Becoming Braver – Knowing Yourself Is The Beginning

You can be successful and still be frustrated.

Knowing myself has been a lifelong project, and I suspect it will remain one because I’m still discovering things about me that I thought I already knew. I’ve always been fascinated by the different ways we can understand ourselves. Personality profiles, strengths assessments, psychometrics, coaching conversations, supervision, feedback from others; I’ve had my fair share of all of them. Some have been enormously useful, particularly when they have given me language for something I had experienced but couldn’t quite articulate.

There is a particular pleasure in discovering that something you had been quietly judging yourself for might simply be part of how you are wired. That can be liberating, can’t it? It can also provide a rather good explanation for some of our behaviour. And that is where I think we need to be a little careful, because knowing why I do something doesn’t automatically mean I am going to do anything differently.

Nor should it maybe.

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I know, for example, that I need time to process information properly. I know that my mental, social and emotional batteries need monitoring. I know that some environments drain me more quickly than others, and I know that when I am depleted I cannot be there for people in the way they deserve or in the way I want to be.

I know all of this.

And yet I still occasionally find myself doing precisely the things I know don’t serve me particularly well.

Which makes me wonder what all that lovely self-awareness is actually for.

I’m beginning to think that self-awareness is useful information, but it isn’t the destination. It’s parts of the jigsaw that give me something to work with. What I do with that information is where the interesting bit begins. This is something I’ve learned repeatedly through my own messy learning journey. I can understand a pattern intellectually and still need to experience it before the penny really drops. Sometimes I need to try something, discover what happens, adjust my approach and try again. That process gives me information I simply couldn’t have gathered by thinking about it from the safety of my armchair.

And perhaps that is especially relevant to we introverts because thinking things through is something we tend to value. I certainly do. I like to understand the landscape before I set off across it. I like to know what I’m dealing with, consider the possibilities and make an informed decision. All perfectly sensible, until thinking becomes a substitute for doing.

I’ve caught myself there more than once.

I can analyse something beautifully. I can identify the possible causes, explore the consequences, consider what other people might be thinking and construct several perfectly plausible explanations for why I am behaving as I am. I can even persuade myself that I am making progress because I have understood the situation more deeply.

Meanwhile, nothing has actually changed, which is an uncomfortable realisation really, because there is a subtle difference between having insight and using insight. One can fool us into believing we have done some groundbreaking work when we have actually just become very well informed about the pattern we are still repeating. Still useful but far from transformational.
I’ve seen this in my work too. People can know an extraordinary amount about their personality, their strengths and their preferences. They can explain themselves beautifully. They can tell you exactly why something happens for them and where it probably came from.

Then the same situation arrives and they respond in exactly the same way. That isn’t a criticism as I’ve done it myself. Patterns are persistent little blighters.

So what do we do?

For me, the answer has increasingly been experimentation.

I love the idea that we can treat life as a series of small experiments because it removes some of the pressure to get everything right. I don’t have to know in advance whether something will work. I can try it, pay attention to what happens and then decide what the evidence is telling me.

That is very different from blindly following somebody else’s formula.

I’ve spent nearly 40 years in learning and development, and one of the things that still concerns me is how readily people are spoon-fed answers. Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon, as E. M. Forster put it so beautifully. Real learning needs the WHY, not simply the What and How, because every situation we encounter will be different and we need to be able to re-engineer a process for ourselves.

The same applies to knowing ourselves. I don’t want to collect more and more information about who I am and then use it as an excuse for staying exactly where I am.

I want my self-awareness to inform my choices.

If I know I tend to overthink, I can notice when I’m doing it and decide whether more thinking is actually useful.

If I know I regularly say yes when I really mean no, I can experiment with a different response.

If I know there is something I want to say, ask for, or change, I can explore what happens when I take one small step towards doing it.

And yes, that may require more bravery than I may typically demonstrate.

Not the sort that involves throwing yourself off a cliff metaphorically or otherwise, but the quieter courage of trying something unfamiliar, knocking knees and all, and being open to learn from what happens.

That is why I’m increasingly interested in what we do with what we know about ourselves because self-awareness is an ongoing journey, and a braver introvert is increasingly self-aware whilst also being willing to undertake small experiments without attachment to the outcome.

So, what do you know about yourself that you have been using to understand your behaviour?

