I loosened my identity. We all have this picture of ourselves, this idea of what kind of person we are. When this idea gets threatened, we can react very defensively. People can question whether we did a good job, and this threatens our idea of ourselves as competent–and so we can become angry or hurt at the criticism. Someone can accuse you of lying and this threatens your idea that you’re a good person, and so you can get angry and attack the other person. My identity of myself as someone who is motivated and productive and has good ideas and so forth … this was getting in the way this morning. When I wasn’t productive, it made me despair because then I was worried I wasn’t who I thought I was. My solution was to realize that I’m not one thing. I’m not always productive–sometimes I am, but sometimes I’m lazy. I’m not always motivated–sometimes I am, but other times I don’t feel like working. I don’t always have good ideas. I can be many things, and so this identity of mine becomes less fragile, more anti-fragile. Then it doesn’t matter if someone thinks I didn’t do a good job–because I don’t always do a good job. I make mistakes, I am less than perfect. And that’s perfectly OK.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 23:45:42 +0000
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