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Making friends with your weaknesses
Here’s a common fear when switching careers. What if you have become so conditioned that you won’t be able to function anywhere else? It kind of makes you wonder if you’ll be able to thrive in your new working environment. My biggest fear of transitioning from entrepreneurship to the corporate world was similar. What if spending the first ten years of my career working alone in my living room…
It would have been nicer to feel better sooner
Ellis’s research on irrational thoughts warns us to beware of the following assumption: Perfect solutions exist for every problem and we must find them immediately. His theory was that if we wait for perfect solutions, we often will miss the whole trip. And doing so will only lead to stagnation and frustration. Have you ever gone down that mental road before? Twisting your guts into knots with this false…
It’s not that hard to fool people
Some companies are not real companies. For a variety of reasons. Maybe the company is a total scam and has legitimately shady business practices. Maybe the company is operating with no profit because it’s just a play toy for some trust fund kids. Maybe the company is just a creepy guy who owns a truck and sends random people to your home. Maybe the company doesn’t sell anything, but…
I’m the psychologist here, so leave the googling to me
If we’re a bit screwed, then we are not going to simply unscrew ourselves on our own. Healing is a team sport. We may have operated as islands in our past, and that might have even been successful. But now that we’ve committed to living differently, the future needs to be one of connection. Even if that only means reaching out to one other trustworthy person, that’s enough. The…
Our results are amazing, so tough shit
When your company is making money and business is good and enough of the team is happy, it’s hard to make change a priority. Because why fold a winning hand? Why shake things up when they already work enough to be successful? Companies are like people in that respect. If they don’t see a compelling reason to step outside of their comfort zone, they won’t just do it for…
Working too much to obtain things that don’t make us happy
My coworker once told me that she feared people’s judgment anytime she left the office before six. And so, she started coming in earlier and staying until seven or eight. Every night. First one in, last one out. This dedication earned her a nice promotion, but her routine was not sustainable. People started casting sidelong glances at her for burning the midnight oil. Because in our modern work culture,…
Proud of having our own feelings about the world
There are no good or bad feelings, on healthy and unhealthy ways of expressing them. And if channeled in a meaningful way, every emotion can be of service. Dayton coined the term emotional sobriety, which means being in charge of our own inner world and able to experience deep feelings, understand them and talk about them rather than act them out in destructive ways. In the spirit of that…
The forceful reckoning with what is
Workaholism isn’t exhausting because we’re working all the time. It’s exhausting because we’re running around playing defense all the time. Medicating ourselves with all these tasks and projects as a way to stave off feelings of loneliness, insecurity, sadness, whatever. Protecting our auras, guarding our egos, armoring our hearts. Facing only inwardly. That’s defense. It’s definitely comfortable and secure. And the upside to operating in this mode all the…
Less critiquing, more complaining
Complainers annoy me, but they sadden me more. Because people who bitch about everything and everything under the sun are signaling to the world that they have no power over their attitude. And in this confusing and chaotic circus of a world we live in, attitude is really the only thing we do have control over. Look, we all get upset when things don’t go our way. Show me…
The place of our own from which we can never be dispossessed
Reveal as much as you can so you can get yourself to a position where you can reveal more. This is the real artist’s journey. Revealing to ourselves and others what we love and who we are. With that authentic intention, nobody can take anything away from us. And while everything we create will not be celebrated or even noticed, we will still have built a place of our…