I used to believe that deferring to the decisions and opinions of others made me a good person. It felt selfish to want things for myself. What ended up happening was that life happened to me. I lost agency.
It’s hard to think for yourself, especially when it requires charting your own path. You need to back yourself because you’ll frequently come across people who challenge you. This is almost always unintentional, but it can be hard to hear from someone who has original thoughts because this can threaten why other people believe what they believe. They will project their doubts onto you.
There are two things I have found useful here.
First, work out what your values are. I only ever hear about company values, not individual values, and I suspect this is why it receives a bad rap. For me, it’s helpful to have a set of three that I come back to when I need to. That’s truth, friendship and integrity. I review them yearly, but right now, I know these values are fundamentally important to the way I want to live my life.
I find it useful to revert to my values when I have to make hard decisions. With truth and integrity as values, for example, it’s easier to override a desire to be cordial, despite this being my default. I know I won’t give in to impulses or let behaviour slide that I know is unacceptable.
Second, surround yourself with people who live a different life to yours. It’s very hard to get away from group think when all the people around you are following the same life trajectory.
Let’s take my industry, for example. Suppose you’re a trainee solicitor and you’ve been questioning whether you should leave the legal profession. If all of your friends work in corporate jobs, you’ll probably think the options available to you are 1) stay; 2) move in-house; or 3) move to another law firm.
When we think about our options, we default to the options we know are possible. When you’re only surrounded by other lawyers, it’s very easy to fall into the ‘but what else would I do?’ trap, forgetting the fact that if you’re hard working and talented enough to work a corporate job, you likely have a thousand career options available to you. You might actually really enjoy some of these.
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I believe many of our mistaken decisions come down to ego traps. It’s all too tempting to choose the decisions that would make you feel like an external success or would maintain your sense of identity, rather than pursuing the ‘unsexy’ path that is true to what matters to you. Usually, these ego traps are associated with job titles, a particular lifestyle, prestige and money.
It’s hard to step out the game because we’re battling a lifetime of conditioning and a world that looks for easy signals for credibility. But there is one question that I find helpful to shortcut the process and it’s very simple:
Is this really what I want to do?