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Posts in category Overcoming obstacles

The big value of small irritations

March 21, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

What if I told you that the small irritations you confront every day – traffic jams, a co-worker droning on pointlessly in a meeting, the grouchy checker at the grocery store – are potentially some of your biggest opportunities?

I’ve been working lately on really embracing the big value of small irritations. Each irritation we experience brings with it a learning laboratory that shines a light on how we respond, what our triggers are, what stories we tell, and ultimately how we get in the way of our own peace.

The other day it took me literally the entire day (from eight in the morning to around eight at night) to get my computer booted up and running (or perhaps more accurately, limping). Here’s a Facebook post from a couple days later.

“I have been using my uber-frustrating computer challenges the last couple days as a training ground for not getting sucked into a negative emotional response. Mixed results on that. Sometimes simply stopping and noticing what’s good in my life, or appreciating the beauty out my window, or even being thankful for the opportunity to practice patience. Other times throwing f-bombs around like a drunken sailor. “

Here’s what I love about using our daily irritations to practice becoming the person we want to become. First, they’re going to happen anyway – why not squeeze all the value we can out of them?

Second, they provide a reasonably low-impact opportunity to improve our ability to roll with life. When you get adept at working with the small irritations, you build coping muscles for the bigger challenges in life.

Third, the more I work with the small irritations, the more they cease to be small irritations. The more I let go of my stories about how things should be, the less worked up I get when the rest of the world doesn’t follow my rules.

Try this: For the next week, do a “small irritation experiment.” Notice the things that irritate you. Each time you do, ask yourself some questions, like:

  • How important is this, really?
  • What can I notice right now that is positive?
  • What might be positive about this situation?
  • What story am I telling about this?
  • What can I let go of?
  • What expectation can I soften?
  • What can I learn from how I’m responding?
  • What might a different response be? Am I willing to explore it?
  • What is the hypotenuse of the square root of chi squared times f(x)?

(OK, I admit, that last one was completely nonsensical, without even a shred of sense, but if it works to knock your brain out of the irritation loop, what the heck! Right?)

Give it a try. Experiment with it for a week and see what happens. Don’t expect to navigate your irritations with perfect aplomb (witness my plethora of f-bombs during my computer issues). The key is just to dive in, explore, learn, and grow.

–-

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Why I’m falling out of love with passion

February 6, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

Since 2001, my work has focused on helping people create careers and lives that energize and inspire them. So what’s the deal with the headline of this post? How could I be falling out of love with passion???

Well, perhaps it’s not so much that I’m falling out of love with passion per se (my definition of passion: The energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do). I still think passion is as important as ever.

It’s really more that I have fallen out of love with the almost manic focus on having more passion, more happiness, more, more, more!

Somehow the idea has developed that we need to shoot for a 100%, Mach 10, All-Fabulous-All-the-Time Life.

And that would be great if it had the slightest thing to do with reality.

But it doesn’t.

Whether you’re looking at your career, your relationships, your health, or any other area, life is a series of ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down.

The self-help world’s insistence that everything stay Up creates the impression that if you’re not jacked through the roof in Up mode, something is wrong with your life. Or worse, something is wrong with YOU.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that my love is expanding. Yes, I’m still head over heels about passion, and happiness, and all those lovely states of being. But I’m increasingly seeing the need for it all to be built on the foundation of decidedly less sexy ideas.

Ideas like being present in the moment. Like gratitude for what you have. Like accepting and even embracing what is, however challenging. Like learning to love your situation exactly the way it is. And learning to love yourself exactly the way you are.

One of the most limiting beliefs I see out there is the dichotomous view that we have to either madly scramble to improve, or sink into the mire of stuckness with a less than preferable situation.

That’s complete crap. Here’s a different take on it. You can both aspire to improve and learn to occupy your current situation fully, compassionately, with love. One doesn’t negate the other.

In fact, learning to occupy the present moment more fully, fighting it less and accepting it more, makes more room for the improvement you aspire to. You’re not wasting so much time and energy struggling and resisting, which means you have more to put into the changes you want to make.

Take a look at your own life. Do you see any either/or beliefs around growth and change versus accepting and embracing what is? If so, what impact does that have? Could you explore taking a both/and approach to it?

