Ep #10: What Does It Mean to be Great?

Failure is your greatest teacher, but if you have a merged identity in what you do with who you are, this is going to be very confusing. It’s going to be much harder to be resilient and come back from it because you’re going to take it so personally.

Welcome to Mental Health Remix, a show for ambitious humans who are ready to feel, think, and be different. If you want to stop struggling with perfectionism, build better relationships, and connect with yourself and your potential, this is the place for you…

Here’s your host, educator, coach and licensed psychotherapist, Nicole Symcox…

Hey, hey, welcome to episode number 10. Today we are talking about being great. And I think for many high-achievers, they are striving to be great. And how many would define that would be I want to be somebody who matters. I want to be someone who’s valuable. I want to be someone important.

And so a lot of times we associate that with this idea of being great. But if we have unresolved trauma or we have unresolved pain in our lives, this can get a little bit confusing because sometimes, what happens is our inner worth gets merged with our outer experiences, meaning the things we do to achieve our goals, sometimes those two identities merge together.

And they don’t belong together because it means that if we are trying to achieve something that we believe is great and it doesn’t work out or we fail, we take it so personally. It’s like a kick to the gut. Because we’re like, well, I put my heart and soul into this business and it just didn’t even pan out. There is something wrong with me.

Not necessarily. What it means is that you need to pull apart your self-worth from what you achieve in life. That’s actually what that means. Because what you achieve, if you’re a business owner or if you’re a leader of a community, or if you’re trying new things in a company, there is a point where you have to get really comfortable with failure.

Failure is your greatest teacher. But if you have a merged identity in what you do with who you are, this is going to be very confusing. It’s going to be much harder to be resilient and come back from it because you’re going to take it so personally.

Let’s say you’re a business owner and you try a new business idea and it bombs. It doesn’t get any likes or views or nobody buys the thing that you’re selling, and if you have an identity that is merged with what I do creates worth and value for me, what do you think you’re going to feel when the business tanks? Or when that one business idea didn’t go right off the bat?

So this is where people in business get stuck because they take it so personally. And the best advice I can give you is to work on your own mental health and heal inside of you whatever story is playing out for you that makes you believe you are only worth your last achievement. Because I’m telling you, that is BS.

You are a worthy, valuable human because you are on this earth. That is what makes you valuable. Your identity is completely separate from what you achieve or don’t achieve. So this is what we’re talking about today.

When it comes to being great, I think we should all be striving for and achieving for being great inside of ourselves with our inner circles through our thoughts, our behaviors, our relationships. Showing up in healthy, balanced ways, rather than just leading life with a void and trying to fill it up with a bunch of achievements and tangible objects. Because my sweet friends, that will create a bigger void. Not a smaller one.

Many, many have tried and failed at this game. It’s the oldest game in the human book. You cannot chase money, power, and status, and expect that to fix the things that feel broken inside of you. It won’t. It will be a Band-Aid. It will temporarily make you feel differently, and then the second you’re alone with your own thoughts or the second you’re not distracted with another achievement or shiny object thing that you’re working towards, all those feelings are going to surface and come up.

And some people spend a lifetime running from them and why? Why run from something when there is so much value in healing from it? I think people spend too much time running from their pain rather than facing their pain. You guys have to remember, painful experiences is also where your power showed up.

If you survived it, you were a powerful person in that, but you don’t know that because you haven’t faced your pain or dealt with it in a healthy way. When you heal and when you get healthy from these things, you don’t have to run from them because they’re not scary anymore.

You’ve looked fear in the face and you’re like, I’ve got this. Totally different mindset than spending your whole life shopping and drinking or chasing one relationship after the next, then in the end, leads you right back to the same place with a lot more mistakes and a lot bigger bills.

And it’s the oldest game in the book. So as humans, I think we’re always trying to go for the most tangible fix or antidote that we can see. And that just doesn’t always work. We have to deal with ourselves. And so chasing our dreams is so important and I’m such a supporter of that. I want you to feel like you have a purpose in life. I want you to go after your dreams. I want you to achieve “great” things.

But I do not want you to sacrifice your mental health for it in the process because your mental health is the thing that carries you through. Your relationships are something you need. These are all human things that we need in life to feel fulfilled and happy.

And I think a lot of where this gets wrong is most of the world does respect, admire, and love wealth, power, and status. It is all over everywhere when you look at the media. Celebrities are probably the best examples of this. We love and admire everything they put on the outside because it creates a feeling for us on the inside.

