Deciding to Not Live Up to One’s Potential

Source: Alison Rambles, Flickr. CC 2.0

The smartest kid in his high school class went on to drive an ice cream truck. Years later, he still does.

While grilling hot dogs at Top Dog, a man talks with a coworker about Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

An Ivy grad who, despite identifying a few careers he feels he’d enjoy and do well in, after five years of rumination, feels unable to choose a career and so stays unhappily in his dead-end clerk job.

Let me expand on the latter person. No matter how much research he and I do, no matter the weighted pros/cons list, no matter the baby steps we list, the accountability, the reminder that everyone has setbacks, he sits hating his clerk job unwilling to even take modest steps toward starting an actual career.

He insists that past trauma has nothing to do with his inaction. Rather it’s, as his psychiatrist asserts, physiologically-caused OCD. Alas, a standard medical treatment—an SSRI plus cognitive-behavioral therapy—has failed. Now, his psychiatrist, without much enthusiasm, suggests he could try a tricyclic, which has a different mechanism of action.

Such clients usually end up deciding to accept their core self, strengths, and weaknesses, and work with what they have, making just tweaks. For example, while I hope that the tricyclic helps a lot, I’m guessing that he’ll end up deciding that the most realistic path to progress is to stay in his current job, tweaking it to fit where he can (e.g., a better schedule) and doing after-work activities that he can enjoy without undue stress.

The takeaway

So, would you like to take a shot at a major change in yourself? Here are a few common priorities:

• Procrastination. Be aware of the moment of truth when you’re about to procrastinate. If the task is worth doing, try doing it the most pleasurable way consistent with quality and think of how proud you’ll be if you get it done.
• Kindness. Make your mantra: Be kind where you can, tough where you should.
• Learn. Deep down many people, especially those who suffer from imposter syndrome, do little to improve. They distract themselves, perhaps rationalizing that everyone feels like an imposter. To some extent that’s true, especially for people with complex jobs, but people do vary widely in how much of an imposter they feel like. What might you learn that would reduce your imposter syndrome? And how—self-study, a class, a tutor, or asking a colleague when stuck?
• Change careers. A Berkeley Ph.D. decided to chuck it and go to nursing school. She’s happier.

If you decide, at least for now, to accept your basic self, what life tweaks could you try that hold promise for at least incremental improvement to your life? A few examples:

• Take on a passionate avocation. We normally think of activities like sports or the arts, but you’re not that limited. For example, I have a client who has become addicted to online Scrabble and reports that it much improves her spirits and overall feeling about life, especially amid the COVID lockdown.
• Find or be additionally committed to a relationship. Sure, it could be romantic or parental but there are other options. For example, I write to two pen pals.
• Commit to a goal that, while challenging, has simple baby-steps, for example, an exercise routine that leads to a big goal, for example, being able to complete a 5K race.

My new-client questionnaire includes this question: “If you’ve been in psychotherapy, what have been the major takeaways?” The most common answer: self-acceptance. Beverly Kaye wrote the classic book Up Isn’t The Only Way. She’s right.

I read this aloud on YouTube.

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