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Hello everyone,
Writing from the midst of the summer heat, I’m reminded that this season is the time of passionate action (or hiding inside for air conditioning, #thxClimateChange).
Because so much is going on, so much is happening, I want to take some time to reflect on what is behind the action.
One of the hope is to train myself and you who read it to notice more of the hidden determinants in how we show up in life, and more importantly take wise action from that place.
In many sense, the material for this reflection has been in the making for several years.
This has been a difficult birth because of the extent I tried to make sense of the inner landscape of motivation and connecting it with what happens on the outside. The world of relationships and work. Writing it also takes long enough with both the nitty gritty of the change in how I operate and the larger observation of life.
It’s particularly relevant for those of us who consider ourselves “young, driven and passionate”. What happens when we no longer care? Why do we burn out and is there way for us to avoid it?
As someone who is deeply invested in growth and development, I’m more and more convinced that “going all in, crash and transform” is not the only way to operate.
I hope it invites some reflection from you. Do share and write back to me if it resonates.
With joy and gratitude,
Khuyen
Beyond Pride
Some self-image is hard to change.
The other day I was talking with a friend who was well-educated from an elite college, smart, ambitious, humble and growth-oriented. Impressive all around, she was already contemplating her next moves while recovering from the breakup of a long relationship.
Her ex seemed to be with someone already, which made her visibly upset. “That’s a bit too fast. I’m not like that, I wouldn’t want to do that so fast. I can’t do that myself now yet.”
Having listened to her for a while, I blurted out in one of those spontaneous gotcha moments that shifted the conversation.”You know, sometimes you don’t need to prove to yourself that you are better than this”.
After a brief silence, I said: “I know you wouldn’t want to do it because you are a good, heartful, sensible person for whom rebound seems pointless and even cruel to the other person. I just want you to know that it’s okay to not have to prove that you are a good or worthy person. It’s ok to grieve.”
She seemed to calm down. I didn’t know if my opinion mattered much, but I felt the need to reassure her.
“You have a lot of drives, and they have pushed you to do well and succeed in many endeavors. What a wonderful gift. At the same time, please know that you don’t always need to prove to yourself. It’s ok. I know your goodness.”
Proving Oneself: the good, the bad and the ugly.
I’m no stranger to this need of proving oneself. For me, it is not so much about proving to others but to myself. It began since my high school time in Singapore, where I went through that Tim Ferriss self-hacking phase from exercising, dieting to improving mental models and trying all productivity tips & tricks. For a while it felt so exciting to constantly track and improve myself. I badly want to be better in everything I do; otherwise, I would feel like a lazy loser.
What is surprising is that this need to prove myself does not only show up in personal pursuits but also in relationships. I notice my own need to prove to myself as a good, dedicated, committed person who can persevere in the many faces of conflict.
In a very practical way, that has allowed me to endure difficult times when love is hard to find. I persevered because I didn’t want to damage that self-trust that has taken long to build.
By self-trust, I don’t mean the aggrandizing way of “Piece of cake I can do that in my sleep” but more of the quiet, calm and intimate knowing of oneself, its present situation, aspirations, its weaknesses and strengths. Indeed, through relationships I have become a lot more confident and trusting of my own capacity to handle challenges.
This brings me back to the conversation with my talented friend. Our desire to be somebody, to prove ourselves and grow can really push us to achieve a lot. Achievement is a good thing, especially for the spiritual wonk like me who tend to fall in the trap of philosophizing about spiritual ideal and become a reclusive bliss-head (my gosh, am I falling into it again?)
Indeed, you have to become someone first before you can let go and be no one.
Now I conclude that we cannot skip this step, no matter how much hippie spiritual “Love makes the world go around” stuff we aspire to.
Our development in reality is not that linear though. Rather, it is simultaneous, messy and confusing with occasional regression and sudden breakthroughs. This is why I only gently remind my friend rather than assert to her (thus proving that I’m right i.e not walking my talk) “You are already someone. To your friends. To your family. To the people you work with. Maybe the people whose opinions matter to you haven’t yet seen you in the way that you want yet. In their eyes, you are still less than Someone. But at least for me, you already are.
So remember that you don’t need to bear that burden of proof all the time.”
A very brief primer on Pride
That conversation about the need to prove oneself also made me reflect on Pride, especially since I was introduced to the Power vs Force model by David Hawkins.
