QUALITY OF THOUGHTS EQUALS QUALITY OF LIFE. 3 TOOLS FOR HOW TO THINK AS A YOUNG PROFESSIONAL.

At Philosopher Kings, we empower next-gen professionals with how to think, speak, and act with knowledge, wisdom, and virtue. This is a riff on why thinking comes before every other thing as a professional and a person.

QUALITY THOUGHTS = QUALITY LIFE.

Marcus Aurelius explains that

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

The emperor means that our thinking FRAMES our entire life. This means who we are and what we stand for, how we treat the important people in our life, and the kind of professional we wish to be. And so he says we must weed out unreasonable thoughts.

For a young professional, we cannot help but have some unreasonable, and even crippling thoughts

• about whether or not we are doing well enough compared to our colleagues.

• as to whether we are a good enough father, mother, partner, or friend alongside our profession.

• whether we are climbing the professional ladder fast enough.

• if it is normal to feel so overwhelmed in our first several years while establishing yourself.

These are totally normal, but often completely unhelpful though loops, which Aurelius actually believes we can learn to control. So do we. It’s one of the primary steps we take in all of the coaching programs and products we provide.

and then there are the instantaneous thought patterns caused by strong emotions….

• when you get angry, mad, or jealous at a client, patient, or colleague because you are under pressure.

• fear of failure or misdiagnosing or making a mistake that warrants review or litigation.

• when you do make a mistake, which you will, and you cannot let it go all day, week, month.

Again, totally normal, but irrational if it is no longer in your control and completely unhelpful to your growth mindset as a young professional provider.

A quick aside, if you have felt a surprising amount of overwhelm in your young professional career, I have something worth way way more in value than the price tag of a couple of lattes together. In fact, the initial training is on WHY being a young professional is so overwhelming and how to stop placing your personal worth on the line of performance. POWERFUL STUFF, and that one’s a freebie. You can grab it here. It’s called the Overcoming Overwhelm Survival Guide.

Okay back to the chase. The next section of this post is an overview of three tools you can use to reframe how you think about being a professional.

Here they are briefly— we do a deep dive on these concepts and how to use them daily in our coaching program, and I also think we touch on it in the Overcoming Overwhelm Survival Guide as well. Here goes.

THREE TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT BEING A PRO.

1) LEARNER’S PATH.

The Learner’s Path is a mental tool for envisaging yourself as a student, a learner, a padawon. To understand yourself as a learner is to take on a permanent beginner’s heart and growth mindset. It is to always be charting your course with the north and south stars around you.

As a young professional, you will make mistakes. LOTS of them. Understanding yourself as a learner on a path towards something noble, great, and with a grand tradition affords you the perspective that you never arrive and always strive. You never arrive, because in any of the noble professions, mastering the field is a moving target as the discipline grows and evolves.  You always strive, because at some point as a learner you cross over and you are all in.

The learner’s path is a great mental tool for being kind to yourself as you learn and grow, and at the same time, possessing uncommon drive and ambition to grow into your professional life.

2) ALTER EGO.

In a letter in the first century, Cicero writes that his friend Atticus is like an “alter ego,” a consciousness just like him who can see things from angles he cannot. Whenever Cicero feels unable to bear up under a difficult task or seemingly insurmountable circumstances, the “other I” (ALTER EGO) takes over and gives him the right advice, leverage, and mindset for the job.

In common parlance, the “alter ego” has come to mean the part of yourself which is almost like your hidden dark side. It’s the part of you unafraid to rush into the fray, take over, and get the job done when normally you would be afraid.

This is a mindset used by professional performers, athletes, and high performers of every stripe. Bo Jackson was a dual (football and baseball) superstar pro-athlete of my childhood (seriously every kid on my block was trying to get a Bo Breaker baseball card for a good five years… ha!).

Jackson once told a reporter that he had never actually scored a touchdown, hit a home run, made one of his jaw-dropping catches, or broken a bat over his tree trunk thighs… because every time he steps on the field, Bo Jackson goes away and Jason Vourhees comes out (the guy in the hockey mask from Friday the 13th). His point, is that he takes on an alter ego— an entirely different persona who is is cold hearted killer. Creepy guys in masks just kill, they don’t ask whether they can or should or if the self-doubt is overwhelming.

Sometimes you need that side of your subconscious to take care of business as a young professional. You have the training and expertise, but self-doubt and lack of experience can cripple you from doing what you are capable of. Enter the “other I.”

The Alter Ego may be the most important mental tool I personally draw upon to take steps no one has taken before in serving the next generation. Whenever, I am afraid to pull the trigger on something truly innovative, I ask myself whether “Swift-footed Markilles” has the same reservations. He most certainly does not, in fact he’s a little pissed at you for even bothering him. He’s a total gunner, and he is my alter ego.

