Well, hello. Hello, everyone. I'm Elizabeth. And we're here today to talk about how to ditch self-improvement, myths to define your own path. But our conversation doesn't start today. In fact, it starts many years ago.Many, many years ago, I was in the third grade and it was gym class and we had to run the mile. You had to go around the monkey bars around the swing, set around the tree, run a tree, run another tree, five laps, made the mile and we were timed. This was back when, you know, kids, uh, kids could be punished. And so we knew that we had to run the mile in the beginning of the semester and at the end it just so happened to be that my house was right next to the school and I would often go over and play on the playground or meet up with friends. But a funny thing happened after that first mile instead of playing, I started running. No, it didn't really help me. I mean, I guess it helped my soccer. I don't know. But what I knew was that I wanted to improve, the story is not about how fast. I was, I don't know, probably faster than I could run a mile today and I don't know how much I improved, but this is one of my earliest memories of wanting to be better and that's why we're here today. Now. You better is different. Probably not faster.

It might be more confidence, less stress. Maybe you want to be more grateful in life or get a promotion no matter what. Today we're talking about growth and being better before I go too far. My name is Elizabeth. I'm a marketer at Four Eyes, a software company by day. I'm a writer by night and I'm a personal growth lover 24 7. Now, since that drive to improve my mile time, I've had a lifelong passion of loving self improvement. In fact, my nightstand generally looks like this full of self help books, although probably not quite as clean, but we're just gonna forget that part. And I even started a blog on personal professional development. I love this stuff. But what I found is that some of the ideas that are supposed to be helpful, art. In fact, some of these ideas go so far as to be counterproductive. So today we're gonna talk about these accepted myths that are actually detrimental to the improvement that we so genuinely seek. And today we're going to spend a brief moment on the guiding questions, look at some specific self help myths and then finally see how we can decide our own path. So let's jump in first, some guiding questions.

You might think after all the reading, all my love of articles and podcasts. Well, life would be pretty great, right. But I still found myself kind of like this sometimes and especially the last year has certainly forced me to question a lot of things specifically around growth and improvement and wanting to be better. This is the question that has haunted me. How do we grow when surviving feels like enough? How do we grow when surviving feels like enough? This last year things have changed. And furthermore, is it really self-improvement if the actions we take, make us feel worse instead of better? I don't have perfect explicit answers for these questions, but they're ones that I posed to you. And I think that we can explore today with some of these self-improvement myths. Let's keep going. Myth number one, we must suffer for growth. This can be summed up in four words, no pain, no gain. Now, it can be very literal. I mean, I guess this guy went through a lot of pain. Um And we often think of the physical example of this, right? You have to blink for days to get those abs, but we also apply it to our intangible goals as well. We have a mentality that we need to suffer to get where we want to be, where we're going. I wonder if this actually has to be the case.

One thing that comes to mind is the negativity bias and that's our tendency to really focus on the negative things. Instead of the positive, it can be summed up like this. You get 100 compliments. You're still gonna think about that one criticism. This is a natural tendency and it makes sense when we're in pain. Gosh, we're looking for ways to grow and get out of it. But I don't know that we can only grow through pain. So let's do something really quick together. I'd love for you to think of one of your recent wins. It can be big, it can be small, it can be work related or not. Maybe you launched a product or you got up and went to the gym early. OK. Now that you have your win, you don't need to share it. Think about what's one thing that you did to ensure success. What's one thing you did? Well, in that situation, maybe you sent out weekly communication on a project and that helped it to launch on time or maybe you just laid out your clothes the night before and that allowed you to get up and go to the gym. Now, think of that one thing that you did. Now, I ask, how can you apply that somewhere else in your life? What can you learn from that experience? Can you apply it to a different area?

You see, I think that we're motivated to learn from our pain because we want to get out of it and everyone wants to know why the product didn't launch on time and not why it did. But I think there's a lot we can learn through the positives. Now, why does this matter? Well, when growth is anonymous with suffering, we might be accepting unnecessary pain and that just sucks. That might translate into things like tolerating a toxic workplace or staying in a role. That's just not right for you. No one wants that. All right.

