Authentic Success

It was a distinct shock to my system the day I realized that righteous anger is just an excuse to really get behind a reaction I was having.  I used it to allow myself to burn fiercely with all of the anger I had in me and cross emotional lines I normally wouldn’t.  It felt so good to just dump all of my angst, resentment, anger and feelings of injustice on another person without having to rationalize my reaction.  That is the danger of righteous anger… the permission it gives you to relieve yourself of your personal emotional responsibility.

Here are a couple of examples:

That ego-maniac boss who treats you with no respect and who dared to make an inappropriate comment this morning.  And you fume, you build that righteous indignation to epic proportions because it feels so good to have a target.  After all, he was unequivocally wrong. No other way to look at it.  He was dead wrong and you have the RIGHT to be angry.  Yes you do.  What you don’t ever have the right to do is ignore the fact that your reaction is ALWAYS about you.

How about that Mom who dares to question your parenting methods?  She is blatantly rude, narrow-minded and so out of line.  Whoa baby, watch my kids for a second while I tear her apart.  After all, how dare she?  Who does she think she is?  And you fume, and you build that righteous indignation to epic Mom-kicking proportions because it feels so good to have a target.

Let’s face it – righteous anger is dangerous because it feels so fricking satisfying AND it feels justified. That feeling of justification is where this kind of anger is deceptive. It makes you think your feelings are accurate and based in a universal truth.  I can promise you that is almost never the case.

Here is the truth – it is ALWAYS about you.

Your reaction is a product of your thoughts, feelings and experiences and has nothing to do with the actual behaviour that causes it.  That boss who so offended you?  He triggered YOU, and that is your job to manage.  That rude Mom?  She is hitting at your soft spots and triggering that reaction based on your beliefs about yourself.  They don’t matter.  Their behaviour doesn’t matter.  Your reaction does.  It is a magnifying glass focussed on all of your triggers.  It is a gift to be explored – not participated in until is turns everyone around you to cinders.

The next time you feel that swell of anger, I want you to follow these steps:

1. Recognize that rising, swelling anger before it hits peak destruction mode.
2. Get curious (without judgement) about what it is in this situation that has triggered you.
3. Be a detective and gently dig in to where the trigger came from for you.
4. Thank the anger for showing you where you can focus your love and attention in the future.

Righteous anger is seductive.  It can be powerfully destructive or powerfully informative.  It is your choice to make because it is always about you.😊

Whenever I talk to women about their talent, capabilities or success, they almost always downplay themselves. I’d say, about 90% of the time this happens. There are two main responses:  1) They genuinely don’t internalize their success (i.e. they have Imposter Syndrome), or 2) They actually understand that they just pulled off something great, but don’t want to sound like a “jerk”.  As much as Imposter Syndrome is my passion and specialty, I want to address the “feeling like a jerk” reaction.

I believe that feeling like a jerk comes from observing other women who celebrate themselves being treated like a jerk.  The empowering movement of having women be bold, take action and step forward consistently bumps up against the reality that they will be brought down with words, looks or actions if they do.  They are treated as arrogant, rude and, yes, like a jerk.  This is not just men reacting this way, I have watched women react chillingly to another’s success.  Contrast this sharply with a man celebrating a well-deserved success.  My observations have been that the people around him are happy to celebrate with him.  Like it is somehow more normal and acceptable for him to acknowledge his contribution to the world.  This standard of normal is very dis-empowering for women on their journey to authentic success.

Without getting in to a whole sociological debate on this, I simply want to encourage women to own their success and tell them that genuinely celebrating what you can, and have done, is never a jerk move.  It is powerful and necessary to build momentum, and move to your next level of success.  So please don’t allow your light to dim in the face of other’s potential reactions.  Celebrate the hell out of what you have done because you deserve it, and the rest of us need to see it!  Young professional women need to see you shining bright.  Our daughters need to see us stepping forward and owning our success with the same vigour as we own our responsibilities.  Our sons need to learn that this is the appropriate response to success for both men and women.

Let yourself be happy and proud for as long as you can hold that feeling.  It is preparing you to be able to hold that level of joy and excitement the next time.  This is a practice that will serve you on so many levels.  Power, joy, confidence, happiness, success – and all you have to do is celebrate!

A note for the men… this is not an attack on you.  It’s simple social conditioning that you can help change so that your wives, daughters, sisters and friends can own their very well deserved successes too.  If you find yourself not owning your success authentically, please know that I am speaking to you too.

If I were to ask whether you put undue pressure on yourself as a woman and mother over the holidays, would you reply with something like, “Does a bear….?” Check.

For most of my adult life, over the holidays I would routinely pull out “the big stick” if things weren’t just so, as my mother used to say. Of course, she was my role model (part of the challenge for most of us). As a child, each year I watched her frantically run herself into the ground. She would only declare “victory” when things went off without a hitch. To me it didn’t seem like a particularly good time, for her at least!  (As an aside, I used to wonder why my parents would start Christmas morning with Bloody Mary’s… hmmm.)

When I became a parent, I tried to model my mother’s herculean efforts. It damn near killed me. After a number of years, I began to ask myself how I had fallen into the same trap. Not surprisingly, it dawned on me that I was simply doing what I had seen my own mother do, without considering the huge divide between my circumstances and hers.

As a recovering imposter, wearing a mask of outward perfection was very important to me. After a lot of inner work and soul searching, I learned that I alone was judging myself, and that I could choose to be kind to myself, and banish “competence extremism” as we call it in our work.