I’m not likely to stop talking about passion, or happiness, or being energized. But more and more I’m seeing contentment, grounding, and a proactive acceptance not just as a way to plug an energy leak  and eliminate a source of discomfort, but as a way to create the space for your pursuit of growth and goals to thrive.

–

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Energize your life, Personal development
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Sometimes the path to positive leads through the Land of Suck

January 30, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m not a big fan of a “positive at all costs” mindset.

Yes, a positive perspective is enormously important. And yes, it’s in your best interest to resist getting pulled into the downard spiral of negative thinking. There’s a lot we can do to create our experience of the world just by how we look at it.

But taken to the extreme, it’s a great recipe for sliding down the slippery slope of repression and denial. And what happens then? What you’re trying to stuff down doesn’t go away. The pressure builds, and at some point, in some way (probably a way you won’t like), it will come out.

Here’s the reality. Life is messy. You can steer your experience of it in a positive direction, but the odds are slim that you’re going to be able to have it be sunshine and daisies 24/7.

Sometimes the best path back to a positive perspective is to simply let it suck. Experience it. Accept it. Let it be what it is, rather than what you think it oughta be.

That’s not to say you should feed the suckiness. If you find yourself on the hamster wheel, telling that story of woe in your brain over and over, that’s a good sign that you’re prolonging the suck artificially.

Sometimes, if I find myself grappling with feeling particularly frustrated or down and nothing I do seems to shift it, I just create space for it. “Screw it. I’m just going to be here today.” I stop trying to get myself out of it and simply give it permission to exist.

Accepting and allowing, without making it wrong or trying to change it (or adding fuel to it), can sometimes be the best and most compassionate path to a more positive space.

Tricky, this life business, isn’t it?

–

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When all this happy schmappy talk feels like bullshit…

January 28, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

I absolutely believe in the potential we all have to drop what is limiting us and step into possibilities we can’t even imagine. I make my living helping other people create richer, more fulfilling careers and lives, so that view is a fundamental foundation for me.

Given that, it might surprise you that sometimes I listen to the incessant positive talk in the self-help world and think, “Aarrrrgh! This all feels like such bullshit!” When I have that response, one of two things is at play. The first is from a professional perspective, and the second is personal.

The professional perspective

In the self-help/personal development movement, there often seems to be an underlying message of not-enoughness. There’s a feeling that, “If I can only improve like this, this, and that, I’ll be OK.”

It’s a conditional acceptance – “When I ______, then I can accept myself.” And the almost manic Cult of Positivity feeds it like grade A fertilizer.

Do I believe that a positive focus is important? Vital even? Absolutely. Can personal growth lead to a richer, more fulfilling life? You bet. But when it becomes just another voice for the message that you need to be better than you are, something is out of whack.

The other thing that frustrates me is the way the excessive focus on the positive paints a picture of the ideal life as nothing but sunshine and fluffy bunnies. Guess what? If that’s your goal, you’re screwed! That’s not a realistic picture, and comparing your life to that ideal is a sure way to come out on the losing end of the comparison.

So from a professional perspective, I just want to jump up on my soapbox, grab a megaphone, and shout, “You’re OK! Just the way you are!” Yes, you have areas where you fall short of where you’d like to be. Yes, you screw up. Yes, you get in your own way on occasion. And while those are all opportunities to grow, you’re OK exactly where you are!

When you see those areas as opportunities to grow and evolve, you’re on the right track. But if you find yourself constricting and contracting, seeing them as the proof you don’t measure up to how you “should” be, it’s time to take a step back…

…and remind yourself…

…you’re OK, exactly the way you are.

(AND you have opportunities to grow and evolve).

The personal perspective

I’ve made a commitment to be as authentic as I can (not wearing the Guru Mask, pretending I somehow have it more together than others), so what about the personal perspective?

As I’ve mentioned before, the last couple years have been challenging for me. Along the way, there have been times when I have felt so close to the edge that I didn’t have room to maneuver.

I felt stretched so thin that I didn’t have any emotional buffer between me and whatever came my way. So each and every bump, even the small ones, felt bone-jarring. It was like riding down a bumpy road with no shock absorbers. All of the force of hitting the potholes and rocks was transferred straight to me.

So from a personal perspective, there have been times when all the happy schmappy focus, far from being a positive reinforcement that lifts me up, has left me feeling like I just don’t measure up, like the message being espoused was beyond my reach.

