self improvement Archives

How to Build Confidence in Yourself and Your Leadership

12/18/202308/04/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Confidence is an enigma for many of us. We know it can help us in many ways. And we hold it in high regard, knowing it can make a big difference.

Yet we tend to view it as something innate–something some people have and others don’t.

The truth is that, while some people have more of a disposition toward confidence than others, it’s something we can all build systematically.

And we should.

Why? When we’re confident, we have conviction that we can succeed.

Contrary to what many people believe, confidence isn’t a fixed trait. We’re not either born with it or missing it. We can acquire confidence and build it over time. As we improve and develop mastery, we build confidence.

Our confidence can go up and down, and we can have high confidence in some areas and low confidence in others.

The Good Kind of Confidence

Note that we don’t want confidence for its own sake–confidence without the merits that cause us to earn it. What we really want is a realistic appraisal of our abilities so that we have an appropriate measure of confidence to match our abilities. And we want to build our confidence over time by improving our abilities and performance.

Confidence isn’t the same as arrogance. Arrogance is an attitude of superiority. When we’re arrogant, we exaggerate our importance. And confidence is certainly not narcissism (when we’re so absorbed in our own life that we ignore the needs of others around us).

Many people struggle with low confidence, for many reasons, including tough life experiences, temperament, cultural background, and more.

When we have low confidence, we pay a price, including: missing out on new opportunities, not stepping into our true power, and lowering our chances for success.

The Benefits of Confidence

**“Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”
-Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former First Lady**

Confidence has all sorts of benefits. For example, confidence can:

help improve our health and wellbeing
boost happiness, joy, and peace of mind
increase our chance of success in work and/or school
reduce fear and anxiety
boost attractiveness
help us remain open to learning and growing
increase motivation to continue practicing in pursuit of goals
help us gain credibility
increase our ability to make a strong first impression, put others at ease, and influence others
help us be more open to trying new things
lead to healthier relationships
help us develop greater resilience and our ability to perform well under pressure
increase our leadership capacity and effectiveness as well as executive presence, since followers tend to respond better to confident leaders
boost creativity and increase our willingness to take creative chances

Of course, confidence isn’t enough to set us up for success. We also need preparation, skill, effort, experience, resources, creativity, strategy, creativity, persistence, and even good luck sometimes. But without confidence, we may decline to begin or try. In that sense, confidence is essential for success over the long haul.

Take the Traps Test

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

How to Build Confidence

“Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered—just like any other skill.
Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.”
-Barrie Davenport, author

Now that we know confidence is pliable, not fixed, and that it comes with so many important benefits, the next question is: How do we build it?

There are many things we can do to build confidence, including:

focus more on areas of our capability and achievement, and less on areas of weakness and struggle
set and meet goals that lead to personal and professional accomplishments
switch off negative self-talk, self-criticism, and limiting beliefs
swap in positive thoughts for negative ones
face our fears and in the process build a sense of agency and capability
stop the unhealthy practice of comparing ourselves to others (and consider taking a break from social media, which tees up unrealistic comparisons)
continue learning, growing, developing, and building new capacities—working on areas where skills aren’t yet up to standards
engage in consistent self-care practices, since these give us grounding and energy
speak up for ourselves (self-advocacy)
stop thinking in terms of fixed traits (e.g., “I’ve always been bad at math” or “I’m not a confident person”) and start thinking in terms of different people with different interests, skills, and abilities—along with a growth mindset (noting that we can all develop our intelligence, abilities, and talents)
think about a time when we felt high confidence and ask how we’d act if we were feeling that way now

There are certainly other things we can do in addition to those noted above, and some of them vary by person or situation. For example, some people can use good posture and even “power poses” to boost confidence (see Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about this).

For others, it helps to dress in ways that can boost confidence, to visualize success, or to use affirmations about our dreams and capabilities. We’re wise to experiment and find out what works best for us.

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.
If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.
Go out and get busy.”
-Dale Carnegie

What Confident People Do

When we feel confident, we act differently, and that novel behavior can lead to dramatically different outcomes. For example, confident people tend to:

make decisions more quickly
maintain optimism
take risks
admit mistakes
accept responsibility for choices and actions
avoid the trap of blaming others
celebrate others’ successes
experience fewer instances of envy and jealousy
laugh at themselves without beating themselves up, which can be endearing
accept compliments, instead of awkwardly deflecting them

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.

On Leadership and Confidence and Self-Efficacy

Confidence can contribute significantly to leader effectiveness, but especially when we have realistic perceptions of our effectiveness. Self-awareness is essential.

Unfortunately, many leaders are overconfident about their leadership abilities. According to researchers (Leanne Atwater and Francis Yammarino), this leads to many problems, including: unrealistic optimism, dismissal of criticism, blindness to flaws, lack of effort made to overcome weaknesses, and even narcissism.

By contrast, when leaders have good self-awareness and agree with the ratings of their followers, they’re better candidates for promotion and less likely to struggle with leadership derailers.

According to research by Bandura (1997) and by Luthans and Avolio (2003), confident leaders are more likely to welcome a challenge, to persist when they encounter obstacles, and to succeed.

Final Thoughts

We’ve seen that confidence has many important benefits—and that we have much more agency over our confidence levels than most people think. So why not engage in regular practices that will boost our confidence while uplifting our mental state and our ability to succeed and make positive impacts in the world?

“With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence
in one’s ability, one can build a better world.”
-The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

Reflection Questions

Do you currently feel confident about the areas that matter most to you now?
In what areas would you like to build your confidence?
What will you do, starting today, to build your confidence in certain areas?

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

– Gregg Vanourek

Tools for You

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

Postscript: Inspirations on Confidence

“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” -Mahatma Gandhi
“Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.” -Samuel Johnson
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” -Norman Vincent Peale
“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” -Arthur Ashe
“Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something … hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.” -Roger Staubach, former professional football player
“With confidence, you have won before you have started.” -Marcus Garvey
“When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.” -Joe Namath, legendary quarterback
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you’ve figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness, and confidence.” -Jack Canfield
“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -Vincent Van Gogh
“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” -Richard Bach, writer
“If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.” -Cicero

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

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

The Complacency Trap

11/14/202407/28/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

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

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

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

11 Signs of Complacency

When we’re complacent, we:

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

Author Brendon Burchard warns us about “the comfortable life:

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

The Problem with Complacency

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

Complacency can:

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

What to Do About It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

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.

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

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

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

Related Traps & Articles

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Reflection Questions

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

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

Tools for You

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

“Are You Getting Complacent? 17 Signs“
“This Is How to Avoid Complacency“
“Taking Stock of Your Quality of Life“

Postscript: Quotations on Complacency

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

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his 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 Trap of Blaming Others

09/25/202406/29/2022 by Kelly Johnson

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

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

“No good comes from blame.”
-Kate Summers

Signs of Blaming

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

The Problem with Blaming Others

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Why You Blame

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

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

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

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

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

How to Avoid the Blame Game

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Reflection Questions

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

Wishing you well with it.

–Gregg Vanourek

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

Tools for You

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

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the Blame Trap

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

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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 Benefits of Systematic Personal Development

06/07/202406/17/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Personal development entails efforts to improve yourself—to develop your potential and capabilities. With systematic personal development, you can improve nearly all aspects of your life.