Note: This graph is an over simplification — read the book!
Modern societies often view pride as a good thing, for at least it seems to motivate people more than guilt, fear, even anger. Even though it seems to be on the darker side of self-esteem, i.e being too proud, most people would still advise each other “you should be proud of your own accomplishment”.
Other examples include: Make America Great Again. Becoming Number One.
Winning The Game. Parents being proud of their kids’ achievements.
As someone who generally doesn’t care as much about the opinions of others, I used to think that pride is not a big personal sin. Alas, I was so darn wrong.
It was only until I started doing internships in college did I saw the strong connection between Pride and the need to prove myself.
Indeed, few other places demand you to prove yourself than at work, especially if you are a bright and young person. Job interview prep teaches that the goal is to convince and prove to the employers of your value and worthiness. Once you start the work, you’d better prove yourself till you earn the trust of your boss. If your boss knows anything about motivation, they can nudge you like “Hmm, don’t you think you can do such a simple task like that faster?” Perhaps much of management is still in this mode, especially when people’s worth is tied to their performance and managers finds all sorts of ways to squeeze more performance out of employees.
Pride and the Desire to Grow
Pride presents itself even behind the need to prove myself, to the desire to constantly grow and the identity of being a “growth-oriented person”.
You might have heard of the now cliche observation that “Millennials at work constantly talk about the need to grow themselves and will jump ship to new growth opportunities whenever they can”. On top of that is the larger culturally sanctioned value of “growth” where all the respectable thought leaders talk about growth-mindset and building growth-oriented organizations.
That’s pretty much true for me. Nevertheless, whenever an idea like “growth” or “learning” is becoming popular, I’d ask myself “How much of that is me jumping on the bandwagon to signal how cool I am vs actually verifying its goodness through my experience? Similarly, whenever a stages of development model like Power vs Force is used, I’d be weary of any simplistic interpretation “the lower stage is bad, the higher one is good” or my own “Well, I’ve been stuck in Pride for so long that I want to act more out of Love”. For better or worse, this journey is definitely not linear, and the way to progress necessarily takes us much deeper inside what we already are. Rather than progressing up a ladder, it’s more like peeling off layers of the onion (often with tears) to eventually find the essence.
As such, I felt the need to go deeper than my usual “growth-oriented” identity. There were a few periods in my earlier life where I was so uncomfortable for not growing as fast (as an internal subjective sense of “I’m learning so much!”) At that time, I was frantically finding ways to fine-tune my growth process by trying different things. That would have made me a very good growth-hacker, to use the tech startup terms.
Looking back, despite the initial excitement and the dopamine from whenever I could tweak something and solve a problem, I was denying one truth: “Behind all those was a deeper, more fundamental restlessness”. Ironically, me worrying about not growing that fast was part of the problem too. It took me a crisis to accept that.
That brought me to the harder question: what kind of growth is truly worthwhile? Is this in size, capacity or performance? Or the second half of life kind of growth in terms of wisdom and depth?
Only in hindsight I could see the extent of my pride through the self-imposed pressure to grow. I also saw that despite its initial fiery enthusiasm, pride eventually drained me. The intense effort in trying to meet a personal goal, the addictive self-flagellation of beating myself up for not achieving what I set out to do, all of these did more harm than good to the psyche.
I had a big aha reading this line from David Hawkin: “Hate isn’t the opposite of Love but of Pride.”
Only when I’m too prideful of myself that I can hate other competitors or the game itself. Only when I have too much pressure to prove myself to myself do I get into that kind of self-hatred situation.
The truth was that I’ve got so tired of doing things to improve myselfalready. I took this game a bit too seriously that it lost all the fun. It doesn’t help that most of the practical self-help section is designed to teach us how to win this self-improvement game and very few are about how to play it well (which doesn’t always mean winning) and keep enjoying it. If the smart solution is to set more realistic goals and get accountability, then wise approach is to get to know and accept where I am.
Both are needed, and more and more I see the need to lean on the latter.
Letting Go of the Need to Grow
At I contemplate on this more, I began to see that pride, masking itself through the need to prove myself or the desire to constantly grow, came from a deeper place of “not-enoughness” that I’ve spoken about here.
Here’s the catch. That “not-enoughness” can bring us quite far, and not further.
