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Today’s motivational gurus are hell-bent on boosting our self-esteem: “We’re okay just as we are.” “We are worthy just by virtue of being human.” “There's genius in all of us!" Hah!
Thinking you’re great is a fast way to ensure you stagnate,
probably in mediocrity...or worse—There’s no need to work on growing if
you already think you’re fine.
A common manifestation of low self-esteem is the Imposter Syndrome:
You have a degree that says you’re a qualified professional but you feel
you aren’t one. That’s often an accurate assessment because school-based
training, often longer on theory and arcana than on practice and
essentials, can easily leave you less than real-world competent. That’s
why, for example, many law firms provide extensive post-law-school training for their newly hired lawyers.
The answer to the imposter syndrome is not to dismiss it. My PsychologyToday.com article today tells what to do instead.
A 1959 journal article
reported that Type A behavior—what’s often called “hurry sickness” and a
tendency to get angry, increases risk of cardiovascular disease.
But a
more recent review of the literature in the American Journal of Public Health
found that a number of follow-up studies failed to confirm the claim.
The authors of that review concluded that studies prominently reporting
that link between Type-A behavior and heart disease were funded by the
tobacco industry as a way to deflect attention from cigarette smoking causing heart disease.
It may nevertheless still be that, when the, ahem, smoke clears,
Type-A behavior, especially its angry variant, will be shown to at least
modestly contribute to cardiovascular disease. And there’s little doubt
that an angry personality usually results in ostracism and less influence.
But rather than dismissing Type-A behavior as such a bad
characteristic that all efforts should be made to quell it, it might be
worth considering its upsides. I outline them in my PsychologyToday.com article today.
My just-concluded career counseling session motivated me to write my PsychologyToday.com article today.
My client has a PhD and is looking for a post-doc in a narrow specialty. He believes that eventually,
he needs to reach out to some of the field’s heavy hitters to get
guidance as to where to turn but, week after week now, he continues to
do more research to try to figure out who the right people are. He’s
still not sure. He admits this is a manifestation of his lifelong
problem with excessive rumination and inadequate action.
By the end of the session, he felt far more optimistic he can ameliorate his problem. My PsychologyToday.com article today. offers lessons he learned in that session. They're applicable to personal as well as professional life.
Most people end up in their career sub-optimally:
- They fall into their careers by chance.
- They pick from a few common choices: doctor lawyer, teacher, electrician, psychologist, etc.
- With a career advisor, human, video, computer, or text, they
inventory, abilities, skills, interests (if they have them, passions),
and values.
The latter approach would seem optimal but it’s not:
- It too often yields unrealistic goals—For example, the person dreams of making a solid living as an environmentalist, performer, sports
executive, or visual artist. Unless you’re brilliant, talented,
connected, or dogged, ideally all the above, they'll why the words
“starving” and “artist” so often adjoin.
- Most careers don’t require a narrowly constrained set of attributes. For example, there are introverted and extroverted psychotherapists, brilliant and merely workmanlike ones, sciencey and feeling-oriented ones.
- There are tens of thousands of careers, most that have many
variants. Even with a computer to screen careers, you’ll be (not very
validly) matched to a few from just a few hundred. Much better fits
could remain buried.
A better way?
In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer an approach that would seem to balance ease with accuracy.
Even some brilliant people suffer professionally and personally from the lack of a likeable personality.
And some such people don’t care: “I don’t want to play their silly
games.” But if you do care to, as the classic book, said, “win friends and influence people,” perhaps one or more of the tips I offer in my PsychologyToday.com article today will help:
