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Inner motivational dysfunction

  • Writer: Christian Van Linda
    Christian Van Linda
  • May 18, 2024
  • 3 min read

When I talk about how my inner life was arranged to to get everyone I met to like me, some people have trouble seeing how that’s a bad thing. It’s not all bad. Not even close. But in certain areas of life it’s incredibly problematic and dysfunctional. Getting people to like you is a valuable skill but it should be choice and not compulsively applies to everyone you meet in every situation. Similar to a lot of what we face, it’s an issue of compartmentalization. Choosing to behave a certain way in certain situations and differently in others.


This sort of behavioral motivation makes things like healthy work or any non friendship based relationships difficult. There are situations, many of them, where we interact with other humans but should have priorities that outrank personal affections or friendship. This is a subtle but meaningful distinction. The dysfunction impairs our ability to advocate for ourselves, to navigate our careers effectively and to see our place in the world clearly. the effects are far reaching and in a lot of cases silently and invisibly debilitating.

I wanted my customers to like me. Nothing wrong with that. On some level everyone does. What I’m describing is not that. It is a dysfunction of that healthy variation of this behavior.

So many times people without dysfunction minimize it because it runs parallel to normal experience but requires different strategies and approaches.


My job was to make money for the company. To maximize profits. Not buy customers affection with company resources.


I subconsciously prioritized getting the person to like me over making money. So it made me bad at my business jobs. Margins too low. Too many free add one. Not enough associative selling.


If someone didn’t want to buy something from me I was more than fine with it. I just wanted a friend. Or a mentor. At Allen Edmonds I had many male customers who called me when they didn’t need anything. Smart and high powered men who knew what I was and what I wasn’t.


I am not a business person. When I think of my attempts at being one and how my family saw me as a failure I laugh. I am a thinker. The men called me for my thoughts. They called me and came to see me because they cared about me. So even in a shitty environment for skill set, I made relationships that last to this day.


I guess the word failure is just as subjective as the word success. By company standards I never progressed. I was underemployed. I was a failure. The truth of the situation is that company was atrocious at recognizing their employees strengths and offering mobility.


Once they put me on a retail track, a track that didn’t even require a degree and gave me a boss like Julie, a horrible boss who should never, ever be in charge of other people, I was doomed. She protected her power at all costs by putting down the people under her. That was her entire managerial “strategy” and Al wasn’t smart enough to see it or didn’t care. I have no good things to say about either’s intellect or ability. Or integrity for that matter. Their dealings with me were not they way good human beings behave. Even in a business setting.


But to my internal logic I was a success. I made friends I still have. I got up and went to work despite how awful it could be and i held a job i wasn’t thrilled about for 8 years. I was a part of what felt, mistakenly, like a family. I learned many things about myself there.


It took me leaving to understand I am an artist. The enneagram and wise people have taught me that and once I saw it in myself I realized it was always true of my soul whether I was able to project it to the world or understand it myself.


A starving artist is a more accurate description than a failed business person.


You can’t fail at something you have no interest in doing. You can only lie to yourself and live in delusion.


More money less peace.


More friends less peace.


Less self knowledge less peace


Less harmony between your mind and your heart less peace


 
 
 

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