Myth number J growth is linear. Now, when you think of growth, what do you see in your head? If you had to pick a stock image of growth, what does it look like? Give me a second. OK. I'll share with you exactly what it pulls up from a stock image, right? We have literal growth in the ground. We have the corporate ladder which we love slash hate. We have a lot of arrows. It's very clear. Growth is up to the right. Go from A to B and that's really what we envision. When we think of career growth, we think of the steps we need to take to the next level. But I love the idea that career consultants Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper share. They say that most people picture growth like this, the stair steps. But in fact, it looks more like this. A squiggle in their awesome ted talk and book on squiggly careers. They say that really this whole stair step idea was built in the 19 hundreds and doesn't fit our modern interpretation of work. And we get so fixated on the next step that we don't really remain curious about what we want to do and what we want out of work. Now, I've experienced this personally.

I was an email marketing specialist and as an email marketing specialist, our job was to Q A emails to fix code and make sure that everything was technically sound. And when I was in this role, I had one goal and that was to become an email marketing manager. I wanted to get to the next step and as quickly as possible. Well, that day came awesome. I got promoted. But guess what? I actually didn't like being an email marketing manager that much. I had to work with a lot of clients, some who, who were great, some who weren't, but it really took a lot of time and changed my day. My strengths are going going deep. That meant that that role wasn't the best fit for me. Now, why does this matter? You like me? Might look to take the next step over? What makes the most sense for you and where your passions lie, Ali and Tupper say. Instead of thinking about what job comes next, we should think about what career possibilities um Excite us. What are we curious about instead? OK. Growth myth number three. We must transform. If you read and think about self improvement, you see this word come up a lot. This is pulled from a bunch of medium articles. You see it very literally how to transform your life. It's always the goal, right? You'll also see it in very visual examples on the grandmother places with transformation Tuesday. It's a very sad before and very happy after. You must go from 0 to 100. I'm not so sure that's the way we should think about it.

Although I have to say there's one transformation photo that I just had to share with you all in this one. All right enough of that. The other visual example that we think of with transformation is the butterfly, beautiful butterfly. But if you're familiar with how the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, you know that a caterpillar basically has to digest itself and become what's called caterpillar soup. Mm I don't think you have to digest yourself for growth. I think you're already the butterfly. Now. Why does this matter?

The go like rule taken from James Clear's book Atomic Habits shows that we like challenges as people but we like them in a certain range. We want them just out of reach, we wanna stretch, we don't want something that is seems too much for us. And we see this very practically um in data from linkedin's gender insights report, their data shows that women are less likely to apply for positions they viewed on the website, they're also specifically less likely to apply for positions that seem like a stretch role and they're more likely to get hired when we view growth as a transformation.

We think that we're so far from where we need to be. We think zero from 100 instead of 60 to 80. Uh That makes me sad, kind of mad. So what can we do instead how can we define our own path? Well, I love to borrow from the book, think again from Adam Grant. He talks about how we should get curious and really be open to new ideas and rethinking our ideas. So again, to define your own path, you must first start with being curious. Well, I have some questions that you can use and I've used myself to get curious right now. The first question is who says, who says, who says you need to be more assertive to get ahead? Who says you need to pick between work and family? Who says you need to like true crime like you don't, you can, you don't have to. It's OK. This question asks us to think about our sources and just like you check your sources for an article, we should check them for ideas. Often when I ask this question of myself, I realize the answer is not that great. My answer is, well, it's, that's just the way it is. That's not a great answer. Sometimes I do have a good answer. You know how I feel about no pain, no gain. And this is a very recent post from Mark Manson. It's the best selling author and someone I admire. And he says just like you have physical pain for growth, you need the emotional pain as well.

Sometimes the who says is a good person doesn't mean you have to accept, it doesn't mean you have to take it. The next question I have is why this step, I wish I asked this of myself when I was an email marketing specialist, I would have thought about why I really wanted it more so than just being heads down and ready to go ahead and along these lines, the question of what do I really want?

What do I really want? When I think of this one, you might say I want the promotion because I want more money. Awesome. Go get some more money. But does that mean that you want that next role? What's the thing that you actually want when I think about what I really want? I like to redefine the rules. I think that I can choose a kinder approach instead of suffering for growth. I choose to think that growth is squiggly and not linear. And I also choose to take one step at a time instead of transform. Now I want to leave you with one final thought for today. It's my motto for 2020. But this was before. Like the craziness, it served me well, still this motto is this. You are who you will become. You are who you will become to me. That means that who you want to be is already inside of you. She's here. Future Elizabeth is not this far off person. She's already inside of me and you. Thank you for your time today. I would love to continue this conversation. I would love to hear your ideas on whether these myths are true or not for you. You can find me on linkedin, my website. I even have a new gram. So, thanks guys.