The question must be asked: if the idea of living your story is so inspiring, and the guidelines for doing so are so simple, then why don’t more people do it? Why do so many fail to even consider themselves for the lead of their own story?
Pitfalls, baby. Pitfalls.
Indecision, Ignorance, & Inflexibility
Many self-limiting behaviors are rooted in self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs, when they are part of the exposition of your story, will stop you dead in your tracks before you ever take one step toward your goal. Remember The Wizard of Oz? Each of Dorothy’s three friends had a serious limiting belief that kept them in place until Dorothy arrived. And while they were each supporting characters in her story, they weren’t even protagonists in their own story until she came along and gave them permission to join her to Oz. They, like many of us, had succombed to self-limiting beliefs.
Down here in the real world, three pitfalls that regularly do people in are indecision, ignorance, and inflexibility.
Indecision
Moments of indecision—a.k.a. hesitating, freezing, choking, crumbling, vacillating, waffling, hedging, equivocating, collapsing, having second thoughts, falling apart, getting cold feet, hemming and hawing, losing focus, exiting the flow, or getting wrapped around the axle… among other things… are caused when the stress of a moment kicks your ass. Some people have a high tolerance for stress and can perform gracefully even under the most intense pressure; others crack up when at the slightest inconvenience. Whatever your ability to stay focused under pressure, expect your story to take you to your limits. (The difficulty of the challenge is what makes it a story.)
Ignorance
Ignorance, whether caused by a lack of education or lack of experience, leads to a lack of trust and an unwillingness to communicate with others—in other words, intolerance of others. Not the best thing when you’re trying to progress your story forward. I picture ignorant people as the ones who actively promote themselves by tearing others down: since they don’t trust the person and have closed off any avenues for regaining trust (because they shut down the communication channels), tearing the person down starts to seem like a good idea. In fact, engaging with “the enemy” in any way begins to sound crazy: why would anyone talk with someone they didn’t trust?! Of course, ignorance leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the untrusted person on the other side of the communication divide, once robbed of any chance of building a relationship, is left with no other option than to bring a fight and deal with the ignoramus at his or her level.
Ignorant people are dangerous, both because of their small-mindedness and also because they are particularly susceptible to others who understand how to “control the frame.” From a story perspective, people can certainly get from cradle to grave as ignorami, when they reach their end, they realize their goal was a mirage and they had been used to advance someone else’s agenda—often at a horrible price.
Inflexibility
Inflexibility—the kind that leads you to tag a person as rigid, uncompromising, obstinate, stubborn, and especially intransigent—is caused by unrealistic approaches to FAITh: Fear, Ambiguity, Incompetence, and Time horizons. As your story unfolds, you will begin to face obstacles, and those obstacles will generally appear in the form of things that are scary (triggering fear), new and different (forcing you to deal with ambiguity), difficult (causing you to develop new competencies), or that throw off your clock (pushing you to speed up or slow down). Overcoming these obstacles requires a certain amount of flexibility because in each case, you need to adjust your approach by stepping into the unknown… and once you step into the unknown, who knows what’ll happen. You’ll need to be open and ready for it.
If you fail to adapt—or simply refuse to adapt—you’ll find your world shrinking. Obstacles will go away, but then, so will everything else, until you’ve done walk Pink Floyd warns about in “Wish You Were Here,” and find you’ve exchanged “a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage.”
Stay bendy, my friend.
Staying Power
This post really only scratches the surface on these pitfalls. To really go deep on what you need to do to stay focused and ready for the career story in front of you, pick up Super Staying Power, which comes out November 2009. In 200 fast-moving pages, Super Staying Power covers what you need to know to avoid falling into either the Indecision or Ignorance pitfalls at work—especially in positions where you are responsible for other people.
(Inflexiblity is not covered in SSP. It’s a newer concept for me that I hadn’t fully worked through when I wrote Super Staying Power. My next book will have to address it… a yet-to-be-written book that I think I just decided to title Screw Your Career Path. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Of course, I’m flexible.)
Overcoming Indecision
Good news, boys and girls, it’s story time! Gather:
This is the story of three Chicago-based actresses: Marcy, Darcy, and Leigh. All of them are incredibly talented, and all of them have dreams of making it big. Marcy graduates from school and decides to stay in Chicago. She gets a job temping and doing community theater. She thinks, “If I get lucky, great, but I need stability first,” and builds a life for herself. Years later, she’s married, has a daughter, doesn’t act, and has no regrets.
Darcy graduates from school and promptly moves to New York. After a few years on Broadway, she sets her sights on LA… sort of. She goes “bi-coastal.” After a number of years, she makes what would be a decent living doing commercials, studio work, and the occasional play, if not for the double rent and frequent trips back-and-forth. Opportunity for her is forever just around the next corner, and while she’d love to make a change, doing so would be such a hassle: she’s having some success on both coasts, so which should she give up? And how will she get out of the contract with her agent? And her family… half of them are planning on visiting her in LA later this year, the other half in NYC, and everyone’s already booked tickets. Everything is drama for Darcy.