And what might happen if you used that same knowledge to experiment with changing one small thing?

You don’t need another personality profile to answer that. You might simply need to notice what you already know, and then be curious enough to do something with it.

 

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𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 and 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 are copyright of Flourishing Introverts

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Becoming Braver – Successful and Frustrated?

You can be successful and still be frustrated.

Have you ever heard yourself say (even to yourself), “Well, I can’t grumble – I’m doing alright really”, whilst another part of you is quietly thinking, Are you sure? I’ve certainly had many of those moments.

I remember periods when I was achieving things, taking on responsibility, doing work I was good at and receiving the recognition that tends to come with that. From the outside, there was plenty of evidence that things were going well. I was perfectly capable of getting on with things, and I did.

But there was also a niggle. That little voice asking whether this was actually what I wanted, whether I was using my strengths in ways that mattered to me and whether the version of success I was chasing still lit me up and inspired me. I suspect many of us know that feeling deep down.

We can become rather accomplished at doing what is expected of us. We work hard, we deliver, we solve problems and we keep things moving. We might even become the person everybody relies on because we can be trusted to get the job done without making a song and dance about it.

And then someone tells us how successful we are, which whilst welcomed on the one hand, can make admitting to frustration feel a little awkward.

Because what exactly is it okay to be frustrated about?

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We have the career. We have the position. We have the experience. We may have worked incredibly hard to get where we are. People may genuinely admire what we have achieved. So we tell that niggling internal voice to be grateful and carry on.

I think we introverts can be particularly good at this because we can spend an extraordinary amount of time in our own heads, making sense of things, finding the reasonable explanation and giving everybody else the benefit of the doubt. We can adapt. We can accommodate. We can become the master of disguise when we need to secure our quiet space.

And all the while, something may be niggling away relentlessly.

I’ve come to realise that success is one of those words we use rather freely, even though we can mean completely different things by it. I think we all have our own definitions which feels right. For some it is about money and material possessions. For others, success comes through power, usually over people and resources. And for yet more, it’s something far more wholesome. A peaceful life well lived. The creation of a positive legacy left in people. A reputation of kindness.

For me, success has become increasingly connected to my values, to taking responsibility for what matters to me and to doing work that leaves me feeling fulfilled. And a large part of my fulfilment is doing things that make a positive difference to others. Even if that is only my small corner of humanity. That has taken some working out, because there are plenty of messages around us telling us what successful people look like and what successful people should want next. More responsibility. More recognition. More influence. More of whatever it is that demonstrates that we are progressing nicely.

By whose standards I am left wondering.

And progress can become a very seductive thing.

We can keep moving forwards because that is what successful people do, without stopping to ask ourselves where exactly we are heading.

That’s where frustration often bubbles up.

I don’t think frustration automatically means that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is the bit of us that has noticed something important before the rest of us has caught up. It might be telling us that an old ambition has run its course. It might be pointing towards something we have been putting off. It might be reminding us that a value we hold dear has somehow been squeezed out of the life we have built.

Or it might simply be telling us that we are ready to take responsibility for defining success for ourselves.

That takes a little courage. It does not demand that we storm into a room, bang our fist on the table and announce that things are going to change, not something we introverts do. And it has never struck me as a particularly useful version of bravery.

Often for us courage is much quieter. Sometimes it is sitting with the uncomfortable truth that you have achieved something you once wanted and still aren’t fulfilled. Sometimes it is admitting that the thing everyone else considers evidence of your success isn’t the thing that matters most to you anymore.

And at other times it is deciding that you are going to do something about it.

So if you are successful and still frustrated, perhaps give that frustration a little more attention.

What is it trying to tell you?

What have you achieved that genuinely matters to you?

And where have you become so good at coping, adapting or getting on with it that you have stopped asking yourself whether this is still how you want to live and work?

Those questions may lead somewhere rather interesting.

Because flourishing, for me, has a great deal to do with living intentionally and making choices that are aligned with who I am, what I value and what I want to contribute.

And perhaps becoming braver starts in exactly that place: being willing to admit that something needs your attention, even when everything on the outside suggests you are doing just fine.

 

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𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 and 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 are copyright of Flourishing Introverts

𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗿: Entirely human written and designed content without any AI assistance.