Along the way I have tried (with varying degrees of success) to take a different approach than a knee-jerk assessment of whether or not I measure up. When I find myself contracting in response to what feels like happy schmappy ideas, I step back from the notion that I need to improve in order to get to “good enough” and simply ask:

“What can I do to love myself, right now?”

That question takes me out of judgment, thwarted goals, insecurity, and the bazillion other things that conspire to drag me down. And it plops me right down in the present moment, focused on how I can be loving, kind, and compassionate to myself.

The more I can do that, the more space I create, and the more room I have to maneuver so I can turn my attention back to growing, improving, evolving, and achieving my goals.

Happy schmappy: Is it wrong?

So is all this focus on the positive wrong? Is it somehow bringing people down rather than supporting them?

Well, no. And yes. It depends.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a positive focus. In fact, as I mentioned at the beginning, it’s a vital piece of the puzzle in living into our potential. It only becomes problematic when we let it create a skewed picture of how the world should be.

Because the positive picture isn’t the full story. And to the degree that we try to pretend it is, we repress what we see as less palatable. And that repression inevitably has a negative effect, whether we see it clearly or not.

So focus on the light. And embrace the dark. It’s all part of the fullness of life.

–

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Personal development

How to turn a screw-up into a workout at the self-compassion gym

January 15, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

Dammit! Why can’t I just get it together??

And so began what might historically have been a prime platform for Brutal Bart, my vicious inner critic, to launch into a cutting tirade.

But this time it didn’t happen. Instead, I took a deep breath and dived into self-compassion.

It was pretty insignificant in the greater scope of things. I got the night wrong for a planning meeting for a workshop I’m co-facilitating and missed it. When I got a message from one of the others asking if something had come up, I started going into a knee-jerk self-flagellation mode.

I’m blessed to be gifted at a lot of things. Organization, unfortunately, is not one of them. As a result I have wasted a lot of time, missed a lot of opportunities, and just flat out screwed up.

So Brutal Bart wasn’t just gathering steam to take me to task for missing the meeting. He was gathering every single time my lack of organization has had a negative impact, getting ready to make his displeasure go supernova.

At least that’s what I assume he was doing. That’s what he usually tries to do.

But this time I headed him off at the pass. I was…<gasp!>…compassionate with myself.

Exercising my Self-Compassion muscles

It’s all part of my diabolical plan to dive deep into self-compassion this year with the Self-Compassion Project. Part of that project is reading and writing about the topic, but an even bigger part is using what happens in my life as an opportunity to exercise my self-compassion muscles so I get more adept at it and it comes more naturally.

Here’s a run-down of what I did.

I got objective.

This was the perfect opportunity to put what I’ve been exploring into action. To start with, I took a step back and looked at it objectively. What had happened, without any story overlay? I hadn’t shown up and the meeting had carried on without me. Nobody died.

Possibly my absence had made me look bad, but even that could be put in perspective. It wasn’t like I was caught on video kicking puppies. I had screwed up my calendar, which I could pretty well guarantee that every other person there had done at one point or another.

So that perspective defused my story about the whole thing. It helped me experience it as, while certainly less than preferable, not that big a deal. Certainly not worth pumping more and more cortisol into my system as I suffered the stress of self-criticism.

I got kind.

That objective picture gave me the space to aim a little kindness at myself. “Yeah, you screwed up. Yeah, your organization could use some work – maybe this is a good catalyst for exploring what you can do to improve that. And this isn’t your identity. This mistake isn’t who you are. You’re a good person, and you’ll make even more effort to make sure you pull your weight for the rest of this.”

I breathed.

I focused on my breathing. I played with some of the ways I’ve been learning about for bringing everything back down to earth and grounding.

I noticed, over and over.

From then until I went to bed, I noticed little surges where Brutal Bart was testing to see if maybe I wasn’t paying attention so he could get a toe-hold. When I did, I reminded myself of the objective picture. Paying attention kept Brutal Bart at bay.

What’s my point?

The point of all this isn’t to pat myself on the head and say, “Look what I did!” It’s to plant the seed for something each one of us can do, and that is to use the inevitable bumps along the way as learning lab experiments to learn, grow, and develop new skills.

As much as we want to avoid it, screwing up can actually be an opportunity to go to the self-compassion gym and train ourselves to respond in a more productive, self-loving way.

That certainly beats letting Brutal Bart run the show.

–

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Heart-based living, Personal development, Uncategorized
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Is your shadow getting in your way?

