How to take new steps in your life without fearing people's judgements

Life is nothing but a cumulative string of successes and failures. These are moments when you come to a psychological and sometimes or even physical crossroads.

Failures bring your life to a standstill.  

The failure could come from completely a completely unexpected source. It could be the presence of a malignant lump or the chronic illness of a partner. Being passed over for a promotion or being put on a dreaded performance improvement plan, pretty much marks the end of your innings. After the initial resistance, the introspection begins. For people in the forties, adversity is a reliable trigger for a full-blown mid-life crisis. 

Successes bring celebrations and a resolve to move faster towards your goals.

For some people, the thrill of the success begins to wear a bit thin. The victory does not give you much pleasure. Usually, what happens when you meet your target? Well …your targets are increased. You have to deal with a rather similar set of fickle customers and unreasonable competitors. Of course, you still have to negotiate the same office politics, horrible traffic, and your waistline constantly reminds you that you are ageing.

Sometimes, it could be right in the middle. You are not wildly successful, but you are getting by. You make a decent salary. You are not a high flier, but you are part of the middle performer. But you are “doing well” for yourself, so why change now?

Failure and success both bring you to a junction. Where you start wondering, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? What will I get at the end of the day? What do I need to change? Why should I change? Of course, can I change? 

These questions become ruminative thoughts that do not leave you. 

Along with these ruminations comes the judgment of other people. We cannot help but notice that other people are judging you. They find you different from themselves. You are perhaps the bottom 20% or even the freak top 5%. You can feel judgmental stares being thrown towards you. If you got promoted, people are wondering; “What did she do to get that promotion?”. If your performance was below expectation; “Is he so stupid not to even achieve 50% of his goals?”.  

Then there is the change of decade birthday. When you move from the 20s to the 30s to the 40s to 50s to 60s. The questions of self-doubt start bubbling up. “I am not as attractive as I used to be”. “I am a pretender, I really did not deserve the promotion”. “Am I really up to it?”. “This cannot be true, how can I be so happy”. Your image of your own self starts taking a little negative tone. You start questioning, your capability, potential, circumstances, resources, and of course fate. 

Our life is a sum total of our experiences. We have all faced similar events, but the stories that we told about the events are what give a person a true reflection of their identity. It gives them a sliver of understanding of where have the come from and who they are being. 

Some people start questioning what is their purpose and meaning in life. You can click here to find out how some people have discovered their meaning in life.  

Others may have an idea about their meaning and purpose, but they start wondering, if they are living their values. In an earlier column, I had written about how some of my clients discovered their values. 

The time has come to now decide the new path. The decision on what needs to change. That is when it gets tricky. If you are a bit confused, you take the most instinctive action. You ask for other people’s opinions. Unfortunately, that is when it gets really messy. Most people “do not get you”. It is really difficult.  They who may not even know what you are feeling and thinking, but would have a ready diagnosis and prognosis. Everyone has a point, a valuable perspective, some experience, and an  “informed opinion”. 

It does take a lot of courage to even think of different options for your own self. When I meet business leaders, they really struggle to come up with options. It takes only a little bit of probing to figure out that they have not really put too many options on the table. At times the options were being evaluated with the end in mind. If they have decided to quit their jobs, they are just looking for validation of their decision. If they have decided a relationship is “not working out”, they just want to know the best way of executing what they have already decided. It is a tough choice. 

You are now being called to make a choice between right and right. 

Making a choice between right and wrong is relatively easy. Making the decision to choose wisely between two options or two outcomes, when both feel equally right, that is really tough.  

We are so tempted to take the proverbial “path less travelled” but then we have our expenses and loans to consider. Should you take a well deserved and much needed sabbatical to pursue higher education and risk falling behind your peers and risk your family? Should you have kids and keep your career and independence on hold? Should you still pursue your third marriage, because you have hope, or just be satisfied being single? 

Both decisions seem so right.

Rita Mae Brown

The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.

I think Brown was onto something. Are you doing something for yourself or for others?

I am not even remotely suggesting that other people’s opinions do not matter. Far from it. There is a lot merit in seeking opinions from experts, friends, colleagues, and battle scared veterans. With some many voices, some imagined and some real, what you really need is a way of bringing your voice to the forefront. 

All I am saying is that perhaps; the most important opinion is that of your own self. 

 

Dance like nobody is watching

What is it that you really seek? What motivates your inner-self and what drives you? 

