Career/Work/Job Concerns
November 12, 2011: Build Your Confidence
November 13, 2011 | 
Author One of the most common themes I see in my office doing counseling, psychotherapy, and coaching with gay male individuals and gay couples is that of low self-esteem and low self-confidence. It’s not surprising; as little gay boys, we get exposed to anti-gay messages outright, or at least to the “invisibility” that comes with the dominant heterosexist paradigm of society (the erroneous belief, according to gay psychologist Gregory Herek, Ph.D., that everyone either IS, or SHOULD BE heterosexual). One of the biggest problems that comes with the tyranny of the majority of heterosexual privilege is that it functions to undermine the self-esteem of all LGBT people (but I focus on gay men here) from a young age.
The adult manifestations of the internalized homophobia and negative messages from society, media, parents, siblings, teachers, coaches, etc. include a general “not feeling good” about yourself, not achieving the career you want, not getting a boyfriend/partner/spouse, not being paid enough at work, not having a safe/comfortable home, not driving a reliable car, not taking care of your health, not mitigating risks at all (unsafe sex, too much alcohol, gambling, etc.), and all the while believing on some level that we, as gay boys, somehow “deserve” to have a life that is “less than” our heterosexual brethren. Baloney.
The little ways it manifests include not being comfortable to ask a guy on a date, not feeling comfortable to go to a party or networking event, avoiding buying a stylish outfit (that you can afford) because you’re afraid you won’t look good in it, and not asking for what we need for many ways.
What do we DO about it? A lot! I could give the flip answer of “go into counseling”, and while that is important and valuable (even if I do say so myself), not everyone is ready for that. So, here are some quick tips, to tide you over until we can really get to work:
1) Understand that you didn’t create the negative messages in your head, you’re only repeating them. Babies aren’t born self-critical; kids (and adults) only get that way because somehow they are hearing they aren’t “good enough” for some reason, and it’s usually a stupid reason (like homophobia, bigotry, or some form of “exclusion” or “elitism”). Understand that while the messages got “in”, it’s up to you make sure they “get out.” If a belief about yourself doesn’t serve you in your adult life, personally or professionally, change it. Louise Hay’s affirmation (famous in her book, You Can Heal Your Life, HayHouse.com), “I love and approve of myself just as I am,” is a classic. Repeat this until you believe it, even it’s 1,000 times a day at first.
2) Begin to notice how often your mind’s “voice” tells you a negative message like “I can’t do that” or, “He’d never like me.” When you catch yourself sending yourself a negative message, stop it, freeze-frame it, and then re-write it: “I have never done that before, but I will try my best now.” Or, “He’s a handsome guy, and wouldn’t it be great if he agreed to date me. If not, there are other fish in the sea and it’s his loss.” You see the difference? To build your confidence, your job is to play “copy editor” with the negative messages in your head until every one of them has been re-written to something positive, or at least something neutral.
3. Apply critical thinking to the negative messages that you carry around in your head about you. Who first told you that? Do you respect their opinion? (In the case of parents who told us the negative message, it’s only human nature to want to believe what they said when we are young children, but sometimes we are older now than they were when they said it). But what if we take that person, and understand that maybe instead of being the authority on everything, they had their own weaknesses, jealousies, insecurities, neuroses, projections, and untamed aggressions that clouded their judgment of you? Then the message loses a little of its sting. If a madman walks up to you on the sidewalk and says, “I’m Julius Caesar, and I declare you the scourge of my empire; you should die by the nearest sword!”, you would be a little scared, but mostly you’d think he was ridiculous because you know he’s suffering from an untreated mental illness and his statement can’t be taken at face value. However, if your cherished mentor in your writing group says that Act II of your script needs a re-write because you didn’t appropriately emphasize the main character, you might take their advice more seriously and do the re-write. In each of these two cases, you are exercising judgment on when to believe someone’s opinions of you, and when not to. This is what makes you an empowered adult, with the critical thinking skills that children lack. Never believe a negative statement about yourself from someone who has hateful, elitist, aggressive, ignorant, discriminatory, superficial, and self-indulgent values you don’t respect.
4. To build your confidence for achieving things, believe in not “if” something is possible, but under what circumstances or HOW it would be possible. It’s not about thinking, “The CEO of my company would never want to talk to little old me about advancing my career”; it’s, “How can I ask the CEO’s assistant for a 15-minute slot on his calendar to ask him about how he built his career out of the mailroom?”
