In the last 3 months I have seen my pet project - Dream Career Project - gain a following of nearly 200 people who want to hear from me about job applications, CVs, interviews tips, and advice on how to build a fun and exciting career.
Buoyed by this interest in my content I have decided to try my hand at videos. I've created a personal YouTube channel and I’m having a lot of fun…
Read MoreIt was two minutes in to my first 1-to-1 meeting with one of my team members at my new job. As one of the first management hires outside of the existing founders I had given an explanation of what my role is when I was met with a comment-masquerading-as-a-question: So you're just kinda like HR for Engineering?
Read MoreWhen I was 12 years old I went to a friend’s house for a sleepover. Let’s call him Tom, not for any made up or privacy-based reason but because that was his actual name.
Tom and I always made the most of every sleepover. We went for a bike ride, played some backyard cricket, kicked a football around, and climbed some trees. By late afternoon we had really built up an appetite and Tom’s mum kindly asked me if I liked spaghetti...
Read MoreMy February started in a sad way with the passing of my grandfather. Throughout my life he has always been there not only as my grandfather but also acting as a father figure, a role model, and a great mate. I loved him dearly and I will miss him greatly but I am not one to dwell on negativity, even in times like these. Instead I like to focus on the positives, to laugh at the good times spent with granddad and to remember the lessons he taught me...
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Everyone has an opinion, and quite often people enjoy sharing (or forcing) their opinions with others. However, opinions are tainted because they only exist in each person’s own frame of reference. That is, each person forms their own opinion based on their own experiences and their own observations of the world. What is “right” for one person is not necessarily right for another. In fact, when it comes to opinions, this is rarely the case I believe that other people’s opinions are not that important to me, and particularly so when that opinion is about me. Other people simply do not have the same level of experience or knowledge about my life as I do and thus their opinions will never be as accurate as mine. I will ultimately know the most about my life, my thoughts, and my desires which means that only my opinion of myself matters.
Which leads me here – writing about how other people form their opinions of us, why these opinions are irrelevant most of the time, and why only your own opinion of yourself is what matters.
Let’s begin…
The first part to the consideration of other peoples’ opinions is to think about how they actually form these opinions. In general, all opinions are formed by a person using their own set of life experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and thoughts as the basis. That is, they form these opinions from their own frame of reference, which is completely different to our frame of reference (which is where we performed the various thoughts and actions that are being judged).
To make an example – imagine a successful and happy CEO of a small company walking down a busy street and running into a dishevelled looking man (long hair, beard, no shoes) who is playing a guitar and singing for the passer-bys. From the CEO’s perspective he judges the guitarist as a “bludger” and forms an opinion that he is homeless and in need of a job. He might even give him some money to help as that is what the CEO, from his perspective, thinks the man needs.
Now switch perspectives, and consider the guitarist. He’s not a bludger at all - he actually has a very nice home and enough money that he has chosen not to work. Instead he travels the world and plays his guitar. He looks at the be-suited office workers (including the previously mentioned CEO) as they pass and he feels sorry for them. He believes they are missing out on their life and forms the opinion that they must be greedy and unhappy because those are the only reasons he can think of for why they would continue to work.
Neither perspective is right, but neither perspective is wrong. Each person has a very different set of circumstances which has led them to their current situation and their frame of reference. Their perspective is built from their life journey and as such they can only make judgements and form opinions with that information. Hence why the CEO thinks the guitarist must be a homeless beggar because he simply cannot fathom someone “rich and successful” quitting their job to live a semi-vagrant lifestyle.
And the guitarist suffers the same folly. Because he was never happy at work he cannot believe that other people could possibly be happy at work. He looks at the CEO almost with contempt, believing that he is willing to exchange happiness for money even though he knows nothing about the CEO, his job, or his happiness.
When someone forms an opinion on you they are doing so based on the extremely limited set of information they have been presented with. They align it to their past experience and knowledge and form an opinion that they think suits the situation best. This opinion has no relevance to you because it does not factor in anything else about your life and what you have gone through previously to arrive at this point. Their opinion only considers what they have recently observed.
Look at the (pretty crude) sketch I’ve drawn above. Consider yourself to be the circle on the left. The outer part is what you allow to be seen by others. This is known as your outward-facing "persona". Inside your circle is everything that defines you. That is where your past is stored. That is where your emotions live. That is where your thoughts happen and where your decisions are made.
Now look at person A and person B (the circles on the right). They exist completely outside of your circle and they have their own outward facing persona and their own internal elements. These are what they use when they form opinions of others.
