Читать книгу A Life Full of Glitter - Anna O'Brien - Страница 11

“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.”

—Eleanor Roosevelt

At age six, I remember sneaking into the kitchen and stealing some cookies to snack on before dinner. My father had told me several times that under no circumstance was I to have any of those sweet, chocolate morsel-filled biscuits before dinner. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right? As I found my way to the staircase, there were only a few carpet-covered wood stairs separating me from sweet success and even sweeter celebration. I had pulled off my heist. Victory was to be mine.

As I rounded the end of the banister, mere footsteps from my room, I found myself face-to-face with my father. I had pulled my shirt up, securing it there with my teeth, to form a MacGyver like sling for my stolen desserts. As I looked at him, my mouth gaped open, sending my shirt and the forbidden treats it contained tumbling down to the white carpet below. Having kept the cookies close to my chest, their little chocolate chips had melted. As they rolled across the tufted ground, they left streaks of brown goo behind them.

“Anna!” my father screamed, and this was followed with a few choice words not appropriate for this book or most public settings. I should mention that my father had spent hours on end caring for this carpet, steam-cleaning it and making sure it was pristine. I had been caught not only stealing forbidden treats, but had also destroyed my father’s domestic pride and joy. His brow was furrowed and his face was red. I was done for.

I burst into a fit of tears, an effort to distract my father from the disaster zone I had created. Despite my best efforts, it did not work. Not at all. I was sent to my room to calm down and sentenced to a spanking with the mixing spoon. This was the ultimate form of punishment in my household, right up there with when my mother would angrily take her shoe off, wave it in the air and threaten us when we fought too much during road trips.

In my room, I panicked. How was I to escape this torture? After thinking about it for a long time, I grabbed two story books from the shelf and went down to accept my punishment. I would take this torture head on.

“Dad, I am ready now.” I said to my father looking him square in the eye. Mixing spoon in hand, he turned to give me a quick thwap. The spoon made a hard cracking noise, as if it has hit something solid. My dad burst out laughing.

“Anna, what the hell do you have in your pants?” I reached down the back of my pants to pull out my two storybooks. I had used them as armor. My Dad looked at me with a goofy grin and gave me a big hug. He simply couldn’t be upset with me.

Even as a child I was an inventive problem-solver. It’s simply who I was meant to be. Isn’t it funny how it seems we spend most of childhood shaping our unique identity, and then most of our adulthood trying to hide from what makes us different? In this chapter, we’ll discuss how our brain works to understand the world around us, how it makes each of us truly unique, and how to become more self-aware. We’ll tackle coping skills for accepting our uniqueness and learn why it’s not only ok, but beneficial to stand out.

How We Develop Our Identity

Our brains are like the perfect organizational expert from our favorite home and garden TV show—they love to put similar things into neatly organized boxes. This happens with just about every type of information our fantabulous little noggin collects—experiences, emotions, and more. Your brain gets the same feeling grouping people that I get thinking about a shirtless sexy man holding sheet cake and telling me, “I just want to give you a back rub and hear about your day.” When you see a person, your brain goes straight into analysis mode, making observations about their actions, appearance, demeanor, and more. Within as little as seconds, that relative stranger has been filed away by your subconscious in a pretty little box of supposedly similar things.

Our mental storage boxes are called “schema.” It’s basically a fancy science-y way of referring to a generalization about a group of people, places, situation and more. Stereotypes exist for a reason: it’s just your brain trying to keep your thoughts tidy. Think about it. Every thought you have ever had is being organized and sorted into its perfect place. Everything in its box. I often wonder how my brain can be an ultimate store of all of this information, but still cannot effectively remind me to clean my house, buy toilet paper, or do my taxes.

These schemas also help us define ourselves and how we should react to things. Schema that characterize how we view ourselves are called self-schema. When I first started researching self-schema, I had a huge identity crisis. Who am I? I don’t even know who I am. However, a few deep breaths and fifteen hours of reading Wikipedia pages with no relation to this book at all, I realized the obvious. I am who I am.