January 8, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

~ Carl Jung

In general anything I post, whether here or elsewhere on social media, has a positive flavor to it. There’s far too much focus on the doom, gloom, turmoil and trouble as it is without adding to it myself. Plus, opening the door for other people to embrace a more positive perspective in their world is where the juice is really at for me.

At the same time, there’s a danger in insisting that everything should have a warm positive glow, because that’s a great way to repress part of life. And what gets repressed has this sneaky tendency to pop out in the most inopportune ways.

In our own lives, that can create what Carl Jung called the shadow. As this article on the shadow describes it:

“The shadow, said celebrated Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung…is the unknown ‘‘dark side’’ of our personality–-dark both because it tends to consist predominantly of the primitive, negative, socially or religiously depreciated human emotions and impulses like sexual lust, power strivings, selfishness, greed, envy, anger or rage, and due to its unenlightened nature, completely obscured from consciousness…Whatever we deem evil, inferior or unacceptable and deny in ourselves becomes part of the shadow…”

In short, it’s what we want to pretend isn’t there. For example, I want to see myself as a caring, giving person. And I am. But if I’m honest, I’m also selfish and self-centered. And to the degree that I try to shove that quality out of sight and pretend it doesn’t exist is the degree to which I create a shadow.

Just because we don’t see it or want to acknowledge it doesn’t mean it’s not there or that it won’t impact our lives. It will. From dramatic examples like the uber-conservative preacher caught with drugs and a male prostitute to more mundane examples like road rage or binge eating, the shadow can wreak havoc on your life.

So you can bring it into the light and integrate it or shove it down below the surface and deal with the myriad ways it pops up anyway. The choice is yours. As tempting as it is to pack your life with love and light, if you don’t pay attention to what lies in the shadow – and work to integrate it – somehow it’s going to come around and bite you in the ass.

One excellent book I recommend if you want to dive in to some shadow work is Debbie Ford’s Dark Side of the Light Chasers. I worked through it last year, and found it really enlightening (no pun intended). I have a lot of work to do yet, but it was a great start.

Here is a video with an interview where Ford talks about the shadow and doing shadow work. It’s a good primer, and worth watching.

I’m all for light and love, fluffy bunnies, and fields of sunshine and daisies. But if you want to minimize the risk of a train wreck in the middle of it all, spend some time shining a light on your shadow.

–

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Give yourself permission to NEVER have it all together

January 7, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

Unless you know me personally, odds are good you have a skewed picture of who I am. Because of what I choose to focus on in my writing, etc., you probably have a picture of me as a positive, passionate, and (hopefully) insightful person with a commitment to focusing on what’s good.

And while that’s an accurate picture, it is also incomplete.

Forget having it all together

One of my big beefs about the self-help industry is how little most self-help experts talk about the “dark side” of their own lives. I don’t think it’s an intentional attempt to mislead. It’s simply the nature of what they feel called to focus on, which has more to do with the positive.

That winds up painting an inaccurate picture. If they own up to bumps and bruises, it is typically in the past tense. “I used to be like this. I used to experience that.” Barring any current information, people tend to fill in the blanks and conclude that those experts have it all together in the here and now.

The problem with that is that the people consuming their insights often don’t feel like they have it all together. Sometimes they feel like they can’t even relate to where the experts are coming from. And that creates a gap between who they perceive themselves to be and who they perceive the experts to be, one that makes it easy to say, “Well obviously I don’t have what it takes.”

I’m here to tell you, I have met very few people – in the self-help world or anywhere else – who if they’re really honest will say, “Yeah, I do feel like I have it all together. There’s no place in my life where I feel like a quivering lump of uncertainty/fear/insecurity/anger/whatever.”

Which means you can give yourself permission to NEVER have it all together!

My life: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Remember that possibly inaccurate picture of me? Here’s a fuller picture. Yes, all those good things I mentioned earlier are true. And I’ve had a really challenging last couple of years. I’ve struggled in numerous areas of my life, from a downturn in business to challenges with relationships to a spiritual dark night of the soul of sorts.

Have there been bright spots? Absolutely! Things like having a chance to interview uber-inspiring people like Byron Katie, Gretchen Rubin, Jen Louden and others, getting notes from clients telling me how their work with me has changed their lives, and the love and support I continue to be fortunate to get from friends and family.