The two coloured cones represent these people looking at you and your external persona to form an opinion. But as you can see, these opinions never consider the full you. These opinions that are formed by others can only look a very limited set of your external persona (remember that is only what you let them see) and they can never reach inside your circle and understand all those internal drivers in your life. As such, the opinions of others are formed solely by them assessing the limited information they can access – the small outward-facing part of your persona they have witnessed.
Of course this means that their opinion is never going to fully align with you. They never know exactly what you know, or what you have seen in your life, so they can never fully appreciate all your internal drivers and why you think, act, or do certain things.
As time goes by and you repeatedly interact with the same people, they will experience more and more of your outward persona. This will enable them to modify their opinion of you but it is still only an opinion that is formed on based entirely on your outward persona. Eventually you may “open up” and allow these people to see parts of what is inside. You may allow these people to look behind the social mask and see what actually drives you.
We do this with our loved ones, but even so we never give them the full picture. We might turn part of our persona into a window that allows them to see inside to understand what drives us. But just like a window on a house, you can never see everything that is inside from a single window. There a rooms hidden from view, and as such, even our dearest and closed loved ones will never have a complete understanding of our internal drivers. The will know far more about us than anyone else but they will still not have the complete picture.
This is not a bad thing but it is just the nature of being human. In the end we are essentially individual creatures living in a coexistent environment, sharing parts of lives through language, emotion, and action. This means that others will only ever understand what we choose to share and then only if we are skilled enough to express ourselves accurately.
Therefore, what truly matters most is your own opinion of yourself. Only you know what your life has been like, what you are capable of, and what you want to achieve. Only you can see all that and form an opinion that has taken everything from your life in to consideration.
But too many people hide from themselves and avoid making assessments of their own actions. I believe that these people are functioning in a purely reactive and “stressed-out” way. They are not living in the moment, they are not aware of their own actions, and they are not consciously in control of their own life.
If you are one of these people then you need to start being honest with yourself and start forcing yourself to assess your own actions. What have you done so far in your life? Have you treated others with respect and equality? What sort of person have you been? More importantly, what sort of person do you want to be? When you start asking yourself these questions, don’t be afraid to answer them honestly for that is the only way that you will initiate positive change in your life.
Remember, your opinion of yourself is what matters most so what do you really think of yourself?
I considered starting this off by saying that honesty plays a very important role in living a happy, positive and successful life but that just doesn’t justify the importance of honesty. Honesty is the cornerstone of all positive relationships and the number one aspect that defines our lives and the happiness and success that we can have. I know this because I used to be a big liar. I was so proficient at lying that it became a compulsive habit. I lied about nearly everything in my life trying to impress others, improve my relationships, and have more success. Funnily enough, none of those things came from lies but I only realised this when I forced myself to be honest again.
Honesty (and a lack of it) influences absolutely everything we do. But it is too easy to not be honest. Especially now, more than ever, with the ability to hide behind the curtain of social media and communicate via text message or email. It is too easy to be fake, too easy to lie to people, and too easy to embellish simply for “social reasons”.
We do this, even though the long-term results of lying are profoundly negative for our lives. The crux of the problem occurs in our usage of lies. We use them as a short-term solution, a crutch to bypass awkward social situations and (wishfully) propel ourselves into a better life. But we blind ourselves by focusing on these short-term immediate (and mostly superficial) gains. Rare is it for someone to observe the long-term negative effects of lying and even more rare is it for that person to be introspective enough to attribute their problems to their earlier lies. Instead we point the finger at something (or someone) else and never understand or accept the full impact lying has.
However, there is a way to break out of this habit. There is a method for awaking yourself from the subconscious action of lying and regaining control of your life by focusing on honesty. This method is called brutal honesty.
Brutal honesty is about being 100% honest at all times. It means always saying the whole truth (and nothing but the truth) even if the results make you feel uncomfortable. The idea is to say exactly what you are thinking without dressing it up or hiding it from others. That’s the brutal part.
It’s brutal on you (some people find it almost impossible to actually say what they are thinking) and it’s brutal on others (other people are usually not used to hearing such raw comments). But that’s the beauty of it. Brutal honesty is such a juxtaposition to what the rest of society does that it causes immediate responses and reflection.
Being brutally honest is a very hard thing to do. It requires a great deal of self-confidence, the ability to calmly observe your own thought processes, and a hell of a lot chutzpah!