“Personal development refers to activities that improve self-knowledge and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and employability, enhance quality of life, and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations.”
-Bob Aubrey, Managing Your Aspirations

You can also leverage personal development to address challenges in your life, such as:

dullness and monotony in your days
unfulfilled dreams and ambitions
feeling stuck or uncertain about what’s next

Personal development involves both inner and outer work. And it can have mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions. It can involve learning and growing from various sources, including reading, courses, workshops, assessments, tools, and actions taken, perhaps with coaching and feedback. Ideally, it’s a lifelong practice. We’re never done learning, growing, and developing.

Benefits of Personal Development

When done well, personal development has many benefits. Through systematic personal development, you can:

increase self-awareness
get more clarity about who you are and what you want to do

“There are so many people who don’t know what they want. And I think that, in this world, that’s the only thing you have to know—exactly what you want.… Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.”
-Agnes Martin, painter

improve health and wellness
build confidence
develop knowledge and skills (e.g., communication, interpersonal, and time management skills)
discover your purpose, values, and passions
determine and develop your strengths (see my Strengths Search tool)
clarify and pursue your dreams and aspirations

develop a growth mindset
advance in your career
increase your earnings and build wealth
feel a sense of accomplishment as you grow in your capacities
realize more of your potential and achieve more of your goals
develop perseverance, resilience, and capacity to navigate change and uncertainty
reduce stress and anxiety
increase emotional intelligence
improve relationships
build your personal power (your ability to influence people and events)
improve your leadership or prepare to launch an entrepreneurial venture
increase your happiness, wellbeing, quality of life, and likelihood of success
deepen your spirituality, if you’re so inclined
be truer to yourself despite social pressures or external expectations

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.

Personal Development Practices

Though it can vary widely by person and context, personal development practices often include:

identifying areas of your life you’d like to improve
analyzing what’s going well and not (which requires brutal honesty with yourself)
developing goals, strategies, and tactics
planning your time (i.e., your day, your week, your year: “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” -Jim Rohn)
prioritizing and focusing on the most important things
developing good habits and practices (e.g., a “golden hour rule” or a “morning miracle” in which you start your day early and invest the first hour in yourself, such as with reading, meditation, prayer, exercise, affirmations, and/or journaling).
creating and employing personal development plans and/or life design approaches
using timelines, deadlines, and action plans
assessing and measuring progress and adjusting as you go
working with an accountability partner
spending time with people who challenge you and make you better

Final Thoughts

Done right, personal development isn’t a solo endeavor. It works much better when you engage with others (e.g., a coach, mentor, accountability partner, counselor, teacher, guide, manager, or small group).

Recall that personal development includes both inner work (reflection) and outer work (action). You often learn, grow, and develop the most when you’re out there trying things and making mistakes. You’ll do much better when you’re action-oriented.

If you’re thinking that you’re already busy and that all this seems like a lot of work, a few thoughts:

First, note that it can begin with small and simple steps. Then, with progress, you gain momentum and start turning the flywheel.

Second, consider all you’re losing and missing by not investing in your development.

Third, when done right, it’s rewarding, energizing, and fun.

Reach out if I can help. Wishing you well with it.

Reflection Questions

Are you investing enough time and resources in systematic personal development?
What more will you do, starting today?

Tools for You

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Related Concepts

Personal enterprise (Bob Aubrey)
Self-leadership (Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan)
LIFE entrepreneurship (Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek)

Postscript: Inspirations on Personal Development

“Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become.” -Jim Rohn, entrepreneur and author
“Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.” -John Maxwell, leadership author
“Taking charge of your own learning is a part of taking charge of your life, which is the sine qua non in becoming an integrated person.” -Warren Bennis, leadership author
“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
“…your life gets better only after you get better.” -Hal Elrod, writer
“Your action, what you do, depends on who you are. The quality of your action depends on the quality of your being…. So there is a link between doing and being. If you don’t succeed in being, you can’t succeed in doing.” -Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, author, and teacher
“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is in your daily routine.” -John Maxwell, leadership author
“Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming.” -Alice Walker
“As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you—the first time around.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” -C.S. Lewis, British scholar, writer, and lay theologian

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Take Advantage of that Transition Time in Your Life

07/25/202404/28/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

I was worn out. I’d been flying around the country for years, chasing big deals with my team, with intense pressure to close them. Our company needed the cash. I was caught between two top executives secretly undermining each other. And I was beginning to recognize that the fit between the company and my values was steadily evaporating.

I wasn’t taking care of myself. Slowly losing touch with my family and friends. Feeling frequent stress and pressure.

The excitement I had felt when we were starting up was slowly dissipating, like air leaking from a small hole in a balloon. I kept going for long runs around the lake, wondering if it was time to move on.

Then one day, I did. I’d had enough. I finally realized it was time.

So I jumped off the train.

I took my life back.

I felt alive and free. And I didn’t leap right away to the next thing. I knew I needed time to detox.

I gave myself an expansive self-imposed sabbatical. A healthy chunk of time to recover and renew. To get my health back. Time to regroup—and to find my way back to myself. I was fortunate to be able to do that. It’s one of the best decisions I ever made.

I was in transition. And that transition needed time and space to play out without me forcing it.

We all go through transitions in life and work. Some are planned, while others are imposed upon us. Some feel great. Others can be excruciating.

Transitions are common: Youth to adulthood. School to work. From living alone to being in a relationship, or in a marriage, or with a family. Back to school. New job or career. A new city, state, or country. New friends and interests. Transition to midlife, and to retirement, and to elderhood. Breakup or divorce. Empty nest. Illness. Loss of a loved one or pet. Becoming a caregiver.

One thing is certain: transitions are on the horizon. They’re coming for us. Transitions are inevitable.

“Everything changes and nothing stands still.”
-Heraclitus, 360 BCE

Given their inevitability, we must learn to live with and manage them. Otherwise they can consume us or take us to dark places.

In his excellent book, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, author Bruce Feiler distinguishes between what he calls “disruptors” (regular challenges and setbacks) and “lifequakes” (which can rock our world). He defines a lifequake as a “forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.”

How does this play out over the course of a lifetime? Combining the two, Feiler explains:

“The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That’s an average of one every twelve to eighteen months…. But every now and then, one—or more commonly a pileup of two, three, or four—of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us. I call these events lifequakes, because the damage they cause can be devastating, they’re higher on the Richter scale of consequences, and their aftershocks can last for years.”
-Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions

Feiler adds them up, and the totals are jarring: “The average person goes through three to five of these massive reorientations in their adult lives; their average duration, my data show, is five years. When you do the math, that means nearly half our lives are spent responding to one of these episodes” (disruptors or lifequakes).

Looking back on my own life, I see tons of transitions. Moving around so much during my childhood. Then moving to London for grad school, later moving to Sweden with my family, and then back to the U.S. after ten years. Transitioning from a nonprofit think tank to an education foundation to an online education startup company. Starting my own company, and then a partnership. Getting married. Becoming a father. Transitioning to midlife.

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.

Typology of Transitions

Our transitions can be personal or collective. Personal transitions are individual changes related to our health, finances, work, etc. Collective transitions are ones we go through together, such as the coronavirus pandemic, global financial crisis, or 9/11.

Our transitions can also be voluntary, such as deciding to get a degree or change jobs, or involuntary, such as getting fired or becoming ill. Feiler notes that most lifequakes are personal and involuntary. Ouch.

And he shows how smaller disruptors can become bigger lifequakes. For example, some disruptors occur at a moment of personal vulnerability, such as when we’re already burned out or having relationship problems. Or it can be the last straw: when one disruptor occurs at the end of a long string of them, causing us to snap. Or it can be a “pileup”: when many disruptors clump together suddenly, much like a traffic pileup on a busy freeway.

