If you happen to be in the USA today then Happy Thanksgiving to ya. Hope you have a great day with people who matter to you.

Save me a slice of pie.

If you’re not in the USA read on anyway, because there’s some important stuff here.

I’m running the risk of sounding as vapid as a Miss World contestant when talking about gratitude – it sounds like it fits right in with talking about world peace and how the children are the future.

I’m not a fan of the fluffy bunny school of self-help (I’ve pissed off a few coaches in my time), so while I may stray once or twice into the fluffy zone in this article my intention is to talk about what ‘giving thanks’ and ‘being grateful’ means in practical terms – terms that you can take away as use productively for the benefit of your confidence and self esteem.

How being thankful is relevant to YOU

First up, a couple of definitions for you –

thank.
1. to express gratitude, appreciation, or acknowledgment to.
2. a grateful feeling or acknowledgment of a benefit, favor, or the like, expressed by words or otherwise.
3. have oneself to thank; have the responsibility.

gratitude.
1. the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful.

So with those definitions in mind, being thankful and grateful is about 3 things.

1. Acknowledging the good stuff.
If you’re going about your days without seeing the good stuff or noticing what makes you feel good, then you’re missing out on some of life’s most simple pleasures.

2. Taking responsibility.
A huge part of experiencing thankfulness is being responsible for your own experiences. It’s very easy to go about your life, bouncing from one thing to the next while disregarding and disowning the successes you have.

You think to yourself, “I didn’t do anything“, “That was just a fluke, I got lucky” and “I can’t believe that happened, I don’t deserve it“, or even worse, you don’t think at all about your successes and the good stuff you have around you.

To really nail this ‘thanks’ business, you need to honestly and simply own your successes and all the good things you have in yourself and your life. This isn’t about being smug, it’s about being honest.

3. It’s not what you do.
Gratitude and thanks are about how you are, not what you do.

It’s about experiencing the feeling of being thankful or grateful, and allowing that feeling to happen without stamping on it, forcing it or over-thinking it.

But hang on just a cotton-pickin minute there. Why be thankful at all? What’s the point?

A simple way to answer that question is to look at the alternative. What would it be like if nobody was thankful or grateful? What would it be like if nobody batted an eyelid when something good happened? How would it be if you never paid attention to what feels good in your life?

Yuck.

The point of being thankful is to make your life a richer place to spend time in.

Gratitude isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it makes a fundamental difference to how you experience life.

That’s why there’s a big link between being grateful and how you feel about yourself, because you can only do those 3 things if you have a healthy level of self-esteem and feel confident enough to express what matters to you. That’s why it has to start with participating fully in your life.

Get that nailed and it can grow and grow. The richness of experience it gives adds to your self-confidence and self-esteem. The shift of perception it offers you allows to notice and leverage more of the good stuff around you every day. The value it adds to you allows you to be a better version of yourself, and that ripples out and touches everyone else in your life.

At the end of the day, the best way of giving thanks is to add to the richness of experience of someone else.

Here’s something to try. No cheating.

1. When you wake up tomorrow morning write down 7 things that you’re grateful for. Be as specific as you can. Don’t just scribble down ‘My family’, write down ‘How my husband smiled at me this morning’.

2. Before you go to bed tomorrow night, write down another 7 things that you’re grateful for. Be specific and don’t duplicate any you wrote down in the morning.

3. Now comes the tough bit – repeat this routine every day for a total of 21 days. 7 things in the morning, 7 things in the evening.

4. Don’t repeat any. If you duplicate one, start from day 1 again.

It sounds tricky, but it’s a bloody good exercise. You’ll be richer for it, trust me.

As someone who spends too much time on , I occasionally get emails from the ‘Compare People’ application, which tells me how I rank on a wide range of factors based on how my friends have compared me to their other friends.

These emails tell me in no uncertain terms where I’ve lost rankings and where I’m up in rankings. If I chose to, I could take it personally when I see that I’ve dropped 2 places in the ‘Most Entertaining’ category, that I’ve lost 1 ‘Smartest’ place or that I’ve slipped to the 6th ‘Most Dateable’.

I can be pretty damn entertaining when I want to be, I think I’m one of the smartest people I know and I like to think I’m a darn good catch for the single women in London.

