traps of living Archives

The Power of Authentic Alignment in Your Life

12/17/202410/28/2024 by Gregg Vanourek

Article Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem of Lacking Authentic Alignment in Your Life

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

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

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

Why We Do It

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

don’t know who you are (or have forgotten it)
feel a need to please others or feel beholden to other people’s expectations
take too many things on because you’re overambitious about what you can do
feel trapped in commitments you’ve made in the past
have become a prisoner of success, perhaps due to an excessive need for recognition

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

Benefits of Authentic Alignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create and Maintain Authentic Alignment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Tools for You

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
Leadership Derailers Assessment to help you identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness

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.

Postscript: Inspirations on Authentic Alignment

“To thine own self be true.” -William Shakespeare, English poet, playwright, and actor
“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -e.e. cummings, poet, painter, and playwright
“I know who I am. The more we try to be something we’re not, the less successful we’ll be…. I don’t care what I do as long as I adhere to certain values.” -Jael Kampfe, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” -William Stafford, from his poem, “Ask Me”
“I think I’ve always had a strong sense of who I am, but allowing myself to be that person is more recent.” -Bridget Bradley Gray, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Being true to who you really are can be one of the hardest things to do in life.” -Carlii Lyon, Australian executive
“Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must This need we may call self-actualization.” -Abraham Maslow, psychologist
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
“…the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most. A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we (or others) feel we ought to do, and what we think we want to do. Our advice? Concentrate instead on who you are, and the rest will fall into place.” -Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger, Do What You Are
“I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.” -Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything
“The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world… life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.” -Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations
“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
“Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“If you are experiencing unease or demotivation in your life, it is probably because you are not living according to your values.” -Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan, Self-Leadership
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“That’s who I am at my core, what I love. I mean, if a young person calls me and says, ‘Hey, can you help me? Can you listen to me?’ I can’t say no to that. It’s almost physically impossible for me to say no.” -Gerald Chertavian, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, author and entrepreneur, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview

Appendix: Related Concepts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critiques. Not surprisingly, there are also critiques of concepts like “authenticity” and “true self” in the research literature. For example, in their article, “The Enigma of Being Yourself,” Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno and Mark R. Leary write: “the human personality invariably contains myriad personality dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible even though they are genuine aspects of the person’s psychological make-up…. People are genuinely multifaceted.”

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

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

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

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

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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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

17 Signs Your Monkey Mind Is Running Wild

09/03/2024 by Gregg Vanourek

Are you racing through life with a restless and easily distracted “monkey mind” that jumps from one thought to another? Do your thoughts swing wildly in different directions?

If so, you’re not alone. But here’s the issue: mental chaos often leads to disruption in your life and work. It can make you anxious—and make it harder to accomplish your goals.

17 Signs Your Monkey Mind Is Running Wild

How to know if you struggle with this? When you’re in monkey mind, you tend to:

have scattered or frequently wandering thoughts
be easily distracted
have a hard time focusing on one task
feel restless, anxious, or unsettled
find your mind wandering after just a short while of doing something
struggle to prioritize effectively
feel impatient often
have a near-constant need for activity or stimulation
experience mental fatigue
make hasty decisions or take actions without thorough consideration
have difficulty listening and struggle to fully engage in conversations because you’re preoccupied
frequently forget details, appointments, or tasks
have trouble making decisions because you’re caught between conflicting thoughts
spend a lot of time thinking about the past or the future, making it hard to enjoy the present moment
dwell on worries that are hard to control
revisit the same thought loops over and over again (rumination)
have trouble falling or staying asleep due to an overactive mind

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.

Monkey mind, while common, isn’t harmless. It comes with a host of problems. For one, it can elevate your stress levels and make it hard to concentrate. The constant mental chatter can inhibit your mental clarity and prevent you from being fully present with others or concentrating on the task before you. In short, it can downgrade many things in your life and work.

“What your future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.”
-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Conclusion

Monkey mind can be a big disruptor. It can diminish your happiness, sap your potential, and degrade your leadership.

Thankfully, there’s hope. Your brain has a remarkable ability to rewire itself. By engaging in regular practices that enhance your focus and attention, you can start taming your monkey mind.

Here’s to directing your attention towards what truly matters and in the process experiencing greater clarity and fulfillment.

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Reflection Questions

Are you finding it hard to handle the chaos caused by your monkey mind?
In what ways is it impacting the quality of your life and work, as well as your productivity and performance?
What will you do about it, 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
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work

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.

Postscript: Quotations on Monkey Mind

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” -John Milton, Paradise Lost
“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit, and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, writer
“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.” -Jack Kornfield, American Buddhist monk, teacher, and writer
“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.” -Ram Dass, psychologist, spiritual teacher, and writer
“The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose. Strictly speaking, you don’t think: Thinking happens to you.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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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How to Stop Blaming Others: 10 Tips

09/25/202407/24/2024 by Gregg Vanourek

Blaming.

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

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

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

The Problem with Blaming

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

How to Stop Blaming: 10 Tips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

How to Make This Happen in Conversation

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Tools for You

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

Passion Probe

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

Postscript: Inspirations on How to Stop Blaming Others

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

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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How to Be More Action-Oriented

01/18/202401/18/2024 by Gregg Vanourek

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is waiting too long before taking action. Not having enough of an action orientation.

What good are dreams, visions, and plans if we don’t act on them? To live well, we must get good at taking action. We have to stop hesitating. We have to stop waiting too long before acting.

12 Benefits of Being Action-Oriented

There are many benefits of being action-oriented. For example, it:

helps us learn and develop
builds our confidence
helps develop our courage
changes our self-identity to someone with greater power and agency
helps us learn about ourselves
expands our sense of possibility
builds momentum
positions us as a doer and leader—and people respond to that.
yields better results over time and increases our probability of success
invites serendipity
gives us more chances at breakthroughs
helps us avoid the cost of regret for not trying

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 Be More Action-Oriented: Five Key Factors

While there are many benefits to being action-oriented, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It requires five key factors:

1. Motivation.

We must tap into our desire for a better future and summon our drive to achieve. Yes, that means getting off the couch and getting to work.

2. Courage.

Becoming more action-oriented requires a willingness to act in spite of our fears. It requires a willingness to go for it despite the obstacles and risks.

3. A willingness to pounce when opportunities arise.

Becoming more action-oriented means becoming more willing to strike, even when the picture isn’t fully clear. We must tap into our warrior spirit.

4. A growth mindset.

According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is a belief that we can develop our intelligence, abilities, and talents. If we have a fixed mindset, by contrast, we believe those things are static, and we’ll be preoccupied with the prospect of looking bad or being wrong and thus less likely to take action.

5. Clarity about what we want and where we’re going.

We can fuel our action orientation with a compelling vision of success, an inspiring dream of a better future.

Goal-Setting Template

Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.

Conclusion

When we move from hesitation mode to an action orientation, powerful forces start swirling.

Also, isn’t it more fun to be in the game than on the sidelines, not knowing the ultimate outcome but engaging in the pursuit and struggle?

Truth be told, we never really know the perfect time for things, so we might as well get started sooner rather than later. Where does waiting get us?

What are you waiting for?

Reflection Questions

Do you have enough of an action orientation?
Or are you hesitating too much?
What more will you do to start taking bold action?

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
Goal-Setting Template (Beyond SMART Goals) to help you set goals you can achieve based on best practices
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Postscript: Quotations on Being Action-Oriented

“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” -Meister Eckhart, German mystic
“An ounce of action can crush a ton of fear.” -Tim Fargo, author, angel investor, and entrepreneur
“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 , writer and lecturer
“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk—and to act.” -Maxwell Maltz, surgeon and author
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” -Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor
“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” -Tony Robbins, author
“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.” -Napoleon Hill, author
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” -Wayne Gretzky, legendary hockey player
“Do not wait till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” -William B. Sprague, clergyman and biographer
“I think the number one advice I can give is: you just have to start it. Just get your feet in the water and do it. I learned a lot from just trying it out.” -Yoshikazu Tanaka, Japanese entrepreneur

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

Are You Feeling Empty Inside?

09/20/202401/03/2023 by Gregg Vanourek

Article Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Signs of Feeling Empty

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

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

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Different Kinds of Emptiness

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

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

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

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

The Causes of Feeling Empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Values Exercise

What to Do About It

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

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

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

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

Reflection Questions

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

Tools for You

Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life
Quality of Life Assessment 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
Passion Probe to help you find the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time

“The Trap of Neglecting Our Inner Life”
“The Trap of Losing Yourself”
“The Mental Prisons We Build for Ourselves”
“Are We Numbing Our Lives Away?“
“Time to Check the Path You’re On?“
“Are You Living a Divided Life?”
“Breaking the ‘Trance of Unworthiness’”
“The Trap of Dissatisfaction”
“Burnout and the Great Resignation”
“Golden Handcuffs: Stuck in a Job You Don’t Like?”
“Tired of Settling?”
“Personal Resilience and Self-Care Practices in Hard Times”
“Why Happiness Is the Wrong Goal”
“The Problem of Going It Alone”
“The Trap of Not Being Grateful for What We Have”
“On Spirituality and the Good Life“
“Is This It? On the Disappointment of Success“
“The Most Common Myths about Happiness“

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.

Postscript: Inspirations on Emptiness

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.” -George Eliot, English novelist
“Feeling empty is often a sign that you’re disconnected from something—whether that be your soul, a lack of meaning/purpose, or your emotions.” -Aletheia Luna, writer and educator
“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” -Carl Sagan
“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.” -Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

“I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be—an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others. We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves superior but because we have no sense of self at all. Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were…. as community is torn apart by various political and economic forces, more and more people suffer from the empty self syndrome.”
-Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

Resources for Mental Health and Crisis Prevention

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

BetterHelp (online network of licensed therapists)
SonderMind (connecting people with therapists)
7cups (a free help network)
Mental Health Mates (U.K. support groups)
Befrienders Worldwide (helplines outside the U.S.)
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (text 988 or call 1-888-628-9454)
Crisis Text Line (text “HOME” to 741741)
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline, 800-662-HELP (4357)
Alcoholics Anonymous
Narcotics Anonymous

Featured image source: Adobe Stock

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!

What Are You Avoiding?

12/17/202406/07/2022 by Kelly Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Avoid

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

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

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

Why We Avoid

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

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

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

Take the Traps Test

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

The Problem with Avoidance

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

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

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

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

How to Stop Avoiding

So what to do about it?

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

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

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

Quality of Life Assessment

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Reflection Questions

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

Wishing you well with it!

–Gregg Vanourek

Tools for You

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

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoidance and Action

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

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

Are You Trapped by Success?

07/11/202408/19/2021 by Gregg Vanourek

Are you trapped by success? It’s an odd question. How can success be a trap? Is that even possible?

Turns out it can be a big trap. Below are 15 quick ways.

1. Addicted to Success

In a culture that worships success, we can become obsessed by it. It can consume most of our waking hours, and most of our waking thoughts. It can become a compulsive drive. We can build our lives around the pursuit of success. But what is success, actually? Have we taken the time to define what it means for us, in our current chapter of life, based on our own values?

2. Success Can Lead to Overwork

The pursuit of success can become all-consuming. It can cause us to be busy all the time, with a perpetual deficit of downtime, or addicted to work. We never feel fully rested and renewed. Or we start losing our perspective and our resilience. We get run down and, ironically, start to lose our motivation and productivity.

3. The More We Aim for It, The More Elusive It Becomes

Some things in life aren’t exactly logical and linear. It’s not a matter of inputs in leading to inputs out. Some things don’t respond to sheer willpower or muscle. Some things in life are more nuanced.

We can’t force a baby kitten to feel comfortable with us. We can’t force someone to love us, no matter how hard we try. In fact, it may push them away. If we go bounding into the woods seeking wild game, they may never appear unless we sit quietly for a while and let them come to us in their own time. We can’t force happiness, at least the real kind. There’s a difference between a real smile that comes when we see an old friend after a long time apart and a forced smile that everyone can tell is fake.

Success will likely elude us if we’re too focused on it. Rather, it’s something that ensues when we get our life in order, when we’re clear about who we are and act accordingly—letting go of the trappings of false influences. Of course, success usually requires focus and hard work. But it’s best when we get lost in our work because we love the process itself and how it makes us feel while we’re doing it, not because we’re set on some arbitrarily created result with factors well beyond our control.

4. Locked into the Wrong Thing

What if the one thing that we excelled at isn’t right for us? What if we’re destined for something more, or something different? When did we make that decision about our career path, and on what basis and with what practical experience about what it actually entailed? Too often, it’s when we’re too young to make sound decisions, and we panic and play the short game or become overwhelmed by all the options. (See my article, “Time to Check the Path You’re On?“)

5. Stuck in One Phase of Life

Perhaps we’re changing, with new interests emerging, but how could we possibly abandon the things that took us to the top? So we stick it out. We don’t grow and evolve into new challenges and opportunities better suited to our current circumstances. We flounder. (See my article, “What Keeps Us from Moving On?“)

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.

6. Never Feeling Successful Enough

There’s this illusion that once we become successful, then we’ll feel happy. But it’s often not the case. There are many “successful” people who are unsatisfied or even miserable. Many reach one goal, enjoy it for a while (literally a few days), only to then start focusing on the next goal, and the next one, ad infinitum. The happiness never arrives, because there are always new goals out there and higher levels of success, achievement, recognition, or wealth. Researchers call this the “hedonic treadmill”: the tendency to remain at a stable level of happiness despite a change in fortune or the achievement of goals. We rapidly adapt to the new circumstances and simply increase our aspirations. We get tripped up by social comparison among a new class of people, perpetually raising the expectations.

7. Resistance to Being Imperfect

Success comes with lots of perks, from wealth and power to comfort and prestige. But it can also make us feel like we need to be perfect. Otherwise, how can we be worthy of success? We fear making mistakes or being wrong in front of others, lest they start to question our worthiness. So we harbor a secret terror of being discovered as a fraud or of letting our imperfect humanity come through. We wear a mask of projected perfection and total confidence, secretly hoping that people can’t see through it. It’s exhausting. Nobody’s perfect. We can’t always be on, and right, and put-together. In this charade, we miss out on what Brene Brown calls “the gifts of imperfection,” including authenticity, self-compassion, connection, intimacy, and more.

8. The Burden of Success

Yes, success has its privileges. But it can also feel like we’re walking around with a hundred pounds of bricks on our backs. We carry the pressures, the expectations, the demands, the effort, the work. Life can start to feel like a burden we must bear.

9. The Illusion of Circumstances

As we chase success, it can feed into a trick our minds play on us, the illusion that the quality of our circumstances determines the quality of our lives. It’s such a pervasive belief that we can go through our whole lives without ever pausing to question it. The logic goes like this: When we’re successful and things are going well, we feel good and we’re happy. When we’re unsuccessful or in pain, uncomfortable, or facing a challenge (ourselves, or for our loved ones), we feel bad and unhappy.

The truth is that we can feel good even when our circumstances are bad. We can return to our values and sense of purpose. Or we can revisit our personal history and what makes us who we are. We can remain grateful for all that we have and have had. And we can stand still in awe of the gifts of life even when things are tough. We can be unflappable in the storms that are a natural part of life. We don’t have to let our thoughts spiral down with our circumstances.

10. The Myth that Success Is the Point of Life

The belief that success is the point of life is another mental trick that we can go through life without questioning. The point is to climb the ladder of success, right? To win the game, right? To be the best, or to achieve success, right? Not so fast.

Aren’t there more important things than achieving success and winning? What about love and our precious relationships? And what about contributing to something greater than ourselves, to our family, our community, our world, or a worthy cause? What about character and integrity? And what about our faith, or spiritual practice, or connection with something deeper and more significant than points on a scoreboard or zeros in our bank account? Yes, we can do great things on a quest for success, but is that really the point of it all?

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.

11. Success Can Take Us Away from Ourselves

As we get caught up in the image, in the prestige, in the chase, we can drift away from our core, from who we really are and what we value. We can get so caught up in the chase that we compromise our integrity on the way to the top. And we can get so driven that we lose sight of the things that capture our hearts. We can lose our artistry and our soul. Or we can become success robots, following social programming instead of pursuing our calling.

12. Success Can Take Us Away from Others

As we drift away from ourselves, we can also drift away from others. From our spouse or partner, because we’re so busy and have such important things we need to do. Or from our own children in their precious formative years or their struggling adult years, because we’re so caught up in our own stuff. From our extended family, from the friends we cherish, from our neighbors and community. We’re busy like bees, so we let our relationships suffer or die.

13. The Comparison Game

When we’re in chasing-success mode, it becomes a numbers game: How do we stack up against others in terms of salary, promotions, title, awards, fame? We start judging our worth by how we stack up on superficial metrics, falling into what Father Robert Spitzer called the “comparative ethic,” instead of the “contributive ethic.”

14. The False Metrics of Success

When we take a mercenary view of success, we start measuring it in cold and calculating ways: cash, net worth, position, power, number of followers or direct reports. These may send our ego to the moon, but do they keep us warm at night and light us up? Will they hold up and stand the test of time as we look back on our lives?

15. Narrow Views of Success

Somewhere along the way we can start to view success in overly narrow terms, thinking about it in terms of professional, financial, and relative social terms—wealth, prestige, celebrity. The problem with this thinking is that, as Clayton Christensen has noted, it causes us to over-invest in our career while under-investing in our health, family, friends, community, spirituality (or mindfulness), and fun.

Personal Values Exercise

Reflection Questions

Are you trapped by success—or caught up too much in the chase?
Which of the traps above resonated most with you?
What will you do about it, starting today?

“Everyone knows that if a child’s parent dies, the child will suffer with sadness, loss, and possibly depression.
No one thinks about this being the case when a child loses a parent to success.”
-Jonice Webb with Christine Musello, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Tools for You

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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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 leadership and personal development. 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 Conformity Trap

10/29/202408/09/2021 by Gregg Vanourek

One of the biggest traps we face as we make decisions about life and work is the trap of conforming to societal expectations or conventional paths instead of blazing our own path in life. Call it the conformity trap.

Conformity entails behaving in ways similar to others or according to their wishes, instead of relying on our own judgment or preferences. We see this all time. We tend to mirror the body language and communication styles of our peer groups.

Our penchant for conformity comes from a strong desire to fit in with the group. It can be conscious or unconscious, and it doesn’t require overt pressure. The pressures can be indirect and subtle yet still powerful (or even misperceived—manufactured by our anxious brains).

As humans, we feel a strong, almost primal need for acceptance. We want others to view us favorably. It’s a powerful urge baked into our biology, presumably because we found safety in the group that helped us survive despite all the risks we’ve faced over the ages, most of which are more pronounced and dangerous when we’re alone.

Willing to Go Along

To see how powerful the effects of the conformity trap are, consider the classic experiment by Dr. Solomon Asch, a Polish social psychology researcher, who gave people cards with lines of different lengths on them and had them judge which line was the same length as the target line. When researchers tested people individually, the success rate was of course near perfect (99%). It was a no-brainer. People could see the lines right in front of them with their own eyes.

But when people were tested in a group setting and there were secret people planted in the experimental group who were instructed by the researchers to give wrong answers, it caused many subjects of the experiment to ignore what they saw with their own eyes.

Overall, they agreed with the wrong answer from the majority about the length of the lines a whopping 37% of the time. So the error rate went from 1% to 37% on a simple and obvious task due to group influences. The point is not about faulty vision. Rather, they were willing to go along with something they clearly knew wasn’t right. Why? To remain accepted and in agreement with the group.

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.

Excellent Sheep

“They’re anxious, timid, and lost… heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. They’re violently averse to risk as a product of being shackled by their academic success.” -William Deresiewicz

In his book, Excellent Sheep, teacher and author William Deresiewicz describes how this problem shows up in elite universities. He heard the term “excellent sheep” from one of his students. It describes a phenomenon in which students “feel toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression,” are in a “constant state of competition,” feel a need for “compulsive overachievement,” go through “endless hoop-jumping,” and are loaded up with schoolwork and extracurriculars and stressed out and miserable most of the time.

The result: a stunning amount of them end up going into the same well paying, high-status, professional careers, dutifully following the herd and the wishes of their shepherds. Yes, problems of privilege, but still problems.

