As high achieving women, we know how to go all in. How to get things done, improve things that were deemed hopeless and how to make the impossible happen. We do this because we are obsessed with progress, making everything around us better than how we found it. And sometimes, when all that energy is turned towards ourselves, it can result in a never ending project of self improvement. One that starts with little tweaks here and there… challenging ourselves to speak up more in meetings, talk less and listen during confrontational moments, slow down to give each of our subordinates personal attention..and before you know it, you’ve blown your entire self-concept up into a tornado of faults where everything you are, needs just a little more tweaking. This, my friends, is a fault obsession.
We become so focused on our faults and everything we need to improve that we lose sight of who and what we want to become. We hold ourselves stagnate, simply by obsessing over everything we could be, but aren’t. Honestly, it doesn’t even matter what is true and what isn’t at this point because you can’t see the forest from the trees.
I recall a time when I fell into this trap. I stopped seeing all the good I was doing and only saw the faults. I criticized myself for being jealous of my coworkers successes, saw fault in the way I showed up as authentically me instead of some perfectly polished version of a human that doesn’t even exist in real life, and I questioned my ability to manage my time even though I always seemed to get everything done. When I ran out of new things to obsess over at work, I started on my personal life. I picked apart how I didn’t have energy for my family, how I wasn’t focusing enough on my relationship with my husband, how I wasn’t a great friend because I didn’t reach out to people on a regular cadence, on and on it went. I became so obsessed with all my faults that I pulled myself into a funk that I felt I couldn’t even get out of, without a complete overhaul of my life.
And then I had to ask myself, is this really what I want to be? How is this helping me?
I had let my subconscious mind run wild and unattended until it became obsessed with finding all the things that I wasn’t doing right. I had even convinced myself that everyone around me must be lying awake at night thinking of all the ways I feel short, because I sure was.
But they weren’t and I didn’t need to be either!
In the Book You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, Jen Sincero refers to our ego as The Big Snooze or BS for short. As she puts it, our BS operates according to all the garbage we’ve made up about ourselves that is less than flattering. A fault obsession is the same as getting so wrapped up in your BS that you settle for a reality that is WAY beneath you.
So how do you get out? First, accept that nothing is wrong. Everything is operating as normal. Most likely, you were en route to a big goal or in some stage of transition, when your BS started acting like a teenager in the height of rebellion. Teenagers rebel, that’s what they do when challenged. It’s how they figure out the world. Brains do the same.
Second, decide what you want to accomplish or create. Commit to doing whatever it takes to get there. Obstacles will happen, it’s part of the growth process. As they do, don’t make it mean that you weren’t meant to succeed. Instead, take it as a sign that you are ridding yourself of your BS and heading in the right direction. To do that, you need obstacles to appear, in order for you to prove to yourself that you will stop at nothing to succeed.
Third, don’t allow the obstacles to stand in your way. Keep pushing past them. Some of them are real and some of them will simply be manufactured in your head. None of them are reason to stop.
Just because you have a strength in achievement and creating success, doesn’t mean you have to use it against yourself. You get to choose to redirect that energy into creating an incredible future. If you need help in that journey, I’ve got your back.
Now let’s go create an amazing life!