Projects at work are often based around a gap statement. Why should we invest time into making this change, developing a report, or working on an improvement? Gap statements are what allow us to determine a comparison between actual performance with potential or desired performance. If an organization does not make the best use of current resources, or forgoes investment in capital or technology, it may produce or perform below its potential.
What if we applied this to ourselves? Are the decisions we are making in each purchase necessarily the best investments of our own capital? If I look over my recent Amazon orders, I would have to say no. If you budget correctly and save appropriately, you can maximize your ability to do things you want to do at the obvious sacrifice of short-term satisfaction. But not all capital has to be financial and just like at a job, there are hours of your life being allocated to specific tasks and responsibilities and whether it is a good use of your time can be up to both you and your manager. Trusting your manager to allocate and use your time effectively can backfire heavily in most jobs you have encountered, especially if it conflicts with what you think might be a better use of yours if you have ideas for change or improvement. Similarly, trusting that what people tell you what they think is best for you can especially backfire because they can either tell you everything you can’t be or try to mold you into their image of you when you might have other ideas for yourself that you would have otherwise explored.
It’s important to be yourself, but sometimes it’s hard knowing what that is if the feedback you get from others can be used to obtain a less biased image of who you are. Perhaps it’s more important to think about what you want to be in the future but laying out plans like that can also lead to errors in how you think you should be based on some ‘perfect’ image of yourself you are creating. Recently I have learned that finding out who you need to become more of, your gap statement, is only possible through other people, but only by availing the strengths within themselves that inspire you to be better in areas of weakness. However, just because you find a gap statement for a project or improvement it doesn’t mean that your sponsor will support the idea, especially since there are often resistances to change. In a similar vein, people in your life may not support your ideas of yourself and will resist your change but that doesn’t make it wrong. Keeping people close to you in life that would seek to stem self-growth or do what would discourage exploration prevent you from achieving the potential within yourself.
Personally, my gap statement has grown large and in becoming aware of more of my gaps I am troubled, scared, and anxious. It floors me to feel this way again but by ignoring every realm of your life that you could explore, you waste yourself of the potential you could have fulfilled.
There seems to have been a common trend in my life where I have grown up and continued to live as a person who seeks feedback from others on whether I’m doing something right. Even worse, I have spent most of my life identifying the person I am by the things I know and can do, rather than what I feel and think. When I try to examine why this is, the only conclusion that I draw is that I don’t really know myself, that I have spent so much time while growing up observing others that I didn’t bother to check in and place myself among those I never seemed to relate to. Looking in the mirror is weird for me because I feel like I am observing someone observe themselves, but not me looking at myself. The same holds for photos, events, awards, and some memories. I don’t really feel like it is me and sometimes reflecting on past events doesn’t make me think I’m being nostalgic, but storytelling instead. When presenting to a group of people, whether peers, supervisors, or even senior management, I experience this same vicarious feeling with the event and disconnect slightly to observe this person who is owning the presentation and looking like a confident public speaker.
Growing up and going through oppressive and discouraging periods of unwarranted beratement and definition from so many people has had a crazy effect on the resultant behaviors traced back to the damages associated to them. It's great to grow and realize this but it creates empty pits in your heart that you don't really acknowledge until some of those insecurities are personally confronted and their depth understood clearly upon hard examination. Once that is realized, it’s near crippling when cognitive dissonance takes over your mind and directs your once focused attention on achieving greatness with your strengths instead toward all of the weaknesses and gaps you have allowed yourself to create in the process. Despite feeling lost or in a state of self discontent, the most disarming thing for me recently is realizing how far I have come since waking up on the bathroom floor after the darkest night of my life and realizing I had hit rock bottom as emotionally as possible and crying out of frustration that I can’t handle this life anymore. When I place that person next to my current self I realize I am unable to identify with that hopeless boy and that he is dead somehow, but part of me still feels him crying out for help when I look at this ‘new’ person in the mirror in present day. I have more confidence I ever thought I could possess, actual faith in myself to accomplish what I set myself to, friends, fucking actual friends that have and would scrape for me, and the self-assurance in my own abilities to never have to depend on anyone who could make me fall again.
However, I need to become more in touch with who ‘Brian’ is, not what he can do or what he knows, but what he has learned from exploring himself instead of through observation. Brian feels so many things and thinks so much of the world around him, but he doesn’t think much about himself, what is best for him, or make true decisions about himself without relying on the feedback of others. He has fucked up a lot and will continue to make mistakes, but he has learned from every mistake he’s made, including the mistake of allowing himself to be defined by so many for so long. What he isn’t doing is loving himself in the way he should be.
At times it feels I am mourning for someone who has died and never gotten the chance to experience what I see now, but it is still the very same person and that is still difficult to rationalize or come to terms with. It's always very disarming and upsetting, but ultimately humbling to look back at your past struggles within yourself and realize you are a much stronger person than you were. To be able to identify a gap in who you could have been before always feels lamentable in that such light could have existed sooner, but to be strong enough to find the gap and deviate from your own baseline represents a birth in thought that should be celebrated.
One of the best quotes I have ever come across said to 'Be the person you needed when you were younger.' I am proud to say that I am the exact person I needed when I was younger and am so inspired by who I am when I realize that. I’m the person I needed then and even five years ago, but I need to become the person that I need now, which is to truly be myself with unabashed execution of expression.