Your strongest self-schemas are always going to be the first things you use to describe yourself to a stranger. So for example, I am a beautiful, fearless, loud-mouthed woman. I care about the people around me deeply, but I am afraid of getting hurt. I am even more scared of failing. I work really hard, and I try every day to make the world happier. You will always know where you stand with me, and I value honesty more than anything else.

If we take a look at this blurb, we can see it not only defines who I am, but also helps my brain predict how I might react to certain situations and how I might engage with my community. Your brain is basically labeling a box of what you are, and on a day-to-day basis it helps you make decisions that fit neatly and comfortably in that box.

These perceptions of ourselves begin to develop as soon as we are born and are as unique as our experiences, environment, looks, and thoughts are. When people say “Speak your truth,” the truth they are talking about is this pure definition of who you are. It’s how you see your bodies, interests, personality, and behaviors.

They also often become self-perpetuating, meaning that we make choices that continue to reinforce how we have already defined ourselves. For example, if you identify as an extrovert, your mind is going to remind you that I need people to feel complete. It’s going to give you the warm fuzzies when you get invited to a party or event. In the same vein of thought, if you spend too much time alone, it might trigger emotions such as loneliness, to remind you that you need to get out of the house and see some people.

These facts and tidbits about who we are get stored in the amygdala, or the emotional parts of our brain. Which means what we believe about ourselves doesn’t have to be logical or factual. It simply has to be a pattern. When I was younger, I thought I was ugly. Not just kind of ugly—I thought I was hideous. At one point, I even gave up on grooming, because what was the point? I was a fugly teenager, I’d be a fugly adult. There was no point working on the parts of myself that couldn’t be fixed.

I developed this self-definition because I was surrounded by friends, TV shows, and random strangers who constantly reminded me that because I was fat, I was also ugly. In my brain, the words fat and ugly were stored in the same box. For a long time, the two words were completely interchangeable for me. It took mentally redefining the word “fat” to help my brain begin to accept that I could identify as both fat and beautiful. Fat was no longer synonymous with ugly.

Now, changing how we see ourselves outright can be like climbing a mountain in flip-flops—painful and nearly impossible. But have no fear: adapting a schema is something our brain does all the time. Your identity evolves, based on the situations you put yourself in, your interactions with others, and how you feel about yourself. I’ve had many women tell me that seeing my images has helped them see the beauty in who they are. At first I was like, “Lies!” How is that even possible?! They’re just photos. However once I researched how the brain works, it made perfect sense.

The brain sees things bound together. In this case we’ll use “fat and ugly,” but usually in our brains things are much more complex. Now when you see an images of a woman like me and see them as being “fat and beautiful,” your brain gets frustrated. Now the first time it happens, your brain might do just like all my ex-boyfriends, and make excuses for it. However if you continue to expose yourself to this cognitive dissonance, it will force your schema to evolve.

Our brain will be like: “Hold up. Trying to group these two things together isn’t working anymore. They need to break up.” Since these two things can no longer be fit into the same pretty little box, your mind will just have to go down to the basement (of your subconscious) and get another box. But the brain will only do this if it feels uncomfortable enough, often enough, to make that change. To change who we are, we must first challenge who we are.

How to Recognize Your Self-Schema

1.Start with the question—“Who am I?”

2.Answer honestly as you see yourself, not as you want the world to see you.

3.List the first twenty things that come to your mind, regardless of the connotation.

4.Group the list into key themes—these are most likely your core self-schema.

You Are Unique

Once you begin to understand how schemas are formed, it became apparent that each and every one of us is unique—just as our experiences, memories, emotions and bodies are unique. One of the biggest and most beneficial things you can learn in life is to embrace, rather than fear, this difference. We often over-focus on the benefits of sameness—no one gets bullied for not standing out. But by the same token, no one truly succeeds without standing out.