But I don’t take it personally because I recognise 3 things:

1. The context of the rankings is one of throw away fun.
2. The rankings don’t reflect the way things actually are, being a subjective and unscientific comparison.
3. The rankings don’t reflect how I see and value myself.

Are you comparing yourself with people at work?

But it’s not just Facebook where I’m compared with others. In the workplace it’s common to compare yourself with your peers and the people below you and above you in the company. “He gets paid twice as much as me and does half the work” and “What she produces is always poor, so why do the managers love her so much?” are just a couple of things I’ve heard from colleagues, friends and clients.

Why do you feel the need to compare yourself with others at work?
Comparing yourself with a colleague is an easy way for you to judge how well you’re doing based on the differences between you, and is something we all do naturally. You might compare yourself on how popular you are, how efficient you are, how much time you spend in the office, how much you’re paid, how good you are at networking or any one of a hundred other factors.

What is common with all of these is that what you’re looking for is a measurement, a way of gauging how well you’re doing or a way of validating how well you’re doing (or not).

I remember one time back in the 90’s when I was working with a hugely capable and wildly popular guy on a high profile project. I asked myself questions about why he was more outgoing and popular than me and how he was able to establish a higher profile and garner more respect than me.

What I didn’t see until the project was done and I’d moved on to something else, is that I was also popular and had an equally high profile (if not higher), being able to influence key players and have people at the top listen to and act on my opinions. And I kicked myself when I found out that a couple of the women on the client team had the hots for me, but because I was under the mistaken belief that I wasn’t as popular as the other guy, I had no idea.

The problem comes when you look at the fact that these comparisons are coloured with your own perceptions and meanings, and are therefore entirely subjective. Mary might get paid more than you but that’s because she’s in another department or has more responsibility than you’re aware of. John might be able to bend the ear of key managers, but that’s because he has the confidence to speak up and has demonstrated that his opinions have value.

Don’t let your comparisons affect your beliefs and behaviour.

Are you comparing yourself with the right people?
If you insist on comparing yourself with a colleague – and it’s a hard habit to break – you need to be careful that you’re comparing yourself with the right people.

You have to compare apples with apples for the comparison to make sense, right? If you compare apples with swans then the comparison is flawed from the start – you might reach some kind of comparison but it’ll be nonsensical. An apple won’t peck you to death but a swan a day won’t keep the doctor away. And that’s just one silly example.

Comparing yourself with the CEO when you’re working in the post room is only going to make you feel crappy, but comparing yourself with a peer in a similar job in a similar industry makes a comparison relevant.

Penelope Trunk recently wrote that you should compare yourself to losers. While that’s a strategy that will work and will make you feel better about how you’re doing, it’s based on the fact that you’re looking for someone who isn’t performing at your level so that you can feel good. Keep doing that and it’s likely you’ll turn into a judgemental, back-stabbing loser yourself.

So I’d suggest that breaking the habit of comparing yourself with your co-workers is the most promising and confident way to go. It means that you need to be confident enough in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it so that you don’t need to look behind or in front to see where other people are in comparison. That doesn’t mean that you can’t look to others for input, a new perspective or to find out about what they’ve learned.

Compare yourself to what you know about your own previous performance. Compare yourself with how well you know you can perform and the quality of the work you turn out.

When comparison are made, take it all with a pinch of salt
Workplace comparisons are subjective, even if the comparison comes from appraisals. Don’t take it too seriously and if someone else (like your boss) is comparing your performance then take it with a pinch of salt – whether the comparison is favourable to you or not. It’ll be based on their perspective and their context.

Are you comparing yourself with your partner or friend

Another place where people compare themselves a little too often for my liking, is in personal relationships. Here are just a handful of situations I’ve coached clients through–

– A woman compared herself sexually, based on stories told to her about her boyfriends previous girlfriends. Consequently she began to doubt that she was delivering the goods (so to speak), pandered to her boyfriends sexual whims and rarely reached orgasm because of the pressure she was putting on herself.

– A woman compared herself to the success her boyfriend had achieved in his organisation. Consequently she felt like she was being left behind and that she couldn’t match up to his expectations.

– A man compared himself to his wife’s outgoing personality, and created a belief that he was introverted and introspective. Consequently, he started taking fewer chances because he believed they ‘weren’t for him’.

– A successful entrepreneur compared herself to her boyfriend who was unemployed. Consequently she felt like her success was ‘rubbing it in’, began to filter what she talked about around him and despite loving him she started resenting him and feeling guilty about resenting him.

