Are you clear on the things that you value?
Do your actions match up with what you say your values are?
A solid test is to look at your bank statements – does what you say you value match up with what you spend your money on?
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Are you clear on the things that you value?
Do your actions match up with what you say your values are?
A solid test is to look at your bank statements – does what you say you value match up with what you spend your money on?
Good ambiguity is ambiguity by design. It’s potentially withholding information in order to propel someone forward by pushing them to discover their own agency in solving problems and making decisions.
It’s reflecting questions back when you’ve got the space to use it as a growing opportunity, and to build up the person asking the question. It’s using silence to allow for deeper reflection, building the systems to support forward motion among uncertainty, and crafting a safe space for people to make missteps and learn from them.
Bad ambiguity is ambiguity without design. It’s withholding information for no purpose, or to increase your own status or power through opacity rather than transparency.
It’s not being intentional with design or being dismissive because you don’t want to put in the emotional labor of interacting with fellow humans. It’s not caring enough to consider others and designing directions, experiences, or things from only your perspective. It’s ambiguity based on fear, carelessness, or malice.
As with most things, the ambiguity you build can be either amazing or terrible, so it’s up to you to choose.
Improvement always has a process behind it, and if you’re looking too far out into the future, you’ll miss the enjoyable part of learning, staying present, and seeing those incremental wins.
And these incremental wins are really important, as the path you might have chosen might be incredibly long. It’s easy to lose sight of the gradual progress you’ve made if you’re looking at something five years down the line. Especially if there are any setbacks or backsliding, if you’re only looking at your goal, these can be incredibly frustrating and discouraging. However, if you’re trusting the process and enjoying it, then these hurdles aren’t quite so scary, nor are they as monumental as they seem when you’re only looking at the end goal.
These smaller steps can compound, and I assert that if you lean into the process you may not necessarily find yourself at your goal faster (although I think you probably will), but you will definitely find more happiness along the way.
So where in your life can you really focus on the process?
Originally part of the Inner Monster Podcast, episode 31: The Hidebehind