But most of Hollywood is smoke and mirrors, and they all admit to that. I mean, I’m not saying anything new. They are prepped, they are scripted, and they are trained on what to say, how to say it, to make you believe the story they want to tell. Most of them are actors. You have to remember that. And if they’re not actors, they’re trained to be on stage.

Even singers aren’t necessarily actors but they want to display something to you, and so they put on a beautiful show. And I’m not dogging these things. Don’t get this wrong. Entertainment is awesome. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment.

What’s wrong with it is if we put our worth and value on it and think that’s the thing we need to be in order to be loved or valued in life, that’s what’s wrong with it. So don’t hear me wrong on this. Go to movies. Go to concerts. Have fun. Comment on her dress. All of that stuff. It’s all fun stuff, but it goes haywire and it goes wrong when you try to build an identity and a foundation around those things.

It will create a heap of depression and anxiety and a void that is very painful to deal with. So here’s my challenge to you since we’re talking about the stories we believe. So if an actor can make you believe that something has worth and value, what story would you need to tell your own self to make you believe that you’re valuable and worthwhile?

And if that sentence ends in, well, I’ll be worthwhile after I graduate college, or I’ll be worthwhile after I’m a CEO of a company, or I’ll be worthwhile once my business takes off, then that is your indication something is not right.

You should not have those kinds of qualifiers on your innate value. That doesn’t make sense. You are innately valuable and lovable up until the point that you achieve your goal. So when you’re grinding it out and feeling like a failure and using every resource you have inside of you to keep going when it’s hard and when it’s tough, those are the moments you value yourself.

And those are the moments that you reach out for support and you treat people well. You don’t treat people poorly in those moments because you think it’s all for the sacrifice of the goal that’s coming up. Don’t do that. You are sacrificing a whole lot of life in between achieving your goals.

So when you decide that you are worth it and that you are just as shiny and spectacular as any celebrity out there, even if you don’t fully believe it, deciding that you are worth it enough to work on the emotions and the mental blocks you have that are keeping you stuck is invaluable.

So for all my perfectionists out there, you’re going to hear my advice and be like okay, I need to just quickly change this and I just need to focus on valuing myself. That mindset doesn’t work. Not even close. You’re just going to get frustrated. You have to do the building blocks. You have to take the tangible steps that build up to the bigger step.

So sometimes, the first step is well, I get really hyperfocused on achieving my goals and sometimes it’s hard for me to be a nice person in relationships because I’m so stressed out and I’m so anxious all the time. Sometimes just admitting that as the first step is enough, as long as you’re taking steps to how to correct that.

And that can take some time, but as long as you are working towards it and you’re not trying to stay the same, that is where the value is at because there are no instantaneous fixes. There are no quick fixes. All of those things fail. So what sustains are small tangible steps that build the building blocks for a new way of being in the world.

So a lot of this is just deciding that you have stuff to work on in your internal world. You’re going to have to process and heal from whatever anxiety story you’ve been telling yourself or whatever traumatic experience that happened to you that is holding you back, that is maybe telling you a story that you’re not good enough for love, attention, or connection, which is not true.

But many times when we have traumatic experiences, those three messages are webbed into our nervous system and so they play out unconsciously. And so sometimes, we merge into achievements or we merge into tangible goals because we can see, feel, and touch those things and it can feel like we get successful at them.

Versus we get really lost and confused on how to heal ourselves from these traumatic experiences that are pumping all these negative messages at us. And this is important to understand, that just achieving your goals is possible. So is healing from your past. And no, it’s not glamorous, and no, it’s not fun, and yes, it hurts, but it is worth it in the end.

It is worth it in the end because I cannot tell you how many business owners, entrepreneurs, and aspiring leaders of companies that I talk to that don’t have this emotional stuff figured out and it truly holds them back in business because their mindset and their emotional reactions are a mess.

Every time a business idea fails, they feel like a failure, versus the healthy mindset on that is to view the business tactic as a failure and thus, learning from it and employing a new one. And quite literally, that fast.

Really a lot of building a business is learning what the market is ready for and how you’re communicating to them and the product that you have. And so you can’t take that personally. You have to separate your identity from what you do.

And so as you’re going out there and achieving your goals, you need to be able to make quick decisions, recalibrate, and try a new approach. Not get stuck in self-loathing and hating yourself for not being good enough. Do you guys see how those two things are merging together in an unhealthy way?

