Have you ever had your dream come true? Then turn into a nightmare. Has your biggest fear ever become a reality. All of this is a very recent and very real experience for me. Long, long story short is this. I got my dream job, things got very complicated, I made mistakes, others made mistakes, and now I don’t work at my dream job anymore. Traumatic? yes. Disappointing? An understatement. The worst of all of it though if I am being very honest. The anxious notion of being a failure. As a rehabilitating people pleaser, and affirmation addict, the thought of people thinking I’m a failure haunts me to the point of paranoia.
I have a hunch where all my new found grief grows. Like mold in a damp basement it festers in comparing myself about everything to everyone all the time. In another article I’ll have to explain the origins of my need to be impressive. For now lets just say my job was always my ace in the hole. All I had to do was drop the line I worked in major college football or the NFL and boom, I was impressive. I felt good about myself. Sean Webb wrote a book called Mind Hacking Happiness. He reports the brain makes sense of the world through a lens of the self in relation to the environment and what’s happening. Everything that happens, the brain must decide what this means to the self. Happiness therefore is the simple equation of: OUTCOME - EXPECTATIONS = LEVEL OF HAPPINESS
Let that sink in, all events filter through the brain applying meaning in comparison to the brain’s expectations. How this event stacks up to our expectations decides what emotion the self should feel. Exceed expectations? Feel happy and proud. Fail to meet expectations? Feel angry and defeated.
Neuroscientists documented that most brain activity is spent on predicting the future, so it can choose an action to take. Now, put that brain in 2019. A place where every other brain it meets constantly reports how well things are going for it by showing that brain a picture of their brain’s feet next to the ocean. Or how much weight their brain’s body lost. Or how much money their brain’s body’s job got them and they were able to buy a boat or whatever.
Our brains are taking all this information and using as data to form an expectation to feel what it wants to feel. I want to be happy. I need my feet by the ocean, I need a big truck with a back up camera, I need to be tan and have those v cut things that go down towards my crotch. Now predict the future. “What if I don’t get to the beach? What if I can’t afford it? Why can’t I make enough money? Am I not smart enough? If I worked hard I could look like that with my shirt off, but I guess I’m just a lazy turd.” The thought pattern slams into the created expectations like a cold front in the Ohio Valley and the elicited emotional response… Anxiety, life altering, paralyzing anxiety. Sure we can go for a walk, or take hot yoga, all proven to reduce anxiety. But it’s merely ibuprofen for the infection. We need antibiotics, we need an understanding of how our brain works, and a paradigm shift in where we find our value
I love to coach. There’s nothing wrong with that. My worth dependent on the logo on my shirt and the conference of my team, is. Galations 6:4 says “don’t compare yourself to others, just look at your own work and see if there is anything to be proud of.” Scripture isn’t written to give us more rules to follow. The verse knows that comparison is the thief of joy. The gravity of the whole exchange zig zags and effects more than us. Our children absorb the emotions we radiate. They’re learning coping mechanisms by watching us cope. If we want to give our children a healthy way of living, we have to start with what we are comparing ourselves with, what we think happy is, and what we think we should be doing. So I’m working on the hard stuff. I’m struggling and not always well. This chapter has been anything but impressive to anyone. And that’s okay. Malcolm Gladwell recently said in his podcast Revisionist History, “The easiest thing in the world is to look at our mistakes and condemn. The much harder thing is to look at those mistakes and understand. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities, they are the way the world understands us, they make our performances real.” Lets scoop each other up when we fall on our face. Lets tell them how great they looked the moment they were flying before they hit their face. Because in that moment, they looked like themself.