In my last post, I talked about clearing our mind clutter and how to do that. If you haven’t already read it, I urge you to go back and do so. This post will make a lot more sense. Today, I’m going to introduce the idea that most of the thoughts running through our mind on a daily basis are not even true.
Depending on who you believe, we have anywhere between 6,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. By implementing a consistent practice of decluttering my mind, I’ve come to find that many of my thoughts sit on repeat… over and over. These thoughts that continue showing up become foundational to our belief system and create our story about the world around us.
Here are some of the phrases related to work that have been prevalent in my mind at various times throughout my career:
- Everything on my plate is urgent.
- Nobody cares about leadership skills, they only want worker bees.
- If you want to get ahead, you have to play the game.
- My boss expects me to be available at all hours.
- Everyone thinks I’m a negative person just because I don’t have a poker face.
- I am not valued here.
Now, if I were to ask you how much of that is true, many of you would relate to a couple phrases and say “yeah, that’s true where I work too”.
But here is the kicker (and you are probably not going to like this)…all of it is a story. Every single last one. The only truth is what lies deep beneath these thoughts:
- I have a job.
- I have a boss.
- I have performance goals.
Let’s even unpack one further. Let’s take the last thought I listed, which was “I am not valued here” and I’ll tell a story. One year I was leading a project and overall, I considered it quite successful. It was something the business had asked for and it was widely adopted early on thanks to several leaders who actively championed it. I went into a meeting with my boss expecting a pat on the back or an “atta girl”, some kind of validation that I did a good job. He said to me something along the lines of “Yes, it was successfully adopted, but I feel like you just checked the box”.
You can imagine the drama that went on in my head. I was looking for validation (which I already had if I was clear on my measurements since adoption was a key success factor) and he was giving me feedback that I could have learned from (which I completely missed because I was too stuck in my own head). Instead, I took the last part of that sentence “I feel like you just checked the box” and made it mean that he didn’t respect me, didn’t respect my work, didn’t value the time & effort I spent on it, etc.. in other words, I am not valued here. But he never said any of that! All of it was a story that I made up and then applied to many different projects and ideas thereafter.
What I hope you get from this, is that so much of our success as leaders is managing our mind. Getting to truth and making a conscious decision about how we WANT to view things vs. allowing our mind to create stories. A thought like “I am not valued here” leaves me feeling defeated and I don’t show up as my best self. It does not move me forward, so why keep it?
The next time you are spinning in frustration about work, take a step back. Write down everything in your head. And then sort through what is truth vs. story. If everyone in the world wouldn’t agree on it, it’s probably a story. It may be a story that you believe with your entire being, but that doesn’t make it true. And if it’s not true, then you get to decide whether it’s a story you actually want to keep.