We often hear the phrase, dance like nobody is watching. Why do we say that? When somebody is watching, you do not want to take a risk and show your awkward moves. We have the fear of being judged and mocked. It is meant to try and remove the desire for recognition of our peers. So perhaps the time has come, only momentarily, to shut the world out. Lets try and simulate an environment, where you can express yourself, when nobody is watching. 

Imagine starting today, your work and achievements will become anonymous. Absolutely nobody will know what you are doing. They will be completely unaware of your potential and capabilities. You will go about your day-to-day routines, and meet all your friends and acquaintances, but they will think that they will think you are in some mundane job, which has no impact whatsoever. You will achieve great heights, but nobody will know you did those great deeds. You might become the world’s richest person, but you cannot show your wealth. You might write the next Harry Potter but nobody will know that you are the author. You might run the marathon, but nobody will cheer for you. You might become the world’s best yoga instructor or school-teacher, but nobody will be there to appreciate your work. Nobody will recognise or encourage you to do what you want to do in life. 

Given that this is what your life will be, what path will you choose in each of the domains of your life.

At work: Will you continue on your job? Will you still pursue that start-up dream, even when nobody will applaud your path breaking products? 

At home:  Will you still give yourself to your loved ones? Will you still love them and sacrifice your personal gain to make sure they lead comfortable lives? In your relationships, will you continue to maintain the same relationships, or would you try and build some other relationships?

For your own self: Will your priorities remain the same? What paths will you select in the realms of say health and self-development?  

In your community: Would you still continue to give back and help those NGOs, even though nobody will appreciate your sweat and hard work? 

The reason behind why the goal is important will be an important determinant to how you will pursue the goal. 

Middle-aged men and women decide that they will run the marathon or undertake a course on spirituality. The answer we are trying to unearth is very simply this.  Are you undertaking new activities or changing the course of your life, for yourself or is it driven by a motivation from external sources? Are you heeding your own voice, or are you giving in to the voices of everyone else? Are the sources of your personal energy and engagement completely in your control or is it in the hands of someone else? 

For some people this exercise is very unnerving. They cannot imagine a world where they are a “nobody”. 

Once they get over that thought, suddenly they are set free. 

In this field, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan proposed the Self Determination theory to explore the various motivational states and drives of humans. 

Finding a sense of autonomy.

They become captains of their fate. Suddenly free to do what they really want to do. They now have the freedom to follow their innermost interests. Why! They could suddenly ask a girl out, because they have the freedom of ridicule. They could take up hobbies. Freed from the labels of cool and uncool, they are free to choose the career they want to pursue. They could make careers out of the hobbies or even make hobbies out of their careers. They can now pursue additional domains of life, such as community or spend time with the family. 

Suddenly there is no pressure to “win a contest” or to “earn higher incentives”. Emergent research shows that sometimes, introducing an incentive for tasks, which were inherently interesting for someone, actually reduced their motivation. Sometimes money and rewards tend to take away the shine from work that you otherwise found interesting and meaningful. 

Still other research shows that actions supporting a perception and belief of autonomy rather than extrinsic rewards, lead to a better outcome. A better alternative is to bring in novelty and raise the bar in line with the potential.

Pursuit of competence:

I still have to come across leaders who did not want to fulfill their personal and team potential.

On the contrary, most of my clients are in search for higher peaks and summits to scale. People get a lot of satisfaction when they are learning and acquiring new skills and competencies. They start developing new potential for themselves.

A very important ingredient of increasing your competence at work is the ability to seek and accept feedback. Freed from labels, they feel they would be able to use the information that is loaded in the feedback. Once their minds can be wrapped around the fact that they can choose the feedback they receive from their environment, it is a liberating feeling. They actually have the power to filter out the labels and stereotypes and focus on the information about their performance. 

The control or steering wheel is back in the hands of the leader. They have the freedom to now choose the path for competence.     

Then we add a layer back. Remember we spoke about being anonymous to the world. That pretty much puts people in a panic situation. So we not try and bring a little comfort back. 

Humans thrive on relatedness:

We need the support, encouragement, and love of the people around us. You can now consider say around five to seven people, in the entire world who matter to you the most. Think of the people who truly had an impact on the important domains of their lives. How do you relate to the people around you? Whose opinion matters and whose opinion hold no value to you? 

Now to bring it together. It is natural that we will adopt the values, social mores, and regulations of the social groups. If you think about it, your food habits, your dressing styles, community work, the language you speak, has been influenced by your relationships. 

To live up to the values, you need to feel that you have the competence. 

