TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CONFIDENT THINKING: BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING!

CONFIDENT THINKING: COMMANDMENT NO. TWO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006

BELIEVE IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING; BELIEVE THAT YOU POSSESS THE ABILITY TO HELP OTHERS SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS.

It is so easy to become the victim to our own destiny by falling into a job, career, lifestyle, relationship, or situation that has little to do with what we desire and are capable of doing.

It is so easy to go with the flow and never take inventory of where you are, or how you got there. It is as if it just happened. This is preamble to understanding what gives satisfaction, pleasure, and purpose. Psychic energy may be enslaved to incentives or motivated to seek gain without the pain of making choices.

A fulfilling life is found in the service of others. Through the service of others, it becomes self-serving and satisfying.

What does this have to do with believing in what you do? Everything. The heart is more reliable than the head when it comes to choosing a career. There is a simple formula that may prove useful:

FIRST, look at what is of greatest interest to you, not analytically, but as a record of the patterns of interests that your life has demonstrated.

SECOND, validate what interests you by considering how much time you give to these interests daily, weekly, and monthly. The commitment of time establishes a representative pattern consistent with these interests.

THIRD, identify your primary and secondary interests, and establish the time you have given to each; evaluate in terms of satisfaction from greatly to moderately to occasionally satisfying. Ask yourself what was particularly satisfying, how sustaining was the satisfaction?

Be ready for surprises because few people realize how much time they spend on nonsense interests, interests that could derail a satisfying and productive career.

Oftentimes sensible and flippant concerns seem on a collision course. Things done are done because “I have to” rather than “I want to.” There is a natural reluctance “to take charge,” preferring “to go with the flow,” and drift into a lifestyle and work without direction or purpose or consequence. A facetious belief is that college must follow high school when many have no real interest in academia and book learning, per se.

Something strange happens when the external demand for doing that comes from “outside” pressure is replaced by something “inside” that governs choices to be made. The governor activated from “within” takes charge and confronts life aggressively.

A game of chase is commenced in the human heart between essence and personality. Essence is that unique “something” that is the special talent that we possess independent of others. It is unique to us and no one else. It may be a faculty for math, music, art, caring, literature, carpentry, or handling some kind of ball in sport.

Personality is the many masks that we wear in life to get by; to gain attention, recognition, win approval, to belong, or a myriad of other longings so that we may approve of ourselves. We are first, last and always a social animal.

Still, we can become lost in this chase. The bright beautiful girl who wants to be accepted plays down her intelligence. The handsome young Adonis ignores his talents and relies on his good looks. If this were only an adolescent tic, it would be one thing, but gifted people often demean their gifts only to ultimately lose them in dissipation of obsequious fawning.

If the most important thing in existence is to be liked, personality will win at the expense of essence. Innate talent is to be used, not ignored, even if it means encountering envy and jealousy. That doesn’t mean you gloat, bring attention to your gifts, or punish others with them, but simply that the masks you wear do not diminish your talent. Satisfaction never comes from meeting others’ needs at the expense of your own. Genuine generosity comes only when your heart and head are in the right place, and that is when you are using your essence, not abusing it.

Believing in what you are doing seldom comes directly like an epiphany, but evolves as if building blocks over time put in place when the activities seem on the surface unrelated. High school typing was one for me. I took it only on a lark, and it has proven invaluable through my many careers, especially now as a writer.

Often along the way certain people introduce us to ourselves. This was the case of a professor of mine. It was a literature course and he asked me one day after class my major. I told him it was chemistry. He informed me I should be in the humanities, and wanted to recommend me for the Honors Program. I balked pursuing my career in chemistry. Many years later, I would become a writer, the work I most believe in.

As a chemist, I went from the chemical lab into chemical sales engineering, and then into corporate management. My work found me traveling the world, then something kicked in that lay dormant in my soul: nothing made sense to me anymore. There had to be more to life. I was at a crossroad.

In my early thirties, I retired to think, read, and write, only to find that l lacked the skill and training for commercial success as a writer. Had I taken my professor’s advice, I might have developed such skills. But here is the “catch 22,” I would have had the skills but nothing interesting to write about. My life of work has provided that material.

The reason for sharing this personal history is that often there is not a direct relationship between activities and the ultimate impact on the work you most believe in.

Another situational activity common to students in college and that is working part time as waiters in restaurants. They have to deal with the public, developing a tolerance for bad manners, and occasional abusive verbal treatment, all the time being professional and in control. This provides a laboratory of the game of power from a powerless position that they should never forget. This can prove an important insight into human behavior should they become a lawyer, teacher, medical doctor, psychologist, public servant, politician, or a corporate manager.

In terms of interest, time and satisfaction, certain activities can be of instrumental (means to an end) but not necessarily of terminal (ends in themselves) value. These activities provide a foundation to a career while seemingly unrelated. A pattern develops in the doing with the pieces either coalescing or shattering your essence.

