The way I did this was to imagine a film crew following me around documenting how successful I was. Regardless of whether I was a success or not, how would I act to show someone I deserved my success? What would I want them to see? What am I doing that I would want them not to see because Iâm embarrassed or ashamed?
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The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well sheâs performed, or how good she is. While simple praise is by no means a bad thing, it captures a moment in the past rather than creating the possibility of more such moments in the future. Instead, what youâll want to do is tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attentionâyour instantaneous reaction to what worked. For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are your reactions, and when you share them with specificity and with detail, you arenât judging her or rating her or fixing her. You are simply reflecting to her the unique âdentâ she just made in the world, as seen through one personâs eyesâyours. And precisely because it isnât a judgment or a rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question.
However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If youâre somebody when youâre successful, what are you when youâre unsuccessful?
My status meeting had a purposeâkeep everyone informed about the teamâs weekly progress. It still ended up lousy because I didnât ask myself, What does a great outcome look like?
It was a good question: why was I behaving like such a twat? I suppose I was doing something dramatic to try and get attention. I realize that, on one level, it sounds nuts, given that I was living in a city that had declared it was Elton John Week, I was about to play in front of 110,000 people, and there was an ITV camera crew in the process of making a documentary about me. How much more attention can a man need? But I was looking for a different kind of attention from that. I was trying to make my family understand that there was something wrong, however well my career was going: it might seem that itâs all great, it might seem that my life is perfect, but itâs not. I couldnât say to them, âI think Iâm taking too many drugsâ, because they would never understand; they didnât know what cocaine was. I hadnât got the guts to tell them, âLook, Iâm really not feeling very good, I need a bit of loveâ, because I didnât want them to see any cracks in the facade at all. I was too strong-willed â and too afraid of her reaction â to just take my mum aside and say, âListen, Mum, I really need to talk to you â Iâm not doing very well here, I need a bit of help, what do you think?â Instead of doing that, I bottled it up and bottled it up and then eventually I went off like Vesuvius and staged this ridiculous suicide bid. Thatâs who I am: itâs all or nothing. It wasnât my familyâs fault at all, it was mine. I was too proud to admit that my life wasnât perfect. It was pathetic.
Getting honest perspectives on your life from people you trust can be very illuminating in your effort to become unstuck. Such trusted observers will almost certainly see things that you canât.
You may also be able to do something like this yourself by asking, If someone else was telling me this story, what would I think? What would I tell them? This kind of self-distanced reflection can shed new light on old stories.