Are you someone who feels more valuable when you’re getting things done, achieving your objectives, or ticking items off on your to-do list?
When I find myself falling into this trap I think about a story someone once told about the way we develop the erroneous belief that our value is connected to what we achieve. I have no idea if it has any empirical validity, but it always floats into my mind when I confront a conflict between feeling I’m ‘enough’ and wondering if I’ve done enough to feel ‘enough’.
This is the story.
It’s the first day of school and you’re there at the gates when your little one comes running toward you clutching a painting they’ve done in class.
You grab the painting, take a look at the truly awful daubs on the page able to make head nor tail of what it’s supposed to be and, wondering if it’s a giraffe or a man with three legs holding a very large stick, you say,
‘Goodness me, what a wonderful picture, aren’t you clever!’
And there it is, a seed sown in the mind of the child that connection exists between what they do and how much they are worth.
If, on the other hand, you push aside the God-awful painting and give the child a big hug, look into their eyes and say,
‘I’m so proud of you. Now then, let’s have a look at this painting,’
the story might turn out differently because the child is validated simply because they exist without reference to anything they’ve achieved.
Of course, this simplistic example isn’t the only reason we might grow up thinking we’re only worth something if we get an A* in our exams or go on to become Prime Minister,
Achievement is, for some of us, the best or only way of getting attention in a chaotic or emotionally arid childhood environment, perhaps as a result of family breakup, unresolved conflict between parents, early years trauma, high expectations, no expectations yadda yadda yadda.
This week, a client wanted to know how they might mitigate the frustration of not getting his tasks done because of the time-sink that is taking care of a young child.
I thought about how recently it seemed that my own children were creating mayhem with glitter and insisting I chase them around the house wearing a grotesque mask I saved for Halloween just because they enjoyed the feeling of being scared in a safe environment. I can still see them hiding in the bathroom like it was yesterday even though it was nearly twenty years ago.
I thought too about the sobering statistic which states that by the age of just 18, we will already have spent 90% of the time we will ever spend with our parents and how seeing as they are now both well into their twenties, I am edging closer to the 100% than I care to think about.
My client expressed dismay at what they perceived as a lack of control due to life with a toddler and what they described as ‘difficulty getting on top of the most important things’.
I wondered if getting on top of things and ‘important things’ are necessarily the same.
If you had to write down the things you need to do and also the important things, would they be the same or two different lists?
While it’s possible to measure one’s efficacy in clearing out the loft in terms of completion % and time taken, is it as easy to quantify the relationship we are building with our children or indeed any relationship at all?
When we feel as if our value is directly related to how we spend our time and what we have to show for it the notion of letting go of the imperative to get things done is understandably difficult.
Tying your worth to how much you achieve might feel OK all the time you’re surging forward because the more you achieve the more valuable you feel in a neverending cycle of self-improvement, but when an inevitable slump comes, your diminishing levels of success make you feel less precious and feeling less precious makes success more elusive in a cycle it can be hard to escape from.
One way of keeping the burning desire to achieve at bay is an idea I got from Oliver Burkeman when he wrote about his habit of keeping a ‘have done’ list as well as a ‘to-do’ list.
When the day doesn’t pan out as you’d expected you can still take credit for what you did instead.
While your original plan might have included, ‘pay the tax bill’, ‘cut the grass’, and ‘do the laundry’, who is to say that a retrospective list featuring, ‘bathed my son while he threw bubbles all over the ceiling’, ‘did some art which resulted in my somehow getting glitter in my underpants, and, ‘lay on our backs in the garden to see which kinds of dinosaurs we could see in the clouds’, is any less worthwhile?
In a training session many years ago a therapist promoted the idea that ‘self-esteem’ as a concept would be rendered unnecessary if we could all accept that our value as humans can never go up or down and that we will only ever be as valuable as we already are.
While that might feel as fanciful a notion as self-actualisation or ‘completing life’, it does set something of a benchmark to which we might aspire.
How much freedom would we feel if there was never any possibility of increasing or detracting from our value?
How much MORE might we get done and what might the impact be on our aspirations if we were liberated enough to feel that we don’t have to prove anything to anyone and that it is always OK to be who we are?
I don’t know what’s on your list of stuff to do today but it’s always worth asking whether something less measurable but more ‘important’ might be getting sidelined in the constant pursuit of unnecessary excellence.
In my case, I will be getting some things done but I will also be drinking coffee, reading the papers, spending some time in my hammock with a book, and metaphorically getting a lot of glitter in my pants.
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