Internal vs External Reassurance

You can not be sufficiently encouraged to consistently do better work.

Reassurance is the human act of telling someone that everything is going to be okay. Exactly the way they planned. That their efforts will be worth it and their goals realised.

You show your project to your colleague and she tells you it’s great, your manager will approve, she’s certain of it.

How many days go by before you need more reassurance to continue?

The future always shows up in ways we don’t expect. When we get hooked on reassurance we spend time and energy searching for reassurance rather than focusing on our work and the change we seek to make.

If we believe the future can be controlled, as those that reassure us often do, we will focus our work on the outcome rather than what we are truly capable of. This leads to working to make the reassurers happy, and not the customer you seek to serve.

Alternatively, we must embrace the feeling of uncertainty and confidently refuse to get hooked on reassurance. The future will arrive soon, our work will ship and we will wait to see what happens.

In the meantime, we will concentrate on creating the most outstanding work possible.

When the outcome is received, we use constructive feedback to inform the amendments we make to our work, self-propelling ourselves forward.