Self-esteem never hovers. It is either rising or falling, based mostly on what is occurring in your life. It usually rises when you win, when you are satisfied with yourself and the progress you are making in your life. It falls when you lose regularly, when life is a constant struggle, when your confidence is eroded, when you feel no connection between you and the world around you.
Your work profoundly influences your self-esteem. People who change paths in mid-career nearly always report that their ill-fitting careers had damaged their self-esteem. Create a future you will be proud of, and your self-esteem will take care of itself.”
Years ago when I stopped smoking I used a technique psychologists call precommitment. I knew that the little voice in my head could easily talk me into just having one. And down the slippery slope I would slide. I made a deal with a friend who wanted to quit as well. We each wrote out checks for hundreds of dollars to the re-election committee of our biggest political nightmare. (We both picked Jesse Helms.) We switched envelopes, stamped, addressed, and ready to go. Then once a week we met, looked each other face-to-face and said whether or not we had kept our promise. If one of us caught the slightest flicker of lie in the other’s eyes, they would mail the envelope. There were times when I would have paid that much money for a cigarette, but knowing it would go to help re-elect Helms kept me on the straight and narrow.
The idea is to make it nearly impossible to crap out on your promise. Odysseus ordered himself lashed to the mast and had his seamen fill their ears with wax so he could listen to the deadly, seductive songs of the Sirens.
What is that huge challenge you want to face that you think your mind will con you out of fulfilling? What is that behavior or habit you want to change?
Find a cost you are not willing to pay and someone to play this powerful game with you.
When you are struggling through one of the difficult parts of turning your dreams into reality, you may wonder why you always get stuck with having to put up with so much fear and uncertainty. Why, you wonder, couldn’t I feel more courageous, like those other people do. You don’t feel courageous because courage is not an emotion. There is no such thing as feeling “courageous”. It is an imaginary emotion. Courage consists of doing what you said you would do even when you don’t want to. In the face of danger you have a choice to be the delegate of either your commitments or your feelings. It’s as simple and as difficult as that
When we make career decisions, we often ask, “what are my competencies?” “What have I done before?” Those questions cause untold misery. They might convince a cat to take that job in the trees. Can you imaging how miserable it would be having to face another day trying to eat acorns and searching in vain for a nice, juicy mouse? A better question: “what sort of work would fit me naturally, perfectly?
The old nature vs. nurture debate continues to rage. Some popular books say you were born a blank slate, that you can accomplish anything you want, you just have to put in the hours learning, that excellence does not spring from natural gifts (as well as lots of practice and good luck.) If that was true, we could search high and low and never find examples of innate gifts. Check out this video clip which blows the whole blank slate theory out of the water:
http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/download_video.aspx?Id=1507&Mode=Mac
Perhaps a better question is: will you struggle with work that isn’t a fit or discover your best talents and put them to work?
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