The Work In Therapy

Introductions are funny, aren’t they? We say hi, nod, shake, and introduce ourselves. The word introduction comes from the Latin verb introducere, meaning to lead in. This leading in assumes that the parties involved will go deeper and learn more about one another. Otherwise, what would be the point of the introduction, right? What if I told you that you don’t know yourself enough to have any kind of authentic relationship with yourself beyond that lead in. It’s not your fault. How many years of math did you take? What about Spanish or French? And how many years did you spend learning about you? Have you ever spent a week diving into the extraordinary uniqueness of you? Two years ago I was speaking at a large leadership conference. It was a group of spa owners and operators. Mostly women, as it happens. I said the math, science, Spanish thing and then asked, When was the last time you spent any time studying the uniqueness of you? A pause. There’s always a pause. And straight faces, stares. People chuckled, cheered.

Warning Signs

Takes courage to yell out in a room of a thousand. I asked her to stand. What’s your name? Destiny, she said. I had erred on purpose. How about the results report? How long did that take you to read? About fifteen minutes, she shrugged. The crowd roared around her. Then the StandOut assessment exactly a decade later. I’ve done research and given thousands of speeches in just about every country. And, of course, since they’re so close to those things they love to do, they don’t value them. I imagine the same’ll be true for you. We see just how easy it is for you to remember customers, their names, and something distinct about them, and we marvel at this gift. We see you zero in instinctively on that one error in the long lines of computer code, and we’re amazed.

Dead Against It

We watch as you find just the right words, tone, and eye contact to calm that patient down, and we wish we could be so naturally reassuring. You aren’t astounded by these gifts. You are inside them, so interwoven with them that it’s not just that you don’t value them. It’s more that you don’t see them at all. You can go a lifetime never seeing them. Tragically, most of us do. It still makes me happy. Because the focus in therapy is typically on what’s wrong with you. And the work in therapy? How to fix what’s wrong. Us humans, we’re masters at drilling into what’s wrong with us. From the beginning of your existence, the word you heard most from your parents was No or Don’t. Your parents’ job was to keep you alive.

That Day Is Done

You got really good at understanding all the bad things around you. Hot stove, busy street, granny’s rosary. Then you go to school. You get an A+ in drawing and painting and a C– in math. Nobody talks about your love for the arts. Everyone’s attention is on your flailing in math. Then you go to work and have your first performance review. Nobody is dedicated to introducing you to yourself, to helping you get curious about and build a really deep relationship with you at your best. Everybody in your life, since childhood, has had expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to you discovering the unique things you love and building a life around them. Of course, your parents want you to be happy. But if you told them that living in your van and selling burritos to hungry surfers is what makes you happy, I think they’d start pointing to alternative, more successful paths. What no one is doing is starting with you, listening to you, paying attention to what you instinctively pay attention to, and giving you methods and techniques to then apply these unique gifts in the world. And it’s an easy thing to say to anyone just starting out in their career, or thinking about a career change. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it. Find what you love, and do it! The hard part is the doing. Of course, you want a life in which you get to do a lot of what you love. You have within you so much energy, so much insight, so much power, so much joy. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and look back and realize that you didn’t get to feel any of it. But how do you actually do it? The data on this is a bit confusing, to be honest. So to tell you that to thrive in your life you’ve got to do what you love would seem to be setting you up for failure. And yet, dig a little further in, and Steve Jobs was still right. To do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. Do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day? Were you excited to go to work every day last week? Those people who are thriving answer strongly agree to both of these. Every single day they report that they get to do something that plays to the best of themselves, something that gets them excited. They don’t necessarily do all they love. Instead, they find the love in what they do. You can learn how they did it, and apply this to all parts of your own daily life. You don’t necessarily need to hold out for that perfect job where you do all that you love. Instead, you can learn the skill of finding the love in what you do. Together, you and I are going to uncover the mysteries of you, and reveal to you the unimaginably unique mark you can make on the world. There is no one, nor will there ever be, who is quite like you.