Let’s say you meet two people today. One of them is unlike any person you’ve ever met. That person is fascinatingly different. The other is just like someone you already know. Which do you think you will remember more? Which do you think you might tell your friends about meeting?

Since your brain likes so much to group things, it’s likely you will remember the unique person solely because they are, well, unique. Your brain had to make space in the attic for a whole new special crate just for them. You’ll probably vividly recall little details about them—silly things like the color of their shoelaces or the way they pronounce a certain word. Anything your human supercomputer has latched onto as different from the norm. And the other individual? The one with similar traits to someone you’ve already met? They’ll just get added to the same box as your existing friend. Other than that, you’ll probably forget most things about them.

I once was at a business conference where individuals were presenting on creativity and technology. There were amazing speakers from the most innovative companies in the world like Google, Facebook, and more. However, if you asked me about what any of them presented on, I couldn’t tell you. In my brain, they’ve all been lumped together into one box probably labeled something like “technology presenters who wear suits and talk about the future.”

However, toward the end of the day, I remember one of the final speakers, Dave Trott, who was starting his presentation. As he took the stage, he dragged behind him an old, worn overhead projector and a stack of clear transfers. Instead of the typical business PowerPoint, he presented to us using handwritten information on those clear plastic sheets. The point of his presentation was to convince of one thing and one thing only: that being different makes you memorable. He wanted us to create a schema unique to him. It’s been three years since that conference, and I can still remember that presentation clear as day. Mr. Trott was right: you never forget someone who dares to stand out.

Embracing and allowing your uniqueness to shine has some major benefits, beyond just being memorable. Once you know yourself, you can more easily communicate your needs, simply because they are more fully-formed. You are acknowledging them regularly. Decision-making becomes easier because the hesitation to choose based on your community’s reaction is removed. In line with this thinking, you feel less guilt or regret as a result of those choices. You have a clearer vision of who you are, your goals, and the daily progress you are making toward them.

If embracing uniqueness is so beneficial to us, why is it so hard to do? Research shows that humans derive some pleasure from fitting in. Conformity sometimes serves as an emotional proxy for one of our most basic human desires—belonging. When we think we belong somewhere, we feel connectedness to a group through a common goal and experience. We are happiest when we feel we truly belong, and find communities that embrace as we are.

However, at times, we convince ourselves that changing who we really are to fit into a community that may not be right for us will give us the same feeling as belonging. We make ourselves blend in, and we do it at any cost. Adapting our behaviors is a double-edged sword. We may feel like we belong, but we will also carry a constant fear that we are not deserving of this acceptance. It’s that nagging fear that if someone knew the real us—they wouldn’t like us. When we conform, we are doing so for short-term gains at the cost of our long-term happiness.

Embracing our individuality starts with self-awareness, or conscious knowledge of our own character, feelings, motives, and desires. To successfully be self-aware, we must not only better understand how we see ourselves, but also take in how others perceive us. Who we are becomes a delicate mix of these two perspectives.

Getting to Know Yourself

Over the course of my life, I’ve been through a lot. I’ve endured horrors that I hope no one else ever experiences. I’ve rebuilt myself. I’ve conquered fears. I’ve adapted my emotions of anger and frustration into ones of understanding and patience. I’ve done hundreds of things people have told me I will never be able to do. Every day, I look in the mirror and I see this. It kills me that so many other people don’t do the same. They see their faults and problems. They see their ugliness and pain. They see someone else’s definition of who they are, because they haven’t made time to define themselves.

Finding myself and my place in this world was a journey—and a hard one at that. I don’t want you to think any of this will be easy. You will have to fight yourself to find yourself. Every time you hesitate or doubt something you wanted to try based on what you think you are allowed to experience, you have to force yourself to try and do it anyways. Gradually, it becomes habit. The fear drops away and a fresh confidence can grow in its place. Soon those things that terrified you, that once felt out of your reach, become things that make you feel powerful. Eventually, you see yourself in actions rather than in words. You see beauty in who you are, and not in the words strangers might use to describe you.