– A woman compared herself to her oldest friend. Consequently, she felt overweight (she wasn’t), unpopular with men (she never gave herself a fair chance) and unsuccessful (she was great at her job in actual fact, but didn’t give it her all because she felt she couldn’t succeed).

What’s the reason you’re comparing yourself to him or her?
In a relationship or friendship, comparing yourself is a way of establishing the ‘pecking order’ and trying to establish your own security. You look at how you differ from the other person so that you’re aware of your social role and so you can spot any gaps you need to cross, holes you need to fill in or areas you need to work on.

It’s a remnant from our old tribal days, when there was a distinct social and familial hierarchy that determined your role in the unit. It’s a way of figuring out where you fit, where you belong.

What’s it doing to you?
The impact on the individuals in the examples I mention above is clear. And that’s just a small sample of the people I’ve worked with who’ve experienced similar things. Just yesterday I replied to an email sent by 16 year old girl who was comparing herself to her best friend and feeling 2nd best as a result.

Comparing yourself unfavourably to someone else will hit your confidence hard. It’ll strip your self esteem and shrink your beliefs about who you are and what you can do.

Stop it.

You’re different people so there will be differences. Comparing yourself to a friend or partner will only highlight those differences, and if you’re not watching what’s happening you can start shifting your beliefs based on those differences.

By all means be aware of the differences between you (difference management is an incredibly useful strategy in a long term relationship, both friendships as well as romantic relationships) , but the action isn’t to eliminate those differences it’s to honestly acknowledge them and even celebrate them.

Don’t let your differences take away from who you are. Your differences are what makes you you, and they’re your best assets.

The bottom line is that comparisons are just dandy as long as you understand that they’re subjective and understand how they’re affecting how you go about things. When you automatically make comparisons and choose a behaviour based on that comparison, you’re running the risk of making choices that take away from your confidence. You’ll run the risk of damaging how you see yourself.

And that’s the kind of damage that’s hard to reverse. It’s the kind of damage you don’t want to cause to yourself. Really, you don’t.

“Question for you Steve, how do you maintain the positivity, you obviously do as it comes across in your writing. This is a problem I have, I can think positive for short periods of time but then go back into a negative state soon after. How do you do it?” – Steve in Derbyshire

How do I maintain the positivity? The honest answer is that sometimes I don’t.

While I probably am more naturally inclined towards positivity, especially since I started coaching people, there are days when I feel low and there are days when I feel sad. I roll with the punches, have my down days and am as much of a work in progress as the next guy.

Pretending that I’m ‘up’ all the time or thinking that I’m not allowed to be down is not going to get me anywhere. And it would be really annoying for everyone else. All it will do is create a gap between how I think I ought to be experiencing my life and how I’m actually experiencing it.

Positive thinking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, so don’t get hung up on not being positive all the time.

There’s a story about a woman looking out of her kitchen window at her overgrown, weed-filled garden, saying to herself “There are no weeds, there are no weeds“. While that’s certainly a positive thought it doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation or put her in a position to change it. All she’s done is create a gap between what she wants to experience and what’s really happening, a gap that doesn’t allow her to move forwards.

It takes courage to ride a wave when that wave is full of fear, emotion and a reality you’d rather avoid.

Riding the wave, even if it’s taking you somewhere unknown, means that you have to resist the natural urge to hide under the duvet or run away and focus on the fundamentals of being you.

The key is to acknowledge what’s happening and your experience of it – if you feel crappy then feel crappy, if you feel good then feel good – and then be willing to make a choice. That willingness to experience the bad and the good is a huge piece of what confidence is, and it’s something I’ve learned from working with clients over the last few years.

That said, there’s an irony here that intrigues me.

The acknowledgment and willingness to experience what’s happening allows you to make choices that you otherwise wouldn’t be in a position to make. If you develop a radical self-honesty it makes it easier to make decisions about what matters to you and what you do with what’s happening.

The woman with the garden full of weeds can say, “Look at all those weeds. Is this something I want to do something about?“, and if she wants to she can get out there with her trowel and change things.

Simply by being willing to experience the bad as well as the good you allow yourself to move forward with greater freedom in your experience, and a natural positivity emerges. With a foundation of self-honesty and self-confidence in place, positivity just comes more naturally.

