No one is better at criticizing yourself than you are.
Who else knows where all the buried bodies are? You are the only person that knows every secret you’ve held, every person you’ve wronged, and all the mistakes you’ve made. All those phony apologies, well, you know those too.
When it comes to all the mistakes you’ve made you are a bona fide expert. It holds you back, because you can’t get better without giving yourself permission first.
That is where it starts. Punishment comes from all sides, even from our own head. We have to decide to turn off the valve of self-destruction and decide to stop adding on to the pain. Only then can the process of healing begin.
There is a concept in money management where when you get your paycheck you stop and pay yourself first. You do this because often with money, we forget to take the time to think about ourselves. You take the time to worry about the urgent and not the future.
We treat ourselves that way. In self management, you have to start with forgiving yourself first, because we don’t think about the future, we think about the urgent.
I based my personality in “the know.” I was proud. I built opinions on “knowing” things. I judged people on how “much they knew.” My religion was my perception of knowledge and I made sure you knew it. If you didn’t know anything then why were we talking. I needed to talk to people who were confident, and if you didn’t know you are scared since you didn’t pick a side.
I don’t think that way anymore. In fact, I go in the opposite direction. I am more impressed in what you don’t know. Anyone who tells me they don’t know something gains that much more credibility in my book, I am more apt to trust them, and get curious about who they are and what they do “know.”
What caused this change
Studying human psychology, philosophy and management shifted my thinking. Spending time digging into Jiddu Kristamurti, Peter Drucker, and David McRaney, along with the ancients like Confucius, Socrates, and Seneca, got me to understand that the minute you think you know, you stop thinking.
In fact, the two thoughts (thinking and knowing) are diametrically opposed. When you know you don’t question, and if you don’t question you don’t think. You can’t know a subject and think about it. Your brain has already created the model and the brain hates moving on from what it “knows.” Thinking takes a ton of energy, knowing doesn’t.
So why trust people who don’t know?
Saying you don’t know is a direct assault on the ego, and the starting point to think about every subject you don’t know about. When I hear that, I get comfortable because I know that we can start to talk, and maybe an opinion can change. Talking to someone who knows is like talking to a brick wall. It may feel better to scream at that wall, but you aren’t going to change the form.
Yesterday I tried Highrise. Highrise is a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that helps keep track of the people you meet. I signed up for the free option, looked at the tools, and got excited. I wanted this tool to systematize my follow-up, and it looked promising.
After adding my contacts, I went into my account and turned on a feature that automated adding contacts to my Highrise account. It seemed non-intrusive enough, add a bcc (thank you Outlook Macros) to every email and it would get the account. You also connect your Gmail account, and voilà – everyone gets sorted into the software.
I thought I could set it and forget it, and I ended up breaking one of my new rules: segmentation is king. I didn’t realize how much email I receive in a day, and this captured everything. Without segmenting and keeping a tight leash around what I let in or out, I opened the floodgates. In two days, it went from working fine to sending everyone that I correspond with an error message.
It didn’t look good, and it served as a great reminder of that lesson of segmentation, and it reminded me that lessons come in the form of annoyances.
We all have limited energy. Nothing can run forever. There is a sunrise and a sunset. As with life, there is a process to all energy, and once that process completes, that energy is gone. This was daunting to me when I first thought of it. I knew that energy had a limit, but I didn’t recognize how much of how I feel and my energy levels played throughout my day. I tried to handle everything at once, and because I tried to do everything – nothing got done. It was frustrating, but a part of regular life. My reasoning is that I could just put it back on the list and knock out multiple things when I get free. My energy levels didn’t matter as much as my “will” to get things done.
There are two sides of this equation though. Taking care of yourself makes your energy levels soar. I am recognizing I am not doing the other side justice. I don’t sleep well, I don’t eat well, I don’t exercise. I affect my limits just because I don’t take care of myself.
I didn’t make it a point to follow thorough, I just thought I would be able to bulldozer my way through with will and focus. Although there are ways to recharge and hold on to that energy throughout the day, I didn’t use them. Tools like checklists and power naps restore, but I thought I didn’t need them.
What I didn’t realize was, everything took energy. Each thought, each action, each plan all took energy. Rescheduling took energy. All these things took from my limited store of energy. When I reached a limit, when I got done, nothing else did. I wasn’t scheduling things or operating on the top of my game. I didn’t realize this is like betting on adrenaline when you’re in a foot race. The adrenaline can make some amazing things happen, but it isn’t controllable. You cannot will adrenaline into yourself.
Making good things happen, instead of waiting for them to happen, rely on proper energy management. The first step for proper energy management, is awareness.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 