being a "miserable success" vs "content success"
A lot of us have a certain level of success that we’ve decided we need to have. 💵 I think of it as the dotted green line in this graph. Sometimes, we start to get worried that our success will start to fall below that point, that we lean into a little bit of demanding self-talk in order to fuel our effort and keep our success up.
And then we learn that being hard on ourselves gets us results. 🤔
And so we lean into (somewhat relentless) negative self-talk in order to fuel our effort.
That increased effort allows us to stay about the green line, but has the unfortunate effect of moving us from a “content success” to a “miserable success”. A lot of us (me included) have spent (substantial) time in this spot.
What we tend to forget (or maybe we just don’t believe) is that if we put in the effort without the negative self-talk, we can still be successful, except now we’ll also get to be happy and fulfilled.
If you’ve made the transition, how did you learn to decouple your effort from your self-talk?
-Paul
PS. Truthfully, the vertical axis could more appropriately be termed success rather than effort, success has many variables (of which your effort is just one), but effort is probably one of the ones you have the most control over, hence why I've got it up here.
This was today’s email. Like it? Join here: