Inner Excellence: When Positive Thinking Isn't Enough
From Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., 9/11/2009 8:43:03 AM
I am pleased to take up the role as "Inner Excellence" blogger for REAL. Since this was the title of the first of my 16 books about work/life balance and success, I am optimistic about committing my thoughts to the written word. But when it comes to live TV interviews: that's another matter.
Sitting in the green room of the CBS Early Show a few days ago, I was getting more and more nervous. The task with which I’d been charged was to concentrate my entire philosophy of work and life empowerment into a couple of pithy sound bites.
I’d arrived early in order to settle down, gather my thoughts and think positively about how I would come across. But the segment prior to mine turned out to be populated by school-aged children modeling backpacks. There I was, trying to meditate on personal empowerment, while the kids tripped over me with their oversized rucksacks. Nerves were quickly devolving into desperation.
That’s when I remembered a sign I’d seen once on a big, scary desk. I was a job applicant—and the sign on the interviewer’s desk simply read: “We don’t need your desperation. We’re already oversupplied.” I laughed then, and then again backstage at CBS, just before the cameras started rolling—and did just fine both times.
But sometimes what is going on in our lives is quite simply no laughing matter. What then? Like in my own case, for instance, when at the beginning of the recession, at the peak of my career as a senior executive with a global corporation, I found myself downsized and out-of-work. I spent a year dealing with job-hunting and rejection, only occasionally feeling optimistic. The story has a happy ending, I finally landed a job I love, despite my sometimes rotten attitude. And here’s the crux of what I learned.
It has been popular recently in empowerment circles to promise that if only we think positively enough, we’ll get what we want.
It is great to think optimistically when you can, of course. But you don’t need to force it. There’s a whole lot more to utilizing one’s full human potential than limiting yourself to the narrow band of the spectrum of possibilities we think of as positive thinking. How about righteous indignation? Bittersweet sorrow? Grieving one’s losses? Legitimate jitters born by taking courageous risks at the edge of one’s comfort level? And of course, my most recent favorite: irritation at kids in backpacks.
What if rather than squashing or judging your honest emotions, you were, instead, to grow large enough to embrace the whole of who you are at any given moment?
This is the essence of what I discovered during that difficult year: that I didn’t need an upbeat or even a brave attitude to make progress. I just needed discipline, putting resumes out, making phone calls, following up on leads and such. This I could do happy or sad, anxious or full of faith.
In the end, the message I hoped to embody at CBS, and the heart of my philosophy about work and life, is this: Whatever it is you have going on with you at this exact moment of time, you can embrace it all, look life in the face and proclaim: “Here I am. Deal with it.”
Even when it’s a pack of kids with backpacks tripping over you in the green room.
Check out Carol's appearance on the CBS Early Show here!
