet and solitary spot in nature.

6. Notice when you’re becoming misaligned. Pay attention to how you’re feeling. Is it frustration? Shame? Something else? Tune into your body and your emotions. Also, pay attention to the situations where it’s common: what are you doing and who are you with? See if there are patterns.

7. Practice disciplined self-care regularly. It’s easy to become misaligned when you’re tired, overworked, or burned out. Maintain healthy habits and rituals so you don’t fall into traps that get you out of alignment.

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

 

8. Discover your core values. Your values are what you consider most important in life, what’s most worthy and valuable to you. Are you living in accordance with your values?

9. Discover your strengths. What are the things you’re good at and that make you feel powerful when you’re engaging in them? Make sure that you’re using them often.

10. Discover your passions. What are the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time? How can you integrate them into your days more often?

11. Discover your purpose. Think about why you’re here and what feels purposeful and meaningful to you. Are you living purposefully? This can be a tough one for people. Author Richard Leider points out that there are two types of purpose. First, is a “BIG P” Purpose (a noble cause or something you can dedicate your life to). But you can also have a “little p” purpose (daily choices of how to contribute to others). Leider notes that “little p” actions are just as worthy. Also, they can add up over time into something potent.

12. Craft a vision of the good life. Think about how you want to live. What’s a bold and vivid picture of that? Make sure you’re working toward living it.

13. Be vigilant in declining activities that aren’t a good fit while agreeing to ones that are in alignment. When opportunities and requests come your way, do you have a good way to screen them? Without some sort of criteria or filter, you can end up with days filled with things are far afield from what you want to do.

14. Pay attention to when you need to interrupt the pattern and make a more radical shift. In a Harvard Business Review article, Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder point out that you may need to break the cycle with a catalyst like a course or sabbatical so you can spot unhealthy patterns and give yourself time to make needed changes.

 

Conclusion

Though authentic alignment may sound straightforward, it’s common for people to drift out of alignment.

It’s essential to be honest with yourself. If you can’t admit to yourself that you’re out of alignment, you’re unlikely to get it back.

It won’t help if you’re too hard on yourself when you drift. A little self-compassion can go a long way. Misalignment is common. If you find yourself judging yourself harshly and engaging in negative self-talk, change the channel and flip toward ideas for how to bring alignment back into your life.

It’s also important to have your own back. Go to bat for yourself just as you would your best friend. Finally, recall that authentic alignment is an ongoing process. Expect to have ups and downs. That’s okay, as long as you work to bring it back when you drift.

Wishing you well with it, and please reach out if you think I can help.
–Gregg

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Authentic Alignment

  • “To thine own self be true.” -William Shakespeare, English poet, playwright, and actor
  • “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, poet, painter, and playwright
  • “I know who I am. The more we try to be something we’re not, the less successful we’ll be…. I don’t care what I do as long as I adhere to certain values.” -Jael Kampfe, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
  • “Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” -William Stafford, from his poem, “Ask Me”
  • “I think I’ve always had a strong sense of who I am, but allowing myself to be that person is more recent.” -Bridget Bradley Gray, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
  • “Being true to who you really are can be one of the hardest things to do in life.” -Carlii Lyon, Australian executive
  • “Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must This need we may call self-actualization.” -Abraham Maslow, psychologist
  • “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
  • “…the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most. A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we (or others) feel we ought to do, and what we think we want to do. Our advice? Concentrate instead on who you are, and the rest will fall into place.” -Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger, Do What You Are
  • “I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.” -Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything
  • “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
  • “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
  • “Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “If you are experiencing unease or demotivation in your life, it is probably because you are not living according to your values.” -Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan, Self-Leadership
  • “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “That’s who I am at my core, what I love. I mean, if a young person calls me and says, ‘Hey, can you help me? Can you listen to me?’ I can’t say no to that. It’s almost physically impossible for me to say no.” -Gerald Chertavian, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
  • “One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, author and entrepreneur, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview

 

Appendix: Related Concepts

There are several concepts related to authentic alignment that can help us understand it better.

Authenticity. When you’re authentic, it means you’re genuine, real, and true. Researcher and author 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.” Other researchers describe it as “the degree to which a particular behavior is congruent with a person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, motives, and other dispositions.” (Source: Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Leary, M. R. (2019). The enigma of being yourself: A critical examination of the concept of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 133–142.)