Therefore, if you want to undertake more community work, do you feel you have the competence, which is capability and time to follow the road of community service. To integrate community work in your life, you need to have a sense of autonomy to decide how you want to express and endorse your contribution to the community. When you operate from a platform of autonomy pursuing interests that speak to your inner voice, you need to positive reinforcement and guidance of the people around you, that is where you build relatedness. 

For example, I might feel that by spending my valuable weekends on writing this column, I am contributing to the cause of the business community becoming more positive and more productive. On the other hand, it could be just an advertising tool to get more clients, a necessary evil, if you will, to spread my brand name. It could even be, that I could have been an aspiring novelist or columnist with a tough editor who has given me a tough and non-negotiable deadline. By Sunday evening, I have to deliver my column.  

Of course, I could be motivated by all three. Maybe that is why I have managed to deliver sixty-six columns within the deadline? 

 

The activity is exactly the same, but the drive, motivation and ability to persist would be completely different.

What Deci and Ryan proposed were that drives could be of various types. 

For example, if you were considering losing weight or running the marathon. 

Your drive or the reasons to pursue those goals could be either of the following four, 

Externally regulated: Maybe your partner has been telling you to start exercising. You feel nagged. Maybe people are even calling you “unfit” or worse “fatso”. The stimulus is external. The regulation and reward (stop nagging you) is dependent on someone external. Someone besides your internal self holds the key to your happiness, engagement, and persistence to stay on track. There is a clear external reward or cost. You exercise only because to satisfy someone else. 

Introjected: Now, maybe the people around were telling you that had put on too much weight. Perhaps other people were on a fitness spree and there was a lot of talking of feeling good. You are perhaps feeling left out. What is really happening? There is a drive or a need to conform to the group. Now the drive is external, but it has been injected into your thought processes. You want to fit in, but maybe for your own benefit of fitting into the conformities of your social group. 

You start behaving in certain ways, but it is not really a part of your personality. Some how you start exercising. 

Identification: Once you start exercising, you start identifying with some parts of it. Maybe you do not like the exercise, but it does give you time for yourself. Maybe you start feeling good about achieving the little exercise goals that you set for yourself. You start relating it to the health benefits. You might even start reading up on exercising. Your commitment is more internally driven and lasts a bit longer. 

It still does not come naturally to you, but it does have some endorsement from you.

Integration: Over a period of time, you begin to love exercise. You look forward to the evening walk. Now you have become a bit more conscious about your eating habits. You start looking nicer. Your clothes fit a bit better. Your self image and self esteem gets a boost. You start achieving your exercise goals and the benefits start showing up in unexpected places. You are more energetic at work. Colleagues start asking you about exercise tips. 

Exercise has now become a part of your day-to-day life. It has become what psychologists called an intrinsic motivation. You have moved from being someone who never exercised to someone who enjoys exercise. Exercise is something that you do, with a sense of great autonomy and freedom. 

There it is. You have discovered your drivers. You have a tool to work with, when you are trying to figure out, what kind of goals should you set for yourself. The next time you are celebrating success or introspecting after a crushing defeat, try and relate back to why did you undertake the journey itself. If you are thinking of adding on additional domains, you might want to first figure out, what is it that you are really missing. 

To conclude, human potential is truly limited by the thought processes jumbling up the mind.

Great leaders are distinct from others in the sense of autonomy that they can instill in their people a sense of autonomy. If leaders have operate from a belief that their people deserve autonomy and independence to live their own lives and to pursue interests that are closest to their authentic selves, organisations will respond much faster. 

Even in the midst of adversity, if leaders have a starting point, that everyone seeks growth and competence then they might learn to speak a different language. If people feel that their views and opinions matter, they might work differently to unravel the layers of adversity to uncover new strengths and skills. 

Leadership is about the strength of your relatedness. How do you relate with the hopes and dreams of your people. How do you help them operate from a frame of autonomy and competency? How do you help people relate their personal goals to team, functional, and organisational goals?

Leadership is about having the autonomy to distill the circumstances and opportunities of life. It is about aligning the hopes and dreams with the competence they desire. It is about it is about the depth of relatedness with which you can speak to the authentic values of you and the people that you lead. 

When autonomy, competence, and relatedness add up, you have some potent levers of human nature to transcend from the mundane into a world of new possibility. 

Have a great week ahead. 

The author is the Founder of The Positivity Company, where he helps business leaders become more positive and productive. Birender can be reached on birender.ahluwalia@gmail.com.