Be true to yourself
As a coffee addict I personally would not mind having a free Starbucks for every time I’ve heard someone say “Be true to yourself.I never took it seriously and thought it was only for people who do not cut their hair much and wear sandals all day, but I’m currently in a stage of transition myself and beginning to understand what it truly means. How much are we willing to compromise what we want for what we have been told is good for us?How many of us actually know what it is we want?
Taking time to stop and think about what we want is for many a waste of precious resource, time and money. Getting a life coach or working with a counsellor through tough times is seen as a luxury, a sign of weakness or not a priority.Yet decisions such as what job we should be doing, what work / life balance we should have etc. are important decisions and can impact our health, our happiness and at times that of those close to us.
In the current economic climate where many are losing their jobs and others are feeling unfulfilled and overstretched by the work they are doing, few feel they have the choice or right to stop and ask if what they are doing is right for them. Some of us are in positions where we have to work so can not necessarily just up sticks and quit if we don’t like what we are doing. However, this does not mean that steps can not be taken to start moving in the direction of change and understanding what that change should look like. Whether that change happens in the short, medium or long-term, sometimes just taking control of your life and deciding to work towards a change is enough to put the wind back in your sails.
Good old Maslow
We’ve discussed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before and what his research has shown us is that the basic hygiene factors are important to us but not the motivators in life, having them fulfilled just stops us from being demotivated. Many of us are socialised into thinking we need to earn more and more money but as many of us have already experienced, the money does not guarantee happiness or even contentment. This recent recession has been a reminder to many that spending more time with their family / on their hobbies / seeing their friends can actually make people not only feel more happy but care less about the actual money.
Recently I read The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil
At a lesser extreme, our workplaces can equally skew or fully distort what is actually important to us.Although the effects of this change are not as shocking as the stories Zimbardo tell us, for those feeling the effects, it can bring deep unhappiness.
Do you know what you really want?
So many of us feel we should be working towards that next promotion or doing a course we hate because everyone around us has that qualification. We’ll work towards a high bonus, giving up social plans with friends or time with family. Our workaholic boss / colleague makes us feel like we’re a ‘part-timer’ so we again give up personal time to keep up.If working late, receiving that bonus or getting that promotion not only makes you skip home at night or jump out of bed in the morning on a long-term basis, then you absolutely should chase those carrots. But if the high lasts about a week until your boss / colleague / the pressure starts driving you up the wall again, then it’s not worth all the tea in china!
We all have things we enjoy doing, such as sport, socialising, reading – and the list goes on. When we do these things we relax, we feel ‘ourselves’ we smile and go to bed / come home happy. Some of us are lucky enough to have found a job that is exactly what we enjoy doing.My fiancé is a writer and has to read widely to be good at his job – he loves reading and he loves writing, bingo!Most of us struggle to work out how to make our hobbies pay.
In the case of my fiancé it was relatively simple, he is very good at what he enjoys doing and it’s a skill that is in demand, a clear and simple match. For many of us it’s more about understanding which elements of our hobbies and experience can be transferred into a new and fulfilling career path. A friend of mine has spent many years working her way up through a corporate to a very senior position.She is also a very warm and outgoing personality who enjoys making people happy. She eventually worked out that she could couple her highly tuned organisational and financial planning experience and natural people skills into running her own business, planning events. I would put money on her being far more successful and ten times more fulfilled in the long-term than if she had stayed with the corporate.
We need money to pay our bills and afford the things we enjoy, we need status because it’s all part of Maslow’s hierarchy, the need for self-esteem.We need power in the sense of some control over our lives and the ability to change things we do not like – but they are the things that do not speak to our soul, that do not make us feel that adrenaline rush of happiness when we think of our lives and the days ahead.
The systems Zimbardo refers to, can be adapted to the context of the workplace.They are these hamster wheels we get caught up in believing that to be happy or relevant in life we need to have a bigger house or car, we need to work harder than those around us.We need to earn more money and get promoted.We are supposed to be doing a really important job.Then when people are spat out of those systems through politics or redundancies they find themselves lost and in a state of shock – the system had told them they were important, how can the system survive without them?How can they survive without the system?Their identity is to be part of that system.
My psychology professor once said in class “When you want to work out what is important to you, imagine you are on your deathbed.Do you think you’d struggle out of the bed, stumble over to the window and play with the electric garage doors, admiring how beautiful they look and how fabulous your Porsche looked inside the garage?”
It is more likely that on our deathbeds we would want the people we loved around us and the achievements we would look back on with pride would not be that great excel sheet we managed to formulate or that amazing 60 page document we wrote 25 years ago.
It’s all very easy for me to say all of this from my armchair, but as I said at the beginning of this article, I am going through a layer of transition myself.I’ve realised I have put too much value on some of the things in life that keep me alive but don’t make me happy.Surviving isn’t enough.The difficult part is sitting down and working out what it is you need to change, maybe it’s something small, maybe it’s many little things or maybe a big change needs to happen. A couple of months ago I realised I needed and had an opportunity for a big change in my life, and I read The Psychology of Success: Secrets of Serial Achievement
, which helped me. For you a book may not help, you may want to try working with someone, such as a coach, to help
identify what needs to change in your life. You may need to just pack your bags and take some time out travelling. If you have commitments that mean you have to stay in the job you are in whilst you work out where you want to be, then maybe you need to take baby steps and slowly grapple some personal time back from your job.You can then use this time to spend that time doing what you enjoy and / or relaxing, in the process thinking about what you want to do next.
I understand that if you are not happy or feeling burned out you don’t feel you have the energy to even think about change let alone action it – but this is the only point when you need to. If you are happy and full of energy, there probably isn’t a lot that needs changing! I know it’s painful and I know it’s hard but if you confront them and chip away at them consistently, trust me, the barriers start to crumble and you’d be amazed at how quickly you start feeling your energy come back just by acknowledging what it is you want to change – even before you’ve actually done anything.
I never thought I’d be the one to say these words, let alone write them down, but I agree with the long-haired sandal wearers, be true to yourself – because if you are changing something you don’t like then you can’t lose but more importantly you don’t know what you’ll gain and that is the truly exciting part.
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