Have you ever had great expectations of yourself that have set you up for stress?
With your nearest and dearest you might be fully open about how you feel about your personal progress, but outsiders may get your public persona, an upbeat version of how you are going. From your place of uncertainty and early stages of learning in a new arena others may seem so much more effective and productive. Well, you may be seeing an illusion.
With little knowledge of the ups and downs of others journey and their struggles its easy to assume that they did it all with much greater ease than was their true reality. But even when others speak of their struggles from a position of having made it, the impact of their story of how they got there is not the same as if they were telling their story while still in the middle of the struggle.
So what is normal versus not normal in terms of progress along our road of education, application and experience? We may have ingrained in our thinking a form of unexamined assumptions about what is normal and therefore what is better than or less than normal.
Fear
Hearing a summary of what others have achieved over years can set up overwhelm and fear that you can’t possibly measure up to or match them.
Seeing others succeed to extraordinary levels can play havoc with self-esteem, feeding feelings of worthlessness, or uselessness, especially when you are personally not experiencing anything near what you would like to be experiencing in terms of progress and results. The bigger the gap between your possible and actual the easier it is to so give up.
“I’ll never be that successful. I should have saved my energy and not even started.”
Expectations unmet and feeling not skilled enough, not smart enough, not discerning enough, failing to live up to expectations, your own or others, can be demoralizing.
Ability to attract
Often people feel disqualified from success if they don’t have specific abilities. “I’m no good with numbers, or planning, or selling.” The truth is people are unhappy and not focused for many reasons. Being told that following a formula set by others will prevent failure and solve all problems is common advice. Yet is success something to acquire, like a consumer item? Maybe it’s all about self development.
We live in a culture that tells us that success or lack reveals all about who we are, especially revealing deficiencies, and judging us as too incompetent, not focused or lacking disciplined.
The message sent is you have to be successful, you have to want success, and be good at success, yet there is no training in honest feed back and self-evaluation. I often ask, “Successful according to whom?” “For the purpose of what?”
Each of us will have our own idea of what success looks like or feels like. Where we got that idea in the first place is something else to explore. But once we choose our own arena for experiencing success, matched to our interests and desires, then we can take whatever action that will fulfill that blueprint we created for ourselves.
Watch a youngster learning to ride a bicycle or a skate board. Note the concentration, the practice over and over, the falling over, the getting up and doing it again, the progressive development of co-ordination and balance over time – till mastery is achieved, till success is attained. Will that same dedication and tenacity be automatically engaged for learning geography or English grammar? It all depends on the interest and goals of the individual.
Like the expectations themselves, the secret is all in our head. The mechanism for success is controlled by our higher faculties brain, the part housed behind the forehead, the front brain, the only part that does new thinking. Performance is controlled by what you think based on what you believe. Lets explore beliefs another time.
Questions for now
Who sets standards for your life? Is it you, your parents, your peers, industry gurus, the papers, movies? What is your definition of success? Success in what areas? For the purpose of what? How will that change how you feel about yourself?
Stress on any of these questions can be identified and dissolved with Kinesiology so you can be in a stress free creative state to find your own answers to the questions and create the life you want.
Life is a journey of self-evolution through experience. Good luck and have fun.
Cheers
Anna McRobert
www.annamcrobert.com