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No daddie’s Barbie
Lima Sehgal
Eve was smart .She figured out the small print of the residential
contract of the Garden of Eden. The one thing that was not allowed was
the only thing that she wanted. The rest is history.
No one has quite matched up to the first lady. She was certainly was
no daddy’s Barbie.
Putting your finger on the small print is crucial. It’s called focus.
Instead, we keep battling the externals believing that these are the
obstacles that have to be overcome to reach our goals, without quite
realising what our goals may land up to mean to us.
Focus is not just about goal setting, but also about a whole gamut of
imponderables. It’s about Christopher Columbus getting lost and
reaching elsewhere. And sorry about there being not even a customs
signboard to verify his destination!
Somewhere along the journey one discovers that success is not about
milestones or even headstones. When one gets down to conquering the
evading horizon, one realizes that success is definitely about the
fact that every point of view is a point of view that keeps changing.
Somewhere it boils down to internal leadership. Which is not about
what to do but what to be. It is only then can we look at reality and
respond to its changing nuances.
What we try to do instead is to get a ‘fix’ on reality, and protect it
from change. The simplest way to do it is to get a fix on our self by
perceiving our self in fixed, unchanging roles at different points of
time thru life. As parents, teachers, lawyers, students, doctors or
whatever. Then we go about pursuing goals of becoming “Somebody” thru
our achievements, which become the rewards for achieving our goals. We
pursue achievements and applause with great vigor. We chase material
comforts, recognition and fame with gusto. These goals also happen to
be the approved mode of being in our society.
What happens with such goals is that achievement becomes the criteria
of defining our selves.To maintain our position we need to constantly
prove even to ourselves our worth. This involves a process of living
upto the expectations of ourselves and others which requires the
suppression or elimination of what does not fit into the parameters of
successful living.
Psychologist Karen Horney says that it results in an energy leak. She
says that the part of ourselves we try to suppress is still
sufficiently active to interfere, but cannot be put to constructive
use. The process constitutes a loss of energy that might otherwise be
used for self-assertion, for cooperation or for establishing good
human relationships.
We have to look for the resulting signs of conflict and the inability
to move on.
Collette Dowling, author of The Cinderella Complex, talks about her
experience – “The time in my life when I spent the wee hours prancing
in my plumed hat, I was also complaining a lot that the reason I
couldn’t make money as a writer was that the editors and publishers
didn’t do right by us writers. Allying myself with all the put-down
writers who ever lived, I kept myself the victim. I refused to do
anything that might compromise my ideals, cursed the system, and
conveniently continued to do the same work I had always done, over and
over again. The idea that I might be afraid to try something new, that
maybe I didn’t have the nerve to take a chance, to experiment, to get
behind something unprecedented – that thought never occurred to me. My
problems remained comfortably hidden while I went on complaining.
Conflict has its advantageous. It allows you to stay exactly where you
are, protecting you from risk”.
Perhaps success can be better defined as not what we have achieved but
what we have overcome. We happen to be our own biggest hurdle.
And blinkers do not count as an excuse for the myopic.
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