At the same time, I have found myself grinding through dark patches filled with frustration and self-judgment and an inner critic run amok (I call my inner critic Brutal Bart). There have been times when I just wanted to explode. Times when I have felt stuck face to face with problems I couldn’t find solutions to, feeling inadequate and inept. I have screwed up more times than I like to admit, big time on a couple occasions.

Harvesting the blessings of trouble

As much as all that has sucked, I also feel really blessed by the challenges I have encountered. I have grown more, evolved more, become more aware, let go of more, and found a greater overall sense of peace in the last two years than during the entire previous decade.

As I have navigated life the last couple years, I have found myself on numerous occasions having the dichotomous response of wanting to scream in frustration and simultaneously feeling really blessed to have the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that can only be done when things are challenging.

Along the way I have had the opportunity to work on letting go. To work on loving myself more. To sort through limiting stories about myself and release them, over and over and over. To stop resisting discomfort and and be with it instead. To bit-by-bit let go of my identification of my small and limiting sense of self.

And as much as I would like to say all of this in the past tense, the reality is that it is still going on. And to varying degrees, it likely will till the day I die.

Newsflash! I’m human! (Oh, and so are you.)

My focus on the positive in my writing is authentic. I frequently ask myself the question, “Is this the kind of energy I want to put out there?” before posting something, for example, on Facebook. And despite my frustrations and dark patches, I’m still pretty chronically optimistic. Overall, I feel pretty good about my life.

But do I have it all together? Ha! ROFLMAO even! I happen to be really good at what I do, but I also have as much FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in me as the next person. I have my own challenges, and I struggle with my own demons.

That doesn’t mean I’m irreparably flawed (despite the fact that sometimes I feel like I am). That doesn’t mean I don’t have what it takes to create the life I feel called to create (though I sometimes don’t believe that) . That doesn’t mean I’m broken (even though I’m occasionally quite sure I am).

It means I’m human. It means I’m on this journey, just like you, learning and growing, exploring and stumbling, sometimes feeling shitty, sometimes shining.

I don’t always like the path, but I have started to learn to feel blessed by it. And to keep going and growing.

I hope the same is true for you.

–

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Authenticity, Personal development

Radical New Year’s resolution: Be OK

January 2, 2014 Written by Curt Rosengren

It’s only January 2nd, and I’m already feeling overloaded with the manic frenzy of ways to transform ourselves from slovenly, unwashed peasants into shining princes and princesses.

I suspect that it’s a function of where I am on my own path, but all the achieve-your-goals-lose-weight-be-a-superstar-change-your-life focus is ringing a bit hollow for me. It all feels like changing the color of the frosting on the cake of life.

Here’s a radical idea for a new year’s resolution: Be OK.

I know, it’s not especially sexy, and it probably won’t sell many self-help books. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like a vital ingredient of the cake.

If I could make one single wish for any of us for 2014, it would be this: To find peace with who we are. To realize that all the stories of insufficiency and lack we tell about ourselves are the supreme fiction. To learn to love ourselves as is, without needing to spit-shine ourselves first.

In other words, to be OK.

That’s a big part of what my self-compassion project for 2014 is all about. I get glimpses of it here and there, more frequently now than I used to, but still not as much as I would like.

Here’s my belief, even if I can’t always feel the reality of it. I believe that each and every one of us, when you strip away all the stories and patterns and beliefs about ourselves, is inherently enough. We’re inherently OK, just as we are. More than just OK, we are each an embodiment of love, and we are each here to bring that love into the world via our own particular gifts, skills, and even personalities.

It’s like the meditation analogy of weather patterns on a mountain. In this case, the stories and patterns and beliefs are the weather, and the mountain is the core of who we really are. To the mountain, the raging storms of not-enoughness are surface level chatter, completely irrelevant at a deeper level.

“I’m not OK” is a story. It’s a work of fiction, one that feels insidiously real and solid. It prevents us from showing up from the heart, and it spills over into the effect we have on the world around us.

Here’s what I believe to be true. Try it on and see if it fits. If you don’t achieve a single thing or make a single change for the better in 2014 besides moving more deeply into an awareness that beneath all the surface chatter you are enoughness itself – if you learned to spend more time as the mountain – the year will have been a stunning success.

So this year, make one of the most radical and important resolutions you can make. Learn to be OK.

–

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Heart-based living, Personal development
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Where is your focus taking you?