So I guess my answer to the question “How do I maintain the positivity?” is that I maintain my positivity by letting myself off the hook for not being positive all the time.

I got back from my trip to New York a couple of days ago, and I had a whale of a time out there. But there was one moment of my trip that was different from all the others, one moment that gave me a fresh experience and a new insight.

To be honest with you, I’m a bit sorry to be back home as a lot of people here seem to be a lot ruder and less respectful. It troubles me. Plus, in New York I know I’m just a short hop away from a darn good meal and a well made martini.

So while I’ll be looking for more ways to spend more time in the USA, that’s not what I want to tell you about right now.

Last Sunday afternoon I headed into Central Park. I’d been out the night before and was pretty fried, so I wanted an afternoon of lying in the grass and schlepping around by myself. A little quality Steve time, if you will.

The weather was beautiful – temperature in the 80’s, clear blue sky, just stunning. As you might imagine, the park was busy with friends and families strolling, picnicking, lolling and playing, and after a spot of people watching I managed to find a more secluded spot on the south side of the lake.

Right on the shore of the lake I clambered up a rock and sat on top, and once I was comfy (and surprisingly the rock was very comfy indeed) I just sat there. The odd row boat came by, but other than that I simply sat, and looked, and let my mind and body rest.

Instead of thinking about what I needed to do, where I needed to go and who I needed to talk with, I just sat and cleared my head.

When all the buzzing things in your head slow and stop, all you’re left with is the real you; the quiet you that’s right at your core.

I don’t think I’ve felt as peaceful for years.

When you stop moving completely all you’re left with are all the good bits, bad bits and work in progress-y bits that make you you. If there’s something there that you don’t know about, that’s incongruent or doesn’t fit with who you know yourself to be, then there’ll be discomfort.

My coaching method takes people to this sense of okayness and makes you confident down to your core, and even I sometimes need reminding of what that truly feels like. It’s so easy to loose that in the middle of everything in our lives and it was SO GOOD to remind myself of it.

Leslie, a friend of mine who I met up with in NYC, sent me a thank-you card about 13 years ago that I still remember today. In it she’d written –

“To those of us in constant motion, here’s to finding that spot.”

That’s what I found on top of that rock in Central Park; it’s part of what taking a holiday is all about and it’s something I intend to keep a hold of.

The sensitive or squeamish might want to look away, but did you see “The Perfect Vagina” on Channel 4 this week?

I’ve written previously about how women in their 20’s are trying to find security and confidence through botox, but this new documentary really troubled me.

It seems that vaginal cosmetic surgery has doubled here in the UK over the last 5 years and labiplastys are the fastest growing form of cosmetic surgery in the UK.

I watched as Lisa Rogers (the presenter) explored the subject in good humour, becoming upset and sometimes tearful as she listened to some of the women who took part and saw them linking the procedure with their self-worth.

I share Lisa’s feelings. Young women are taking increasingly desperate and risky steps to increase the value they place on themselves, and something’s clearly wrong here.

Trying to be perfect or normal will not boost your self-esteem

Let me spell it out. Unless there are very good health reasons for it this is purely about insecurity. There’s no such thing as a perfect woman or normal woman, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect man or normal man. Trying to attain the idea of perfection or even normality will not make you confident and won’t boost your self-esteem.

You have to develop a good relationship with yourself and your body, otherwise those insecurities will continue to get in your way and damage your self-confidence.

This Sunday sees another documentary on Channel 4 – ‘Superbotox Me‘. I won’t be watching because I know it’ll trouble me just as much as this one.

You may have noticed the colour switch of the blog from purple to blue. If you haven’t noticed, don’t worry – it used to be purple and now it’s blue (it now matches my eyes). This is interesting timing, because I’ve been kinda down for the last couple of weeks since coming back from my trip to Stockholm.

I’ve been in a slow feeling, nap taking, schlepping around, not-doing-much, puffy-eyed, hayfever funk, and haven’t been in the best of moods. I’ve finished at the London ad agency and the change in pace and lifestyle has been marked.

This me-not-being-at-my-best period also ties in with a post I’ve been following over at Brazen Careerist, where there’s been a discussion about whether living up to your potential is something valid, or if it’s just a bunch of BS, which stirred me and spurred me to add my two-penneth.

Does the last couple of weeks mean that I haven’t been living up to my potential? Well, if you look at just the last couple of weeks, then sure, I haven’t been living up to my potential. It’s been tough making myself get out of bed, I’ve been watching too much TV and I haven’t accomplished much of anything.

But if you look at it in a broader sense, then I know that this time is necessary so that I can live up to my potential. It’s a continuum, not a series of starts and stops.

In her post Penelope talks about how getting out of bed each day is an act of faith for many of us, and I completely recognise that. Life is hard. Sometimes it takes a huge amount of effort to go about your day with any kind of gusto, and feeling like good things are happening and knowing that you’re doing well seem a world away.

But at the other end of the ‘realising your potential scale’, why not ask an Olympic medalist whether it was worth realising their potential? You can bet they’ll tell you how tough it’s been, how bloody hard they’ve worked and how many sacrifices they’ve made. But having watched a couple of medalists being interviewed, just look at how alive they are knowing they’ve nailed it.

Does the fact that I’m feeling pretty crappy and can’t compete with an Olympic medalist mean that I should forget about living up to my potential?

No. Not a bit of it.

Feel free to forget about what the self-help industry has preached for too long – life isn’t about competition and it isn’t about achieving goals – if you think it is then I’m sorry to point out that you’re missing the point.

But – and this is a big but – without the concept of living up to your potential there’s a lack of meaning, and it’s by engaging with the things that mean something that we step into whatever potential we have.

This is the whole point of what I do – to take people to a point where they know what matters to them and build their natural confidence so that they’re able to engage with those things without worrying or second-guessing. That’s truly confident living. Say it with me.

The tipping point isn’t being kind or nice as Penelope suggests, but making a deep choice about what matters and having the self-awareness, self-esteem and self-confidence to prioritise those things.

It’s not easy. It takes guts, it can be bloody hard and sometimes it just plain sucks, but if you’re participating in what matters and what has meaning to you, it doesn’t matter a jot if you have a down period or feel blue sometimes in the middle.

Are you living up to your potential or do you think it’s a bunch of hoo-ey?

I can’t catch a ball to save my life. I suspect that if a Very Bad Man had an automatic weapon aimed at me and demanded that I either catch a ball or a bullet, I’d fumble the ball and get a bullet right in the kisser.

Fortunately I’m not a sports player or a likely target for deranged gun-owners, so there are very few times where that particular weakness of mine matters. Another of my weaknesses is that I like to be in control and have a tendency to think very logically, which sometimes strips away any spontaneity. Someone hurtling into my well-constructed plan could well be on the receiving end of a frosty reception as I hastily refocus and replan. The impact of that can be pretty harsh, both on me and other people

What I’ve learned is that my creativity and my need to have a whole load of fun can be a great way of dealing with that particular weakness. I recognise that planning everything and looking at everything coolly, is, well, just plain dull. I need to laugh myself silly and I need to allow myself to wing it sometimes.

I’ve got bags full of weaknesses and bags full of strengths, and I’ve learned a whole lot about both. I’ve seen too often that people are always quick to beat themselves up for their weaknesses, and that negative focus can quickly strip away your self confidence and self esteem.

Just as you need to be confident in your strengths, it can be a real eye opener to get to know a little bit about your weaknesses and learn some simple ways to kick them into touch.

Suzi was a client of mine whose promotion in her marketing agency meant that she had to travel around and deliver presentations to clients. She was terrified. She’d presented once before and had frozen solid, so her level of confidence about having to present regularly was zero.

She waxed lyrical about how badly organised she was, how badly she’d screwed up and how she just wasn’t a good presenter. She was really just focusing on her weaknesses (some of which she’d blown up out of all proportion) and creating her reality exclusively around those weaknesses. That’s where her focus was so that’s what her experience became, and her confidence suffered as a result.

In one session I took her through my strengths exercise, and we found that she was actually pretty brilliant creatively, had a huge amount of energy and determination, and was fantastic at connecting with people one-to-one both socially and professionally.

So what we did was find ways for her to play to her strengths in her new role. She looked at her presentations as a playground for her creativity which suddenly allowed her to enjoy what she was doing. She used her strengths in connecting with people to shift her thinking from having to present to a room full of strangers to presenting to a room full of individuals she could connect with.

Suzi’s still presenting, gets amazing feedback and absolutely loves it.

