Stop Killing Your Own Golden Egg Laying Goose

A friend of mine asks me to check out his CV for him as he is applying for a job. Half way through his educational history I read he decided to leave a Science degree course and go into a career in Catering.

This looks like a genuine decision to me but he has written down ‘failed to achieve’ under the Science degree course and I notice he has also written ‘failed’ in various other places on his CV for other things that were also genuine, understandable choices. Writing ‘failed’ everywhere has made his CV look horrible.

I challenge him on this and he argues he obviously did ‘fail’ and was not ‘good enough’. Every time we talk I notice he keeps talking himself out of doing things – out of going for jobs he could get; out of asking people for help when he needs it – a whole range of things. The truth is my friend is a bit of a gifted genius – others tell him so regularly but he cannot see it in himself.

I am not talking here about someone with a few normal self-doubts now and again – this is a semi-permanent, very difficult to shift mindset. He worries so much about these alleged negatives he does not sleep nights.

He sits awake all night worrying about issues; the solutions to which are right in front of him and well within his abilities. He has been doing this worrying-all-night for so long he thinks it is normal. When I sit talking to this friend I think to myself ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. Some of my other friends who know him think the same way about his predicament.

We can call this ‘Golden Goose thinking’. Done a little bit it can be a useful motivational tool – but when it comes to a point it is your only way of thinking it has the opposite affect. It shuts your mind down completely.

The Story of The Goose that Laid Golden Eggs in One Sentence:

A couple find their goose lays gold eggs and kill it to get all the gold out in one go but find no gold inside so no more gold and no more goose.

In the case of my friend he has either started using negative imagined motivators designed to get him to produce more of something or to be better at some particular skill – but it has killed the golden goose of creativity, learning and progress within him.

Negative self-motivators used habitually do not work because they lead to ‘catastrophisation’.

Catastrophisation, also known as ‘building mountains out of molehills’, is the process of building full-blown negatively imagined scenarios which we then emotionally react to as if they were real-life events.

The net result of doing this causes us to shy away from areas of life we need to enter, and mostly enjoy, in order to cultivate personal growth.

To stop this we have to learn to tell the difference between a real-life event and the negatively-charged imagined scenario holding us back. When you explore your reasoning behind the existence of the false negatively charged scenario you will see that although it is designed to pre-warn you of what might happen it has no direct affect on what actually happens when you arrive.

Negatively charged motivators achieve nothing but self-destructive mind-wiping.

I am pleased to report my friend changed his CV and got the job he thought he could not get. He still has quite a way to go though. He has to learn to stop hurting himself in the belief it will make him successful one day.

Some sleep would not hurt either.