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

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

Self-concordance. Originally, researchers thought of self-concordance as being in touch with your deeper self. More recently, researchers are conceptualizing it as congruence between your implicit motives (unconscious, automatic drives) and explicit motives (conscious drives like personal goals). When you’re self-concordant, you tend to choose goals that are more personally productive and fulfilling. It enhances your ability to grow, achieve your goals, and feel happy. Researchers measure self-concordance via the relative autonomy index, with a continuum ranging from external to internal motivation. (Source: Kennon M. Sheldon and Erica A. Holberg, “Chapter Four—Using free will wisely: The importance of self-concordant goal pursuit,” Advances in Motivation Science, Vol. 10, 2023.)

Self-congruence. When you have self-congruence, you tend to behave consistently with who you really are and what you’re really like, according to researchers. This can include things like your “true self” or your attitudes, beliefs, and values.

True North. Authors Bill George and Peter Sims define your true north as “the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point.”

Critiques. Not surprisingly, there are also critiques of concepts like “authenticity” and “true self” in the research literature. For example, 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.”

“Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-Walt Whitman, poet

Do we truly understand ourselves, including our behaviors, and the reasons behind them? Are our self-perceptions biased, incomplete, selective, or even inaccurate, as some researchers suggest? Additionally, how much does nonconscious mental functioning drive our behavior?

Researchers have noted that there’s ambiguity and variability in the definitions of terms like “authenticity,” not to mention cultural differences. They also warn against having an idealized version of the self, because it’s unattainable, leading to potential feelings of inadequacy or failure. For some, the pressure to “be authentic” can result in significant anxiety and stress.

Jongman-Sereno and Leary also note that our ability to adapt our behavior to suit different situations is generally beneficial for our psychological wellbeing and social relationships. We often find ourselves playing various roles at home and work, and that’s normal. (But there’s a significant difference between making small adjustments to ease interactions and wearing a mask to disguise who we really are.)

(1) Dr. Asha Prasad wrote about this topic in her 2016 book, Authentic Alignment: How Ancient Wisdom And Modern Science Can Revitalize Your Health, Happiness and Potential. Others have written about “inner alignment” and related terms.

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

Getting to the Root Causes of Things: Why and How

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’d finally gotten to the root of it.

 

What Are You Struggling With?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

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9 Tips to Help You Discover Root Causes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conclusion

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

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Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Root Causes

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

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

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

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

Here’s an example:

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

Another example:

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

 

Appendix: Examples of Getting to the Root Causes of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases

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When it comes to giving and receiving good advice, your brain may be getting in the way.

Daniel Kahneman, author of the blockbuster book, Thinking, Fast & Slow, is famous for his work on the psychology of decision-making. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. An enormous body of research from Kahneman and his colleagues over decades suggests the following:

  • You’re not as rational as you think.
  • Emotions, automatic responses, and mental shortcuts are much bigger drivers of our decisions than you might think.
  • Facts matter much less than you might think when you’re making decisions.

Kahneman and his long-time colleague, Amos Tversky, report that humans are prone to “severe and systematic errors” in their thinking because of the way their brains work. Much of that flows from cognitive biases, which are systematic errors in thinking that influence (and degrade) your decisions. Unfortunately, these cognitive biases can degrade or even ruin both the giving and receiving of advice. We address each of those in turn below.

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How Cognitive Biases Can Affect GIVING Advice

Here are several examples of how cognitive biases can degrade the thinking of advice givers and thus the quality and helpfulness of their advice:

Overconfidence Bias (when your confidence in your own knowledge or abilities exceeds the actual accuracy or skill you possess). You’re likely overestimating the probability your advice will work while also downplaying the potential difficulties. For example, if you’ve had some successful investments in the stock market, you might become overconfident in your ability to pick stocks or predict market trends. You might suggest risky investments without fully accounting for the risks and complexities involved. Big pain may follow for your friend.

Anchoring (when you rely too heavily on the first piece of information you encounter—the “anchor”—when making decisions, even if that information is irrelevant or incorrect). People tend to weight information more heavily when it appears early in a series, even when order isn’t important. For example, you might advise a colleague to accept a job offer based on the salary figure mentioned, which is higher than their current salary. Your colleague may end up overlooking other important factors like benefits, job security, flextime, and career growth opportunities.

Illusion of Control (overestimating your ability to control events). When giving advice, you’re likely forgetting many of the things that helped you address a similar situation. You may focus on your approach while downplaying the role of other key factors, such as other helpers and mentors, outside events, or even blind luck. Maybe you have navigated a few personal conflicts in your own marriage or with your team, and you start to believe you have a special knack for resolving relationship issues. You might give advice to friends experiencing relationship troubles, recommending specific approaches that worked for you. However, overestimating your ability to control and influence relationship dynamics can lead to poor advice, as each relationship is unique and influenced by complex factors that may not be addressed by the advice.