3) GAP AND GAIN.

Once when I was a young-gun grad student, I was backpacking in the Ein Gedi National Park in Israel. Not gonna lie, it was pretty baller; we were up in ibex country.

I was with a mentor, and going on and on about my future plans, what I hoped to accomplish, and how I was going to get there. After some time, my mentor turned to me and simply said, “Mark, you’re missing it.”

“Missing what?” I said, offended that he didn’t appreciate my ambition to go forward with excellence.

“This. Thousands of sages have walked this path, our entire tradition is shot through with the beauty of this wilderness, and you are somewhere else.”

Oof. He was right, and we were silent for sometime.

After a while longer, he placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Stay in the present.”

I have had to learn and relearn that lesson, and as a young professional, it is likely you will too. Because it’s true. High performers always struggle with the present. By our nature, we have goals and take aim at targets way out in front of us. This is a good thing, so long as we still enjoy the journey and discipline ourselves how to be in the present.

The Gap and the Gain, is a coaching technique taught by one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial coaches, Dan Sullivan. There’s a great book on this concept, if you find you like it as much as me, written by Dr. Benjamin Hardy called The Gap and the Gain.  The big idea, is measuring your life with how far you have come instead of comparing your life to where you want to be in the future.

This is a fantastic framework, and you can learn how to use it to calm yourself down, appreciate your professional and personal journey, and take JOY in who you are becoming, at exactly the right pace.

TEST CASE: MICHELLE:

LEARNER’S PATH, ALTER EGO, and GAP AND GAIN are three tools that can give you quality facts about yourself, your professional abilities, and personal development. Learning when to use which tool is important, and we will cover it in detail in the next three posts.

But for now, imagine with me, through a test case. My friend Michelle is a pediatrics nurse who is part of the Philosopher Kings Coaching community. Here is how she uses quality thoughts to equal a quality life as an up and comer with a bright future:

Michelle is a young nurse in pediatrics. She is well trained, excelled in her studies, but finds the fast pace and social world of the hospital system to be dizzying and a little terrifying. There seem to be so many ways to make mistakes, so many people who wish to point them out, and all the while, she is trying to recall a massive body of knowledge while remaining compassionate with the patients and families she serves. Hospital systems can be overwhelming, to be sure, but Michelle has been using a few tricks she picked up from Philosopher Kings. She understands herself to be on a Learner’s Path, and so she knows she absolutely will make mistakes. Her job is simply to learn from mistakes, repeat them as few times as possible, and continue along the path. She will meet wonderful guides along the path, but she will also meet cynical and jaded ones. It is her job to choose to right mentors to emulate. She is afraid of telling difficult news to families. While the physicians deliver the most information, oftentimes families approach nurses for clarification because they are more approachable and socially gifted. Whenever this happens, a part of Michelle wants to run and hide. However, she uses her Alter Ego who is not afraid of delivering news, or much of anything else, and she is able to enter the room and say what needs to be said. Finally, Michelle has learned there is no end to wishing she was already way farther in her progress as a healthcare professional. She dreams to more degrees, higher pay, greater confidence, and more consistent success. But she does not measure here self-worth by these dreams. Quite the contrary. Michelle measures backwards: Gap and Gain thinking. And so Michelle charts how far she has already come. She celebrates her journey thus far, and only pursues her dreams out of gratitude and the confidence of past success.

The big takeaway of this post, is that if you can change how you think, your words and actions will follow your mind into bold bravery and calm confidence as a young professional. The three tools we have explored are the 1) learners path, 2) the alter ego, and 3) the gap and the gain. If you want to radically transform how you think as a professional, stick around and don’t be afraid to go forward. Developing your internal self is as big a journey as your professional training, only it goes way beyond your job and pays dividends the rest of your life. I am so glad you are here.

Remember, your philosophy is your life, and your life is your philosophy.

Mark Shaffer

Philosopher Kings

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Here are a couple of ways to grow for free.

• Philosopher Kings Facebook Group, a community of high performers going pro at being human!

• Listen to the Podcast, where we break down the basic principles of what makes a Philosopher King.

And here are some ways to go farther faster in virtue and practice:

• Sign up for the Philosopher Kings MEMO, a good-old fashioned 10 page Memo that will be most fun and formative thing you read each month.

• Fix the emotional overwhelm of being a young professional once and for all with the Philosopher Kings Overcoming Overwhelm Survival Guide. Give us the price of three lattes and two hours to teach you how to crush overwhelm with an emotional mental toolkit, understanding the learner’s path, and embracing your alter ego. This training is fire. Ha!