(the following is an excerpt from the free online course "The Art and Science of Change" to sign up for the course click here)
Self Improvement vs. Self Provement
Often a passion for success becomes an obsession when a person moves from the healthy quest for Self Improvement to the unhealthy drive for Self Provement.
Self Improvement is the act of trying to improve one's skills so as to gain greater confidence in an area and to earn subsequent rewards.
However, Self Provement is basing one's worth on his or her accomplishments. It is the belief that “I ABSOLUTELY MUST succeed or else I AM no good, or at least not as good as I COULD be”. This is a sneaky little variation of the Failure Mindset we discussed a few weeks ago.
As you remember, we discussed how failures may trigger the Failure Mindset. However, even people who are succeeding may have this same mindset. People who obsessively try to succeed may be placing their very worth as a person on their accomplishments.
This mindset is detrimental to a person for many reasons. The top four reasons are:
No one can succeed all of the time, so when a person with this belief failes he or she is less able to bounce back and recover and spends too much time mentally "beating himself up" or excessively ranting about the unfairness of others.
Because it can actually make a person less likely to try to accomplish difficult tasks for fear that he or she may fail and therefore “prove” his or her worthlessness to himself or others.
It reinforces the mindset that people who don’t achieve are no good (or not as good as others who have achieved), which hinders relationships with others.
It increases anxiety about achieving (because their very worth as a person is at stake) and therefore actually decreases their performance.