Take the Traps Test

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

The Difficulties

Transitions are hard. They trigger all sorts of stresses and fears, changing our mental state and our physiology.

And they’re messy. When we’re in transition, we’re leaving something known behind for something new and uncertain. We’re grasping in the dark, suspecting danger right around the corner.

We can lose not only our sense of stability and security but also our identity. We begin to doubt ourselves.

When I left that intense job after months of deliberation, I didn’t know what I would do next. I thought about waiting—playing it safe and lining new things up before I left. That can be a smart play. But it didn’t feel right to me then.

I wanted to give it my all when I was in it and then leave it when I felt I couldn’t anymore—or didn’t want to. I sensed I needed down time to get whole again before figuring out my next move.

It’s unsettling to be in that in-between mode, without clarity our resolution. Who are we without that title and the social capital that we believe comes from our position? Can we handle the gaps, with all their perceived judgment and perhaps even rejection or condemnation?

“People who can tolerate the painful discrepancies of the between-identities period, which reflect underlying ambivalence about letting go of the old or embracing the new, end up in a better position to make informed choices. With the benefit of time between selves, we are more likely to make the deep change necessary to discover satisfying lives and work and to eventually restore a sense of community to our lives.”
-Herminia Ibarra, professor, author, and career change expert

The Benefits

Though surely difficult, transitions also come with a host of benefits, many of them unacknowledged. Here’s a short list of eight main benefits:

Transitions can lead to a better situation, or even a breakthrough.
They’re opportunities for a “do-over,” when we can think and act anew, taking advantage of the tabula rasa.
Transition time is alive time—when things are new or challenging, and when our lives are on the line. The adrenaline surges. Our hearts beat faster as we relinquish safety and venture forth into the unknown.
Transitions allow us to slough off the masks we wear for others and to become ourselves more fully again. We can stop pretending and have the courage to be who we really are, even as we fear the reactions or rejection of others.
When managed well, transitions can lead to powerful and memorable moments in life. Psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck writes, “Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
Transitions are a real opportunity for a fresh start, when we set down old obligations and get a taste of true freedom once again.
They’re an opportunity to reassess and determine if there’s a gap between the life we have and the one we want. Those gaps can last years, or even decades, as we drift through life, so even painful transitions bear a gift with the wakeup call that can lead to needed change.
Getting good at managing change and transitions is a key leadership capacity. According to leadership expert Warren Bennis in his classic book, On Becoming a Leader, “the one competence that I now realize is absolutely essential for leaders—the key competence—is adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is what allows leaders to respond quickly and intelligently to relentless change.”

Personal Values Exercise

The Mistakes We Make in Transition

Despite their relative frequency, transitions generally don’t occur often enough for us to develop natural capacity to manage them. We have to work at it. Meanwhile, we tend to make mistakes, adding to the pain. Here are some common mistakes:

-Awaiting perfect clarity before making a decision or taking action. So we never get off the starting blocks, or we wait much too long.

-Having unrealistic expectations about the pace or scope of change.

-Rushing it, often because we’re feeling behind. Premature decisions can set us up for failure by trapping us in recurring negative patterns.

–Going it alone, trying to solve complex life equations without tapping into the wisdom of others who’ve been there before and the support of people who can witness our suffering and sit with us so we don’t feel so scared and alone.

-Choosing for the wrong reasons, such as the desire to please our parents or impress our friends and colleagues. A sign of the “prestige magnet” in action.

-Being confined by our past, our relationships, or our self-identity (e.g., “I’ve been a lawyer since I was in my twenties, many of my friends are lawyers, and I don’t know who or what I’d be if I weren’t practicing law”).

“We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.”
-Pastor Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

-Wallowing in negative thinking, focusing on the worst case, or ruminating on mistakes or sleights. These only place us in a mental prison of our own making.

Tips for Navigating Transitions

Since many transitions are so hard, we’re bound to fumble through them at certain points. Still, there are things we can do to lighten our load. Here are some quick tips:

-Take care of yourself. Invest in good sleep, exercise, nutrition, socializing, hobbies, and other self-care practices. Without these, everything else will just be harder.

-Develop healthy routines and rituals, leveraging the power of habit. Find what works for you, potentially including exercise, breaks, meditation, prayer, reading, journaling, sleep, and more—especially in the morning and before bed.

-Look for small wins and take a systematic, intentional approach, avoiding the temptation to try to force a breakthrough. Take it one step at a time. Slow and steady wins the race, as long as we’re also awake to opportunities and willing to take action.

“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
-John Wooden, legendary basketball coach

-Avoid premature resolution. Try to hold out longer in the fog of transition time. Be sure to give yourself adequate time and space to do the necessary inner work of reflection, conversation, pattern-spotting, meaning-making, and experimentation.

“This is now my #1 tip for changing your life. You need to clear a space for the new you to emerge.”
-Joanna Penn, author

-Get clear about your individual purpose, values, vision, strengths, and passions. These can serve as a safe harbor to return to when you hit storms in your life. They give your life meaning as you tease out the patterns from your personal history.

“Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.”
-Charles de Gaulle

-Be willing to join the dance of change, alternating between leading the dance, being led by others, and observing yourself in the dance from afar with your mental observer (your ability to step out of your unintentional thought flow and observe your thoughts and reflect on your life).

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
–Alan Watts, philosopher

-Expect and embrace imperfection, messiness, and the unexpected. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” as the saying goes.

-Focus on changing yourself, not others, and focus on what’s in your control, not on complaining about the way things are.

-Recognize your abilities and assets—and all the previous transitions you’ve navigated. Have a little faith.

-Give yourself grace and practice self-compassion. Recall that transitions are hard for everybody.

-Let go of relationships that are no longer serving you. As terrifying as this can be, sometimes it’s the missing key that will unlock a better future, though it’s likely to take time, pain, grief, and healing.

–Reframe change and transition from something to be avoided to something that’s natural, inevitable, and an exciting opportunity for an adventure and growth. View it as a challenge to overcome, or a puzzle to solve. Transitions can be great opportunities for learning and growth.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
-Frederick Douglass

-Lean on your support network and don’t go it alone. Talk to family and friends. Lean on a mentor, coach, or therapist. Join a small group, perhaps a men’s group or a women’s group.

-Think creatively and boldly about potential change, even fundamental change, over time (while also not rushing it and remembering the power of small wins in the meantime). Otherwise, we risk settling for poor or mediocre outcomes and wasting the potential embedded in the transition.

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist essayist, philosopher, and poet

Closing Thoughts

As much as we can struggle with them, we should give ourselves more transition times in our lives. Too often, we stick it out in a sub-optimal situation for too long.

We should also work to get good at them, allowing ourselves to transform as we learn and grow and as the world changes around us. As we do so, we reduce our self-inflicted wounds and have more time and space to enjoy our lives.

Give yourself more transition time—and get good at it.

-Gregg

Reflection Questions

Are you in need of a voluntary transition? Have you been waiting too long? What’s holding you back?
Are you taking advantage of the transition times in your life, or jumping right away to the next thing?
How can you get better at navigating the disruptors and lifequakes you experience?

Tools for You

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

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.

