If you want to do your best work you have to abandon your inner (and most unkind and fear-based critic) and tap into the science of simply not giving a flying f**k anymore.
About any of it.
Amy Adams said in a recent interview, “I’m a harsh critic of myself. I see when I stopped needing to be perfect. I stopped carrying the weight of criticism. I really was so tired of giving a [expletive] cause I just gave so many all the time.”
Sounds easy. But she talks about how it’s taken her a long time.
So how do we get there? I think the first step is realizing what makes us care so much ”“ and what put that concern there in the first place ”“ and how to dismantle it.
As children, pretty much all of us entered into an unconscious agreement or “contract” if you will, with an adult ”“ generally a parent or some other powerful figure. In this engagement, we were taught ”“ consciously and unconsciously ”“ that we needed something from someone in order to be safe, loved, comforted, accepted, seen, understood. (At one level, this is fundamentally true because, as children, we need adults in order to survive.) But beyond our basic survival needs, we also were incorrectly taught that someone other than ourselves (and outside of ourselves) held the key to the things we (thought) we were missing. And in order to receive it, someone (or something) had to give it to us.
As we developed, we pretty much transferred that incorrect perception onto almost all relationships and experiences.
We needed someone who we saw as powerful ”“ that could be a sibling, parent, lover, boss, friend, teacher ”“ or an entity, institution, or establishment ”“ a college, school, job, industry, profession ”“ to give us that which we thought we were lacking to be okay. So generally, that was achieved in terms of results ”“ money, success, fame, a degree, popularity, likes, victories, desirability. So someone decided for us that we were deserving of these things.
Someone anointed us with the thing we had been taught we lacked in self. So by you getting that job, you’re talented. So by me getting that boyfriend, I’m desirable. So by her getting that money, she’s successful. So by him being chosen, he’s loved.
Sadly, that agreement is a broken one. No one, no thing, nothing bestowed upon us that doesn’t come from self, can ever fill us with the thing that must be filled from self.
You all know how this works. You’ve gotten the thing you felt you needed to choose you ”“ the boyfriend or girlfriend or job or producer or title ”“ and then once you’ve had that thing you realize nothing is fulfilled from the outside. Or maybe you don’t know how that works and that’s why we get so upset when our partners don’t give us the thing we feel they should be giving us (this isn’t what love is supposed to look like!), or we go from job to job searching for something else, or we move to a different city.
The writer, James Altucher teaches people something simple and profound. He says “choose yourself.” Don’t have other people choose for you. They can’t anyway. I mean, yes we have to engage with other people in the world and interact with them and collaborate with them but our sense of self doesn’t have to come from what can’t be chosen for me by other people.
I get to decide. As do you. And no one can take that away from you.
Choose yourself. When you start doing that, not only will you be in the most exciting phase of a “F**k it” in your life, but you’ll also be living your life the way you thought you always needed someone else to give you the permission to do.