But the rewards are worth it…
There are many benefits to being brutally honest but here are what I consider to be the top three reasons to use brutal honesty in life:
When people lie they are putting on an act, covering up their real identity and saying what they think other people want to hear. But there are many problems with this style of thinking.
The first problem is that none us are mind readers so we don’t actually know what other people want to hear. People have a hard enough time figuring out and controlling their own thoughts but somehow manage to believe it easy to understand what everyone else is thinking in every moment. We make wild assumptions on what people are thinking and then use that as the basis for forming lies and covering up our true identity. Crazy.
But if we focus on being honest; always speaking the truth about our own thoughts, feelings, and desires then we do not need to worry about performing the miracle of mind reading. We can just focus on living an honest life and reaping the rewards.
Remember, an honest person is comfortable with themselves and confident with their own thoughts. They always act in a way that is congruent to their internal drivers and they are respected for doing so. Even if other people do not like what you say they will at least appreciate your honesty and respond in kind. Honest people always receive genuine response in social interactions.
What happens if you believe you know what someone else is thinking so you make up some lies (maybe to impress them) and then you find out that they actually dislike whatever it is you lied about? You went to all that trouble of hiding the real you and making something up to impress the person, only to have the complete opposite effect.
This happens all the time when we lie to others. When we try to make ourselves seem different, we create a fake version of ourselves that we *think* the other person will like. But if we’ve read the situation incorrectly (quite easy to do) then we end up in a worse position then we started. Not only is the target person not impressed with us but they have also made a negative judgement of us based entirely on a fake version of ourselves.
When we lie we create a lose:lose situation. If the lie is accepted and liked by others then we now must continue the deceit forevermore into the future which is tiring and emotionally draining. But if the lie is not accepted or liked by others then we incur a different loss. We discover that all our efforts (being fake and lying) were wasted and we’ve been judged on these falsified actions rather than being judged on who we actually are.
But when we are honest we create win:win situations. If we are honest, truthful and congruent at all times then we can accept the response we receive from others. If someone does not like our truth then that is fine. It is their prerogative and their opinion and they are entitled to it. But at least you have both been honest and you both know where you stand.
Honesty is always respected. A known liar will be greeted with mistrust, held at arms-length, and never fully welcomed into any interpersonal interaction. But someone who is known for their honesty will be welcomed with open arms. These people are respected and trusted because you know exactly where you stand with them. There is no second-guessing, no game-playing, and no manoeuvring or backstabbing because you know you can trust what an honest person is saying.
And that level of trust gives an honest person more power. Their opinions will be held in higher esteem, their ideas will be given more credence, and their stories will captivate the attention of others. We look up to honest people and, as such, we give them a greater level of attention and respect.
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Honesty has many benefits for our life, and brutal honesty is just taking normal honesty to the extremes. It’s a method that forces us to think about our action and it reminds us to live an honest life that is always true to ourselves.
Do you need a little bit of brutal honesty in your life?
The message for today is simple: Never be a suck-up. Ever.
I am sure we have all known a suck-up or two (like the guy in the cheesy picture above). These are the people that run around trying to make themselves look and feel good by getting approval from their peers, and particularly from their mangers. They might even try to call it "networking" or "making connections" but most of the time these actions are just sucking up in disguise. They are especially prevalent in the workplace where individuals mistakenly think that being a suck up (brown-noser, ass-kisser, whatever you want to call it) will propel them further and faster up the chain.
Sadly for the suckups this kind of thinking is completely wrong. Sucking up does not get you anywhere good, and it actually has a very negative impact on your career and on your life in general. In fact, the more you suckup the more detrimental it is to your life. Here are five good reasons why sucking up is stupid.
..because you are!
No matter how good you are at sucking up, everyone else around you will notice it. And when people notice sucking up they immediately label that person as insincere and fake. Even those you are sucking up to will think this.
Sucking up sends a very clear message about yourself:
My own ideas, thoughts, and actions are worthless and I will blindly say and do whatever I need to to get approval from others.
People will get this message loud and clear and they will see all of your actions as insincere, even if you do manage to 'grow a pair' and actually decide to have your own opinion.
Consider the situation from the perspective of a manager working with a suck up subordinate. If that person is constantly acting as a "yes man" and always trying to be on the manager's side would that manager feel like they are able to trust them? Would the manager be comfortable leaving them to handle an emergency? Would that manager have confidence that the suck up would be a strong leader without the manager around?
No-sucking-way! (sorry, that was bad)
Nobody trusts a suck-up because they spend too much of their time and energy trying to impress others, rather than just getting stuck into the work and being productive.
