If you can’t be compassionate (or encouraging, or kind, or productively critical) with yourself, create an alter ego that can perform that emotional work for someone else - a someone else that happens to also be you. That is, if don’t think you can do something, make up an aspirational version of yourself who can - an embodiment of you once you’ve already reached your goals - pretend to be that version, and do the damn thing. This trick is an extension of that - it creates the necessary critical distance between you and your problems, and gives you an explicit, easy-to-embody persona to step into when you can’t do it “yourself.”īy becoming your you-but-not-you alter ego, you open yourself up to achievements and possibilities that regular you may not have thought possible possibilities that “regular you” may have given up on out of hand. They are all me, but with different facets of my personality dialed up or down to suit the needs of the situation. We already wear different personas by just existing in the world. The person I am when I’m alone with my partner is different from the person I am when running a workshop for 20 people is different from the person I am when I’m trying to squat twice my bodyweight. Who needs to know that you’re faking? And if it’s still you, are you really faking at all? The premise is pretty simple: whenever you feel like you’re not the person you want to be, make the person you want to be up, and then pretend to be them. It’s also a strategy that can be found in several books that are broadly about gamifying your life, like Steve Kamb’s (quite good) Level Up Your Life, Chris Hardwick’s (also quite good) The Nerdist Way, and Jane McGonigal’s (excellent) SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully 2 She calls the concept a “Secret Identity,” but it’s the same basic premise., among others. Beyoncé has Sasha Fierce NFL/MLB double-all-star Bo Jackson famously never played a single down of football as “Bo Jackson,” instead literally pretending he was Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies according to biographers, Steve Jobs perfected and embodied a “Steve Jobs, Apple CEO” persona that only tangentially resembled who he was when with his family. One of the ways I harness these peccadillos productively (as opposed to letting them stun me into doing nothing, ever, for fear of bad outcomes) is with alter egos.Īlter egos and alternate personas have long been used by entertainers and other highly successful people.
#Sorry you are too young for this episode alter ego game professional
Clinical anxiety is a very different thing, and there’s no shame in getting professional or chemical help for this or any mental health issue. 1 Important caveat: the amount of anxiety I’m talking about is more or less “standard human with an overactive inner life” the kind that can definitely be overwhelming or cause second-guessing, but normally exists as low-grade background radiation. It’s not the cleanest-burning fuel, but more often than not, it gets me where I want to go. When I can keep it at reasonable levels, it gets me moving more effectively than a general, non-urgent desire for improvement. I don’t consider this an inherently bad thing - I have a semi-productive relationship with my negative self-talk, anxieties, and impostor syndrome.
As a general rule, the person that I am meanest to, rudest to, most demanding of, less forgiving of, regularly show a lack of confidence in, think is most likely to fail at a given task, and am generally hard on is me.
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