Ambivalence and the freelance software developer
I recently read a book entitled ‘Coach Yourself: It’s Your Life, What Are You Going to Do with It?‘ by Anthony Grant. It’s an interesting read, especially if you’re one of those people who, like me, always talks about making big changes in your life and never really gets around to it.
There’s a reason I never got around to it, I know that now. If you’d asked me then I would have talked about it not being the right time, it needed more thought or other complications in my life meant it was difficult for me to do something like that right now. The classic excuse was that I was just too busy. It’s not just me, I have heard this sort of excuse from colleagues time and time again. I think we all know it’s an excuse but we’re all playing the game to make ourselves feel better.
‘Yes, I’d like to do it but there are other things outside of my control that prevent me.’
The simple fact of the matter is that I was scared of doing it, just like I’m scared of making any potentially life changing decision. A colleague once referred to it as the ‘velvet rut’, a reference to the fact that the current state might not be taking us anywhere but it’s comfortable. He realised that, but he still did nothing about it.
And that’s what the book talks about; this feeling of ambivalence we get with any change to our lives. The interesting thing is, it made me look at that feeling in a different way. Instead of seeing it as a warning to not go ahead and do it I started to accept that there will always be a part of me that feels insecure and worried about change. The trick is to listen to the other part of you that is excited and optimistic about the change. I don’t know about you, but I’m not psychic so that voice of concern was probably not a vision of the future even though I treated it like it was.
Now I’m not saying all ideas will be good ideas because they won’t. I have friends who don’t appear to have this feeling of ambivalence when they have an idea and to be honest they could do with some! There was a time when I wished I had this apparent ability to not care about the negative repercussions of my actions. Now I realise that I’m better off being a little more cautious (and I believe my family certainly are). As with everything else balance seems to be the best option; realistic rather than pessimistic and positive rather than expectant.
Ambivalence was a word I don’t think I really understood before now. It always held very negative connotations for me, whereas now it’s just something I look out for and recognise without promoting it to the level of premonition. Also I’ve never thought much of self-help books; not that I actually read self-help books before making that assumption. I always treated any issue I had with myself as if it really wasn’t an issue or it had an external cause not under my control. I guess that’s another protective measure that many of us put in place.
I do realise that you should be careful not to just give your life over to the techniques presented by others. Not everything works for everyone and there are a lot of bad self-help books out there just wanting to cash in on peoples insecurities. But that’s not to say that you can’t pick up some really useful advice or get a new insight into an issue you might have.
See what I did there? Realistic and positive…
Popularity: 23% [?]