That kind of stuff is going to take you down faster and guess what’s going to happen? Your business is going to fail because you’re not going to have the tenacity or the resilience to do what you need to do in order to make it go.

So you become a superpower when you are in therapy or you are learning how to heal these emotional wounds inside of yourself so that you can separate from the tangible tactics of running a business or being an entrepreneur or being a leader of a company from your self-worth. They don’t belong together. They absolutely don’t belong together and it’s going to create a mixture of pain for you.

Okay, so here are some tips and some tools to kind of get you going in this direction. So one of them is that if this is you, if you are a business owner or you’re an entrepreneur, or you’re a leader, and you’re finding that your emotional responses are getting in the way of you being those things effectively, or you’re having challenges implementing strategies because you get so caught up in the emotions of the thing, I would really encourage you to find a therapist that really knows how to work with your particular set of issues.

And kind of assess in yourself like, what are the patterns? How am I getting defeated? How is my anxiety showing up? Am I constantly going back to feeling like a child that’s being wounded by their parents or being wounded at school? That’s all information for you to figure out what kind of help and support you need because there’s a lot of therapists out there and I have to tell you peep, we’re not all created equal.

We’re very different and we’re very unique. And at the same time, we have all the same goals for supporting and helping clients heal and feel better. But we all have different modalities that we’re trained in, we have different viewpoints, and so you want to find a therapist that you can really feel comfortable relating to because 50% of the work is done in the relationship with your therapist.

So feeling good with them, feeling like their modalities are supportive to you, and sometimes it’s a little bit of an interview process. You might have to check out a few therapists at first to figure out who’s a good fit for you. But don’t get discouraged so easily where you go to therapy once and you meet a therapist that you didn’t click with and then decide therapy’s not for you. That’s not a fair assessment. It’s really, really not.

Because people will tell you who actually really have benefited from therapy that they have really enjoyed the relationship with their therapist. And enjoy doesn’t mean it’s always easy. A good therapist is going to challenge you. A good therapist is going to push you out of your comfort zone a little bit in a supportive, healthy way.

But they would be able to see you and help you sharpen some areas that aren’t going well for you. So don’t be afraid to be challenged in therapy. That is how you grow.

Number two, journaling before bed is actually a really great routine. And so if you’re a high-achiever or if you’re starting a new job or you’re in the professional world, sometimes you just need to do a mind dump of all the things you’ve been thinking about all day long so that you can go to sleep.

So I would recommend 20 minutes of journaling as just a mental vent session just out in your journal, just getting all the thoughts and feelings out from your head and on to paper, and rip and tear it up and get rid of it. You don’t have to keep it. It’s not designed to be a dear diary, I really am in love with Johnny and he’s so cute and adorable, and you’re keeping it.

No, that’s not this kind of journaling. This kind of journaling is just like a huge brain dump so it may not even be coherent on paper so there’s no reason to keep it. But you want to get out some of those stressful thoughts, the mental static that’s going on in your brain and just get it on paper so you don’t have to swirl it around and around in your head when you’re trying to sleep. Because when you’re trying to achieve great things, you need your sleep.

Alright my friends, I hope you have a great week and that this was a little bit helpful. And I hope that you learned how to define being great for yourself as taking care of yourself, taking care of your relationships, maintaining a healthy inner circle of healthy connections and relationships and being part of community and managing your thoughts and emotions, and really being the best that you are capable of being and really learning how to value yourself as a human rather than a to-do list, or an achiever.

Those two things are separate. And when you get this figured out, you will be unstoppable. Alright guys, I’m rooting for you.

I want to do a little disclaimer here as a way to empower your sense of wellbeing. If you notice things come up for you when you’re listening to this podcast, such as strong emotions, feeling triggered, or feeling stuck, I highly recommend you seek support from a mental health professional in your local state of residence.

You have to remember, triggers and emotional responses are just information that something in your emotional world needs support. There is absolutely no shame in seeking out support from a mental health professional in your local state of residence.

And lastly, if you enjoy today’s show and you don’t want to worry about missing an episode, you can subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you haven’t already, I would so appreciate if you could leave a rating and a review to let me know what you think and help others find this podcast.

You can visit my website at nicolesymcox.com/podcastlaunch for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe, rate, and review. All right, my friends, I’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Mental Health Remix. If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more, go to nicolesymcox.com.

© 2019 Nicole Symcox, all rights reserved