“Tips for New Graduates on Life, Work, and Making Big Decisions“

Postscript: Quotations on Transitions and Change

“In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.” -Warren Buffett, investor
“To be in transit is to be in the process of leaving one thing, without having fully left it, and at the same time entering something else, without being fully a part of it.” -Herminia Ibarra, professor and expert on career change
“It is when we are in transition that we are most completely alive.” -William Bridges
“She knew this transition was not about becoming someone better but about finally allowing herself to become who she’d always been.” -Amy Rubin
“To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.” -William James
“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” -Deepak Chopra, spiritual teacher and author
“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” -C.S. Lewis
“Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” -Marilyn Monroe
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” -Albert Einstein
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” -Rumi
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” -Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Learning to make meaning from our life stories may be the most indispensable but least understood skill of our time.” -Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions
“Not in his goals but in his transitions is man great.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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The Powerful Pull of the Prestige Magnet

10/14/202304/16/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching is not only engaging with students about the subject at hand but also how it may contain deeper lessons that apply to their life and work. The class readings are a reliable vehicle to those insights. One of my favorite insights recently comes from Paul Graham, the programmer, entrepreneur, writer, and investor behind the acclaimed tech startup accelerator, Y Combinator. In his article, “How to Do What You Love,” he writes about the dangers of prestige and the prestige magnet:

“You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
-Paul Graham

This notion of a prestige magnet has stuck with me (and many of my students), in part because I think it’s so universal and insidious.

The peril of the prestige magnet is that it can pull us into a strange and unhappy vortex in which we’re avidly pursuing prestige while making ourselves—and often those around us—miserable in the process. A dangerous downward spiral.

Signs of the Prestige Magnet in Action

You may think that you’re not susceptible to the pull of the prestige magnet. You may be thinking, I’m not self-centered. I’m not overly ambitious or too concerned about status and prestige.

Most likely, though, you’d be wrong. Our brains are brilliant at helping us deceive ourselves.

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

Here are some telltale signs of the prestige magnet in action:

Wanting a pair of cool sneakers or jeans to impress your friends when you’re a teenager.
Enjoying the signaling of social status through the car you drive, the part of town you live in, or where you go on vacation—and the attendant social media posts broadcasting it.
Secretly hoping that or enjoying it when your degree, profession, title, or organization conveys status to you.

Let’s be honest. We all want prestige—or have wanted it at some point. It’s baked into human nature.

In a recent “How to Build a Life” column for The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks notes recent studies indicating that the biggest goal in life for American children aged 10 to 12 is fame, and a survey of British children found that “YouTuber” was the most coveted career choice.

Evolutionary psychologists note that we can acquire social status either through dominance or prestige (or both). It’s important because high-status individuals tend to receive more protections from their social group, appear more attractive (giving them reproductive advantages), obtain more resources, and have better health and longevity.

Meanwhile, many of us go through an education system that points to prestige pursuit as the standard recommended option (so ingrained that it’s often simply assumed and not even explicit), and we live in a culture that prizes, and sometimes idolizes, status and wealth.

Take the Traps Test

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

How the Prestige Magnet Can Warp Our Lives

Clearly, there are advantages of social status, and we shouldn’t hold it against people for deriving benefits from their hard work, commitment, courage, or creativity. Far from it.

But there are also disadvantages, some of which are not only costly but also underappreciated.

Here are nine of the main disadvantages:

1. Career Choices

The prestige magnet can keep us from doing what we really want to do, or what we’re better suited to do, or from pursuing our dreams. It can pull us into career fields for the wrong reasons that don’t hold up over time, and with high switching costs (or even a sort of lock-in effect). I recall how popular and prestige-soaked the fields of consulting and investment banking were when I was getting my MBA. The point isn’t that there’s anything wrong with those professions but rather whether those jobs were a good fit for all those classmates and whether there wasn’t a phenomenon of social contagion at work. (And yes, I dipped my toes in those waters too. Let me be clear: I struggle with this trap, among many others, as well.)

2. Addiction

We can become addicted to the pursuit of prestige and its close cousins (success, fame, wealth, etc.), with all the implications that addictions carry, including crowding out other important areas of our lives, like health, relationships, and peace of mind.

3. Happiness Effects

By pursuing prestige, aren’t we placing parts of our happiness and sense of self-worth into the hands of others, including people we don’t even know or like?

4. The Expense

Pursuing prestige can be expensive, from costly universities to the pricey cars, homes, neighborhoods, and lifestyles that put us on a financial hamster wheel, sprinting to try to keep up. Getting nowhere fast. It can be exhausting—and financially precarious if things go awry.

5. Hidden Costs

Prestige often comes with hidden costs, including:

- feeling trapped in jobs we don’t like, sometimes with colleagues or bosses we don’t like
- working excessive hours (many prestigious firms pride themselves on this, as a sort of twisted bragging right)
- burying ourselves in spreadsheets or presentation decks
- wondering if our sacrifices are worth it
- experiencing stress, anxiety, or depression

6. Career Damage

Those who are chasing status and prestige can come across as self-centered and self-serving, which can impair their teamwork and leadership effectiveness, because it’s off-putting. It can even take people on a path to becoming a toxic leader.

7. Identity Effects

If we’re consumed by a hunger for status and prestige during our career, where is that likely to leave us when we retire or if we change jobs or need to stop working? Are we okay with who we are even without the recognition or status? Do we need to be viewed as successful to feel content or happy?

8. Relationship Pain

Being in hot pursuit of prestige can keep us away way too much from those we love, from our spouse or significant other to our children, parents, or close friends. How will we view those tradeoffs and compromises later in life?

9. Regret

Following the prestige path is likely to lead to painful regret down the road, with a rude reckoning for our choices.

We can note here that many of these disadvantages, in the larger scheme of things, are problems of privilege. Many people struggle with much nastier problems, like surviving and feeding their families. Still these problems of the prestige magnet come with real pain and damage for many, and they’re found on all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum.

So now we must ask, what to do about it?

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.

How to Demagnetize the Prestige Magnet

From science class, we may recall that physical magnets can be demagnetized via certain techniques. For example, via high heat. Or a reverse field. We can even hammer the magnetism out of it. Best of all, we can leave the magnet untouched for long periods of time, and demagnetization will occur naturally over time. Like magic.

The prestige magnet can also be altered. Here are ten ways to address it:

1. Why

Step back and consider why you’re pursuing prestige, including whether there’s some sort of pain, loss, or hurt in your life that you’re trying to numb—and whether you might address it better by going to its roots.

2. Who

Think more critically about who you’re trying to impress. Who are they? How much do they truly matter to you? How likely is it that they’ll matter to you long in the future? Are they really so concerned about you, or are they more likely to be caught up in their own concerns, including their own prestige magnet?

3. Work

Instead of dwelling on how you stack up, focus on the work itself. Get lost in the process and concentrate on creating value for the intended beneficiaries. Become a craftsman and focus on slow, steady, and systematic improvement.

4. People

Spend your time with people who are comfortable with who they are regardless of the vagaries of status—and who care more about your heart and soul than your status and prestige.

5. Service

Serve others. Leave the prestige pursuit behind and focus on helping others. Be part of a community and contribute to something larger than your own personal wants, needs, and insecurities. If you’re in a position of authority, consider practicing servant leadership, a counterintuitive and revolutionary approach to leadership that emphasizes serving others first, including developing them and helping them accomplish things they never thought possible.

6. Purpose

Discover and pursue your purpose, or something that feels significant or meaningful to you, or that captures your heart. This will get your out of your head and into a project or endeavor that motivates you and benefits others. If you’re in a position of authority, consider taking on our triple crown leadership quest—a commitment to building an organization or team that’s excellent (achieving exceptional results and positive impacts for all stakeholders), ethical (doing the right thing, even when it’s costly or hard), and enduring (standing the test of time and operating sustainably).