Pride is more like firework than sunlight. It’s nice, but it’s not quite a sustainable source of inner motivation. As such, the right response to pride is to be grateful for how much pride has fueled us, and ONLY then acknowledge that what got us here won’t get us there.
Without acknowledging it, the process of finding a new and better source to replace pride will be painful. In my case, it took me at least six messy monthsto let it go, particularly under this identity “I’m someone who seeks for challenges and growth”.
It doesn’t mean that the growth mindset is no longer there — it still is. What is different now is that I can hold it more lightly and thus making space for other identities to come in, such as the part of me who likes the trivial and jovial, who is lazy and doesn’t feel like working hard. With enough space in my own inner house, these two don’t necessarily have to fights but take turn to lead. Amazing enough, re-embracing that jovial and playful part of me back into work (not just in vacation) has done more to my life than any productivity tips and training programs.
The practice is simply to notice whenever there is a voice inside asserting itself “Yo, don’t forget you are the kind who seeks challenges and growth, don’t give up just yet” and then taking a moment to just breathe. The silence in between is affirming “It’s okay. I know, you don’t have to prove that.”
With enough practice, the impostor syndrome thought of “I’ve got to prove myself, otherwise people will know that I’m a charlatan and I’ll feel super shitty” doesn’t frequent as much. When it does, I can recognize and breathe.
The (Tricky) Path To Acceptance
The shift away from the need to prove oneself to the acceptance of where one is happens slowly over the course of a young adult journey.
In theory, most if not all of us know that more energy is wasted on proving ourselves rather than doing what is meaningful and purposeful to us (which ironically will eventually be our best proof anyway). In practice, it takes a while for our whole body and emotions to catch up with such intellectual insight of self-acceptance.
This transition comes with several tricky parts. First is the initial confusion: without the need to prove myself, to grow and be someone, where do I get the drive to do what I have always been doing?
One helpful analogy that helps me after having been through this phrase for a while is that if you are used to cook with fire coal and now you switch to electric stove, the initial response will be “WAIT, there’s no fire how does food get cooked?”
It still does. While fire has its enormous place in the kitchen of the existential chef, not everything has to be cooked via visible fire.
The second tricky piece is the nostalgia: what if I miss fiery, ambitious part of my proud past?
To continue the analogy, the kitchen still has the fire coal that you can use for things that need it or when you feel nostalgic. It’s just that your taste and cooking style has changed. As an example, let me share with you my experience of the shift.
For me, pride often has a swelling up and stiffening physical component, with the seeming invulnerability of a suppressed anger. Pardon the phallic connotation, but it’s really like reaching an orgasmic peak: super nice at first and then followed by a crash and a letdown feeling.
Not that there is anything bad or wrong with swelling up. Quite the contrary, most of us, myself included, will die for a bit more of such peaks. Think about the last time you achieve a personal goal, be it a new weight at the gym or a new sales record. Wasn’t it the best thing ever?
In deeper contemplation, I discovered something profound: the pleasure of proving myself is rather meh. Yes, it’s good, and soon enough it becomes “okay”. For me, proving myself now becomes a “good to have and fine not to have”, “topping rather than cake” type. For better or worse, the Sisyphean task of continuously pushing the boundaries and achieving something to prove to myself is getting tiresome. As a pastime motivation for indulgence, it’s nice, but surely there must be more to life than that?
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See the full post here on Medium
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
From this beautiful talk at 17:40, Reflection on Carl Jung & Love. For those philosophical soulful singing.
“When in your life did you stop?
Singing (or bringing your voice forward)
Dancing (or moving your body)
Enchanted by storytelling (esp your own unfolding story)
sweet territory of silence (in contemplation & reflection)
This is when you start experience the loss of your spirit.“
Angeles Arrien, cross-cultural anthropologist speaking about the human journey. I just discovered her recently and have been grokking!
“Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment. [...]
The most compassionate people are the ones with clearest boundaries.
I can see God in you, and I do not stand by the things you did. “
Brene Brown in her interview with Russell Brand. She’s one of those public author whom I respect: funny, brave, and definitely no fluffy.
Another short story she wrote about that just rings so true.
When Brene asks her husband Steve as part of her research if "people are doing the best they can", he answers, “I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.”
She continues "I cannot imagine the fact that they have done their best because that means I’ll have to let go of my anger. And boy, anger is addictive."
That's insight from someone who lives through it!
Lastly..
Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be helpful.