You can fall into one of these temporary activities as a permanent status because it is easy, comfortable, unchallenging, and involves no struggle, pain or embarrassment. Consider the restaurant business. This provides transitional jobs for people on their way to doing other things, but you can get stuck in such a job and never find your way out until it is too late.

The window of opportunity is not a wide window, not even in these opportunistic times. If the skills demanded are not honed early, then opportunities decline at a precipitous rate. Race, religion and ethnicity are often totted as prevalent job biases, when it is age affirmative action notwithstanding.

Those caught in this vice play games with their psyche saying they are going to do something about their situation, but always tomorrow, until time runs out and nobody wants them even for what they have been doing, because they are too old.

What can you do about it? The beauty of life is that as long as you have your health you have your wealth. As long as you have that wealth, it is never too late to take charge of your life whether you are thirty, forty, or beyond. If the energy is there, the will is there, and the need survives the neglect, there is hope. Chances are whatever that work is it will be in the service of others. Nothing compares with such satisfaction. Serving others makes life worthwhile.

The reason is fundamental. Want piggybacking on need drives material wealth, and want can never be filled. You can never have a big enough job, income, automobile, house, following, enough adoring friends, or as much as you feel entitled. You are not driven by what you are doing, but by what you claim to be. It is like the child who never has enough toys. It represents the unexamined life, which is dangerous.

Should you experience short shrift in this regard, you may play the injured party, the victim and be your own executioner. You have established the identity, perhaps unconsciously, of blaming all your woes on the ambitions of others, when you willingly played their game and not your own.

The inability to see is not only a condition of having blinders on, but also a result of spiraling into outrage, stereotyping those assumed to have wronged you while finger pointing everywhere but at yourself. It may be convenient but it fails to serve you seeing a conspiracy against you when the only enemy you must master is the one lurking in your heart struggling between essence and personality.

Matters can become easily confused when privileges are treated as rights. You have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. But education is a privilege, a good paying job is a privilege, an affluent lifestyle is a privilege, a satisfying productive life is a privilege. None of these are rights. None of them are guarantees. You must earn them.

Take education. Education is there to take. So often education is treated shabbily as a right when it is the most empowering privilege known to a citizen. You would think this privilege would be treated with reverence. Yet, tens of thousands of middle and high school students skip school every day; a hundred times tens of thousands fail to finish high school altogether, while ten times tens of thousands fail to complete their college education. Too often those that do attend hurl abuse at their teachers, cheat, cut corners, use electronic devices to secure the answers, or simply idle their time away plotting some kind of mischief.

Reality doesn’t settle in until middle age when it is too late for damage control. This damage is never is a matter of essence or the lack of innate ability, but the failure to apply that essence when the privilege was presented.

More than anything else that gets in the way of believing in what you are doing is lifestyle. Many young people confusing privilege and right, need and want, instrumental and terminal values, desire and satisfaction, interest and passion, have allowed themselves to be seduced by commercial manipulators hawking consumerism as their packaged therapy. Such people have been led to believe that having and becoming is the route to happiness and bliss.

A modicum of suspension of good sense is expected in the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. This is often manifested in self-destructive behavior such as eating, drinking, smoking, partying and playing to the point of excess. The problem is not with the transitional behavior. The problem is when the transitional behavior becomes transformational behavior and then the permanent lifestyle.

Where skimping occurs, it is in staying up too late and getting up too early, and not getting enough sleep, working too hard, partying too much, while not getting enough exercise. The lack of sleep actually impairs the brain’s ability to create new brain neurons, in other words, slows learning and your thinking ability. To compensate for sleep deprivation, lifestyle turns to the drugstore for artificial stimulation and rejuvenation.

The downside of lifestyle diseases are soaring medical insurance costs. It has become a financial burden on every health insurance subscriber to subsidize lifestyle behavior of the hedonists. Corporations are gutted by it. General Motors has been placed on life support for the health insurance burden it has assumed for current and retired personnel, a cost reflected on the price tag of every vehicle off the assembly line.

To believe in what you are doing you need to see clearly where you are. If you are burning the candle at both ends, you have no focus. You are in a cage of your own making. All escapism starts innocuously with little awareness it owns you. Constant pressing for advantage without paying the price becomes a vice of tightening intensity. The spirit breaks, the body gives out, and confidence with it. The job you want is off the rails. Internal stress and strain are no match for external accelerating demands of an ever-changing climate of work and life.

So, as a self-indulgent lifestyle destroys the body and kills the spirit, there is no energy or will to believe in anything much less what you are doing. Coping becomes a full-time job. Pain and the promise of more pain is the cacophonous reminder of living a lie. A lie can manifest itself early on with a shrinking perspective and an embittering outlook. All because somebody gave you a drink or a pill or smoke telling you it would boost your spirit, always adding, “it’s not addictive,” cutting the soul from the body, the mind from the heart, the will from passion, and the spirit from work.

