Dare to be you!

Summary:
Being you is a quest only you can do. No matter, whether selecting a career or a mate, you have to be the best you that you can be and realize that you are constantly changing as you have new experiences and meet new people while you go through life.

Becoming

The Politics of Dignity

Telling Our Story

The Key To Being Happy At Work

Resources

Be Who You Want To Be

---

In the mid-sixties Sammy Davis Jr. sang a song called "I've Gotta Be Me," in which he sang about what he needed and wanted from life -- how he had to be true to himself.

Many people today struggle with this concept. Fashion magazines, movie stars, athletes, movies, TV, music and videos provide unrealistic images of what you need to be and who you need to be like to be popular, sexy, successful, or all three. The word on the street is you aren't good enough being who you are, you need to aspire to be... Could that be why there's so many antidepressants prescribed in North America? Have we stopped striving to be the best me we can be?

Go to Top of Page


Becoming

As we have learned from developmental psychology over the past century from people like Sigmund Freud, Erik Erickson, Jean Piaget and Laurence Kohlberg, each of us progresses through stages of development until we reach adulthood and abstract thought processes, as well as, physical, emotional and spiritual maturity.

People can become fixated or stop in one stage of development and may not always reach full maturity. Hopefully, as the initial conflict is resolved, they can keep moving onward. Or one might just stop, never progressing from the one stage where he /she is blocked and never accept new ideas, new measures of behavior, new truths.

So who we are becoming and who we think we are is in constant flux.

Go to Top of Page


The Politics of Dignity

Robert W. Fuller discusses this evolving in "All Rise -Somebodies, Nobodies and the Politics of Dignity." "One day standing alone in my bedroom it struck me that beliefs of every sort were fallible and by the same token subject to improvement. And that meant that it was impossible to demonstrate beyond doubt was anything was absolutely true once and for all... It was as if at that instant, I had suddenly grown up. The experience, although strangely liberating was also sobering. And because my sense of self was shaken, I saw my identity as I might have seen someone else's-from the outside."

"My new prospective subtly affected the relationships I had with my friends. I began listening to them differently. Instead of judging what they did or said as right or wrong relative to some preordained standard I drew them out and absorbed what they told me. ...For whatever reasons I became curiously non-judgmental in responding to their troubles and within a short time my circle of friends began to expand."

"After completing school and working for a dozen years-first as a physics professor and then as a college administrator I took some time ...then in my late thirties I had accumulated enough personal history to see that over time I had indeed presented several rather different "selves" to the world. ...I now saw that my identify had undergone periodic metamorphoses. In addition to lots of incremental changes. I'd been a nobody, a somebody and a nobody again with no end in sight to the circle."

"Self-understanding, like scientific theories undergo continuing revision. ...Over time we fabricate our sense of self bit by bit until like a resume, it gradually assumes form and and acquires totenic status. It feels "real" and permanent, but at a close moment by moment look, it reveals identity to consist of elements that are constantly in flux..."

Go to Top of Page


Telling Our Story

"To keep our identity in working order, we continually amend and burnish it, principally by telling and retelling "our story" to ourselves and anyone who will listen. The older we get, the more we feel we need to rehearse and shore up the narrative, because we sense the possibility of our identity disintegrating into its constituent bits like the collapse of a rickety old shack."

"Seeing personal identities as models allows us to see ourselves from a distance. It is easier to feel detached from a model than it is from a self image By understanding our identity as a particular model that we use at a given time under specific under specific conditions, we gain the freedom to let go of pieces of it an allow new ones to replace them in response to changing circumstances. The feeling that life is a battle is replaced with the sense that it's a game played with opponents who upon deeper reflection, are unasked as allies."

This was brought home to me this weekend after attending a going away party for my editor at the Tribune, where I am on the community editorial board. Two gentlemen who have been arguing with me in the paper over the course of the last two years happen to be sitting at my table. The one gentleman who was particularly vitriolic in his condemnations of my columns said to me, "Oh I only take you on because I know you'll give me a real good go at an argument." I looked at the man stunned as he'd called me a few names publicly and said, oh? And he said you're a very smart lady and I find it fun to fence with you in the paper. If I didn't think you could handle it I wouldn't bother."

The other young man, who can be at times obnoxious, has alienated himself from just about everyone on the board with his holier than thou attitude. That evening sitting alone at the table until we all came to sit down he was his usual remote self. He sidled over to me and said he didn't want to have to "break in" a new editor and I said to him to him, "well, we don't know who it will be at this point and we'll have to just wait and see. Perhaps you'll like this new one even more than you did George. Change can be healthy and good."

I swear the editor, knowing I wasn't keen about this gentleman deliberately made sure we were at the same table.

"Absent adversaries, it's almost impossible to raise our game to a higher level. With age many come to this perspective. Former antagonists - colleagues, spouses, parents, are seen are sent to have been essential participants in one's development. Accessing a dignitarian outlook earlier in life can spare us and others from the consequences of self-righteous posturing and from inciting continuing rounds of conflict in an attempt to even the score. This is something Nelson Mandela learned in prison and later exemplified as he lead South Africa to reconciliation."