Sadly there are some managers who enjoy having people suck up to them and sometimes they even encourage it. But have a think about the kind of manager that would do this.
A manager who is swayed by sucking up is not a good manager. They obviously lack confidence in their ability to lead, and thus receive a small burst of positive reinforcement whenever a suck up comes along. So what do they do? They encourage the sucking up! After all we all like to feel good about ourselves don't we?
The suckup might see this as a wonderful opportunity but it is actually very limiting. A poor manager that feels like they need ass-kissers will also feel like they need to sabotage their career progression in order to always keep them one step below. They will use the suck-up to make themselves look (and feel) good but never allow them to grow to their potential.
A manager without confidence will forever be a negative and reactive manager. They will feel like they are fighting against everyone else to make themselves look good, and when it comes to the crunch time, the suck-up will not be well looked after.
The irony of all this is that a manager that encourages sucking up, or is not skilled enough to even spot it, is not a good manager to work with in the first place. Instead of wasting your time with these people, move on and find a good manager that will help you grow.
A good manager values integrity and honesty above all other traits. They respect the opinions of those around them and are open to, and willing to listen to, new ideas and even feedback on their own performance. This is the difference between being a manager and being a leader.
A good leader knows that their role is about guiding and supporting the team below them. A good leader knows that the people below them are the experts and the leader is there to ensure they get the best possible environment to thrive and develop their skills. And it is this thinking that means a good leader does not like sucking up.
These good leaders want a team of smart individuals that work cohesively as a team. A suckup breaks this team dynamic by attempting to make everything all about themselves - something a good leader will not stand for.
The result is that the suck-up does not last in a team with a good leaders. They will move on to another position where they hope that their brown-nosing skills will be more respected. As I've already described, the only manager that will respect such behavior is a bad manager and the suck-up ends up doing more harm than good to their career. Especially when they could have stayed and grown so much under the guidance of the good leader.
The final reason for not to be a suckup is that suckups do not make many friends. We spend a lot of our lives at work so it makes sense that we form close connections and friendships with our colleagues. But no-one wants to be friends with a suck-up.
Sure a suck-up might make many "connections" in the sense that they know a lot of people in the business world, but rarely will they develop close friendships. The suck-up is more likely to have 500+ connections on LinkedIn but less than a handful of true friends in real life.
Friendship is a massively important part of our lives. Having great friends brings so much happiness and positivity to our lives. When you have truly close friends they become like a second family that you can share your life with. I know I am blessed with an amazing bunch of friends and funnily enough I met most of them in at work.
Sucking up does not get you anywhere in life. It results in nothing but negative outcomes, both in professional and personal contexts. It is time to stop sucking up and start being honest in your life.
I was at a social event recently that was filled with what I would consider to be highly intelligent people, and I was amazed to see a slightly disturbing pattern emerge. What I saw was that many of these well educated people were so hung up on impressing others that they had forgotten how to just be social and have a good time. It was as if life had become one big competition to these people and that in the brief two hour window in which they met it was a "measuring contest" as to who had been more successful and impressive in their lives so far. Pretty sad huh? But the real sadness was that none of them were really all that impressive. Sure they were all university educated and well employed in successful and respected companies, but they were not actually impressive. Why? Because it was obvious that they were too caught up in making their lives sound impressive rather than just actually being impressive.
And so it struck me - people who spend their time worrying about impressing others end up living the least impressive lives.
If you are trying to impress others then you're doing it wrong.
What other people think of you does not matter at the best times, and particularly so when thinking about how impressive your life is. In order to be a person who impresses others you actually need to stop caring about impressing others.
People that expend their mental energy trying to impress others are projecting thoughts, ideas, and examples from their life that they think are impressive. The biggest flaw with this thinking is that everyone does not think the same. What is impressive for one person may be dull and boring for another.
If a 20 year old man told you how he was excited because he had walked to shops earlier that day you might not be too impressed. In fact you might think that he was a little lazy (or crazy). But what if that man had been in a wheelchair for the majority of his life? What if he had been told that he would never walk again? Would you be impressed now?
Of course you would! And that is a perfect example of why the measurement of your life has nothing to do with others. To that fictional man the act of walking is impressive and that is all that matters. The fact that most other people can do that easily is not the point. His actions are only judged from the perspective of his own reality.
And the same rules apply in your life. Your opinions of your life are what matter most. No one else in this world has the exact same knowledge and experience as you. That means that no one else is positioned as well as you to make a judgment on your life. Only you can determine if your life is impressive.