Consider the response of a former student of mine when asked in a survey about the top challenges faced:

“We feel the pressure of achieving high grades in school, having a job, doing extracurricular work such as volunteering to build up a CV, having a social life, and exercise—all at the same time. Social media makes it seem as if everyone is totally capable of juggling twenty balls at once, emphasizing only positive experiences. Nowadays, the only thing that is important is ‘measurable’ success. Anything you cannot put on your CV or on social media doesn’t count anymore…. Because of all these measurements, I feel like I am only extrinsically motivated. And I don’t want that. I want to be intrinsically motivated and block out everything that others or society expect of me—but do the things that I want to do because I value them.”

The Problem with the Conformity Trap

“Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.”
–Janet Wojcicki, professor, University of California at San Francisco

The problem is that this conformity urge can interfere with our ability to make good decisions—decisions that keep us safe or that leave our character intact.

Bronnie Ware identified the “top regrets of the dying” after years of work as a palliative nurse caring for people in the final weeks and days of their lives. The top regret she noted was this:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

These pressure patterns of the conformity trap start early and continue with great momentum throughout our lives. Common examples during adolescence include pressure to do the following to fit in:

bullying, racist, or sexist behavior (going along with it or looking the other way)
casual sex
alcohol or drugs
ditching school or vandalism
cheating and cutting corners (according to researchers, we’re more likely to engage in unethical behavior when we see others succeed at it)
feeling that our parents will only be satisfied if we do what they want us to do, regardless of what we want, and following their preferences toward safer and more lucrative and prestigious careers (note also that they may have felt similar pressures from their parents, and so on, in some sort of endless family loop; making things worse, we’re conflicted because we love our parents and don’t want to disappoint them but we also want to find our own path in life).

Consider this message from another former student:

“I am facing a few obstacles at the moment, and most of them are related to what is expected of me, especially by my family. I have always been a very good student at school, I got the highest grades throughout high school, I was valedictorian at my graduation, I got into a top university for my bachelor’s degree and my master’s, and I have been working full-time and part-time during my studies as well. I’ve always heard from everyone around me that I would make a great businesswoman, that I would get in to ‘any of the top companies’ I wanted. And now that I’m at that point, I don’t know if that’s the type of success that will make me the happiest…. So at the moment, my major obstacle is internal; do I risk disappointing them for not following the path they would expect me to? Or do I accept the fact that I might end up working somewhere that is not a true ‘fit’ for me to make others happy?… Another obstacle I have is internal; I don’t want to fail. And I am terrified of failing. And this fear of failure is putting limits to what I will allow myself to do…. I am scared of taking a step in the wrong direction.”

When we conform, we can lose our individuality and uniqueness. What’s more, we feel anxiety about having to maintain an image of near perfection.

It’s important to note that conformity is not all bad. We evolved with a desire for it for good reasons, and there are some benefits of it.

For example, it can make our lives simpler and easier because we don’t have to worry as much about harsh judgment from our peers. It also gives us something of a safety net we can fall into when we’re anxious.

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 Second-Order Effect of the Conformity Trap

Here’s the problem. We move through different social circles during our lives: from childhood and teen friends to early-career colleagues and neighbors, to new people we meet at work or in new places we live or visit, including our spouse or partner’s friends.

Sometimes we make decisions about work to impress certain people and fit in, but we won’t even be in touch with those people in a few years. As we age, we’re shocked by how little it matters what some of those people think, when back in those early days it felt like the weight of the world upon us. And yet we make big decisions that are hard to change based on those often superficial and unhelpful influences.

The effects of conformity can be long-lasting and hard to unwind, given the switching costs of trying to make big changes later (like a change in career or college major).

What to Do about the Conformity Trap

So the forces of conformity are powerful and hard to resist. What to do about it? Here are a half-dozen tips:

First, know yourself. That begins with knowing your story—and weaving it into a cohesive narrative based on the patterns you’ve seen in your life and especially drawing on your sense of purpose, values, strengths, passions, and aspirations. It also means learning from challenges, setbacks, and tragedies but not letting yourself be defined or limited by them.

