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My intention with each of these posts is that you’re challenged to interrupt the noise and routine in your life, just for a moment, to think more deeply about what really matters in life… your relationship with yourself and with others in your professional and personal life.
Action Summary
- Tune into your sense of worthiness about being successful
- Understand that ‘betterism’ is more healthy than perfectionism
The WHY:
In this post I want to get you thinking about your sense of self-trust.
Having the confidence and discipline to trust yourself might seem on the surface fairly easy to do. Whenever I ask conference audience members do they trust themselves, most people readily nod their heads positively. But when I follow-up with the question, have you ever let yourself down, again, the majority of the audience (albeit somewhat reluctantly), also nod their heads affirmatively.
This is what I refer to as an exercise of taking stock of your truth, and it’s central to understanding your character and the beliefs upon which you live your life.
For you to live a meaningful, flourishing and prosperous professional and personal life, first requires you to have a belief that you are worthy and deserving. This is a key ingredient of self-trust.
In ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’ author and researcher Brene Brown 1writes: “Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness.”
It’s a pretty tough road ahead for anyone whose personal belief is that they are not worthy or deserving of success in their professional and personal life. Your results in life are achieved through a combination of your skills, knowledge, attributes, motivation and of course your actions.
However, your skills, knowledge, attributes, motivation and your actions are directly impacted by your belief about who you are and your capacity and worthiness to be successful.
This is where the idea of striving for improvement – for betterism – is more healthy than adopting the hope of perfection.
With the Commonwealth Games just winding up on Queensland’s Gold Coast, we’ve had example after example of athletes who not only won medals but so many more athletes celebrating when they achieved personal bests. This is the embodiment of betterism – not always winning, but celebrating the incremental improvements along the way.
Let me summarise this with a quote from Dr Wayne Dyer:
“You are always a valuable, worthwhile human being – not because anybody says so, not because you’re successful, not because you make a lot of money – but because you decide to believe it and for no other reason.”
My best to you for now and remember when you intentionally improve the life of others in your professional and personal relationships, you set up the power of reciprocity … what you give out, you get back.