Stop trying to impress others and start trying to impress yourself.
Taking everything I've said into consideration it should be obvious that you do not become impressive simply by trying to be so. You become impressive by living a happy and purposeful life.
And here is how to do just that...
If there is one thing that is universally impressive it is when someone breaks away from the traditional pursuits of our society to chase their dream. Stories of people quitting their mundane jobs to do what excites and motivates them are naturally inspiring. We love to hear these stories because they remind us that it is actually possible to live our dreams.
Compare the difference in the following scenario. Imagine meeting some new people at a party and the conversation takes the standard "what do you do?" path. The first person is a hard-working office drone in some well known accounting/law/consulting firm, earning a decent living. The second person is barely getting by but is running their own business, writing a novel, and training to become a WWF wrestler. It's pretty obvious which person is more interesting and which person's story would be more inspiring isn't it?
So don't base your life around what you believe others will think is impressive. That "successful" office job is actually not that impressive when compared to the endless possibilities that are available if you only decided to follow your dreams instead. :)
Nobody likes a bragger. If you go into a conversation with aim of bragging and trying to sound impressive then the chances are that you'll just annoy everyone.
What people respond to better is someone who is quietly confident and does not need to talk about themselves or be validated by others. This personality trait is very impressive.
Consider me as an example. I believe what I have achieved in life so far is impressive, at least from my perspective. I'm respected and highly sought after in my career, I am the founder of a software development company, I write articles that touch over 4,000 unique visitors a month, and I actively participate and advise in multiple private equity projects.
But I don't start off telling that to anyone when I first meet them. I generally tell them a very small subset, just glossing over the details, and only if they show enough interest do I go into detail. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for self-promotion but that time is rarely in purely social situations.
If you do impressive things in your life then you should give others the chance to discover this for themselves. They will respect you much more if you are humble about your achievements.
It is amazing how contagious and inspiring a positive attitude can be. If you exhibit a happy and positive attitude towards everything in life then people will find it very hard not to be impressed. Even the most negatively minded person will feel the impact of a positive attitude. Just make sure you're not doing the in-your-face-happy-clappy-my-attitude-is-better-than-yours positive attitude. Nobody likes that.
But seriously, your attitude defines everything in your life, and if you are projecting a strong and positive attitude then you will attract like-minded people.
Imagine the situation where two people are doing the same job and one describes it as "just a boring job that pays the bills" and another describes it as "an amazing job working with great people and getting to learn lots of new skills and processes". Which person would gain your attention?
If you have a positive attitude, even if the face of negativity, then you will always come across as an impressive individual.
This is the final ingredient to being impressive - stop worrying about what others think.
If you are following all the above steps AND you simply do not care about what others think of you then I guarantee that people will be impressed by you.
When you operate in this mode you give off an aura of passion, motivation, productivity, happiness, and success, which are all highly impressive traits.
That's it. That's how to be impressive. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start being impressive today!
Over the past few years, and particularly the last 6 months, I have been doing a fair bit of in-depth thinking about psychology. I've experienced a lot of personal development (or "spiritual growth") and I've discovered many things about myself that I wasn't previously aware of. Good news so far, but it got me wondering as to whether I have changed as result of this introspection or whether I have essentially stayed the same person but am just more aware of what that actually means.
I decided to revisit the Myers-Briggs Personality Test to answer this question.
I have previously done the Myers-Briggs Personality Test twice in my life. It is a very interesting test but I distinctly remember having troubles picking one or other in certain circumstances.
In the first test I ended being almost borderline for the 4 categories. Basically I sat on the fence.
In the second test I had just begun down the self development path so I was becoming more self aware (I sound like a robot from a sci-fi movie) and thus could answer the questions better. I still had some troubles and still ended up borderline on a few aspects but the overall result was ENTP, and everyone seemed to agree it sounded like me.
It's been three years (or more) and I've spent a lot of that time in deep analysis of myself. I feel like a very different person but has my personality changed? Or do I just "get" myself more?
Drumroll please….my current personality type is: ENTP!
So on the surface it looks as if I haven't changed and I guess in terms of the overall picture that is true. I am still an ENTP but I am much happier with that classification now. I think I have strengthened myself in those areas in which I used to be borderline - this time I found it much easier to answer the questions and pick which type summed me up - so if anything I've just become a more definite ENTP.
For those interested in finding their own personality type, or those who are wondering what the hell these letters mean, then check out this pretty handy chart.
Remember kids, its not an exact science, but it is very interesting.
So what is your personality type?