Second, embrace your uniqueness as part of your identity. That way, you can explain your nonconformity with the group using your difference in a way that fits with your core identity—with who you really are.

Third, build up your courage—the courage you’ll need to resist the Siren call of conformity. How? By practicing hard things. By doing what you think you can’t. Start with something small. See how often it turns out that fears were phantoms, and that the worst cases imagined almost never materialize. And how resilient and resourceful we can be when we need to be. As we develop an increasing ability to withstand criticism and fight against the pressures of conformity, our confidence increases and we develop a clearer sense of our identity and uniqueness. It can turbocharge our life and work.

Fourth, find support from people who value you for your uniqueness and differences—and who don’t pressure you to fit into to conventional boxes. (And be sure to reciprocate.)

Fifth, stop spending time with people who put you in uncomfortable situations. Terminate the toxic in your life.

Sixth, and most importantly, JUST BE YOU. Stop following the crowd and blaze your own path in life. It may make the difference between a lifetime of fulfillment versus regret.

Personal Values Exercise

Reflection Questions

Are you falling into the conformity trap in areas of your life? If so, which ones?
How is it hurting you or holding you back?
What will you do about it, starting now?

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 Conformity Trap

“Our deepest calling is to grow into our authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be.” -Parker Palmer, educator and author
“There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice.” -Po Bronson, writer
“But there is something that’s a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That’s what it means to become an adult…. You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about.” -William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep
“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
“Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original.” -Adam Grant in his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
“Any day of the week I would choose to be ‘out’ with others and in touch with myself… than to be ‘in’ with others and out of touch with myself.” -Portia Nelson
“Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.” -Shakti Gawain
“Cowardice asks the question ‘Is it safe?’ Consensus asks the question ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks, ‘Is it right?’” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular… but because conscience tells one it is right.” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

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Is Your Identity Wrapped Up Too Much in Your Work?

12/29/202308/05/2021 by Gregg Vanourek

Work is a big part of our lives. It’s essential to our income and security, and it can be a source of meaning and satisfaction. But there are dangers with having our identity too wrapped up in our work.

What happens if we’re laid off? Or in-between jobs? No longer able to do that kind of work? Retired? We’re vulnerable to an identity crisis and a downward spiral when the work that animates our identity disappears or changes.

“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

For sure, there are many different types of workers out there: nine to fivers working for the weekend, side hustlers, part-timers, hybrid professionals, unemployed, underemployed, and more. Some like or love what they do. Others despise or endure it.

Some toil away in a workaholic organizational culture. Others are trying to live up to parental expectations. Some are trapped in golden handcuffs. Others can’t stop ruminating about work situations and scenarios.

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 Traps of Overidentification with Work

There’s nothing wrong with working hard. Or with loving or liking what we do. Or with identifying with our work.

The problem comes when we identify too much with our work, losing other important aspects of ourselves and our lives in the process.

“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive.
You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f**king khakis.”
-Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Problems come when we bury ourselves in busyness and overwork—when we glorify being busy and can’t slow down and shut if off (or can’t feel good when we’re not working). According to a meta-analysis of 89 studies, workaholism is related to lower physical and mental health and lower job, family, and life satisfaction. Sometimes we use overwork to avoid dealing with difficulties, disconnections, rejections, or wounds.

We get into trouble when work is all about trying to please or impress others. When we reject who we really are—abandoning our true nature and avoiding our calling.

Problems pop up when we bury ourselves in someone else’s priorities so much so that we never get to our own.

It’s nice when we get recognition, praise, or even prestige from our work, but it’s dangerous when we become dependent on those, addicted to our next hit.

It’s a problem if we feel terrible when work is going poorly, clouding everything in disappointment.

It becomes a trap when our relationship with work becomes an obsession in which we’re constantly striving and can’t switch it off—when we’re never satisfied with things as they are.

It’s trouble when our attachment to work disconnects us from meaningful relationships—from the people we love and who need us.