Your can more than compensate for any weaknesses you might have, so don’t beat yourself up or feel less than for having them. Here are my 4 strategies for managing them.

1. Transform them. Just like Suzi did, how can use your strengths to overcome your weaknesses? What strengths can you apply that will transform your ability to deliver? Your strengths are more than a match for any weakness, don’t let yourself think otherwise.

2. Eliminate them. Do you actually need to do what you’re weak at? If you don’t need to do it, why do it and beat yourself up about it? Like me playing catch, if you can eliminate the activity without dodging responsibility or eliminating something you enjoy or something important, by all means go for it.

3. Delegate them. Is there someone else you can give the task to? Can you outsource the activity or give it to someone who’s stronger at it than you? Again, if it’s something you can delegate without it being a way for you to dodge responsibility or avoid screwing up, then go for it.

4. Minimise them. How can you minimise the weakness? Is there something you can learn that will improve it or the impact that it has? What’s a way that you can practice or get better at something that might be a weak point? Remember, you’ll never excel at a weakness so know when to call it quits.

A couple of years ago I took a 4 hour a week shift in my local Gap store. I loved it. I broke the store’s sales records, had regular customers who scheduled their shopping for when I was working and I flirted like crazy. I was in my element.

But it was also the first time that I really saw how important body image is with regards to self-confidence.

I had great fun helping women pick out a pair of jeans, going through a few different pairs until we found ‘the one’. I was sure to give honest but positive feedback, and when a customer looked great in a pair of jeans I’d tell them. The effect of telling a woman that she looks great in a pair of jeans was instant.

Every time I did it she’d visibly change. Her posture shifted; her face shone; she became self-approving instead of self-deprecating, and her whole personality seemed to relax. The first time I saw it happen I was pretty stunned at how one little compliment had such a huge effect in their self-esteem.

I see this everywhere on the TV too. There are so many makeover shows (What Not to Wear, 10 Years Younger, How to Look Good Naked, etc, etc.) where, at the end of the show, the woman always grins broadly and her friends and family all say how confident she’s become – something the restyled woman will also enthuse about.

Research indicates that when women over 18 look at themselves in the mirror, 80% are unhappy with what they see. So I’m willing to bet that a month or two down the line those made-over women will slip back into their old way of thinking about themselves, and their self-confidence will slip backwards too. The same goes for those women who I said looked great in their new pair of jeans – they may have been buoyed temporarily but would soon have gone back to their old way of seeing themselves (until the next time they went shopping).

Those makeover shows and my role in Gap all did the same thing – to build someone’s self esteem and self-confidence by dressing up the outside and hoping that it leaks through to the inside.

I’m not about to tell you that “it’s what’s on the inside that matters”, because it’s often more complicated than that. The fact is that your relationship with your body is important – it would be stupid for me to tell you otherwise. If you have a bad body image you have a bad relationship with your body. It’s like having a bad relationship with your partner and not knowing it – you’ll be sure to suffer as a result.

And that means that your body image matters.

Your job is to get along with yourself no matter what, and that includes getting along with your body. By all means hit the gym if there’s something you’re not happy with that’s within your power to change, but don’t go too far and don’t let that be a conditional relationship. Don’t tell yourself “I’ll be happy with myself when I lose 6 pounds” or “I’ll be happy when I can get into those jeans I wore 5 years ago” – that’s making your happiness dependent on a bad relationship with your body and it won’t work.

Also feel free to enjoy a compliment, but don’t go searching for validation in order to get some relief from a bad relationship with your body.

With some clients I’ll get into this area with them, while with others it’s not an issue. What’s abundantly clear and what I’ve seen work is that a good body image starts with radical self-honesty. That means being totally honest about what you like and what you might not like so much, and it’s only with complete self-honesty that you put yourself in a place where you can make different choices. That’s how you’re able to celebrate what you like about your body and learn to be okay with what you don’t.

Let me know how your relationship with your body affects your self-confidence, and check out this neat little body image test.

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

If I was to sit you down now and go through everything that you’re currently getting up to I’m sure it would be a pretty long list. All that stuff in your head, all that stuff that occupies your time, all the people, all the to-do’s, all those things you’d love to do if only you had the time. Yep, it’s a pretty long list.

