Looking back on 2019, one of the biggest accomplishments I’m proud of this year is making a career change into my dream industry (yep, I work a full-time job just like everybody else). This is something that I’ve wanted to do for the past few years, but I’ve never gotten around to actually doing it.
It was always one of those “important, not urgent” things in the back of my mind. The fancy scientific term for this is cognitive dissonance—basically, that uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re doing something you know you shouldn’t (or when you’re not doing something you know you should.)
An example of cognitive dissonance that we can all relate to is eating a bag of potato chips even though you “know” it’s unhealthy. Whenever I do this, I always end up telling myself things such as:
- “Ah, it’s just one bag of potato chips”
- “I don’t eat potato chips that often anyway”
- “I’ll work it off later”
Take a wild guess at how many times I’ve actually “worked off” a bag of potato chips after eating it.
Zero?
Yep, that’s correct.
Sure, it’s easy to identify this sort of self-defeating self-talk when someone else says it. But how many of us are guilty of sabotaging ourselves through our own self-talk, especially around women?