The Trap Hiding Inside Good Job

This trap used to trip me up so often, and it led to a lack of consistency in my life with regard to large, important responsibilities.

And this just happened to me.

On the side of building my coaching and software business, iAlign,

I also take on bioinformatics and data science contracts as a private consultant in the programming world in order to make sure I keep my programming skills sharp.

(The many-decades long future of iAlign requires my experience in data science and engineering so it’s required that I continue to take on work in these domains)

I did a significant amount of work on a project for a client.

But I still have a lot more to do.

And so I got on this call with this client, and they said,

“Oh, this is great. Awesome job.”

And this is where the trap is.

Wait a trap? This seems pretty positive right?

Well, let me tell you.

I had a tendency in my life, when I got positive or validating responses like,

“Good job, Flint.” or,

“You’ve done a great job.”

To think, “Yeah, good job me… I guess I can stop and don’t have to keep working this hard.”

But the reason that I was in this position where I did well was because I worked hard.

That logic makes no sense, but it comes up in the back of our minds so often.

It’s the reason you go from doing good work to scrolling your phone or watching TV or taking a snack break that ends up in a 2 hour long lunch break followed by mentally taking the rest of the day off.

This is not to say, don’t pat yourself on the back and feel proud of the work that you’ve done.

It’s to not allow that experience of positivity and validation and satisfaction veer you off the track from the actions that led to it in the first place.

This is a hidden, sneaky, negative feedback loop hiding in so many of our minds, which is that we don’t have the emotional resilience to actually handle positive validation and have it lead back to action.

And instead, the positive validation leads to rest, which is not bad.

It’s good to take rest, just not too much rest.

And not forms of rest that we don’t actually want.

For example, a common experience is after someone says “Yeah, I can handle that,” they’ll feel validation, then they’ll take a “earned break” and go scroll their phone… which will actually ends up making them feel worse and not get started on that work they just said they can handle.

Because the act of doom scrolling tends to be comparative and anxiety-provoking, and not restful.

Now, the way that you solve for this is you start to identify those moments where your positive validation leads to veering off track

To do this, ask yourself:

When am I feeling good about myself because of the result of my actions?

And in those moments, how can I remind myself

that the reason I was in that position was because I worked hard,

or because I acted in alignment with my values,

or I did something that I was proud of,

and it led to me feeling good.

How can I positively reinforce that behavior,

that action, from the positive feeling?

How can I, when I feel good,

when someone validates me, when someone says, good job,

how can I go from that point to,

oh, I did a good job.

Maybe I should do more of that thing.

As opposed to,

oh, I did a good job.

Time to fuck off.

The capacity to master this loop is foundational to long-term consistency.

You are going to go through spurts of effort, right?

Where you do a good amount of work,

and people are going to reward you for that.

But allowing that to let you veer off track from your goals

will prevent you from continuing to do those things

and being consistent with your goals over the long haul,

which is the only way, as we all know,

to achieve the really, really large goals that we have in our life.