The past year has proved to be the most challenging year of my life so far.
I find this self-reflection helpful because it illustrates that we can get stuck in old belief systems, despite conscious living and self-awareness. We feel like being in complete control of ourselves but have to learn our lessons the hard way, which nearly forces us to recalibrate and change.
One of the essential skills for leaders is the art of making good decisions. However, because managers have to justify decisions to their supervisors, they support them with arguments and “algorithms”. On the contrary, entrepreneurs often choose to decide intuitively. This can be due to limited resources and the existential pressure that business owner face (of course, this feeling is not exclusively true only for business owners).
We reveal our most profound, authentic selves, dominant traits and belief systems whenever we face pressure, distress, or fear. Life invites us to look more closely if we have only been balanced and calm on the surface up to this point.
I have found myself in some pressurised situations in 2022, for which I am grateful because I have been able to get to know a part of myself that I had not dealt with in recent years.
I’ve fallen for a false attribution… even though I quickly recognise it in others
My past year’s catharsis had come from nothing more than an unbalanced lifestyle and opposing goals and purposes. All of us have multiple roles: we are friends, partners, co-workers, supervisors, athletes, parents etc. I typically like to maximise my resources, to consciously and purposefully put energy into something.
Currently, I put most of my energy into my work. People like me tend to put work or others first instead of themselves. Fortunately, I have already learned to put myself at the top of my priorities. To make everything else work, I need to be balanced and well. When I’m well, I can deliver peak performance, love without expectation, and be creative.
During my second significant cathartic experience, I realised I was wrong. I thought I was at the top of the pyramid, but I wasn’t—the reason: false attribution.
False attribution is a common error that can limit our progress.
I always put myself on top when I visualise my role pyramid. As a next step, I form mental equations for every role; this way, I define my role-related purpose and goal. Last year I described my me-time mainly as work, as I am passionate about building my future and career. Looking down the second, third and other life-role equations, every stage was motivated by performance and power. Each level requires my active commitment, a certain level of effort, and energy, but the sources of recharging are missing.
Because I was convinced that I would manage my well-being without actively forming an equation and goal around it, I was wrong; in the end, my whole focus was on work; all life roles were focused on work from different approaches.
In other words, I had fooled myself. At some point, my body sent me a catharsis signal that called me for reframing.
Often, our Solution to a Problem is the real problem that prevents us from progressing. Share on XHow did the catharsis experience look like?
When I pay enough attention to myself and regularly recharge my batteries, I feel like I can handle any challenge.
But when my charge level drops too much, I feel insecure about my decisions and ideas. I doubt myself and feel a greater need for external validation. There was a time when I was unaware of the actual reason for being insecure in certain decisions. Back then, I was busily searching for confirmation until I realised that I needed to care for myself rather than look for validation.
This demonstrates that my solution was the actual problem in the belief system.
However, it is important to stress that my low battery state did not look like a classical depressive mood. Not the kind of evident exhaustion where you have no energy for anything and hardly get out of bed. Instead, it felt like an unsatisfied desire for self-actualisation, a higher cognitive self that wants to be expressed.
As the year was challenging, I cut myself off from old love projects and put all my reserves into our companies. But my catharsis and self-reflection made me realise that it was time to dig out my old, forgotten love projects and passions.
From this realisation, this blog was born 🙂
