How to Deal With the Inner Dialogue Trying to Dissuade You
The simple yet hard secret to human flourishing
Starting any new endeavour, after the initial excitement, necessarily requires dealing with friction.
You will have to face things you don’t know how to do, and constantly be willing to close the — never ending — knowledge gaps.
You will have to realize over and over how far you are from being ad good as you would like to quickly be, and learn to deal, emotionally and practically, with slow incremental growth.
You will have to show up consistently, even when you don’t feel like it.
However this apparently grim perspective becomes way more acceptable, and even exciting with a few mindset shifts.
A common experience.
I have nurtured for years the idea of a ‘container’ in which to document my professional journey and create a space where I can dig into the topics I’m mostly interested professionally and personally: psychology, psychotherapy, personal development, etc.
Since I started thinking of a project that would allow me to do it, to imagine the container, a couple of years have passed.
Partly inevitably dictated by the myriad of other things that mark the time of my life, starting with my work as a doctor and my training in psychotherapy.
But partly (or mostly) also due to ‘resistances’ pushing me to slow down, to keep one’s projects in an eternal phase of planning, and postpone the moment of materializing them as much as possible, to the point of actively sabotaging them.
Such resistances can take on various forms, but they have some common characteristics.
The rational justification
First of all, this resistances manifest themselves in consciousness (usually in the form of thoughts) systematically with perfectly rational justifications.
At least, they appear perfectly rational.
Our mind is incredibly efficient at finding excellent reasons for NOT doing something.
The specter of mediocrity.
One of the best motivations is to avoid mediocrity, which of course we are incredibly good — almost excellent, I would say — at noticing and amplifying when it comes to our projects.
In this process we formulate thoughts that, although having nothing reasonable about them, appear absolutely reasonable to us. For example, comparing ourselves to people who are already established in the same field, perhaps with decades of experience.
The demon of perfectionism.
As one can easily imagine, it is the other side of the same coin.
For some bizarre reason, we believe that we must be excellent in the projects we care about the most, starting from day one.
We have a perfect image in mind of how what we want to achieve should be.
So when inevitably its version in reality shows all its majestic mediocrity — an apparently unbalanced and haphazard version, which to make matters worse often is the result of great efforts, of what we had imagined with great ease — we can only come to a logical conclusion.
“I’m not good”
Which easily becomes “I will never be good.”
Once again: a totally unreasonable thought appearing as the most rational conclusion.
The way out
I mentioned, in the beginning, the only way out. Well, it is apparently simple: deciding on a frequency to do something and doing it regardless of the result. Learning not to care about judgments (external but above all internal) and learning to have fun.
Nowadays consistency is the mantra of every content creation guru.
Wonderful suggestion.
However it is anything but easy. Certainly easier said than done: I have “known” this for years, but I am still trying to internalize it completely.
It is not something that is enough to know cognitively: that awareness seems bulletproof in moments of enthusiasm but crumbles like snow in the sun in moments of discouragement.
Besides there is no guarantee of success: the survivorship bias gives us the illusion that a specific trait (like consistency) is what made those gurus successful, because we don’t hear at all from those people who were consistent for a long time without any luck.
Consistency is probably a necessary trait to achieve success, but certainly not a sufficient one.
Most people are desperately seeking for guarantee of success when looking for advice, which unfortunately is likely to end up being counterproductive. Success is usually a slow and unpredictable process, building high expectation on external rewards can easily demotivate you and push you to give up.
For it to be emotionally sustaining, it must be at a deeper level than the cognitive one. Next I will talk about the main, necessary, mindset shift required to deal with self-sabotaging inner dialogues.
Growth mindset.
American psychologist Carole Dweck wrote the book “Mindset,” which illustrates a concept as simple as it is enlightening.
Dweck differentiates between two fundamental types of mindset:
- The fixed mindset, which essentially consists of that destructive mental mantra I mentioned above: “I will never be capable.” It places great emphasis on talent (something innate, and therefore beyond one’s control) and very little on learning and skill acquisition.
- The growth mindset, conversely, can be expressed through an inner dialogue like this: “I am not capable yet, but I am improving.” And obviously, the emphasis is the opposite of the previous one: learning matters much more than talent.
Of course, this does not mean that everyone can become a Leonardo da Vinci, but it would be good to let go for a minute or two the fixation on excellence, and focus instead on slow, incremental progress for the time being.
“I want to be better than myself yesterday” generally is a much better perspective on life than “I want to be the best”.
This can be done by rewarding effort rather than performance: when you work on your projects what matters the most is the intentionality, the focus and the dedication you put into it, rather than the end result.
If you keep working on those, if you keep focusing on the process, results will get better overtime. If you beat yourself up over every result ‘below expectations’, you will quickly come to the conclusion you are not good enough and give up.
Give yourself the chance to learn, to fulfill one of the most wonderful adventures in life: human development and flourishing.
