image by Elle Linda Yaven
1. Ungrounded
Outrage can be a starting point. Or curiosity.
One day I spontaneously asked my students: “What are you no longer willing to tolerate in your teamwork, calendar, lack of clarity and professional life?"
Here's link to this post: I AM NO LONGER WILLING TO TOLERATE
There was one more category to the above list: Self-Belief. It deserved a post of its own.
While anciently true, the sanctity and stability of inner coherence is a prudent way to meet these times. It's become more of an imperative to craft your personalized self-belief style -one nimble, yet unwavering enough to act as a through-line to your intentioned future.
This topic opened a Pandora’s Box of ungrounded potential without the controllable metrics expected in a data driven MBA program. My awesome students went for it!
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“By the way, I just wanted to share that after yesterday's class, I went out with friends to a birthday party.
And that night in the middle of my sleep, a light just shed on me regarding what you said about self-alignment and I started to connect the dots. I used to give up values in exchange for friendships. But I stayed true to my values last night at the party. And I woke up feeling really good.”
- A Student
INVITATION:
What story streams in your head or being without initiation?
Curate that tune. Inserting the thinnest wedge matters.
2. Hope
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Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops - at all.
- Emily Dickenson, Poet (1830 -1886)
Self-Belief is dusted with hope.
Embedded in self-belief is some variation of “How can I become an instrument for making my dreams real?” On the upside, this question alone delivers the thrill of keeping a secret between you and you. The challenge to such an ask is awareness of what it will take to accomplish IRL.
A little self-belief goes a long way. As with a seed rooting, it will need water and the sunlight of attention.
Self-belief inhabits the gap between reality and desire. Like any trickster worth its salt, it loves a good game of hide and seek. Yet despite its now you feel it/now you don’t resonance, with practice, self-belief will usher in new realities.
Yet for a long while self-belief can seem irrelevant. It appears burdensome -as if you’re supposed to give a darn when instead it’s like a fly you keep shooing away -a nuisance getting in the way of your drive to achieve. At best it becomes an item on a list of meta-narratives of self-development you'll get to someday.
So even as I advocate for it, I know you don’t need to live in self-belief 24/7. Despite hours, days, even years where self-belief is nowhere on your radar -you can still accomplish pretty wonderful things.
Of course, more power to you if self-belief has become a no-brainer habit, yet the truth is a tiny drop goes a long way. As long as consistently applied.
This insight, which began as the intuitive hunch of a creative, turned into a belief and is now grounded in real world evidence. Based on thousands of coaching sessions with students and clients about their specific living relationship to their talents, my research evidences creative drive is a phenom much larger than we are.
However, a key clause in that contract is that having a talent doesn’t mean it works in your favor. It will carry on with or without us. It doesn’t care unless we do.
INVITATION:
Small wins compound. Be 5% more generous with yourself. It's contagious!
3. Stubborn
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A curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system involving motivation, reward, desire and pleasure.
Robert Wright, "Why Buddhism is True"
She said: “On the upside, there’s a spine aspect to belief, a stubbornness I like!”
My coaching people is based in a system of Talent Archetypes. Belief had showed up at the top of my Client A’s list.
She continued: “Between the reality and my beliefs there can be a disconnect; but in my beliefs, I’m like reality doesn’t matter – it scares me when people can accept reality just as it is. I have a hard time relating when people feel “whatever” about things. Or stop at “This is just the way things are".
Yet I also know my beliefs can make me rigid -it’s the shadow of stubbornness. I sometimes wish I could turn it off or be more flexible. Just when I’d like to change my mind, listen to someone's POV, run a different morning route or reach out unexpectedly, my interior rulebook of “A’s Stubborn Beliefs” shuts things down pretty quickly”.
A desire to control all the variables and address contingencies is understandable in times that are a-changing. Yet, like any creative endeavor, personal innovation implies the curiosity to test the sometimes crappy, often enriching, discomforts of ambiguity.
So there's an efficiency to seeing self-belief as a hypothesis, one you are curious to test out for yourself. Like any creative urge, it begins as a journey of trust. The call of a hypothesis is to ground yourself in accrued evidence. Otherwise, self-belief remains aspirational/speculation/all talk until taken out for repeat test drives in your zones of discomfort.
Self-belief has to be earned to embed in your psyche so that in one swift silken gesture you pull it from your back pocket like a never-ending flow of colorful scarves. Keep instilling the circuitry and be sure to have a maintenance plan in place for the off days.
INVITATION:
What’s your experiment?
What are you curious to test out?
What would be so cool to design today or next 90 days?
4. Resilience
nor·mal·ize
ˈnôrmə,līz
verb
bring or return to a normal or standard condition or state.
They realized normalizing the care of their life as a communicator was ultimate self-care
mid 17th century (in the sense ‘right-angled’): from Latin normalis, from norma ‘carpenter's square’. Current senses date from the early 19th century.
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“Before this course, presentations felt like performances to perfect rather than conversations to engage.
I shifted my focus from perfection to presence to learn the value of understanding my audience. Spontaneity, once intimidating, now feels like an exciting opportunity to connect authentically and adapt fluidly. Now, I aim not just for confidence but for engagement”.
- A Student
While self-belief and resiliency make a great tag team, they differ.
Resiliency brings the sticky grit of clear marching orders: “No matter-how-I-frickin’-feel-I-will-get-it-together-get-up-again-bounce-back-to-continue-on!”
Self-belief is more a shelter you return to, than a sprint forward.
Loving practical outcomes, we admire/count on resiliency to keep us on course until the light right around the bend comes into view. Best to have a well-lit welcome mat (of your own design) greeting you at your door.
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In my new robe
this morning-
someone else.
- Basho (1644-1694)
Linda (Elle) Yaven, guides rising and seasoned leaders identifying their Talent Archetypes for practical outcomes. She is Faculty member, MBA and Masters Interaction Design Programs at California College of the Arts and has coached at Pixar, IDEO, Allianz and Auto-Desk.
elle@ellevateyou.com