To paraphrase Shakespeare in the quotation from Macbeth above (my English Literature O’Level wasn’t wasted), you get so busy with everything on your list that all that ‘stuff’ becomes a load of busyness and pressure that sometimes doesn’t add up to a whole lot.

So sometimes I throw this curveball question at my clients – “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being you at your best, how much like you do you feel right now?”

Think about it. Right now, as you’re reading these words, how much like you do you really feel?

Being a ten out of ten means that you feel absolutely right, like you’re completely yourself, in the perfect place or that you’re able to be exactly who you want to be. Take a moment to figure out where you are on that scale right now.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that when I ask people that question, the vast majority quietly answer “6“, which is a pretty low place to be on the ‘Being You’ scale.

Blowing my own trumpet for a moment, by the time I’m finished with them I always hear them confidently say “9” (10 out of 10 is normally reserved for those utterly ‘perfect’ moments that come and go).

Wherever you scored yourself, it means that the remainder of the scale is busy doing something other than being you. If you scored yourself as a 6 out of 10, it means that 40% of you is busy doing something else. While 60% of you is busy being you the other 40% is occupied with other things that have nothing to do with being you.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that seems as crazy as a soup sandwich.

As long as there’s a chunk of you that’s busy doing something else you’re not giving yourself the chance to be at your best or to feel like yourself, and over time it’s pretty obvious that you’re sense of self will shrink along with your self-confidence.

You need to get to grips with what that other chunk of you is focused on – otherwise you’ll never feel as much like yourself as you deserve to feel.

That’s part of the thrill for me in working with my clients – that I get to see them climb that scale and become more ‘them’. So think about what that other chunk of you is doing. What stuff is it busy trying to deal with? Is it struggling to find a way to make what you want happen? Is it resisting the place that it finds itself in? What’s distracting it? Is it dreaming about what comes next?

Having a piece of you that’s busying itself with not being you makes as much sense as having Ernest Borgnine lead a Jazzercise class.

So tell me, what are you really up to?

I love getting good feedback, and just recently I’ve had some great feedback from my coaching and from the ad agency I’m freelancing at. Coaching clients are getting results and the agency have asked me to stick around for another couple of months (I said ‘Yes’, coz I’m having fun).

It feels good to know I’m doing a great job and that people value what I do, but there’s this niggle at the back of my head that says, “Steve, if you’re so flamin’ confident, why is it that you’re feeling great simply because someone said something nice about you.” Giving it some thought, here’s what I think.

Yes, people spend too much time looking for signs that they’re doing the right thing or on the right path. Sometimes we get that by hearing that we’re doing well at work, sometimes it could be encouragement from a friend or loved one, and sometimes we get that feedback by seeing our material wealth or possessions growing.

It’s all about validation, and speaking as a human being it’s something that I need. I know that I’m good at what I do, that I work hard and deliver results, but that knowledge and that feeling of capability is internal. Without external validation there’s no feedback, and everything I do exists in a vacuum.

I can say to myself “Nice job Steve” and “Well done Steve, did really well there“, but that’s a different experience to having someone say those things to me.

Knowing that I’ve done a good job carries with it a degree of satisfaction and fulfilment based on whatever the activity means to me. When there’s external validation of something I’ve done it carries a different experience of satisfaction and fulfilment based on what it means to someone else, and that’s where the difference is.

The problem comes, of course, when you start seeking out that external validation as the only means of feeling good about yourself. Start people pleasing and doing things with the agenda of attracting validation and you’ll end up chasing things based on what they mean to other people and not what they mean to you.

That’s a slippery slope that leads to you’re-okay-and-I’m-not-okay-ville. It’s a place that sucks, and going there will only damage your self-confidence and self-esteem (i.e. that’s bad).

So the difference is one of focus. Rather than looking for external validation and aligning your behaviour to deliver that, you need to align your behaviour so that it leads to great work, then look at and acknowledge what you did to deliver that great work.

The cool thing is – and I didn’t know this when I started coaching myself on this whole ‘Why do I need validation‘ thing – that aligning your behaviour to deliver great work is really the same thing as playing a game that matters to you. Make a choice to engage with something that matters and play to your best level, and not only will you feel like you’re doing great work but it’ll be a whole lot more likely that you’ll get some great feedback from others too.

So I’m not bothered by the fact that I love external validation, as long as I’m sure my focus is in the right place.

Who doesn’t love a bit of validation once in a while?