I had a call with my coaching buddies on the ‘Making it Work Online’ class with Jenny Shih and one of them has an amazing business where she helps people, particularly those who work internationally and those who need help fitting a unique job or employment gap into their work history with their resumes.
We did a role play where I pretended to be a person with an I.T. background who had gone to work with a travelling circus for a few years and now wanted and needed to get back into I.T. In the coaching Anna helped me see what the relevance of my work in the travelling circus was to the I.T. job.
After the call I was on a dog walk, where often I think about this blog and what to talk to you about on it. I thought about how the travelling circus person could have thought it an impossibility that they could get back into I.T..
They could have thought that none of the two years with the travelling circus was worthwhile. They could have labelled it as a waste of time.
Our society is really good at helping us to draw attention to where we fall short. Ask any child who has brought home a report card with all As, bar one. The B is considered, pondered, mulled over like an ink spot on a white T-Shirt.
Suppose you are applying for a job or returning to work after the early years of mothering. You look to see where the opportunities are. You might be disqualifying yourself even in where you choose to look for those opportunities.
You might decide that the particular newspaper or site only has jobs that are out of your league and so choose not to look there for fear of being disappointed.
You might disqualify yourself when looking for a partner, thinking you are not good enough for another person, when you have no real way of knowing that.
You might disqualify yourself as a good mother, as you have some idea of what a good mother is that you are not in some way meeting.
You might be disqualifying your body from being seen as beautiful as you are measuring yourself up to some societal airbrushed image of what beauty is.
[Tweet “Where in your life and you disqualifying yourself, before you even let the world decide?”]
Are you:
too late
too early
not educated enough
too highly educated
not from the right background
without the right connections
too old
too young
too fast
too slow
not good enough
too good for that
too well know
not well-known enough
too introvert
too extrovert
too busy
too undecided
too uncertain
too certain
not beautiful enough
too attractive / beautiful
too clever for that
not brainy enough for that
too far behind
too much ahead of the times
too poor
too rich
not creative enough
too dreamy and creative
Oh, and if you were not disqualifying yourself, what would you do?
Can you? Dare you? Will you?
One life…
and
it’s
now.
Let me know in the comments where you notice that you disqualify yourself and what wonderful thing might happen if you didn’t. I’d love to know.