October 22, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

One day a few years back I was in the gym, running on the treadmill. As I ran, I was watching hockey on a TV in front of me and a bit off to the side. Absorbed, I stopped paying attention to the treadmill. Slowly, step by step, my stride started drifting in the direction of my gaze.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t end well. My left foot came down on the non-moving side of the machine, causing me to stumble. My right foot hit the still-moving belt, and succumbing to the laws of physics, I shot backwards off the treadmill.

Trying to play it cool, I jumped back on immediately without missing a beat. And without missing a beat, the treadmill shot me right back off. It caused enough of a ruckus that everyone in the room turned to look. “Hey man, you OK?” All there was left was to fend off my feeling of humiliation with humor. “Nothing hurt but my pride,” I laughed as I cautiously mounted the treadmill again.

And that’s exactly what we happens to us so often in life. Our focus determines our direction. That fundamental truth can be used to your advantage, but too often our focus drifts off-target. We start directing our attention to our fears, or to our self-limiting beliefs, or to our destructive habits, or to what’s wrong with our life.

And when our focus turns away from the goal, guess what happens? We drift off the path. Sometimes it’s a slow drift until we find ourselves lost in the middle of the overgrowth, wondering how the hell we got there. Other times it’s a bit more dramatic, and we end up getting shot off the back of the treadmill.

Do a focus check

Where is your focus on a consistent basis? Do you center your attention on the vision of who you want to be and what you want to create in your life, or is it aimed at your fear of what could happen? Do you pay attention to what’s positive and enhancing, or is your awareness filled with the limiting and destructive?

Realign your focus

If you need to realign, how can you shift your focus to reflect your vision of the life you want to create? Here are some ideas.

Start with a vision: Without something to focus on, drifting is inevitable. That vision could be a goal, a picture of who you want to be, how you want to live your life, etc.

Take stock of the drift: How is your focus drifting? Are you replaying worst case scenarios over and over in your mind? Are you spending time creating a negative world view in your mind by watching the news? Are you wasting time focusing on things that don’t really matter?

Course correct: Once you know what your ideal focus is and how you’re drifting off track, ask yourself, “What would acting in alignment with that vision look like? What would support movement towards it? What specifics steps would lead me in that direction?” Start bringing more of that into your life.

Odds are good this will be a constant process that you will need to revisit again and again and again. That’s fine. Because even if you find yourself drifting off-target again and again, when you make a habit of regular course correction, the net result takes you in the direction you want to go.

–

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Energize your life, Fear
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Newsflash! Everyone else is clueless too!

June 28, 2013 Written by Curt Rosengren

In my Passion Catalyst coaching work, there’s a frequent conversation I have that goes something like this…

Client: Everybody else seems to know what they want to do in their career, and I’m just lost. I’m stuck. Gawd, I suck. There must be something wrong with me.

Me: Don’t worry. Everyone else is clueless too.

OK, so that’s a really abbreviated version of the conversation, but it’s the basic gist of it.

If there’s one thing I have learned over the last dozen years of helping people energize their careers (and their lives), it’s that the facade of “I’ve got it all together” doesn’t run very deep for most people. Underneath is a litany of uncertainty, doubts, and fears.

Take people’s careers, for example. When you look around, it’s easy to think that most of the people around you feel like they’re on the right path. And yet statistically, studies have shown year after year that over 50% of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs! And another 30+ percent are only “satisfied – as in, “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” Only 15 percent or so really love what they do.

Not exactly in line with “everyone else seems to know where they’re going,” is it?

Just because people don’t wear a flashing neon sign advertising their uncertainty and dissatisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not there. So next time you feel compelled to compare yourself to how together other people seem to have it, just remember, “Everyone else is clueless too.”

It might not be in the exact same way you’re clueless. They might not have the same fears you have. They might have clarity where you feel uncertainty. But somewhere in their lives, in some way, I can just about guarantee that they’re experiencing their own version of doubt and insecurity.

If you use other people as a measuring stick for assessing how you’re doing in your life, you will always be able to come up short. Why? There’s a quote I love from pastor and author Steven Furtick that somes it up brilliantly:

“One reason we struggle with insecurity: we’re comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.” 

So remember, when you fall short in your comparisons, you’re only seeing the highlight reel. Let go of how other people are doing, and focus on your next step.

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Fear, Personal development
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