“…the work I’ve put between us, you know it doesn’t keep me warm.”
-Don Henley in “The Heart of the Matter”

It’s limiting when our current work keeps us from moving forward and trying new things, because we feel safer in the current iteration of our work and wary of venturing forth. So we avoid the uncertainty and awkwardness of the in-between periods of our lives—the ones that tend to lead to the biggest breakthroughs in growth and fulfillment after we ride out the storms of fear and doubt and stare down the unknown.

The problem is when our identity is wrapped up too much in our work, with too much emotional investment (and time). It leads to stress, anxiety, burnout, or depression—and a sense of emptiness, disappointment, or regret.

Who are we? Are we only our title? Only the person who gains income or accolades? Yes, we are those, and we’re wise if we’re intentional as possible about infusing those activities with as much heart and soul and fun as we can. It’s great if we can integrate our life and work into a cohesive whole that suits us. It’s powerful if we can integrate our values, passions, and authenticity across all the domains of our lives, bridging them with an overarching sense of purpose.

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

But aren’t we also husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, sons or daughters, friends and neighbors, lovers and dreamers, community members, citizens, and humans bound together on spaceship Earth?

Take the Traps Test

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

What to Do If Your Identity Is Wrapped Up in Work

What to do when we’re identifying too much with our work and not honoring other important areas of our lives?

Return to what’s important: who and what do we love? What do we long for? What are we missing in our life?

Do we have enough vitality, connection, and contribution in our lives, as Jonathan Fields recommends? Do we have a strong sense of our “core identity,” and are we living with “authentic integrity” (integration of all aspects of our lives in a way that coheres with our true nature)?

We all get off-kilter sometimes. We need to cut ourselves some slack. But we also need to stop lying to ourselves. We must take our lives back when we’ve given them away. We must honor the fullness of our nature and the marvelous range and depth of our lives, both in and out of the work we do. If we do, we can learn to be well regardless of the events and circumstances of the day, grounded in a deeper presence and appreciation for all that we’ve been given.

Reflection Questions

Is your identity wrapped up in work?
What important areas of your life are you neglecting?
What will you do start doing to make yourself whole again?

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

Personal Values Exercise

Postscript: Inspirations on Life, Work, and Identity

“Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.” -Epictetus
“‘Can I be comfortable in my own skin regardless of what’s going on around me?’ And that to me is the definition of true success.” -Peter Crone
“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

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 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!

Article Summary:

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

The Problem of Lacking Authentic Alignment in Your Life

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

Take the Traps Test

Why We Do It

Benefits of Authentic Alignment

How to Create and Maintain Authentic Alignment

Quality of Life Assessment

Conclusion

Tools for You

Take the Traps Test

Related Articles & Resources

Postscript: Inspirations on Authentic Alignment

Appendix: Related Concepts

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

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

17 Signs Your Monkey Mind Is Running Wild

Take the Traps Test

“What your future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Conclusion

Quality of Life Assessment

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Articles

Personal Values Exercise

Postscript: Quotations on Monkey Mind

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

The Problem with Blaming

Take the Traps Test

How to Stop Blaming: 10 Tips

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

Quality of Life Assessment

How to Make This Happen in Conversation

Final Thoughts

Tools for You

Passion Probe

Related Articles

Postscript: Inspirations on How to Stop Blaming Others

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

12 Benefits of Being Action-Oriented

Take the Traps Test

How to Be More Action-Oriented: Five Key Factors

1. Motivation.

2. Courage.

3. A willingness to pounce when opportunities arise.

4. A growth mindset.

5. Clarity about what we want and where we’re going.

Goal-Setting Template

Conclusion

What are you waiting for?

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Quality of Life Assessment

Postscript: Quotations on Being Action-Oriented

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Article Summary:

The Signs of Feeling Empty

Quality of Life Assessment

Different Kinds of Emptiness

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

The Causes of Feeling Empty

Personal Values Exercise

What to Do About It

Reflection Questions

Tools for You

Related Articles

Take the Traps Test

Postscript: Inspirations on Emptiness

Resources for Mental Health and Crisis Prevention

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

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

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

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

“What your future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.”
-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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

“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

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

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

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

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

“Everyone knows that if a child’s parent dies, the child will suffer with sadness, loss, and possibly depression.
No one thinks about this being the case when a child loses a parent to success.”
-Jonice Webb with Christine Musello, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect