Structure of a story:
a. Weakness and internal need: Self-doubt and need for appreciation.
b. Trigger event: An email message.
c. External need: Do good audits.
d. Adversary: Routine.
e. Plan: Change things.
f. Fight: Keep on trying doing audits.
g. Self-revelation: Realizing the mistake with audits.
h: New equilibrium: Therapy and pretending things are fine until it actually happens (Placebo).
There was once a little boy, Olivian, who was good with small details. He could focus on the small things but sometimes missed the bigger picture.
Time passed, he got a job in marketing, a combination of communication and IT, which fitted him quite well, knowing quite well both fields.
What Olivian didn’t know very well was that he didn’t trust himself all that much. He had self-doubt, he kept doubting himself, and constantly needed external validation.
He did his work, kept on working, until, at one point, a client sent a message asking why was he so critical in the technical audit he made, not focusing at all on the good parts of a web site.
Olivian was quite surprised by the message, he thought that any audit should have, as its main purpose, saying the things to be improved, rather than focusing on the positive aspects.
He thought for a while on how to make the audits a bit better.
He added a positive part about an audit, and, at a later stage, kept adding things like „This is fine, this is OK”, which balanced, very roughly, at a 50/50 rate between positive/negative remarks in an audit.
He didn’t like the change at the beginning, but, after some reflection, he kept it, nevertheless.
In time, he got to understand what the problem was, wrote some articles on the blog about it (My soul »; „Încrederea în sine e tăcută. Nesiguranța de sine e vocală!” »), and realized that the issue was that he didn’t appreciate himself quite enough, and also didn’t know very well on how to handle love.
What was the solution? Doing some therapy and pretending that the solution was already attained, that he already had love, and that he already trusted himself.
