I drew this comic when I was feeling particularly ‘up and down’ at work. I’m still always amazed at how quickly I can go from thinking that I am just killing it professionally to feeling like a big, huge, epic fail. This is a feeling I think many of us can relate to. It’s been an extra hard one to notice and realize that small (or even big) mistakes don’t make me dogshit.
I’ve done some pretty big career shifts in my life, two of which have happened in the last 5 years. I’m 40 years old right now and often catch myself (or actually, catch my demon) saying:
“Is this really where you thought you’d be at 40? It’s pretty crap, you are starting again and again. Shouldn’t you be doing something that’s been established, and you are an expert and making piles and piles of money? Like Scrooge McDuck level money?”
Sometimes I listen to the demon and I sit at my desk and think… “What the hell am I even doing here? Who am I kidding with this? I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Other times, and more often lately, I have learned to hear the demon and then say to myself “This is part of learning, this is part of growing, only I can define if I’m successful.”
This is really, really, hard to do.
I want to share something that my coach and I talked about in a session where I was in one of these ‘I’m an epic fail’ mindsets. To start this little narrative, I need to let you all know that I am a HUGE Harry Potter fan, like have a tattoo of HP reference on my right wrist and listen to the books as a bedtime story pretty much every night, kind of fan. Judge me all you want, but it’s true and it’s awesome.
The reason this is important is because my coach and I got to talking about how Ron Weasley gets is so frustrating when he can’t get out of his own head when playing Keeper in Quidditch. For those of you who don’t know the books, the main best bro in the books is basically a soccer goalie. You as a reader want him to just let go of the bullshit in his head and play like he can. But instead, he mopes, whines, fears and takes heckling to the heart, it’s infuriating! For a critical match, he ends up thinking he takes, (but doesn’t actually take) a ‘luck potion’ and ends up playing incredibly – because he believes the luck potions is helping him do it. The whole point is that it was all in his head. This is such a simple concept, how we perform and feel about ourselves, is a head game. It frustrates us to no end when people (or in this case beloved characters in a book) can’t see it for themselves.
My coach and I talked about this concept and in the end got to the conclusion that I was being a LOT like Ron. We looked at past evidence that I can do the job, we talked about what ‘success’ really means to me, we go into how brave it is to leave my comfort zone and try something new in order to have the life I want…but I still could only view myself as a fail?? WTF. I was not a fail, it’s in my head.
It didn’t take one session and a Harry Potter analogy to get past feeling like a failure sometimes, but it was a big step in the right direction. We all want Ron to play well, believe in himself and save all the shots, it’s just infinitely harder to apply it internally.
I continually must tell myself that I am capable and smart and am doing something hard but worth doing. I’ve also accepted that I’ll never not have a demon whispering in my ear. But I can say, with practice, support and self-compassion it gets a bit easier every time.
The Graphical Bear 