This holiday season, I invite you to practice a little self-compassion, as I have slowly learned to do. Here are two suggestions for you to consider as we enter the “holiday chute”:

• Listen to your inner-dialogue. Self-criticism isn’t motivating! You were likely taught to have compassion for others. Make a pledge to yourself this year, that when you go looking for the “big stick,” you’ll try to treat yourself as a dear friend would.

• Forgive yourself for your need for perfection. It’s just not possible. In our group program last week, my amazing partner, Deb, led us through a tapping exercise based on the ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness, called Ho’oponopono. It was moving for us all. It is both healing and powerful to forgive ourselves, and others. I’m going to share it with you here. Repeat it a few times each day. If you’re a tapper, tap on the points as you say each sentence.

I love you.

I’m so sorry.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.

Give yourself a gift this year, that will unquestionably trickle down to those you love. Show yourself some self-compassion. I’ll be doing the same, right along with you. May your holidays be filled with light and love; and leave the dazzling to Martha!

Ever wonder why you can be capable, confident and powerful at work and yet, in your personal growth and development you feel like you are constantly floundering?  Or why you can be open, funny, silly and engaging at home, but that kind of behaviour has no place at work? For me, my “work self” was confident, solid, smart and powerful, and my “home self” was quiet, insecure, emotionally drained and in desperate need of a hug. These were two wildly different personalities that I put on every day. When I got exhausted enough by this pattern, I dug in to figure out why. The answer was pretty simple really – I was faking it at work!

Yep – I had simply learned to put an almost impenetrable mask of confidence on at work.  It let me be what I thought was a strong leader, a compassionate (albeit a little arrogant now that I think about it) listener, a great problem-solver.  It kept the vulnerable parts of me safe.  Genius really.  Or was it?

Here’s the danger if you notice your work life persona is a mask.  It is EXHAUSTING. I mean, on an energetic, authentic level…this kind of fakery is emotionally and energetically exhausting.  It robs from other areas of your life to shore up your professional life.  This might work temporarily to advance your career, but from an “authentic success” perspective, it is a flawed plan. One area will always be giving energy to support another, and eventually that imbalanced neglect will start to show.  You might get sick and need a few days off to recuperate, which allows you to store some much needed energy.  Your home life may get rather dramatic because you are short-tempered, exhausted and running on empty by the time you get home.  Your work may start to suffer because it is the only thing that will make you take notice.

For me, it was a series of dramatic and emotionally draining work events that precipitated my wake-up call.  A tricky thing about that confident mask – it blinds you to what your authentic self would see quite easily.  It keeps you operating in a state of fear that you have to be perfect, have the answer, push harder…all the damn time.  Here is the irony, your authentic, successful, flawed, powerful self, is so much more motivating and inspirational to others than your mask. Taking off that mask will allow you to fail without taking it personally, and achieve incredible success that you own on a very personal level (because let’s face it, you are too busy attacking the next challenge to own the success of the accomplishment you just achieved).  The truth is that there is immense power in shining your true face to the world.

Bottom line…the harder you are holding on to that mask, the deeper is your fear of not being good enough or accepted for your true self.  That fear is a dangerous place to live, because it cuts off your true access to happiness and success.  I can promise that taking off your mask is worth all of the learning, vulnerability and practice that it takes to show, shine and rock your authentic face to the world.  I hope you find that bravery for yourself – it is absolutely worth it.

Our brains are pretty incredible. They keep us safe by guiding our behaviour based on experiences. Our behaviour becomes a pattern that we unconsciously play out our whole lives. This is really great for the safety factor – after all, our thinking has kept us alive until now. What it’s not so good for, is breaking a pattern because it doesn’t differentiate patterns that are good for us vs. patterns that aren’t. Many of the beliefs we formed about ourselves happened between the ages of 1 – 8 years old. This is before our brains are capable of logical thought. These are not the beliefs that we want guiding our lives.

My 5 year old self thought she was stupid because she was a day-dreamer, which translated into a small being that wasn’t paying attention to other humans. That was often interpreted as “not being very bright”. You’ve seen this happen right? A kid in a store gets that exasperated sigh and angry look from Mom or Dad because they aren’t paying attention? Don’t get me wrong, as a parent it is exasperating…but as a child, I interpreted that sign as “I am stupid”. No judgement or blame here, that is how I (and a lot of other kids too) interpreted that expression and sound.

Now, my 37 year old self has had a lot of proof that I am not, in fact, stupid (I also don’t like to use that word, but it’s what my 5 year old self used).  Know how I knew that “I am stupid” was one of my core beliefs from childhood?  Because almost nothing else pissed me off more than feeling stupid as an adult. Red flag right there. My feelings were such an over-reaction to the situation that I had to figure out why.  I didn’t want to be reduced to tears or rage when someone questioned my work, or judgement, or opinion.  But that is what would happen, because those questions triggered my belief that I was stupid.  So I worked on it through EFT (tapping), paying attention to my reactions and making conscious choices about my behaviour.  Awareness is the first step, so give this a try:

1)  Recognize that your reaction is a pattern that has kept you safe to date.  So don’t be upset with it, just observe your feelings and try not to judge.

2)  Keep asking yourself “why does this bother me?” until you end up with an answer that has “I am” in it.  That is where the power of a belief lies, because “I am” is about the core of you.

3)  Congratulate yourself on your amazing detective work in discovering one of your core beliefs from childhood.  Just notice your feelings and reactions for now.  This is empowering awareness.

Beliefs can be changed. Not without awareness, and not without work, but they can be. For me, my belief that “I am stupid” has been worked through, and in its place I now believe “I am valuable”. That shift impacts my happiness, my relationships, and my fundamental success, because I no longer operate from a 5 year old’s perspective. Our negative beliefs are one of the rare times that feeling like a kid is NOT necessarily in your best interest.