Framing (reacting to a choice differently depending on how it’s presented, whether as a loss or as a gain). For example, perhaps a business mentor advises a colleague to accept a job offer because it includes a significant annual bonus. Meanwhile, that framing is focused solely on the bonus without considering that it’s conditional on meeting challenging or even unrealistic performance targets—or that the base salary is lower than industry standards. Because of the framing, the mentee might overlook other less favorable aspects of the offer, resulting in a decision that doesn’t fully align with their current context and career goals.

Selective Recall (when you more accurately remember information or messages that are closer to your interests, values, and beliefs than those that contrast with them). You might recall more recent instances when taking an aggressive approach with your boss resulted in a big pay increase, forgetting about less successful times. Or you might be reminiscing about how a broad job search strategy worked well for you. As an investor, you might better recall the times when your stock picks were successful, conveniently forgetting the duds.

Curse of Knowledge (when you assume others also know what you know about a subject). If you have expertise in a field, you may struggle to simplify complex information for others who lack that specialized knowledge. It’s likely that you’ve known some things for so long that you forgot what it was like not to know them and thus have a hard time remembering that not everyone else knows them as well. For example, you might advise a junior employee to quit a job because you’re confident  they can quickly find a better position. Perhaps you’ve been through multiple resignations and firings. Meanwhile, you’re taking for granted your own extensive network and industry knowledge. You may be overlooking the junior employee’s less extensive network and their limited experience and job market understanding. Not to mention how overwhelmed or even terrified they may be feeling about the changes.

“Skillful performance and skillful teaching are not always the same thing,
so we shouldn’t expect the best performers to necessarily be the best teachers as well.”
-David Levari

“Hammers and Nails” (if you’re good with a tool, you may want to use it more often than is warranted). Example: If you’ve analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem. Recall that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite tool is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers and wrenches. As a CEO, maybe you’ve used drastic cost-cutting in the past and now over-rely on that as a strategy. Or as a manager, maybe conflict-resolution training has worked well for you in the past but isn’t appropriate in the current context. As a founder, maybe you believe your inspirational speeches in front of the whole company are more impactful than they really are. (Source for the “hammer and nails” term and concept: Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World–And Why Things Are Better Than You Think.)

“We are skeptical that advisers can rid themselves of the cognitive and motivational biases that skew advice.” -Jason Dana and Daylian Cain, “Advice Versus Choice”, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 6, December 2015

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How Cognitive Biases Can Affect RECEIVING Advice

Unfortunately, cognitive biases can also downgrade or corrupt the thinking of the person receiving advice, compounding the problem even further. Here are examples:

Confirmation bias (your tendency to favor information that confirms your pre-existing beliefs and to ignore information that contradicts them). The person receiving your advice is likely not getting the message you’re trying to send. Instead, they’re subconsciously hyping the things you’re saying that fit with their existing beliefs while downplaying or even ignoring the ones that go against their beliefs. Common career beliefs that might bias their thinking include:

  • changing careers is a sign of instability or failure
  • a successful career must follow a straightforward, linear progression
  • advanced degrees or prestigious educational institutions automatically lead to better job opportunities and faster career progression

“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books.” -Dan Lovallo, decision-making researcher and professor

Halo Effect (when your overall positive impression of someone influences your judgments about their specific traits or advice). For example, you might get advice from a respected professor with an engaging teaching style but who has expertise in a different field. Because you admire the professor, you might follow her advice on career choices or thesis research methods that are outside her area of expertise. Meanwhile, you might be downplaying your own goals or not letting your core values guide you.

Positive Illusion (when you have unrealistically favorable attitudes about yourself or your future.) Did you know that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above average when it comes to leading, driving, getting along with others, and, yes, giving out helpful advice? Example: as an entrepreneur, you might believe that your new startup is destined for success despite numerous warning signs and market challenges. Your overconfidence can lead you to ignore critical feedback or warnings, ultimately jeopardizing your venture’s success.

Mere Exposure Effect (the tendency to develop a preference for things simply because they’re familiar). As a hiring manager, maybe you’ve repeatedly heard the name of a candidate from colleagues or advisors. This repeated exposure can lead you to favor (perhaps subconsciously) this candidate over others, even if other applicants are more qualified.

Personal Values Exercise

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

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How Cognitive Biases Can Affect BOTH GIVING & RECEIVING Advice

Sometimes, the problem with cognitive biases and advice works in both directions—degrading the thinking of both the advice giver and receiver. A few examples:

Planning Fallacy (the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and to overestimate their benefits). For example, you might advise someone to set an ambitious deadline for a new project, underestimating the time required for research, development, and testing. Meanwhile, they’re overestimating the benefits of the work while downplaying the challenges. Ouch.

WYSIATI (“What You See Is All There Is”—the tendency to ignore the possibility that there’s missing information in a scenario). Here you might not consider that your current knowledge might be incomplete and that missing information could significantly impact your decisions. For example, if you traveled somewhere years ago, you might recommend that place based on your positive experience there, overlooking potential issues like crime, safety, seasonal weather differences, or new political problems. The person hearing about it may assume they don’t need to do their own checking based on your effusive recommendation.

Strengths Search

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Conclusion

Clearly, advice comes with many challenges due to the way our minds work. You’re wise to be mindful of those challenges when giving and receiving advice—noting that many of these factors can be at work in a single advice session. Why not consider other ways of giving and receiving help that don’t have these pitfalls?

(This article is third in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “The Hazards of Advice” and “Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead.”)

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Appendix: Quantity vs. Quality of Advice

Another problem comes with the quantity of advice given. Assistant Professor David Levari of Brown University and his colleagues found, across several studies, that top performers give more advance than others, but don’t give better advice.

“In our experiments, people given advice by top performers thought that it helped them more, even though it usually didn’t…. Top performers didn’t write more helpful advice, but they did write more of it, and people in our experiments mistook quantity for quality.”
-David Levari

In a 2022 Psychological Science article, the researchers concluded the following: “People seem to mistake quantity for quality. Our studies suggest that in at least in some instances, people may overvalue advice from top performers.” (Source: David E. Levari, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson. Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice? Psychological Science, 2022; 33 (5).)

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

Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead

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We often take for granted that advice is beneficial, but it has several hazards that are frequently overlooked. Often, it’s resisted or resented. Sometimes, it does more harm than good.

What to do, then, instead of giving advice? Here are 18 suggestions for how to help people without giving them advice:

1. Ask and listen. When people come to you seeking help, ask questions—ideally guiding questions that allow them to tap into their intuition, judgment, and deeper wisdom. Avoid jumping in to fill the silence. Give their thoughts and ideas time to percolate.

2. Clarify. Ask many questions to clarify the situation, people involved, and the relevant factors. How can you help if you don’t understand the context?

3. Invite their ideas. Don’t just leave room in the conversation for their initiative and creative ideas. Invite and celebrate them. Here are some things you could say:

What do you think?
If you had to get started on this right now, what would you do?
How could you make this work?
What are some possibilities to consider?

Focus on tapping into their inner wisdom and soliciting answers from them instead of handing down your own proclamations.

4. Detach from the results. Offer your help without attachment to what the person decides to do, or to the results. Guard against the sneaky arrival of your ego in the conversation, because it will place the focus on you instead of the person you’re trying to help.

5. Engage your heart. Share from your heart, not from a place of wanting to be right or needing to save or persuade the person. Invite their heart and wisdom into the conversation as well.

6. Provide space. Give the person space to express their own perspective, including concerns and fears.

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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7. Be humble. Approach the situation with humility. Share your ideas and perspectives when appropriate (especially when asked), but allow for the fact that you may be missing something and that there may be multiple ways to address it. Recall that you don’t have all the facts and may be missing essential parts of the puzzle. Keep in mind that smart and experienced people often disagree about what to do with many situations.*

8. Focus on exploration, not certainty. Preface any input you provide by acknowledging you’re in exploration mode, not in certainty mode. For example:

Let’s bounce some ideas off each other.
This may be off but…
One idea could be…
What would you think about…

9. Empathize and offer emotional support. Don’t jump in without first pausing to observe how difficult this must be for them. Show them you recognize that—and that you care.

10. Walk alongside. Emphasize collaboration, not instruction or direction. Consider actually going for a walk so you’re literally side by side instead of facing each other.

11. Show loyalty. Have the person’s back and be totally committed to their success.

12. Show respect. Show the person deep respect with your presence and attention while acknowledging the difficulty and complexity of the situation at hand.

Quality of Life Assessment

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13. Demonstrate belief. Show them you believe in them and trust them to solve the problem. Express your confidence in them.

14. Place them in the starring role—and keep them there. It’s their challenge and their life, so the solution should come from them. Will you be the Samwise Gamgee to their Frodo? The Peeta to their Katniss Everdeen? The Mr. Miyagi to their Karate Kid? The Minions to their Gru?

15. Determine the most valuable form of help in the situation. There are many different forms of help beyond advice: input, reactions, feedback, constructive criticism, guidance, coaching, mentoring, dialogue, reframing, and more. Even playing the devil’s advocate or setting a good example. Don’t assume that because someone comes to you asking for advice that advice-giving is warranted. Read the person and the situation. Maybe they need help seeing the big picture? Or a deep dive on the root causes? Maybe they need wisdom and discernment instead of a quick fix? Perhaps they really need encouragement, motivation, or inspiration and not “the answer” handed to them on a silver platter. Or maybe they just need a sounding board—or an opportunity to brainstorm together without judgment. Or empathy and understanding. In most cases, guiding and coaching are much more helpful than giving advice.

16. Accept them as they are. Don’t try to change or control them. Help them find their own way through their travails given their personality, preferences, passions, and values, not yours.

17. Share your personal experience when appropriate. Let them draw their own conclusions. Don’t assume that because something worked out for you that it means they need to do things the way you did. Different person, different situation.

18. Lead by example. Perhaps most important of all, focus on setting a good example by what you do instead of doling out advice. Your example is your most influential tool.

“A good example has twice the value of good advice.”
-Albert Schweitzer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician

 

Conclusion

Yes, advice can help sometimes, but too often it’s lame and ineffective, an ego boost for the giver but a downer for the receiver. Why not up your game by really thinking through how to support someone without stepping on them?

(This article is second in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “The Hazards of Advice” and “How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases.”)

Tools for You

Strengths Search

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Postscript: Inspirations on “Don’t Give Advice”

  • “Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.” -Cicero, ancient Roman poet and philosopher
  • “As much as we love advice, we often don’t need it. The answer already lies within us.” -Bruce Feiler, The Search
  • “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.” -Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
  • “We stand with simple attentiveness at the borders of their solitude—trusting that they have within themselves whatever resources they need and that our attentiveness can help bring those resources into play.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

* Think of all the conflicting advice out there. For example, should you plan in detail or go with the flow and be agile? Should you specialize or diversify? Start strong and make your mark or spend the first 100 days on a listening tour? Exude confidence or demonstrate humility? Stay the course or cut your losses?

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

The Hazards of Advice

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Article Summary: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

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The Problem with Advice: 18 Risks and Flaws

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

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

Here are 18 risks and flaws that come with advice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

 

Reflection Questions

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

 

Tools for You

Strengths Search

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

Find Your Strengths

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Quotations on Advice

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

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

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

How to Stop Blaming Others: 10 Tips

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Blaming.

It’s a common trap—and more damaging than you think.

Focusing on what your parents did wrong instead of owning up to your own issues.
Chiding your spouse for XYZ while you yourself have been dropping the ball on ABC.
Blaming another department in your organization for product, service, or hiring delays.
Attacking the other side for their faults instead of working together to solve the problem.

It’s tempting to shift blame onto others. Blaming might bring temporary satisfaction, but it ultimately stalls progress and even moves you backwards.

 

The Problem with Blaming

Blaming, despite feeling oddly good in the moment, comes with many pitfalls. It leaves things unresolved. Often, it backfires, exacerbating problems by damaging relationships.

Also, blaming undermines your own sense of agency and triggers defensiveness in those on the receiving end of your condemnation. (Who doesn’t resent being blamed?) Furthermore, blaming tends to escalate minor issues into larger conflicts. And it can be contagious, perpetuating a cycle of negativity in your family or work team. In the end, it diminishes your effectiveness.

Meanwhile, blaming often involves a degree of deception—distorting facts to evade responsibility while magnifying others’ faults—which erodes your credibility. Ultimately, you bear the brunt of these consequences, not those you blame.

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 Stop Blaming: 10 Tips

The downsides of blaming are clear, but it’s hard to stop because it can feel so darn satisfying. Here are 10 tips for how to stop blaming others:

#1. Stop ruminating on your problems. Fix your attention instead on something more positive and productive.

#2. Shift your attention to what you’re grateful for. You’re much more likely to thrive when practicing gratitude than when you’re casting blame.

#3. Consider why you’re blaming. With a little self-reflection, including focused attention on the situation, you may discover that you’re trying to avoid shame or pain by externalizing the situation, at least in part. Look for a richer and truer picture of the situation than what comes with the simplistic focus on a guilty or offending party. This, of course, requires character and self-awareness.

Are you honest and strong enough to see your own hand in this?

#4. Consider whether you’ve become subconsciously attached to the problem and its associated drama. It may be feeding you with energy—albeit negative and unproductive energy—that makes you feel vindicated or superior.

#5. Practice empathy and try to understand the context, motivations, and feelings of the person you’re blaming. Put yourself in their shoes. Ask questions and explore their perspective and rationale. Which will serve you better: understanding or blaming?

#6. Look for a lesson that you might learn if you focus on understanding instead of blaming. Instead of using it as an opportunity to stroke your ego and attack someone else, why not reframe it as an opportunity for you to learn, grow, and avoid similar problems in the future?

#7. Focus on finding a solution, not a scapegoat. In the end, what you really want is resolution and progress.

#8. Instead of allocating all the blame to somebody else, try assuming joint responsibility. In the end, the assignment of blame matters much less than resolving the issues well. Take note: You want to avoid too much externalization of the problem but also too much internalization of it. In most cases, both sides played a part in letting things slide.

#9. Focus on collaboration instead of blame. Explore ways in which joining forces to address the issues may benefit you both and sidestep potholes.

#10. Take full responsibility for your life, including your choices, behaviors, and outcomes. Sure, there are always outside factors present. But assuming responsibility restores your agency.

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 Make This Happen in Conversation

When in conversation with someone you’re tempted to blame, take a deep breath, regain your composure, and try to remain nonjudgmental, curious, and open-hearted. Focus on jointly exploring the situation and finding solutions instead of attacking each other.

In an article, podcaster and former lawyer Jordan Harbinger recommends avoiding statements like “It’s all your fault” and “I can’t believe you did that.” Instead, ask questions like the following:

“Help me understand why you made that decision.”
“Did I do anything to make you react that way?”
“Is there something I’m missing about my role here?”
“Here’s how I see things. How do you see things?”
“What should each of us have done to make this situation as productive as possible?”

 

Final Thoughts

Sometimes you may unconsciously resort to blaming. It can be automatic (and thus difficult to stop).

It’s important to recognize blaming as a trap that tends to make things much worse. Why not rise above it and in the process find solutions while building trust?

 

Tools for You

  • Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
  • Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
  • Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
  • Passion Probe to help you identify your top passions and start integrating them more into your life and work

Passion Probe

Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.

Find Your Passion

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on How to Stop Blaming Others

  • “The blame game is a waste of time. Any time you’re busy fixing blame, you’re wasting energy and not fixing the problem.” -Rick Warren, Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author
  • “Blame… can be poisonous, hurtful, or devastating for its victims. It can tear apart marriages and fracture work relationships; it can disable major social programs; it can inflict damage on powerful corporations; it can bring down governments; it can start wars and justify genocides.” -Stephen Fineman, The Blame Business
  • “It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “Wherever you find a problem, you will usually find the finger-pointing of blame.” -Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
  • “You become a victim when you blame yourself or others for some problem or error.” -Jay Fiset, Reframe Your Blame, How to Be Personally Accountable
  • “Blame is the demonstrated lack of self-respect choosing to deposit one’s negative actions onto others to reinforce one’s view of being of good, fair, and approved.” -Byron R. Pulsifer, author
  • “To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents.” -Maya Angelou, poet and civil-rights activist

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

The Importance of Perspective in Life and Leadership

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Do things feel heavy and dense in your life right now?

Maybe you’re stressed out about a challenge at work, or a problem at home that’s got you off balance. Perhaps you lost your job, or lost a big account at the office. Maybe you’re struggling financially, or have health concerns in your family. Perhaps your team is struggling with performance and motivation.

It may feel like the world is closing in. In those moments, it’s hard to maintain perspective.

 

The Problem with Lacking Perspective

Feeling that way is understandable, but losing perspective can be a big problem—and even make things worse. How?

When you’re stressed, you tend to view things through negative filter, causing angst, resentment, and pessimism. And when you lack perspective you have a hard time determining the relative importance of things. (See my article, “How to Stop Catastrophizing—Managing Our Minds.”) That can cause you to let things get out of whack, leading to new problems down the road.

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

 

20 Benefits of Having Perspective

When you can put things in perspective, it means you can think about them in a reasonable and sensible way without making them better or worse than they are. Doing so has many benefits. For example, keeping things in perspective helps you:

  1. assess the importance of things in their broader context
  2. focus on what matters most
  3. understand situations and other people’s viewpoints
  4. keep anxiety and worries in check
  5. understand things more clearly and accurately, thereby reducing mistakes
  6. view things from different angles
  7. see both positives and negatives
  8. react intentionally and constructively instead of impulsively
  9. maintain your objectivity
  10. develop empathy and compassion for people instead of judging them
  11. avoid unnecessary conflicts
  12. improve your relationships
  13. forgive people instead of holding onto counterproductive grudges
  14. learn from experience
  15. discover new ways to view your problems
  16. develop your resilience
  17. grow as a person and leader, in part by seeing how you can transcend your current limitations
  18. appreciate what you have
  19. live intentionally and according to your core values and vision of the good life
  20. maintain your happiness and wellbeing

 

The Importance of Perspective for Leaders

Maintaining perspective is also important for leaders, in part because they face so many challenges.

