There is a myth that has come up that if you pursue your passion, then you will never work a day in your life.  This odd myth seems to be the idea related to a career as being something that gives some degree of meaning and purpose to your life as a positive addition.  However even those with careers will have aspects that they dislike or do not enjoy doing.  The other side of things is the idea of work.  I exchange my time in a negotiated exchange to receive payment...

So the idea is that I enter the world of work and hope to get into a career that I can then attempt to achieve competency in.
The biggest problem is that in a career due to the nature of the fields that no one can possibly know everything in it, and my own lack of feedback or internal beliefs, I may struggle and always feel as if my head is barely above water for the entire time I am in my chosen "career".  Which may be even odder when people start to look to me as a mentor.

This problem can be summarized quickly, that is I am a terrible judge of when I have achieved competency, and struggle instead of understanding competency and working towards mastery (confidence in ability and ability to make myself better).  A huge issue is lack of mentors, and the next is the fact that domains of knowledge are too vast.  No one knows everything about medicine, nor software engineering, nor many other fields...the awareness of what I do not know feeds the self doubt rather than knowing my individual scope of competency......Comparing myself to others who are doing different things fuels this as well.

So how do I know when I have reached competency?  Most likely you will not know and you will be the worst judge to decide that.

This has given rise to the idea that is popularly known as "imposter syndrome".
This is related to a collection of negative core beliefs, such as "I am not good enough,"
......see negative core beliefs and USA (lists)


Another in the list of things creating frustration and confusion, is the scarcity or lack of mentors in every field.  Along with others coming to you looking towards you for mentorship, and adding to yet another skill set that you do not have and are suddenly expected to exhibit.  (another should, I should be at the stage to mentor others, it is expected of me...Another chance to beat myself up.)
....The reality is that you have discovered no mentor for yourself, much less for others....Obviously if I never reach competency and am struggling, then when and how would I have ever found a mentor, much less developed that skillset?

The work from competency to mastery and the mentor's role is to make it where you are making yourself better, it is called being a "reflective practioner" and if I am so busy beating myself up for failures, I have no bandwidth to improve myself, nor any belief that I can.

This is a very real problem.

So how do I judge this idea of competency (mastery)...
It is mostly about your brain sorting out whether a situation resolved the way that you expected it to, or if you were completely floundering and it was maybe even disasterous.  If I hold a core belief about myself like "not being good enough" then that is working against me; and if I have an inner critic, that never knows when to stop beating me down, and hammering me with guilt, these internal factors have to be resolved first.....

The over-thinker is like the ghost of Marley in a Christmas Carol, over and over creating his own chains that forever weigh him down and keep him from success..

The idea is that if I go into and dig into something, I have to be able to focus on improvement, rather than focus on errors.  Focusing in improvement will lead to improvement, focus on errors will not.  I screwed up is unhelpful, what did I learn can be helpful, but not if I am counting the whole thing as a failure......
....This is the path between competency and mastery, where the main tool is being a reflective practioner.....A mentor then is the person who helps you get to competency and then teaches you the tools (yes plural) towards mastery, and in the process teaches you how to be a mentor.

I have heard people talk about the process from competency to mastery in different ways, one is work, evolve and achieve; another is try, learn, success (more); although these seem to be good ideas, they do little to move the person into competency.....



Much like the relationship myth of "the one" most of this doubt leads the person to burn out, and ultimately determine they are in the "wrong career"......

What if I am exactly where I should be at the moment?
What if I am not the best to judge or evaluate myself?
What if I  do  not see  the overall destination and feel lost/stuck?
What if?????

Another thing to expand upon is the idea that I should have some sort of "instant mastery"  I recall seeing this first in The Wizard of Oz, for courage all that was needed was a medal, for intellect all that was needed was a diploma....
Then in The Matrix, the download of pilot/kung fu/ whatever creates this idea even further...  But in reality if I start anything worth pursuing, I am going to start as "the fool" in order to ever become "the master".....In starting that new thing, with the scarcity of feedback and direction, it is the perfect storm of high anxiety, and low confidence....... leading many to return to school, I need my Master's or second Master's or I need my PhD....

“The great man is the play-actor of his own ideals,” said Nietzsche.  Encapsulates the same idea
When I start the new thing I am play-acting my way to my version of “greatness”
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Interest is an obvious component of what someone may choose to do amongst all the choices that the choice paradox can offer us, and the fear of failure of course, along with not wanting to waste time.

Season of life, priorities,  transferable skills, etc may all play a role

There are some well know measure of interest but they often totally ignore talent or ability in nailing down just the idea of what types of things am I interested in  doing or what things can I do that match up with my interest?


RIASEC or the Holland model is
Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising and  Conventional
This is the current offering of the Department of Labor's O*NET online has in what it calls it's interest profiler.......
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The so called work/life balance?  is it really right or useful in a real way, perhaps.
Some prefer to call it work life challenge(s), is this a better conception? maybe?

Maybe a better conception might be
self care
Selfishness
responsibility

or is it better to say service to self, service to ideas/values and service to others?

Freedom vs. responsibility.
How are these ideas connected or related to one another?
Permission? Can I give myself permission?
What about FOGs..fear, obligation guilt shame; regret, fault/blame?
If I feel I owe someone an apology or need to obtain forgiveness, then I was never able to grant myself permission in the first place!!!
**********DMN being idle "wasting time"
This reminds me of the debate or ideas around what is called the focused mind and the unfocused mind. Or thinking that involves the prefrontal cortex a lot and thinking that is more in tune with the DMN (default mode network). It seems that we have decided one is good "productive" and the other one is not so much, or is possibly labeled as negative "waste of time". However there is some research and work done that the DMN is not just your brain in an idle state, that it can still be active and useful, just not in the way we tend to think about it.
There was a book written about this from 2017 called "Tinker, dabble, doodle, try; unlock the power of the unfocused mind, by Srini Pillat, MD.

*********Mental Switch
So sometimes there may indeed be mental switches that get tripped and flipped, or constantly nudged in one direction over another direction.
The two I often think about as examples are the man who keeps talking about getting a round to doing something, like deep sea fishing, and then one day, he starts saying, "I used to go deep sea fishing". The second one is the woman who says she is "divorced for 10 or 20 years, and then one day she starts referring to herself as "single".

I believe there is a switch for work as well, that the thoughts that keep the switch flipped into always being worried about work are thoughts like "I am far behind" and "I need to catch up"......with the switch in that position, I may think I cannot take time off, and end up thinking about work when I am not working, even on a day off like Sunday. This makes my physical stress level tick ever upward and that includes the cortisol system, heart rate and even my amygdyla in my brain. People are supposed to get opportunities to physically reset the baseline of this system; but most people do not get any break in order for that to happen. In fact for a large portion of people the last reset they got was summer vacation between their junior and senior years of high school.

So even on a "good" day I feel good about the accomplishments of the day for one second, and then it is all about what I did not get done and what I have to do tomorrow. Instead I should feel good about my accomplishment through the entire evening. And stick a pin in work as it will be there tomorrow.

What if the idea of "catching up" is false? If I caught up on work today (or any day) then no reason to work tomorrow; and what if far behind is also a lie (or does not exist)? I am firmly keeping my switch into one way, when it could be the other way!

How does that sound?
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:54, Sat 21 Oct 2023.