If you come from a home where love has been conditional on the results you produced, you learn that it takes an extraordinary performance to earn unconditional love.
Delivering great performances can be wonderful – but if you do it to be loved, your sense of success will always hang on whether people applaud when you cross the line. That’s what’s known as a weak motivator.
This is why a stockbroker in New York threw himself off a tower block on Black Monday in October 1987, when his fortune had been halved from $700m to $350m. The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t fall apart if we stripped him of his title and made him a monk. Whether people applaud isn’t important to him.
The Superman syndrome shows up when we’re driven by the fear of not being good enough – the fear that love will be withdrawn if we don’t perform. We find the syndrome in our relationship, with our friends and at work.
Whether you’re a friend, a parent, a colleague or a boss, you can easily give criticism without the other person ever doubting that your feelings are genuine. When that happens, a healthy balance emerges between performance and a sense of self-worth.
The first step towards a greater sense of being worth something – no matter how you perform – lies in the courage to dare to break free of other people’s opinions about what you do. Not a revolt – a release. A revolt is like swerving from one ditch into the other, while a release is finding your balance and driving down the middle of the road.
/Martin
– Thank goodness it’s almost Monday!
– Thank goodness it’s almost Monday!
