This is Part Two of a two-part series.
In 2011, Ray Dalio, founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, published a book outlining his principles for success in life. Principles, he said, are concepts that an be applied over and over gain in similar situations – they are ways of successfully dealing with the laws of life – and can be used by anyone to get what they want out of life.
Dalio outlined the five most important choices we can make for a successful life. You get to define what success means to you, but once you decide where you want to go, you then have to make important choices on how to get there. If you make the wrong ones, you don’t arrive at your goal.
Being a life coach myself, I’ve seen these principles play out in people’s lives (mine included) in a very personal way, affecting not only careers but relationships and personal fulfilment.
The five choices people can make for a successful life are:
- Understanding how to manage pain to produce progress
- Face “harsh realities”
- Worry about achieving the goal
- Make decisions on basis of first, second, and third order consequences
- Hold themselves accountable
Today’s choice is:
- Avoid facing “harsh realities”
- Face “harsh realities”
Facing harsh realities, while painful, can actually help us progress faster towards our goals.
Common realities that people avoid facing:
- Things are fucking up!
Despite signs that things are not going well, many people stick to a certain course of action simply because they cannot admit that they were wrong initially. This is where the sunk cost fallacy comes in. When people cannot see that things are not working, they do not take any action to fix things. Things go from bad to worse, when corrective action could have been taken.
For example, when I was organising an outreach campaign last year, I repeatedly tried to reach out to organisations through email, believing that these organisations would respond and bring participants to my campaign. I did this for months before realising that the method did not work. If I could have admitted to myself earlier that this method was not working, I could have changed my approach and achieved better results. Eventually, we figured that reaching out to NPOs was not the most effective way, and reaching out to corporate partners was much more effective in bringing in people.
This happens not only with events, but in people’s lives as well. Sometimes, our lives are not exactly going the way we want it to. But we are so invested in the present reality that we cannot admit that something is wrong. So we go on pretending that things are okay, when they are really not. If we simply had the courage to admit to ourselves that “things could be better”, we could take the effort to make positive changes to our lives, instead of harbouring the delusion that things would get better on their own.
- Threats to our self-image
Another harsh reality people have trouble facing is the truth about who they are. Many times, we hold on to our self-image – that we are beautiful, good, kind, competent, or whatever we’ve convinced ourselves we are, and whatever props we’ve hung our self-worth and ego upon. This hinders us from seeing the harsh realities and moving forward in life.
For example, when I was just starting out as a life coach, it was very very important to me that I was a good coach. Somehow, my self-identity got associated with the quality of my coaching. When I actually started coaching and realised that I was not as good as I was, I got very discouraged and thought that perhaps this was not the path meant for me. Eventually I came around and admitted to myself that my skillset was simply not where I wanted it to be. There was a huge gap. And I had to endure many ineffective and so-so sessions of coaching before my skill gradually improved. There is a still a long way to go, and I can admit that to myself. Because only by seeing where my gaps are can I have the humility to start working on them. And that actually gets me to my goal of being a good coach faster.
Similarly, at work you may have a desire to appear competent and omniscient. Of course, that is not true. So if you come across something you don’t understand, the part of you that wants to uphold your image of being competent would not seek to find out more and discover better ways of doing things. You might hold to that self-perception and therefore stop yourself from improving.
- Ideals of how the world should be
This is one of the harsh realities I struggle with, because I am an idealist myself. Although learning this lesson has been hard, it has allowed me to connect more to myself and gain back my own personal power.
One of my flawed beliefs and impositions on the world was that everyone should accept me as who I am. Because I really want the acceptance of others, I would change and mould myself into the way that I thought these people would want me to be. So even if people accepted me for the image that I portrayed, I felt that they loved a lie and a mask, never the true self that I was hiding underneath.
Eventually I realised how silly that was, and I found the love for myself as well as the courage to see the world for what it really was. I expressed how I really felt to my parents, instead of pretending that I wanted a career in finance, I told them I really wanted to work for an NGO and work on changing people’s lives. Surprisingly, they understood where I was coming from and actually supported my decision.
Even if you bare your soul, there are still people who would reject what you have to offer. But accepting that enabled me to seek true connection, and ultimately greater fulfilment. When I gained the courage to see the harsh realities for what it truly was, I felt my need to please others diminish, and instead I could focus on what was truly important to me.
