What three “gifts” would you give a 20-something if you were a “Forty-Godmother”? Here 40-somethings share three wishes to help a 20-something get a head start on the confidence to make decisions that are right for themselves. No more woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Today’s 3 Wishes are excerpted from an interview I did with Tara Sophia Mohr, a career coach I met several years ago. Her advice always stayed with me. It struck a chord as very real and actionable. Here are some of her wishes for 20-somethings:
Take time to focus on your inner strength.
As a coach, if you give people all the tactical stuff without the inner foundation, they can’t use those tools because the underlying system is broken.
If you are being run by your inner critic*, if you don’t know how to deal with fear, you are simply not going to be able to play big in your career because playing big means stretching yourself. And whenever you stretch yourself, when you go out of your comfort zone, you are going need tools and skills to deal with these things if you don’t want the fear to be in charge. You need a compass for the woman you’re trying to grow into… to have vivid vision for that.
Control the inner critic in your head.
The inner critic is a different voice in you, and we have to learn to separate that voice and have you being able to observe the inner critic. You need to recognize when it is running your life and learn to not take direction from it.
Listen to your inner mentor.
I’m really big on the inner mentor. That’s about getting a vision of the older, wiser you – you 20 years from now – and having a dialogue with her so that she is the one giving you advice. You can do that through guided visualization or through journaling — there’s a lot of different ways to do it
But you can’t really get to that by just saying, “Who do I want to be in 20 years?” because then we get too much ego-projection. So usually we really get people relaxed and use a visualization to access her because we have to separate out their fantasy of who they will be in 20 years. You have to get a very compelling, emotionally real image. Then we can be in dialogue with that woman and say, “What would you do? “.
And lastly, anytime that you hear that inner critic just remember, “There’s no such thing as failure. Failure is only learning.”
* The inner voice is the voice in your head that says — this is going to be the day when they find out I don’t know what I am doing, that says you’re not ready yet to take on that bigger role. He will never go for me.” We all know that voice. But if that voice is affecting what you do – what job you apply for, who you go on a date with, what you say to your boss, then you’re being run by your inner critic. And the problem with that is that your inner critic is an irrational liar.
More about Tara Sophia Mohr here.
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