"To see the world as changing and not include our identities in the flux is naive. Moreover, we can't expect to remodel our personal and institutional relationships if we are wedded to an unchanging model of ourselves."

Go to Top of Page


The Key To Being Happy At Work

In her blog the Brazen Careerist states that "People don't like work because they don't like their personal life. And the key to being happy at work is not so much finding the perfect career as it is in finding yourself. The more self-knowledge you have the happier you will be. Stop looking at your job to solve your problems and instead look inside yourself. Make friends with yourself and other people and your job whatever it is, might start looking better."

I consider the eSight team (Jim, Nancy, Nan and Marten) my friends, as well as, my colleagues as much as I do my friends on the community editorial board and friends I have both online and off line. My friends range in age from teenagers to people in their middle 80s and they're all scattered all over the world. I think eventually even the two gentlemen who give me a hard time in the paper will become my friends, you can learn from everyone, no matter what their age or status, if you're open to it and don't dismiss someone else's truths as idiotic or of no relevance, just because they're not the same as the opinions you hold.

Trunk continues, citing the Harvard Business Review, "People would be a lot happier with the job they have, if they were happier with themselves outside their jobs. There's been a steady decline in job satisfaction no matter if the employment rate is very low or very high and even when most people have control over their time and their workload, they still report they are unhappy in their jobs."

Trunk then states that "the job hunt is separate. The job is something you have to do to support yourself, since you're going to be doing it for a good portion of your life, you could look for some basics: People who respect you and your personal life. A company that is honest. A job that uses your skills and your experiences. A job that challenges your abilities without overwhelming you."

For my money, that pretty much sums up eSight and The Associated Blind. Besides working for the Tribune this has been for me one of the most accepting, respecting places I've ever worked. Nancy and Marten and Jim have integrity and are kind and caring and affirm my self-worth whether or not we always agree on a topic.

Trunk compares a career to the type of mate you're looking for and his/her qualities. "A career is like a mate. The relationship is limited by what you bring to the table. If you're not happy with yourself, you won't be happy with the match up."

"The part about you is most important. What do you do when you're alone? How do you feel about yourself? What are your core values and do you lead your life according to them every day? Do you numb yourself with food, or TV or alcohol? Have to be honest about this stuff.

Yet amazingly people spend lots of time looking for a job and a mate but very little time locating themselves."

I once had a friend who said honestly she was afraid to look too deep within herself out of fear she wouldn't find anything there. She pooh'd pooh'd self help books and trans-personal psychology and called it fluff, she is still one of the most lonely unhappy people I know. Always dyeing her hair, trying plastic surgery, etc. to regain her youth and when she thinks men thought she was beautiful. She detests getting old and would go back to her teens and twenties in a heartbeat. She flits from man to man trying to be fulfilled, she hates her life and her job. My mother once told her beauty fades but dumb is forever. Maybe she'll come to actually know herself before she dies.

In the "Enduring the Long Haul, Part 1" article we discussed the role of happiness and its effects on your self worth and your attitude. We also did tests to see your happiness level, as well as, what your strengths and weaknesses were. We also discovered that kindness had a far greater impact on our attitude than did hanging out with friends or eating a sundae or going to a movie. Service or stewardship to others helps contribute to one's sense of worth and well being.

Go to Top of Page


Resources

There are numerous self help tools and psychological tests you access online or in book stores to help you along with your job search. I particularly like Richard Boles' What Color Is Your Parachute? It's a good way of doing an inventory on your life whether you're just starting out or just coming back into the workforce. It's fun but it's also thought provoking.

If you are affiliated with a voc rehab program or a job finding club ask if they will administer a Myers-Brigg test or a MMPI test. Both are aptitudes inventories, you can find them on the web and do them yourself but it's always good to have someone help you interpret your scores. They will be a pretty good predictor of what your skills and aptitudes are.

eSight also has many many different kinds of resources and courses. Don't hesitate to contact MemberServices@eSight.org to ask for recommendations of articles or forums or courses.

Go to Top of Page


Be Who You Want To Be

I like Penelope's last take on job searching, she compares it to an online dating service. "Online dating is not a bad model for evaluating a job. For one thing that you want a mate to make you fulfilled is asking too much of a single person. Yet we complain all the time that our jobs are not fulfilling."

"Dating services ask you to be specific as possible in your desires. So try that for a job. Write your own list for a job as if you were looking for a spouse." Trunk's were: "Fair, fun, mind-expanding, consistent with my core values, interesting and leaves space for the other areas of my life."

"You are probably going to have to be your list, to get your list. That's why interesting people are at interesting companies. So be who you want to be, instead of looking for a mate or a company."

"I gotta be me ... Who else can I be, but who I am ..."

And as Doctor Phil says you can't give away something you don't already have.

Dare to be you!

Go to Top of Page

Bookmark this article to: