How many times have you said something like, “I’m not very good at X.” only to be told not to be so hard on yourself, not to put yourself down, or some variation of that theme?

I grant you that sometimes these comments are accurate and that the person is under-rating herself, but, just as often it’s a valid statement of fact.

Maybe it’s partly a function of age, but, it’s mainly a function of knowing one’s self and knowing when a viable ROI on the time/energy investment to change/create/fix something in ourselves just isn’t there.

For example, All my life I’ve been a procrastinator. I was about an 8 on a scale of 10, with ten being the worst. Over the years I invested a tremendous amount of time and energy in changing that—and I did change it, to a 4. When I hit four, I realized that the effort it was taking me to move to 3.8 was larger than when I moved from eight to seven.

That meant the change wasn’t particularly productive, in other words, bad ROI. So I stopped investing in change and learned to compensate instead, meaning I channeled my remaining procrastination into areas that don’t really impact the important parts of my world.

The point of all this is two fold

1. Know yourself well enough to know what you really want to change—change is a very personal decision—because to change successfully, it must be your idea.
2. Recognize when the return on your time/energy being spent is too low to warrant the investment and develop work-arounds to deal with the remnants of the change-item.

Finally, don’t let those pesky don’t-be-so-hard-on-yourself comments push you into actions that aren’t in your best interest. After all, they don’t know me as well as I know me, or as well as you know you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Culture, Motivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.