7. Gratitude

Be grateful for what you have. Incorporate gratitude practices (e.g., prayers of thanksgiving, meditation, a gratitude jar) into your life. And determine what is enough for you so you don’t catch the “disease of more.”

8. Creation

Build or create something: a side hustle, blog, passion project, memoir, garden, novel, startup, or social venture—whatever captures your interest and gets you lost in a state of flow.

9. Mortality

Think about your death. That’s right. As morbid as it is, remembering that you’re mortal—and given an unknown time span on this Earth—can help you remember what’s truly important in life—and what’s not.

10. Resolve

Decide and declare that you don’t need validation from others to determine your worth. Change your focus from worrying about what others may think of you to putting your head down and being the best person you can be, growing and giving as best you can every day.

The prestige magnet has its pull on many of us these days. Thankfully, though, there are many things we can do to dull its effect while still thriving in our chosen endeavors.

Reflection Questions

How strong is the prestige magnet in your life?
What can you do to reduce its downsides without eliminating its upsides?

Tools for You

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

Personal Values Exercise

Related Traps

This prestige magnet trap doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s related to many of the other traps we’ve been addressing this traps series, including:

Postscript: Inspirations on Prestige and Ego

“Ego is the enemy.” -Ryan Holiday, writer
“The bigger your heart, the more you love, the more you control your life. The bigger your ego, the more you’re scared, the more others control your life.” -Maxime Lagacé
“Egotism sucks us down like the law of gravity.” -Cyril Connolly
“Don’t worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.” -Ray Dalio
“The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.” -Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist
“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” -Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.” -Colin Powell, U.S. Army officer, statesman, and diplomat
“Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.” -Paul Graham, investor
“When the ego dies, the soul awakes.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
“The foundation of the Buddha’s teachings lies in compassion, and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compassion.” -Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
“The ego is a veil between humans and God. In prayer all are equal.” -Rumi, 13th century poet and Sufi mystic

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Why We Want Adventure in Our Lives—And How to Get It

09/20/202404/07/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me.
-Walt Whitman, poet

Adventure. It’s an amazing part of life and work, but often overlooked and neglected.

When I was little, my Dad used to tell stories to my brother and me—always about an adventurer, with a rucksack, off on some expedition. We loved it, in part because of the surprise and danger.

It turns out that adventure has much to teach us about living and leading. Of course, it’s not often that we encounter opportunities for exciting, daring, hazardous undertakings of unknown outcome.

But what if we could cultivate adventure in our lives?
What if we could pursue grand and meaningful adventures in our work?

The Benefits of Adventure in Life

Adventure isn’t something just for daredevils and skydivers. It’s something for all of us who want to live well.

Adventure makes us feel more fully awake, alive, and free. It feeds us with the energy and excitement of exploration, discovery, and surprise. It even comes with a physiological response, with norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter that increases alertness and arousal) and elevated respiratory and heart rates.

“The danger of adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.”
-Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist

Adventure comes with many benefits:

Adventure can give us remarkable experiences to savor and extraordinary memories to cherish.

It helps us discover who we really are (or rediscover it), which can be hard to do if we’re constantly mired in responsibilities, expectations, pressures, deadlines, and incessant busyness.

“…your dreams come clean over miles of road.”
-Jackopierce, from their song, “My Time”

Adventure can help us feel whole again, especially if we’ve been living a divided life, and reconnect with our heart and intuition.

It can help us learn and grow, as we face new situations and challenges and try to improvise our way through them.

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with his own life.”
-Herbert Otto

Adventure can help us develop our strength and courage as we learn to confront our fears.

It gives us an opportunity to transcend limiting beliefs. (In turn, we can move forward toward fulfilling our potential, learn how to trust ourselves, and develop a greater sense of our own agency.)

Adventure can lead to the accomplishment of great things, none of which would have been possible if we hadn’t dared to try.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt

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.

Ways to Bring Adventure into Our Lives and Work

Despite all these benefits, it’s easy to self-select out of adventure opportunities because of a limited view of ourselves as “not the adventurous type.”

But ceding this territory to the adrenaline junkies and thrill seekers is a mistake, especially since there are so many ways to invite adventure in our lives, some of which are straightforward and accessible for many:

Get out into nature, away from civilization and noise, and venture out into new areas. (You can also take it up a notch and do something like an Outward Bound expedition.)

“In the middle of the forest is an unexpected clearing, that can only be found by those who are lost.”
-Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish poet

Travel to new places. (When you do so, be sure to get off the beaten path and take what Clif Bar entrepreneur Gary Erickson calls the “white roads.” When cycling through Europe with a friend, he noticed that, on a map, red roads are the big roads, full of vehicles, noise, and exhaust, while white roads are the smaller, quieter, less traveled paths full of surprises.

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks—on your body or on your heart—are beautiful.” -Anthony Bourdain

Learn or try something new. Try running, surfing, sailing, rock climbing, scuba diving, snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing, paddle boarding, rafting, triathlons… whatever calls to you.

Sample new cuisine. My friends in Maryland are currently on a quest to eat a meal from every country in the world.

Ask someone out if you’re single. Take that chance even if it scares you. You ever know what might be on the other side of that decision.

Engage more with strangers. You never know what you may learn or encounter—or how much it may mean to someone in need.

Make new friends. Too many people start cocooning later in life after settling down, leading to disconnection, loneliness, and unhealthy over-reliance on a spouse or significant other.

Take advantage of transition times in your life (e.g., after graduating, in between jobs, when the kids leave the home, retirement, etc.). (For a great book on this, check out Life Is in The Transitions by Bruce Feiler.)

Launch or join a startup venture, or an innovation initiative or skunkworks project at your workplace. These can be thrilling in their challenges and opportunities—and career highlights.

Break out of a career rut, no longer settling for a bad manager or toxic culture, and finding something more worthy of your efforts and more aligned with your values and aspirations.

Go back to school to help launch you on a different career track that’s a better fit, or just because you’re curious and would like to learn and engage with new people and settings.

If you’re a manager, give your team an epic challenge, or create exciting new experiences for them to break the monotony and invite their creativity.

Join an adventure expedition or festival. There are many options. A summer camp for adults, a Tough Mudder, Burning Man, South by Southwest, and more.

Go on a retreat or a spiritual pilgrimage. Retreats like InsideFirst Roundtables, Modern Elder Academy workshops, and Inventure expeditions. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mecca, Camino de Santiago (France and Spain), Mount Kailash (Tibet), and Shikoku (Japan) to something more homegrown and local.

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.

Some of my favorite adventures over the years have included:

backpacking through Europe
studying abroad for a year in London in graduate school
camping and climbing a pair of “fourteeners” (mountains rising to 14,000 feet above sea level) in the Colorado Rockies with friends
sailing on an overnight felucca boat down the Nile with my brother
performing live music at gigs, bars, and coffeehouses
trying to learn how to surf in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, spotting a great surfer on the same beach, asking him if he knew anyone around who could give me surfing lessons, and then getting a personal surfing lesson from him and learning that he was an international surfing competitor
joining school plays and musicals despite having no background in theater
bridge-jumping with a friend at his college
canoeing and swimming in a Puerto Rican bay among bioluminescent plankton
cliff-diving at an Adirondack lake
working at a tech startup that became a scale-up, with all its highs and lows
taking a self-generated sabbatical after leaving that startup so I could take my life back
getting married
becoming a father
moving to Sweden, getting out of my bubble and learning a new culture, language, and worldview (and then moving back to Colorado)

These are some of my fondest memories, but I also see that there have been long chapters in my life in which adventure has been absent.