Part of the job of a leader is finding problems in and discovering ways to get them solved. Encountering problems can feel overwhelming if you don’t have the ability to rise above them and see the big picture.

“One of the things leaders have to be good at is perspective. Leaders don’t necessarily have to invent ideas,
but they have to be able to put them in context and add perspective.”
-John Sculley, businessman, entrepreneur, and investor

Adaptive leadership is a modern leadership framework focused on how leaders can prepare and encourage people to deal with changing environments that are beyond the technical capacity of people to solve with straightforward solutions or the normal way of doing things.

Instead of trying to be the hero and solve everything, adaptive leaders motivate the people in the organization to face their difficult situations and adapt to the challenges they face together. They recognize, as Harvard leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz says, that “The work is through the people.”

One of the keys for leaders, according to Heifetz, is for them to “get on the balcony.” He explains:

“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of ‘getting on the balcony’ above the ‘dance floor’ to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”
-Ron Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

The idea is for leaders to maintain both sharp focus and broad comprehension at the same time. This will help them understand the situation, the challenges, and the people. Meanwhile, leaders must reframe their view of conflict, seeing it not as a problem to be avoided but rather as an opportunity for learning, growth, and advancement. Doing so requires perspective.

Strengths Search

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

Find Your Strengths

 

How to Maintain Perspective

How can you maintain perspective when it feels like things are spinning out of control? Here are 12 ways to do so:

1. Read. One of the best ways to develop and maintain perspective is to read a lot, including classics of philosophy and literature as well as religious or spiritual texts.

2. Project forward. Think ahead five or ten years and imagine looking back on your current situation. That can help you see it in the larger sweep of your life so you don’t blow it out of proportion.

3. Talk things through. Lean on family, trusted friends, colleagues, a mentor, or a small group. That way, you can connect with others about what’s going on and hear their views on things. You’re also wise to talk to people from different vantage points (e.g., age, gender, culture, circumstances, history).

4. Distance yourself from the situation. You can do that conceptually, by looking at it from another person’s perspective (e.g., if you’re struggling financially, consider your challenges from the vantage point of someone with far fewer resources than you). Or you can do it physically, by changing your scenery. Often, removing yourself from the situation helps in ways big and small.

5. Do a reality check. Keep in mind that bad things happen to all of us, and that’s okay. It’s the nature of life. Be clear about what you can and can’t control.

6. Recall your capabilities. Think of times when you’ve overcome challenges in the past. Why shouldn’t this time be any different?

Passion Probe

Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.

Find Your Passion

 

7. Start working on solutions instead of worrying so much about problems. With small but steady steps, you’ll start to see that your problems are probably more manageable than you thought initially.

8. Get out into nature. Go on a hike. Get out on a lake or into a forest. Feel the sun on your face and breathe in the air while taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of our bustling world. Contemplate the vastness of the cosmos and observe the intricate mesh of nature and life with reverence and awe.

“They will forget the rush and strain of all the other weeks of the year, and for a short time at least, the days will be good for their bodies and good for their souls. Once more they will lay hold of the perspective that comes to those who every morning and every night can lift their eyes up to Mother Nature.”
-Theodore Roosevelt, conservationist, naturalist, and former U.S. president

9. Be grateful for what you have. Pausing to think of all the blessings in your life can help you avoid excess negativity and keep the positive things in your life front and center in your thoughts.

10. Meditate. With a meditation practice, you can train your mind to be more present, focused, and still, with a calm and clear awareness of the present moment. That can help you avoid anxious reactions to life’s vicissitudes.

11. Pray and attend religious services. Prayer can help you tune into a divine perspective. Attending religious services can connect you with ancient scriptures and teachings—and the importance of viewing life from a sacred perspective.

12. Contemplate your death. Engage in the ancient practice of memento mori, which is Latin for remembering that you will die. In many ways, death can be the ultimate purveyor of perspective. It can help you see trivial things for what they are. And it can help you face up to the fact that much of what you worry about isn’t so important after all.

 

Conclusion

Ultimately, when you maintain perspective you’re able to weather storms better and keep your focus on what’s most important. Getting good at having and keeping perspective will serve you very well in life and leadership.