Discovering who you are is a process. You have to make time and emotional space to dig under all the layers of “what you should be” to discover who you could be. Slowly, you begin to understand what you want in life, what causes you to do the things you do, and what your emotions are trying to tell you. Begin with a journal to track your feelings. Set goals you want to achieve, so that when you are faced with life decisions you can always check in and make the right choices for your future self. Lastly, make time every day to get away from the noise of the world to just think about who you are, where you are going, and what you have accomplished so far.

Tasha Eurich, author of Insight, studied a group of individuals who were proven to be successfully self-aware. Her research resulted in some interesting results. Often when a situation goes awry we ask ourselves, “Why?” Why didn’t I get this job? Why didn’t I get asked to prom? Why do I feel alone? The word “why” focuses our attention on assessing past decisions and events. Through this process, we expect to discover a reason for our current situation. However, our minds are fickle beasts, our memory isn’t perfect, and much of the information we use to make decisions lives in the messy basement of our brains (our subconscious).

When we ask ourselves “why,” we are forcing ourselves to rehash a situation that has already passed and that we likely have a skewed perspective on, looking to discover a detail we can’t change and hoping this knowledge will make us happier in the future. If this sounds unrealistic, it’s because it is. This type of introspection can make us stressed-out. It can depress us. Even worse, it delays our ability to solve problems. We literally become trapped in our own self-analysis of our history. We can’t move forward.

I remember having dinner with a friend where we discussed our pasts. We both had similar disadvantages and challenges as kids. My dinner partner, once recognizing we had a similar history, asked me how I had managed to become successful despite it all. As we continued to discuss each event and dissect how my choices had netted me in increasingly better positions, I began to notice a pattern.

Every time a major incident happened, I always asked myself what I could do to make it better. With each setback I developed some new learning about myself that would motivate my next action in life. After years of working hard to always find ways to be better and overcome my rebellious past, I developed the unwavering belief that the best thing I could learn from today was what I needed to do tomorrow to improve. In fact, for the last ten years I have been asking myself that same question nearly every day. What can I do tomorrow, this month, this year to make tomorrow better than today?

Interestingly enough, Eurich’s research found that those who receive the most value from self-awareness are those who analyze their lives using the word “what.” By phrasing questions when self-analyzing using “what,” we are asking ourselves to critically think about our values, needs, and wants and establish what we need to do to make them a reality. This makes us better able to handle tough situations, because we’re always focused on taking a future action and less likely to get bogged down by whatever terrible, no-good, rotten past events and mistakes we might make along the journey. We’re letting them go instead of constantly digging through garbage (bad events), hoping to a find a nugget of gold (an amazing insight or life direction).

Activities to Increase Your Self-Awareness

1.Keep a journal of your emotions and feelings and look for patterns in your behavior.

2.Set goals to help center your growth and development around an objective.

3.Choose “what” versus “why” when applying critical introspection.

How Other People See You

When I took my very first corporate job, I had trouble transitioning from “cool co-ed Anna” to formal, full suit-wearing “Ms. O’Brien.” I treated my cubicle much like one would treat their fifth-grade locker: I covered the walls in Teen Beat posters of JTT. Yes, this was ten years after JTT’s star had peaked. I painted my nails at my desk, put googly eyes on the office plants, and listened to my music out loud for all to hear. I even went so far as to come in one weekend and give my cube a Trading Spaces (does anyone remember that show?) makeover, complete with hanging lanterns and a tapestry pinned up like wallpaper. I thought I was being whimsical and funny. What I was doing was committing career suicide.