5. Don’t be afraid to use silly mind-trick encouragements. If you have to use the story of, “The Little Engine That Could” (“I think I can, I think I can”) then for heaven’s sake, use it! It might be the difference between having the confidence to ask your boss for a raise (that’s another blog article entirely) and getting by with the same salary you had last year. Or, pretend that you are someone you know who has confidence and poise, and “play the part.” People in AA will often say that acting “as if” something is true, helps you to manifest it actually happening – fake it till you make it.
6. Get impatient. One of the best ways to move past a lack of confidence is to simply declare to yourself that there just isn’t TIME for this nonsense. There are projects to be accomplished. There are people to see. There are places to go. There are dates to have. There is sex to be had. There are games to be won. There is LIFE to be lived. Even if you live to be 100, there isn’t time for self-doubt; there is only time for doing. Because living your life with confidence is what your life is there for. It’s what you are here to do.
Give these ideas a try. And if you need more support for your specific situation, consider reading my book, Self-Empowerment: Have the Life You Want!, available at LuLu.com (hardcover or paperback), or on Amazon.com (hardcover and e-book). Or, let’s work on it together, in either in-person sessions in my office, or over the phone (310) 726-4357.
It’s never too late to be what you might have been.
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The Importance of Focus and Hope in Your Work
In psychotherapy and coaching sessions with my gay male clients every day, I’ve noticed lately that a frequent focus is about work issues. This makes sense, given that the news and current events atmosphere has focused on a volatile political and economic climate: we get bombarded with news daily, from everything from Facebook to newspaper headlines to network TV news, about a poor job market, global economic peril, and the almost pathetically comical political race for the 2012 elections about who is going to “save the country” and return us all to prosperity. As much as I believe a lot of that is political posturing, for my clients’ sake, I long for the days where I am helping a client make a decision between which of three new job offers to take, or role-playing with them how to do a salary negotiation, or educating clients on which local gay-related charities I recommend for them to donate part of this year’s large annual bonus to (these are things that used to be much more frequent in my office).
Today, I help my clients do more work on maintaining their current job, working out conflicts within it with colleagues, or helping them to find enough work as an independent professional to keep their incomes stable. I don’t blame my clients for being anxious; there is much to be anxious about, especially when we are all subject to inflammatory media messages on a daily basis that the sky is falling, because, you know, “bad news sells newsapers.”
That’s why I try to encourage my clients facing professional challenges to keep a sense of focus and hope. It does no one any good at all to succumb to the news, however much it’s a mixture of hype versus fact. My clients are often handsome, intelligent, knowledgeable men who have learned to grow a thick skin by growing up gay in a more or less homophobic society. For this reason, they are very often excellent salesmen. They’ve had to learn to “read” people when they developed their “gaydar” to see which men are safe to approach romantically or sexually. They’ve to learn to mount defenses to people who would challenge them. Gay culture, in general, tends to teach culture and sophistication, and we often appear “charming” to straight customers. All of these qualities lend themselves to being an influential salesperson.
This can be sales of a product or service (many of the guys I work with are the top salesmen in their company and the envy of the straight guys, who often don’t look as good in a designer suit or can’t charm female (or even male) clients with the same panache). It can also be selling yourself (not in “that” sense, usually, although I have worked with a number of successful escort boys) in the sense of bringing your creative talents to market – as with actors, TV writers, designers, photographers, fashion designers, architects, and interior designers, all who work for themselves as what I call the “gay male creative entrepreneur” as self-employed independent contractors (West Hollywood is nicknamed “the creative city”, after all!).
And what qualities do my most successful clients exhibit? I think they are focus and hope. Our work is often about maintaining a focus on what mindset, point-of-view, and mental positive statements to maintain to get a certain job “deal,” succeed at it, or parlay that success to the next gig. When challenged by not enough work or not enough of the work projects that are especially desired, it’s maintaining hope that their skills, talents, and abilities are indeed needed, often desperately, by someone, somewhere, who is willing to pay for them. Getting work is often a match-making process between the skills and talents that you have, and the person who needs those skills and talents to achieve something important to their own job (think of a casting director who needs to cast just the “right” actor for a part, or an entire movie full of parts!).
I encourage the use of what’s called “metrics” – which is maintaining some sort of records (it could even be an Excel spreadsheet, Quicken data, or other database; even a notebook) of previous sales, deals, and successes. Then, looking at where they came from, what kind of networking did you do to bring those opportunities about, what skills got you the gig, and what the final benefits were to the client you worked for. By analyzing past data, you can get an idea of what’s worked in the past, and what’s likely to work in the future. If you’re a fashion designer who makes commissioned dresses that are one-of-a-kind, and your last three clients who paid $3,000 each for formal event gowns were high-income middle-aged women in West Los Angeles, then it might behoove you to think about what that demographic reads or looks at online to determine where your next advertising strategy might be. If you’re a salesman and the majority of your last quarter sales were all to small start-up companies with young female decision-makers, you might want to call on other companies in your territory that fit that description. Sometimes the best predictor of future success is looking at where your success has come from in the recent past. This kind of focus helps you maintain the hope that you are making the progress you want to make toward your professional goals this year.