Thankfully, I’ve been inspired by adventurous friends and colleagues. One friend talked his way onto a naval submarine off the coast of South America so he could hitch a ride down the coastline.

Another favorite of mine: an entrepreneur we interviewed for LIFE Entrepreneurs who retreats to his own “secret office”:

“Each year, I try to take twenty-five work-week days and spend them hiking, biking, or on the water some place. It’s like having your own secret office with the world’s best views. These aren’t bank holidays or the days between Christmas and New Year’s. They’re mid-week days right in the heart of the year when everyone else is at their desk. My best creative thinking is on these days. The places I go are inspiring, and exercise tends to calm my mind and help me see the big picture. Following these days, I try to resist the urge to catch up on emails at night. Instead I’ll write or think about what occupied my mind that day.”
-Max Israel

If you struggle with jumping on the adventure bandwagon, consider this unconventional motivator:

Contemplate your death.

This ancient practice from the Stoics (memento mori: “Remember that you must die”) and other traditions can help put our lives in perspective while also highlighting their flaws, sparking urgency to grab hold of our lives while we have them.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
-Steve Jobs

The most important adventure of all is the one that’s most hidden: everyday life.

Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of daily activity, it’s easy to lose sight of the grand adventure that is life itself. The miracle that we’re here, wandering on a planet hurtling through the cosmos, all part of a wondrous, incomprehensible whole.

How can it all possibly be? What will happen next, in our lives and the world? Why are we here? What will we choose to do with our unknown number of days, and who with, and to what end? A grand adventure, indeed, and the most precious of gifts.

Traps that Keep Us from Having Adventures

There are many pathways into adventure, from the mundane and simple to the morbid and sublime. But let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that it’s always easy, given our circumstances and obligations.

Too often, we fall into the common traps of living, many of which make adventure feel out of reach. Some of the traps:

Conforming: conforming to societal conventions or conventional paths.
Drifting: getting carried along by time, circumstances, and outside influences.
Playing the short game: being short-sighted and neglecting the big picture.
Being outer-driven: being driven by external (parent, peer, societal) expectations and caring too much about what other people think.
Postponing happiness: deferring plans or dreams because it’s not practical or “the right time.”
Settling: compromising or settling for “good enough.”
Being a workaholic: being addicted to work or success, letting it consume our thoughts and time while letting other important things slip away.
Wrong path: pursuing a path that doesn’t align with your values, aspirations, and preferences

The traps are tricky. They sneak up on us, sometimes capturing us for years. But they’re not insurmountable.

We just need something worthy of our efforts to break free. Something like the sweet thrill of adventure and the lasting glow it brings. Here’s to more adventure in life.

Do you have enough adventure in your life?
What can you do, starting today, to invite more adventure into your life and work?

Tools for You

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

Personal Values Exercise

“The Benefits of Nature and Getting Outside“
“The Power of Awe in Our Lives“

Postscript: Quotations on Adventure in Life

“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten-track for ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau
“During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is: not to take the risk.” -Soren Kierkegaard
“We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.” -Albert Camus
“Cover the earth before it covers you.” -Dagobert Runes
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” -Helen Keller
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” -Andre Gide
“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.” -Soren Kierkegaard
“Only those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.” -Robert Kennedy
“Jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your soul.” -Jaime Lyn
“Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you.” -Marcus Purvis
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” -Anais Nin
“Above all, life entrepreneurship is an adventure.” -Warren Bennis
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” -Mark Twain
“When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.” -Winnie the Pooh
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.” -Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Bonus: Inspiring Adventure Classics

Many of us cherish the classic adventure stories from literature and film that inspire our dreams and ambitions. Some of my favorites:

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien took us on an epic ring quest. Starting in the Shire, the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin band together with other wily characters like Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Arwen, Galadriel, Boromir, and others to take on Sauron, Saruman, the Orcs, Trolls, and more hideous creatures and wizards and try to destroy the Ring in Mount Doom, thereby saving the world. It’s a classic tale of courage and good versus evil, wrapped in a brilliant adventure.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-Bilbo Baggins, a character in J. R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Odyssey

In this epic poem by Homer, Odysseus struggles to endure the wrath of the gods, smite mystical creatures, and survive daunting threats—from a cyclops and witch to a sea storm and the alluring Sirens—in a decade-long struggle to return home to his wife, Penelope.

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time.”
-Homer, The Odyssey

Into the Wild

This book by Jon Krakauer recounts the spirited adventures of Christopher McCandless (a.k.a., “Alexander Supertramp”), a young man disillusioned by the conventions of civilized life in suburban Virginia and its soul-sapping monotony. He gave up his possessions, donated his college fund to charity, and embarked on a brand-new path, traveling westward across the country, abandoning his car after a flash flood, and then hitchhiking to the Stampede Trail in Alaska, where he set off alone in the snow with only ten pounds of rice, a camera, a rifle, ammunition, and some reading.

“I now walk into the wild.”
-Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Harry Potter

J. K. Rowling’s fantasy novels tell the story of Harry Potter, a young wizard touched by fate, and his friends and allies Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Albus Dumbledore, and Hagrid. Their escapades at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry place Harry in harrowing battles against Lord Voldemort, the dark wizard.

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
-J. K. Rowling

Shackleton

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an explorer who led three expeditions to the Antarctic in the 1900s. During the Nimrod expedition, he and his crew made the largest advance toward the South Pole in history. After subsequently losing the race to the South Pole to Roald Amundsen, Shackleton focused on crossing Antarctica from sea to sea via the South Pole. During this expedition, its ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice and was gradually crushed. The crew camped on the sea ice and then launched lifeboats and traveled an incredible distance to reach Elephant Island and then South Georgia Island.

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness.
Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”
-newspaper ad placed by Sir Ernest Shackleton to recruit a crew for his Antarctic expedition

Bonus: Gregg’s Curated Music Playlist for Your Next Adventure

“8 Miles from a Paved Road,” Edwin McCain
“America,” Simon and Garfunkel
“Beautiful Day,” U2
“Can’t You See,” The Marshall Tucker Band
“Drift Away,” Dobie Gray
“Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman
“Free,” Jackopierce
‘Hit the Road Jack’ by Ray Charles
“Into the Mystic,” Van Morrison
“I Want to Get Lost with You,” Stereophonics
“My Time,” Jackopierce
“On the Road Again,” Willie Nelson
“Peaceful, Easy Feeling,” The Eagles
“Ramblin’ Man,” Allman Brothers Band
“Roam,” The B-52’s
“Route 66,” Chuck Berry
“Runnin’ Down a Dream,” by Tom Petty
“Running on Empty,” Jackson Browne
“Seven Bridges Road,” The Eagles
“Shotgun Rider,” Tim McGraw
“Southern Cross,” Crosby, Stills, and Nash
“Take It Easy,” The Eagles (or the original Jackson Browne version)
“The Mountains Win Again,” Blues Traveler
“Vineyard,” Jackopierce
“Where the Streets Have No Name,” U2

What are your favorite adventure or road-tripping songs?
Contact me here to send me suggestions for this list.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

The Power of Awe in Our Lives

09/09/202403/29/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

When’s the last time you experienced awe?

It’s one of the most powerful emotions we can experience. A marker for life at its grandest.

Awe is what we feel when we encounter something so vast or incomprehensible that it defies our current frame of reference. It’s a feeling of reverential respect, often mixed with fear, wonder, veneration, or even dread.

Awe can be inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it “the emotion of self-transcendence.”

Awe gives us an experience of vastness, and of novelty and mystery. And it leaves an alluring and hauntingly beautiful lasting impression.

My Own Awe Experiences

When I think about my own experiences of awe, I’m humbled. They don’t come often, but they can make me shudder. I think about:

being there with my wife when our daughters were born and feeling time stand still
feeling a powerful, warm sense of love and connectedness during a candlelight vigil when our family members entered the room
swimming among bioluminescent plankton in a magical bay in Puerto Rico
staring out at the grandeur and near timelessness of the Grand Canyon
gazing at the stars
seeing multiple thunderstorms in the distance while driving across the Kansas plains with my wife
walking between volcanoes and glaciers in Iceland and basking in natural geothermal pools amidst the ancient rolling hills
looking up at the gargantuan redwoods in California
staring out at the ocean horizon and at the view from a Colorado mountaintop
witnessing the playful convergence of music, story, and thrilling acrobatic feats of a Cirque de Soleil show
being part of a committed team and accomplishing something together that we barely thought possible
reading an incredible masterwork that draws me in and feels like it speaks to me directly
looking at our daughters when they’re in their element and reflecting on how much they’ve grown and changed
contemplating the vastness of the universe and wondering how it can all possibly be

Awe may be rare, but there are ample opportunities for it if we’re open to it and paying attention.

It turns out that awe isn’t just an amazing feeling. It’s also good for us in a surprising number of ways.

Quality of Life Assessment

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

The Benefits of Awe, The Power of Awe

Experiencing awe, as powerful as it is in and of itself, comes with a surprising number of benefits, including these ten:

Making us feel truly alive, with wonder and gratitude
Inspiring us to want to achieve or be part of something great
Elevating our mood and increasing our happiness and wellbeing
Putting things in perspective, especially when we get caught up in our own little dramas or ego, and boosting our humility
Elevating us from mundane matters and dampening our materialism, essentially reordering our priorities
Reducing our sense of time starvation, giving us a sense that time is plentiful and making us less impatient
Connecting us more with others—and with humanity—and reminding us that we’re part of a greater whole
Increasing our urge to be generous and to cooperate with and help others
Helping us recognize the role that outside forces play in our lives (e.g., the influence of others, or luck)
Potentially improving our health, including stronger immunity and lower levels of inflammation

So what can we do to invite more awe experiences into our frenetic and overly full lives? Or do we have to wait until lightning strikes?

Awe-Inspiring Activities

The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley developed this helpful list of awe-inspiring activities:

Write about a personal experience of awe (the “awe narrative” practice)
Take an “awe walk” (ideally in a new place, a natural setting that’s peaceful and quiet, or a place with a view)
Watch an awe-inducing video
Read an awe-inspiring story

(Tip: check out Jason Silva’s excellent “Shots of Awe” series on YouTube, perhaps starting with his “Awe” video.)

There’s much darkness in the world today. And we live in a culture of overwork, consumption, cynicism, and burnout. It can be a black hole that pulls awe into its vortex and smashes it into oblivion, if we let it.

It may be tempting to give in to these cold and dark forces and just go with the flow, chasing material success, comfort, pleasure, and prestige while letting awe slip away.

But how will that hold up when we look back on our lives? What will be the things we truly cherish? Powerful and profound, our experiences of awe may be some of the most precious and sacred we’re given.

“I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic, and more despairing: Sacred Awe!”
-Nikos Kazantzakis, in Zorba the Greek

Reflection Questions on the Power of Awe

When’s the last time you experienced a sense of awe?
Is your life overly full and heavy right now, or are you open to small daily experiences of wonder?
Do you savor these experiences, and feel grateful for them?
What will you do to bring more awe opportunities into your life?

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.

Tools for You

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

Postscript: Quotations on the Power of Awe

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
“There is one means of procuring solitude which to me, and I apprehend all men, is effectual, and that is to go to a window and look at the stars. If they do not startle you and call you off from vulgar matters, I know not what will.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” -Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher
“We fit the universe through our brains and it comes out in the form of nothing less than poetry. We have a responsibility to awe.” -Jason Silva
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living….” -Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder
“To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair.” -Jason Silva
“If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.” -Dorothy Day
“The most beautiful experience in the world is the experience of the mysterious.” -Albert Einstein
“Awe is the best drug in the world.” -Jason Silva

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The Power of Taking Full Responsibility for Your Life

12/17/202403/22/2022 by Gregg Vanourek

Responsibility.

It’s a word we hear a lot. We take on more responsibilities as we go through life. Responsibility for the rent. Car payments. Mortgage. Deadlines. Getting the job done. These things can be daunting.

But there’s another aspect of responsibility that cuts the other way, that empowers us: taking responsibility for our lives.

And not just responsibility. Full responsibility.

What Does It Mean to Take Full Responsibility for Our Lives?

What does this mean? Carry out the logic and it leads to a sweeping conclusion:

Taking full responsibility for our lives means
taking full responsibility for everything in our lives.

Carry out the logic still further and it leads to a stunning insight, one that’s capable of transforming our lives:

Taking full responsibility for our lives means
taking full responsibility for everything in our lives,
regardless of what has happened or why.

That means taking full responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, words, actions, circumstances, and impacts. It means taking full responsibility for our health, relationships, education, career, finances, choices, behaviors, and free time.

Our ability to accept responsibility for things depends on our sense of agency: our perceived ability to influence events and direct them toward the achievement of our goals.

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.

Locus of Control

That brings us to what psychologists call “locus of control”: the extent to which we feel that we have control over the events of our lives. Are we the captains of our fate, steering the ship toward our horizon of choice, or are we drifters on a raft, being carrier by the current and winds randomly out to sea?

Drive and direction matrix from the book, *LIFE Entrepreneurs*, by Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek

Researchers distinguish between an internal locus of control (when we believe that control over what happens resides within us) and an external locus of control (when we attribute success to luck, fate, or other outside influences). Note that locus of control occurs on a continuum; it’s not a one-or-the-other situation.

According to researchers, people with an internal locus of control tend to:

be healthier
report being happier
exhibit more independence
achieve greater success in the workplace

So far, we’ve seen that it means to take full responsibility for our lives. It sounds simple enough. But it’s quite difficult to do it consistently—and it’s exceedingly rare.

How to Know If You’re Not Taking Full Responsibility?

Most people bounce back and forth between taking responsibility for their lives and shirking that responsibility. How to know if we’re not taking responsibility?

When we’re avoiding responsibility, we’re tending toward the following:

blaming others
complaining about things
feeling hopeless
experiencing “learned helplessness” (when we stop trying to change things because we’ve become conditioned to believe that a bad situation is inescapable)
feeling powerless
drifting through life without traction on our deeper aims
settling for a less than ideal situation

Take the Traps Test

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

The Incredible Benefits of Taking Full Responsibility

Taking full responsibility for all aspects of our lives, regardless of what has happened or why, is one of the most important things we can do to improve the quality of our lives, relationships, and work outcomes. It comes with many benefits. Taking full responsibility can:

boost our confidence
provide us with a more resilient sense of calm which isn’t dependent on others
increase our decisiveness
improve our health
reduce our stress levels
lead to taking more action in life
help us achieve our goals
free us up to see the good in people and situations
help summon our courage
lead to better relationships
help us improve our follow-through
invoke our power to choose
dramatically improve our leadership
help us craft our life intentionally

What We Must Give Up When We Take Full Responsibility

Clearly, the benefits are extensive. But they come at a price. Taking full responsibility means giving up on several bad habits and guilty pleasures. For example:

It means giving up on complaining.