Then there’s Leigh, who follows Darcy to NYC and then capitalizes on her own success to move her butt to LA and plant herself there. She says goodbye to a fantastic NYC apartment and a boyfriend in the process. Her life still feels like a crapshoot (who knows which script will be the big winner?), but when her phone rings, it’s real people on the other end offering her real opportunities, and she’s pursuing them the best she can. (There is no “sidebar drama” in her life.) She’s had her name in lights, she’s been on the red carpet, and she’s got a nice bank account building. Her family in Chicago hates the distance, but they’ve come to accept it. When Leigh smiles, it’s from ear to ear. She’ll succeed or fail on her own terms, and everyone around her knows it.
I’m sure you know the moral already, so I’ll be brief here: when the moment comes to make the decision, make it. Marcy makes it—family over career. Leigh make it, too, in the other direction. Both are living their stories. Then there’s poor Darcy. We all feel like Darcy sometimes. When you find yourself split like that, MOVE.
For a primer on how to MOVE under pressure to tide you over utnil your copy of Super Staying Power arrives, take a look at this post on stress, pressure, and the Quality Event (aka Magic Moments).
Overcoming Ignorance
From a raw intelligence standpoint, I think I was never smarter than when I was 18. After thirteen years of school, my brain was chock full of knowledge, I was open to new ways of thinking, and I was practiced in a variety of styles of problem solving.
So why didn’t I rule the world? For the same reason lots of smart 18 year olds don’t rule the world: my expansive brilliance was on a functional plane only: see a problem, solve a problem. Which is great for school and utopia. But here in the working world, success requires excellence on three separate planes: functional, social, and political. Excellence on only one plane means big pockets of ignorance on the other two, either of which is enough to sink you. Take a look at this post for a quick hit. See Super Staying Power for an in-depth analysis. (The chapter on the political perspective is itself worth the cover price.)
Overcoming Inflexibility
Fear, Ambiguity, Incompetence, and Time horizon issues. How do you overcome these?
Briefly:
- Overcoming fear takes courage. Courage is the willingness to move forward in spite of your fears and takes time to develop. I can’t say anything pithy to make you more courageous. This one can take time, and the will to stay loose even when you’re scared stiff. Not. Easy!
- Overcoming discomfort with ambiguity takes conceptual thinking ability. Flat out: I can’t make you smart. From an intellectual horesepower standpoint, you’ve got what you’ve got, all you can do is make the most of it. So make the most of it: you have to do your best to see situations from multiple angles if you are going to be able to triangulate some sense of stability in an ambiguous environment. Take some time each day to stretch yourself: play a game, do a crossword, engage in witty conversation. (In some circumstances, faith can be used in place of intellect to accept ambiguity, but in practice, I don’t like this, because faith is too often leads to ignorance… and what good is overcoming fear of ambiguity if it leads to an intolerance of others?)
- Overcoming incompetence takes a learning orientation. Don’t force learning. Few people have a global learning orientation; most of us seem to have localized learning orientations. When we need something, we dive into it; when we don’t need it, we tune out. Subjecting ourselves (or others!) to knowledge absorption when it’s not necessary is useless; we tune out. And calling it “immediately usable” doesn’t help: it either is or is not what we need right now, despite how it’s marketed. During the course of living your story, it will become clear what skills you need. When that happens, don’t worry if you’re the only one studying the subject or if it seems to be a detour from your career path. Dive in. Likewise, if you find yourself hitting the same type of obstacle over and over, then take a hint: there is a piece of knowledge you might not think you need… that you actually need. Stop fighting it and
- Overcoming time horizon issues takes a Tao-like acceptance of time pressures: since time is fixed, you have to adapt to it, not the other way around. Never the other way around. But I can’t make you patient, I can’t convince you to step up the pace, and I can’t be there to help you distinguish between helpful mentors and false gods who will sell you get-rich-quick schemes or feed your self-limiting beliefs.
Bite-Sized Wisdom Nugget Conclusion
Really? You think I can wrap all this up with a quick hit solution? Please. Two-thirds of this post is the backbone for an entire book. The remaining third is a book unto itself. And you think you can get it all distilled down into a one-liner that, if you read it, will transform you? Sorry, but your brain doesn’t work that way.
By the way: if you’re scrambling right now for a way to pull all this content together, then you are on the verge of living your story. BUT… if you are tempted to throw this away because integrating this information into your world view seems too hard, rest assured, you are about to give into one of the pitfalls mentioned above. (Can you guess which one?)
Pitfalls are subtle, pervasive, and powerful. Don’t give in. Stick with your story, and expect that if you are progressing toward your goal, you should be frustrated from time to time. Like now.
Here’s my rule of thumb as a career coach: focus on developing the right perspective rather than amassing pre-digested knowledge-lite. Perspective drives people to action; knowledge-lite drives people crazy. People with perspective get good at dealing with life and come to share common sense. People with knowledge-lite get good at memorizing data and come to share a common rallying cry: “I knew that was going to happen!” Rather than walk away with only a topical understanding of the subject, break it down: pick the element that makes the most sense to you, and work it into your life. Take Ignorance, for example, and think about how this obstacle impacts your relationships: take a sheet of paper, write down key relationships you have, and then for each one, ask yourself, “Assuming I am neither fully extending trust nor allowing full and open communications, how is my behavior in this relationship holding my story in check?”
There’s your wisdom nugget, I hope it makes sense in light of the pitfalls described above. Now get out there and live… your… story!
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 