 

Tools for You

  • Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
  • Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
  • Passion Probe to help you identify your top passions and start integrating them more into your life and work

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

 

Related Articles

 

Related Books & Resources

  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  • Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
  • Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
  • Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
  • Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
  • Song: “The Long Run” by The Eagles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Perspective

  • “Plan with your whole life in mind.” -Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher
  • “Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river…. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here…. You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  • “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, novelist, and scientist
  • “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” -George Eliot, Middlemarch
  • ”Some things are just plain more important than others; in fact, some things are so important—your life, your health, your family—that others are trivial by comparison.” -Stephen R. Covey, Primary Greatness: The 12 Levers of Success
  • “As you look back on your life, you may realize that the things that mattered most were too often at the mercy of things that mattered least… that you were terrorized by the tyranny of urgency, and that you enjoyed very little creative freedom…. How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.” -Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”
-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

How to Avoid the Trap of Focusing Too Much on Others’ Needs

by

Daily life can be demanding. Work. Family. Bills. Deadlines. Dishes. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, especially if you fall into the trap of focusing too much on others’ needs.

This challenge is common among caregivers like nurses and teachers. Also, many women struggle with it, in part due to all the expectations they encounter around nurturing, caregiving, and supporting homes and families. But it can affect anybody, especially those wired to give. This trap can result in empathy overload, compassion fatigue, and giver burnout.

Signs of being too focused on others’ needs include difficulty setting boundaries, struggling with saying “no,” internalizing others’ emotions, feeling responsible for fixing other people’s issues, and losing yourself in relationships. These habits can become ingrained.

 

The Problem with Being Too Focused on Others

Focusing too much on others’ needs can lead to neglecting your own needs, harming your health, and feeling exhaustion or burnout. It may also pull you away from pursuing your own goals. It may even lead to an addiction to helping others that inhibits your own healthy functioning.

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 Avoid the Trap of Focusing Too Much on Others’ Needs

What to do about it? Here are 14 things you can do to avoid this trap:

1. Recognize that sacrificing yourself to help others isn’t sustainable. Be warned: troubles lie ahead if you continue down this path.

2. Create separation and distance between yourself and others when needed. Remove yourself from these situations when you can.

3. Designate times to enjoy life free and clear without the press of outside needs and obligations. Go for a walk. Read a book. Watch a movie. Choose activities that bring you joy. Make time for renewal and sanctuary.

4. Get better at setting boundaries and saying “no.” State clearly that you can’t help right now. Since you’re human, you have limits. Honor that so you can thrive personally and have the energy to continue helping others.

5. Develop a shield. University of Miami psychologist Heidi Allespach advocates for medical residents to cultivate what she terms a “semi-permeable membrane” around their hearts. This counsel extends to anyone grappling with compassion fatigue. She explains, “Without enough of a shield, everything just comes in.”

6. Reduce the extent of your assistance when needed. Remember that looking after someone doesn’t equate to swooping in to save them. Understand that even the smallest gestures can have a significant impact. People can feel upheld and comforted even by small acts of kindness and connection. They might not even need or want a ton of help. Sometimes, a simple visit, call, text, or meal can mean a lot.

7. Enlist the support of others, ensuring you’re not alone in providing help. Bringing a network of helpers is likely to lift the person’s spirits and ease your own load in the process.

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

 

8. Clarify what you need from others and ask for it directly even as you’re providing help. Don’t hesitate to articulate your own needs and requests while also being generous towards others. Master the art of advocating for yourself so you can continue helping effectively.

9. Try “cognitive reappraisal”—reframing how you see a situation involving someone in need. Rather than assuming people will suffer or fail without your assistance, imagine how they might cultivate fresh coping mechanisms that will help them help themselves in the future.

10. Imagine a friend experiencing compassion fatigue (and feeling guilt for not being able to help more). You’d probably advise them to give themselves grace and take care of themselves first.

 

11. Prioritize self-care practices. Eat well. Move your body. Get a good night’s sleep and make sure you have a good and regular sleep routine. Spend more time outside. Take regular breaks. Meditate. Try journaling. If you don’t take good care of yourself, how can you take good care of others?

12. Guard your heart and don’t let yourself get to the point of empathy overload or compassion fatigue. Pay attention to the emotions that arise when you witness others’ suffering. Allow these emotions to pass through you. Acknowledge them without clinging to them. This practice can help you stay grounded in the present moment with equanimity.

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

 

13. Connect with family and friends. The research unequivocally points to the profound advantages of healthy relationships. They play a pivotal role in enhancing your happiness and fulfillment.

 14. Preserve your time and energy for the others you care about and who rely on you. Focusing too much on assisting one person in need may hinder your ability to support others, including your family or colleagues. And it may detract from other important tasks.

 

In the end, the solution isn’t being selfish or neglecting others. It’s about taking care of yourself so you can maintain the energy and stamina to keep helping others.

 

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

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

Take the Test

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Quotations

  • “Don’t lose yourself trying to be everything to everyone.” -Tony Gaskins
  • “Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.” -Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
  • “It’s OK to do what is YOURS to do. Say what’s yours to say. Care about what’s yours to care about.” -Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lutheran minister

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for 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!

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