The defense is to recognize you are a problem solver. Problems are never outside you, but very much a part of the way you think, behave and relate to others. Whenever we get ourselves into lifestyle messes, then applaud ourselves when we extricate ourselves from them, we think we have arrived when we have not left the starting blocks. That is why recidivism is so high in all these celebrated addiction step programs.

You cannot solve the problems with the same thinking that created them. Step programs employ the same linear logic, chronological time; offer the same incentives, and iterate the same mantras and support jargon only in different keys.

The deceptive brief, erroneous as it is, is that pain, struggle, and a real break with the status quo can be avoided. The incentive to join is a step program involves a gradual coaxing of the psyche to behave differently, which it never does. If you are a binge eater, and addictive to food, the mind must change its mental chemistry from living to eat to eating to live. If you are a smoker, you don’t quit with a patch or a step program, but cold turkey. The first thing your mind will think of come a crisis is for a cigarette to calm your nerves. It won’t be there.

Choices must be made. Step programs avoid choices by flattering clients with one-step-at-a-time progress, when an elaborate support system must be in place to assure even temporary success. This is playing a game on the mind, and the mind always wins because it doesn’t want to make choices, but to continue thinking as it has always thought.

Lifestyle addiction might require the separation of you from friends and family that reinforce the compromising behavior. This is necessary because it is too radical for a mind to comprehend much less deal with reminders of the bad behavior. The mind always wants it both ways, the benefit of change with only cosmetic or pretend change, continuing to be with the same people that coaxed you into the problematic behavior.

Nor is it wise to frequent places associated with the behavior. Ambience can be as much a destroyer of a person as people can.

As a problem solver, you need to redefine your purpose in life, what interests you, what you aspire towards, what brings you satisfaction and a sense of renewal, and what you would prefer devoting your time, attention, and energy for the balance of your life.

In my early thirties making a good living as a corporate executive, my life made no sense to me anymore. I was living in colonial splendor in South Africa where the majority suffered dehumanizing apartheid, while I was being treated as if royalty. This was quite a departure for the son of a blue-collar working father. I resigned to take a “time out” to reassess my life and where I was going. I had a wife and four small children but that didn’t deter me, taking a two-year sabbatical in which I read and thought and wrote.

When I was nearly broke, I went back to school full-time, year-around for six years to earn my master’s and doctor’s degree in psychology, consulting on the side. I was looking for answers in academia but found none. During this additional six-year-period of study, my family experienced difficulty adjusting to a lifestyle quite different than what they had grown accustom. I mention it here only to relate that I know the pain, struggle, disappointment, depression and failure that accompany radical change when one listens to the heart and is no longer controlled by the head. Working a job you do not love is a kind of prison.

Once you make this commitment to truly change, once you back away from worrying about what other people may think, you find you are not the first to go this road less traveled nor will you be the last.

With radical change, there are setbacks, reversals, and much uncertainty. Would I do it again? Yes. Why? I have never felt such liberation before or such fulfillment. An erroneous belief is that you can avoid setbacks, and regret, that the costs are minimal while the benefits maximal when quite the reverse is closer to the truth in the short term.

Difficult choices have to be made, certain friends have to be cut out of your life, certain experiences must be discontinued, frequented places must be permanently avoided, certain weaknesses must be faced without terror and with full acceptance, and you must recalibrate your sense of strength in terms of its foundation in weakness.
There must be a full acceptance of yourself as you are so that you may see, understand and accept others as you find them, not as you would have them be but as they actually are. You must get outside the cycle of your enslavement, which is solving problems with different thinking than what created them.

This calls for conceptual understanding of yourself in relation to your work, friends, family and community, and how these relationships either enhance or diminish you, and what you can do about it.

The problem in believing in what you are doing is made more complicated because of emotional pollution, which must be differentiated from ecological pollution. In South Africa, I was assured that apartheid was not bad for the Bantu people, who represented 80 percent of the nation’s population. Such assurance came from co-workers, American friends, my South African Catholic Church pastor, the nuns teaching my children, my American bosses in the States, and from English and Afrikaans speaking South Africans. Yet, these Bantu natives had no vote, had to carry a passbook into the city, and could be jailed without charge for 60 to 120 days. Then, my gardener was murdered and it was treated as if the family dog had been killed. I was living a lie, suspended in the lap of luxury. I was brain deep in emotional pollution. An instinct for survival led me out.

Confident thinking is realistic thinking seeing clearly “what is” without blinders on with a will to do what is proper, fair and right. You do this by listening to your own drummer, your own best friend; sometimes your only friend. You hear others talking about you and it hurts, but that is because there is a certain truth to what they say that registers with your heart of hearts, and it knows it, and so you should use it, as if it were gold. If you do, you will one day see yourself on the stage you desire, doing what you want to do, being what you want to be with no apology to anyone. You will encounter others where you once were, helping them find their way through the fog to their own path less traveled. That is the compensation to doing what you believe in. No one walks in your shoes; no one understands the rhythm of your heart, no one else but God, and that god is the “god within,” what the Greeks called “entheos,” and which we have anglicized to enthusiasm.

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