Are you waiting to be chosen… or are you choosing yourself?
How often do we wait for permission before pursuing the life we really want? Whether it's applying for a new job, reaching out to someone we admire, asking for help or taking the first step towards a goal, it can feel safer to wait for someone else to notice us.
In this episode of Inner Work, I reflect on one of the biggest ideas to emerge from my conversation with Clinical Psychologist Cliff Hawkins: the importance of agency, self-belief and learning to raise your hand rather than waiting to be picked.Together, we explore why confidence often follows action, how small acts of courage can change the direction of our lives, and why nobody is coming to rescue us—but that might actually be empowering rather than frightening.
If you've ever wondered whether you're holding yourself back, this gentle reflection is for you.
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Hi, welcome along to Inner Work. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent. Thank you so much for being here. Let's think then about whether we are going to start taking control, whether we are going to continue to wait to be chosen. This can crop up in so many areas of our lives and this was evoked for me in the conversation I had with Cliff Hawkins. I think it can be really important to think about coming up with a bit of a goals list really. What are your goals? We can't have probably 10 or 15 goals. We were allowed to have one personal goal, one professional goal, and one work-life balance goal. If you were going to think about those three goals, what would they look like for you?
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How can you start to be able to begin to take a little bit of more control, a little bit more intention towards having that goal happen? And Cliff's idea was actually reaching out to people, asking people for meetings, asking for people's time. And then of course they can only say no. All it makes you look is conscientious. And people do reach out to me all the time to ask me things. Sometimes I'm in a position where I'm able to help drop them a little bit of advice. Other times they might be looking for work and I'm not recruiting, but how can you empower yourself to start moving your life forward in the direction that would make you happy? I would love to know your thoughts. And I think that can be really difficult. Sometimes having that self-belief, having what Maslow's hierarchy would think about as self-actualization.
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So at the top of Maslow's hierarchy would be the self-actualizing phase. And I think it often is linked to what we've had before as to whether we think of ourselves as the kind of person who can go out there and be a go- getter, get what you want. Would you feel like you deserved that? Would you feel like others might come along and take that away? And it's being able to work through some of that distress, but to know that if you don't try and create some of that agency for yourself, the others who maybe not even be as strong a candidate as you or strong at whatever it is you're trying to pursue may get there because they are better at raising their hand and asking for help. It's that idea of nobody is coming to save you, which is really hard because can't they just come and save us?
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Wouldn't that be easier? Yeah. You've got to be able to empower yourself to do that. And I have to do that with myself reaching out to people to think about partnership working and sponsorship. So yeah, it isn't easy, but we have to sometimes have the difficult conversations to be able to get ourselves where we want to go. I would love your thoughts on this. How can you be bold? How can you be brave? How can you move yourself closer to your goals? I would love to know. Thank you for being here. I'll be back along with the next episode of Inner Work next week. Take care.
