A Job to Love by The School of Life

Author:The School of Life [Life, The School of]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: The School of Life Press
Published: 2017-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

iv. Confidence and inner voices

We don’t often dwell on this – and may never discuss it with others – but when it comes to responding to the challenges we face around our careers, many of us have voices in our heads. We have a murmuring stream of thoughts inside our minds that constantly comment on our aspirations and achievements.

Sometimes, the voices are warm and encouraging, urging us to find more strength or to give an initiative another go: ‘You’re nearly there, stick with it’; ‘Don’t let them get to you; rest and you’ll be ready for a new fight tomorrow.’ Yet sometimes, the voices are harsher and more condemnatory; their tone is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. They don’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities. These aren’t the voices of our better nature. ‘Stupid fool, imagining you knew a way to beat the odds.’ ‘You’ve always run away from the real truth about yourself …’

Speaking to ourselves in these stern ways may feel natural, but another person in a similar situation might have a very different kind of inner monologue in their head – and they might reach their goals a great deal more effectively as a result. Being successful is, after all, to a critical degree a matter of confidence: a faith that there is no reason why success would not be ours. It’s humbling to recognise just how many great achievements have been the result not of superior talent or technical know-how, but merely of that strange buoyancy of the soul we call confidence. And this sense of confidence is ultimately nothing more than an internalised version of the confidence that other people once had in us.

An inner voice is always an outer voice that we have previously heard, absorbed and made our own. Without our quite noticing, we have internalised the voices of the very many people who have dealt with us since infancy. We may have assimilated the loving, forgiving tone of a grandmother, the unruffled perspective of a father, the humorous stoicism of a mother. But along the way, we may also have absorbed the tone of a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the words of a schoolyard bully, or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. And we have absorbed such unhelpful voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded extremely compelling and unavoidable. The messages were so much a part of our world that they got lodged in our own way of thinking.

Part of mastering a career we can love involves coming to terms with our inner voices. We need to tease out what voices characteristically operate in our minds, what they are telling us, and where they are likely to have come from. We need to audit the voices, and edit out some of the less helpful ones. For this, it helps to remind ourselves that we have a choice about the voices we entertain.

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