I remember when HR called me into the office to talk about these cubicle antics. I had anticipated good news—maybe even a promotion. I had made so much effort to liven up our humdrum office floor, and I expected them to be grateful. I was wrong. The office found me annoying, distracting, and unfocused. Gulp. They didn’t love me, they hated me. I was distraught. I needed to start looking for a new job. I was a failure. They were going to fire me any day.

I spent the next two weeks silently working at my desk. I didn’t leave for lunch. I stayed late. I was terrified anytime someone senior walked over to my desk. Eventually my mentor at the time pulled me aside and helped me see the light. My HR manager hadn’t told me those things to make me feel bad; she had told them to me to make me better. I was given feedback, but because of my own insecurities I had turned it into criticism.

Being able to receive feedback is crucial for becoming more self-aware and developing into the best version of ourselves. Take my office shenanigans. Obviously, I was young and I just wanted desperately to belong and be accepted in my new adult world. It wasn’t that I was intentionally doing things wrong; I was simply misguided. In college, the likable people went to parties and dressed like they were always prepared to be a backup dancer in a rap video. I was mimicking that behavior and doing what totally professionally inexperienced me thought would help me belong. I needed feedback to correct my actions. It wasn’t an attack, it was a gift.

When people give us feedback and we actually make changes, a funny thing happens. People respect us for it. As I began to apply my HR manager’s feedback, I also began to repair those bridges I had burned with my loud music, colorful walls and childish antics. Just like I had learned as the original office party girl so many years ago, it is true that if we listen and take action on feedback regularly, we are more respected by our peers, are better leaders, and deliver better results professionally.

Just like we have to learn how to receive feedback, giving feedback is also a skill. Let me tell you the painful truth—not all people were made to give feedback. When you find someone who can really offer insight, never let them go. Choose who you rely on for feedback very carefully. Personally, I look for people who have a reputation for being a good mentor to others or who have a history of career or life coaching.

Your first time hearing feedback you will probably react, much like I did, by internalizing and attaching emotions to the feedback the giver did not convey or mean. This is why I always choose someone I trust and who I feel will give me the benefit of the doubt if I overreact. Finding a mentor who, in the beginning, will let you react openly and help you work through those emotions is essential to progression. Always frame the situation first by letting them know upfront that this is a new experience for you and that asking for feedback is hard for you. You are still working on how to better learn about yourself from others. Let them know that becoming more self-aware is important to you—I was 100 percent honest in saying that I may not react well initially, and my openness helped my mentors prepare for and not take it personally when I got flustered.

It is important to acknowledge that not all feedback we receive is meaningful feedback. Sometimes feedback helps us to course-correct and recognize we are sacrificing our self and happiness to achieve a goal. When you receive feedback, always be thankful for the other person’s perspective, but remember that you still have the power. You get to acknowledge and apply it, or you can choose to reject it. You are always in the driver’s seat. Feedback just helps you understand where certain roads may lead.

Learning to take and apply feedback is something that only gets better with practice and is a lifelong pursuit. However, the more open we are to receiving feedback, the more opportunities we will have for growth. There have been times I have received feedback that taught me things about myself I would have never realized on my own. There have also been times where feedback helped me realize that the changes I need to make to achieve a certain goal weren’t worth it. Feedback is simply another feed of information to help us learn about ourselves, and we can use it to make more informed decisions about what will make us happy.

How to Successfully Ask for Feedback

1.Come with Goals: Let the person you’re asking feedback from know what you are hoping to achieve from their assessment.

2.Focus on the Future: Ask for feedback about what you can do better in the future instead of dissecting the validity of past behavior.

3.Actively Listen: Let the person share their entire feedback before reacting. This is not only respectful to the feedback-giver, but also makes it easier for them to give you feedback.

4.Ask for Clarity: Don’t be afraid to ask for examples or more details if feedback is unclear or doesn’t make sense to you. Write down key ideas or themes to follow up on.

5.Express Gratitude: Giving feedback is as hard as getting it, so make sure to let your feedback-giver know how much you appreciate their time.