As I mentioned in my first post I have a personal “board of directors” that I have built over the last few years to help me make decisions. They operate just as a board would for a business. I come to the table with my problems and what my goals are and they help me figure out the best path to get there – it is pretty awesome!
I highly recommend working on building out your own personal board of directors because you would be shocked at the things you can achieve with a little push & advice from others.
My recent new board member has been my career coach, Alli. In the past 2 months, she has helped me with a wide variety of things but one of the biggest, being defining my current core values – Growth and Recognition. I think of these two values similar to the “core memories” that Riley has in the Pixar movie – Inside Out. If you haven’t seen this movie – I recommend you check it out.
I will focus on Growth in another post because I do think it is important (I mean of course I do – it is a core value of mine) however, for today’s post I want to focus on ✨recognition ✨ because this is where I struggle. I also have a strong feeling I am not alone in this boat because I am learning that there is a fine line between a healthy and toxic relationship with it.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with another one of my board members and I had mentioned this concept of my newly defined core values and them being, growth and recognition. Immediately, she said, “That’s interesting that you value recognition so much, but what happens when you don’t get recognized?”
I could not answer that question, because, for all 26 years of my life, I feel like I have always worked very hard to have people validate that I am doing a good job. I have recently noticed that because of this, I end up measuring my self-worth by my accomplishments and how my actions are being seen by others.
This same board member then challenged me to list out some things that I do where I have no expectation for gaining recognition… okay, easy I thought! Reading was the first thing that came to mind and then I realized nope – I track all my books in the Goodreads app to make sure I am on track to hit my annual reading goal to share it at the end of the year in order to have people say, “WOW, you read a lot!” It sounds silly for me to care about something like this but the recognition does motivate me and each year and I read more and more books because of it.
The second thing I thought of was biking – I love biking but, I use Strava to track my rides to get “kudos” from others once I post and I find myself sometimes pushing myself on bike rides to go longer than I really want to, just to get those extra “kudos”(see image below).
So my two favorite hobbies outside of work – both still revolve around some sort of recognition… that’s when I realized this might not be such a healthy core value to have.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being recognized and forever will but, I am learning that if this is going to be one of my “core values” I need to establish some boundaries – for instance, I set a personal goal to do at least 2-3 things a week just for me – no recognition expected.
It is a hard challenge, but I started to “heal” my relationship with recognition and in doing so I have gained better control over my happiness because I am not constantly looking for outside validation to control my emotions and actions. Also, as someone who would love to go into management someday having a healthy relationship with recognition is going to be critical for my well-being. Being able to manage confidently without the need for constant outside validation is going to be necessary for me to personally be successful as I have noticed that managers don’t get the same level of recognition as individual contributors do.
I am very curious if anyone else struggles with this battle – if so please comment or reach out to me to let me know of things you do where you don’t expect recognition from others because my list of things is pretty short and I would love to expand it! ☺
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