“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it.
If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
-Maya Angelou, poet and civil rights activist

It means giving up on making excuses.

“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.”
-Benjamin Franklin

It means giving up on blaming others.

“An important decision I made was to resist playing the Blame Game. The day I realized that I am in charge of how I will approach problems in my life, that things will turn out better or worse because of me and nobody else, that was the day I knew I would be a happier and healthier person. And that was the day I knew I could truly build a life that matters.”
-Steve Goodier

It means giving up on being a victim.

“Abandon the idea that you will forever be the victim of the things that have happened to you. Choose to be a victor.”
-Seth Adam Smith

What to do instead? Instead of complaining, making excuses, blaming, or playing the victim, change your mindset toward one of agency and accountability. Instead of deflecting toward others (or toward bad luck), turn your gaze within and ask:

What is my role in this?
How have I contributed to this?
What will I do about it now?

Get curious about what happened and why, and what you might do differently in the future to make it better or avoid the same mistake.

Personal Values Exercise

What Taking Full Responsibility Doesn’t Mean

Taking full responsibility means holding ourselves totally accountable, but it doesn’t mean being a “Lone Ranger,” disconnected from others.

Even as we take full responsibility for our life, we can—and should—reach out to others for help. We can ask for their input, or for them to help hold us accountable.

For most people, strong social relationships are the most important contributor to enduring happiness. We’re wise to take full responsibility for our relationships too, instead of expecting others to know what we want or waiting for others to change.

Being accountable doesn’t mean being alone. It means being the captain of our lives, being a “life entrepreneur.”

And it ultimately means changing the trajectory of our lives toward more fulfillment and better outcomes.

“The luckiest people are those who learn early… that it’s essential to take charge of your own life. That doesn’t mean you don’t accept help, friendship, love, and leadership—if it’s good leadership—from others. But it does mean recognizing that ultimately you’re the one who’s responsible for you.”
-John W. Gardner, public official and political reformer

Reflection Questions on Taking Responsibility for Your Life

In what areas are you:

- complaining?
- making excuses?
- blaming others?
- being a victim?

What will you do, starting today, to take back the initiative and take full responsibility for the situation?
Are you taking full responsibility for everything in your life, regardless of what has happened or why?

Tools for You

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

Postscript: Quotations on Taking Responsibility for Your Life

“Self-leadership means taking responsibility for our own lives.” -Andrew Bryant & Ana Kazan, from Self Leadership
“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” -Joan Didion
“The degree to which you accept responsibility for everything in your life is precisely the degree of personal power you have to change or create anything in your life.” -Hal Elrod
“Personal responsibility is the foundational key that opens the door to freedom…. the moment you choose to accept personal responsibility for all your inner experiences independent of what appears to have caused them, the escape hatch automatically swings open, providing you with the opportunity for passing into the land of freedom. You become authentically empowered, and you discover there really is a calm at the center for the fiercest hurricane where you can reside. In fact, eventually you realize that you are that calm.” -H. Ronald Hulnick and Mary R. Hulnick, from Loyalty to Your Soul
“Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. Never excuse yourself.” -Henry Ward Beecher
“Don’t believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” -Robert J. Burdette, 1883
“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” -John Burroughs
“Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“Never tell your problems to anyone… 20 percent don’t care and the other 80 percent are glad you have them.” -Lou Holtz
“Don’t complain; just work harder.” -Randy Pausch
“See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.” -Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now
“I had to take complete ownership of what went wrong. That is what a leader does—even if it means getting fired. If anyone was to be blamed and fired for what happened, let it be me.” -Jocko Willink, from Extreme Ownership
“You are responsible for the energy that you create for yourself, and you’re responsible for the energy that you bring to others.” -Oprah Winfrey

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

The Good Kind of Confidence

The Benefits of Confidence

“Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.” -Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former First Lady

Take the Traps Test

How to Build Confidence

“Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered—just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.” -Barrie Davenport, author

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie

What Confident People Do

Quality of Life Assessment

On Leadership and Confidence and Self-Efficacy

Final Thoughts

“With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence in one’s ability, one can build a better world.” -The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Postscript: Inspirations on Confidence

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

11 Signs of Complacency

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

The Problem with Complacency

Quality of Life Assessment

What to Do About It

Personal Values Exercise

Related Traps & Articles

Take the Traps Test

Final Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Articles

Postscript: Quotations on Complacency

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

“No good comes from blame.” -Kate Summers

Signs of Blaming

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

Quality of Life Assessment

The Problem with Blaming Others

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

Take the Traps Test

Why You Blame

How to Avoid the Blame Game

Final Thoughts

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

Reflection Questions

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Tools for You

Related Articles

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoiding the Blame Trap

“Personal development refers to activities that improve self-knowledge and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and employability, enhance quality of life, and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations.” -Bob Aubrey, Managing Your Aspirations

Benefits of Personal Development

“There are so many people who don’t know what they want. And I think that, in this world, that’s the only thing you have to know—exactly what you want.… Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.” -Agnes Martin, painter

Strengths Search

Personal Development Practices

Final Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

Related Concepts

Postscript: Inspirations on Personal Development

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

“Everything changes and nothing stands still.” -Heraclitus, 360 BCE

Quality of Life Assessment

Typology of Transitions

Take the Traps Test

The Difficulties

The Benefits

Personal Values Exercise

The Mistakes We Make in Transition

“We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.” -Pastor Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

Tips for Navigating Transitions

“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.” -John Wooden, legendary basketball coach

“This is now my #1 tip for changing your life. You need to clear a space for the new you to emerge.” -Joanna Penn, author

“Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.” -Charles de Gaulle

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” –Alan Watts, philosopher

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” -Frederick Douglass

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist essayist, philosopher, and poet

Closing Thoughts

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment

Related Articles

Postscript: Quotations on Transitions and Change

**“Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”
-Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former First Lady**

“Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered—just like any other skill.
Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.”
-Barrie Davenport, author

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.
If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.
Go out and get busy.”
-Dale Carnegie

“With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence
in one’s ability, one can build a better world.”
-The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

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

“No good comes from blame.”
-Kate Summers

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

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

“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

“Personal development refers to activities that improve self-knowledge and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and employability, enhance quality of life, and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations.”
-Bob Aubrey, Managing Your Aspirations

“There are so many people who don’t know what they want. And I think that, in this world, that’s the only thing you have to know—exactly what you want.… Doing what you were born to do … That’s the way to be happy.”
-Agnes Martin, painter

“Everything changes and nothing stands still.”
-Heraclitus, 360 BCE

“We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.”
-Pastor Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

“When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don’t look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
-John Wooden, legendary basketball coach

“This is now my #1 tip for changing your life. You need to clear a space for the new you to emerge.”
-Joanna Penn, author

“Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.”
-Charles de Gaulle

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
–Alan Watts, philosopher

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
-Frederick Douglass

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist essayist, philosopher, and poet

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

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me.
-Walt Whitman, poet

But what if we could cultivate adventure in our lives?
What if we could pursue grand and meaningful adventures in our work?

“The danger of adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.”
-Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist

“…your dreams come clean over miles of road.”
-Jackopierce, from their song, “My Time”

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with his own life.”
-Herbert Otto

“In the middle of the forest is an unexpected clearing, that can only be found by those who are lost.”
-Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish poet

Do you have enough adventure in your life?
What can you do, starting today, to invite more adventure into your life and work?