In so many ways, the experience of making it to adulthood involves a constant stream of needing to impress others and to perform to others’ standards. And that is just what’s involved in getting a proper education. Add the need to dress fashionably, to speak without making errors or saying “um,” and to be in just the right mind frame, job, and sports utility vehicle, and you have the recipe for an unwieldy impressiveness machine.
The constant monitoring of how impressive we need to be drains our personal resources — our time, our bank accounts, our energy, and sometimes, quite unfortunately, our self-esteem. The problem with trying to be impressive is we get pulled away from who we really are — and then we get pulled away from our real strengths. It’s ironic, I know. Not only is it ironic, it is also often futile, because being impressive is a state that needs to be constantly maintained. Here’s why:
- people’s views change
- there will always be an endless supply of new people to impress
- we’ll need to work harder and harder to make the money to keep up with our impressive habits
- we’ll be wasting a lot of time “fixing” ourselves up
- we’ll likely end up feeling insecure anyway
We can get stymied in our work because of our underlying wish to be impressive. We get lost trying to figure out how to say something instead of deciding what we need to say. In order to circumvent that, I suggest connecting with the idea that completing what we set out to do is noteworthy in itself. Show yourself and others you can handle things. Make that the goal for now as you develop a better sense of who you are, without the need to be impressive to others. When you are not as concerned about who is looking, you end up doing more focused, higher quality work anyhow.
Take a few minutes and think for yourself, what would you want to do to your fullest? What chance would you like to take to see what might happen? What could you do or change in order to make yourself feel bigger, stronger, calmer, abler, or more you?
There will always be the temptation to want to be impressive to others. And of course, there are wonderful versions of this, like expressions of love and generosity, and displays of pure talent and great humor. I encourage you to find what you need to focus on for yourself, in order to have your brightness be at its glowing best. What a lasting impression that will be.