It’s important that if you have fallen into the opposites of focus and hope, which are feelings of being demoralized, scattered, unmotivated, or even resentful, and you’ve lost hope, energy, drive, and confidence, that you work quickly to reverse these and mitigate any damage they are causing to your professional “mojo.” Sometimes you need prompting and an outside person to ask you the right questions, help you clarify your own feelings, and identify your internal strengths or external resources that you might have been overlooking. Counseling and coaching can help, before current circumstances undermine the pursuit of your vision of your Ideal Professional Self.
Conquering Self-Doubt as "The Gay Male Creative Solo Entrepreneur"
Someone asked me recently what I did for a living. Fair question, common question, but I gave an uncommon answer: “I’m a licensed psychotherapist and life/business coach who focuses on helping the gay male creative solo entrepreneur close the gap between how life is, and how he would like it to be.”
Blank stare. Followed by, “What (TF) is a ‘gay male creative solo entrepreneur’??”
I explained that over the past 5 years or so (among the 18 years I’ve done psychotherapy and coaching with gay men and gay male couples), I’ve been seeing more and more guys in my practice who are 1) gay male (that’s for starters; that is my specialty); 2) self-employed; 3) in a creative field (TV writers, screenwriters, journalists, photographers, fashion designers, actors, architects, interior designers, etc.); 4) recently started their business and are looking for the support to grow it in profitability, influence, prestige, and satisfaction; and 5) all while balancing that with a healthy and robust personal life in their health, relationships, mental outlook, fitness, and finances.
Oh, is that all?
These are the traits that “my guys” (as I affectionately call my clients) have in common, and it’s fascinating. Supporting another’s personal and professional growth, what I call “the development of the Personal and Professional Self”, is very rewarding (and effective) work.
My conversation with this stranger got me to thinking about other things “my guys” have in common. Much of our work is about eliminating the self-doubt that stands between where they are today and where they want to be. It makes sense; gay men grow up with so much crap in the negative messages we are raised hearing in our society: “different”, “sick”, “bad”, “wrong”, “anti-family”, “weak”, “illegitimate”, “undeserving”, “less than” — or even the latest one in some state politics, “separate but equal” (such as “civil unions” — cuz, you know, we’re just not “good enough” to have the full marriage rights that straight people do). Is it any wonder, then, that later in life as adults we have self-doubt when trying to start, run, and maximize a business as a self-employed creative professional?
Part of what I do with clients includes teaching them the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy skills to chip away at self-doubt and ultimately eliminate it. It can be done; no matter how many homophobic messages you were exposed to growing up (and even that continue today, every day in the news), you CAN learn to apply critical thinking to them and “disarm” them, realizing that YOU are not the sick/bad/wrong one, THEY are for being homophobic, ignorant, and just plain hateful in the first place.
If you have self-doubt in your ambitions to grow as a creative professional, you’re not focusing on the craft enough. If you doubt that you’re “any good” as a writer, then you need to snap out of it and get back to concentrating on why Act III of your spec script doesn’t work yet. If you doubt that you’re any good as a fashion designer, you need to get back to your sketches and think about what would look fabulous on the aging actress who has commissioned you to make a dress for her. Self-doubt is a luxury of “mental real estate” that we cannot afford; every second you spend on self-doubt is money out of your pocket because you’re not focused instead on growing your business.
Lots of things can help. Reading the blogs of inspirational people (looks like you’ve already started that, kiddo 
) like Seth Godin and Chris Brogan, and balancing working “in” your business (doing your design, writing, etc.) and “on” your business (networking and marketing like crazy) will help. Certainly, having a weekly coaching or therapy session to keep you focused, accountable, energized, and inspired can help. Let me know if that last bit might be of interest to you.
Managing Recession Anxiety: How to Cope with Layoff
While the current economic recession may spare many of us as gay men, who are often considered an “affluent” segment of society, it will ensnare others. Even the threat of being affected by the recession is enough to cause anxiety, but for those who are laid off, have a partner who is, or who have to be the ones doing the laying off, anxiety pervades. How do we cope? Here are some ideas:
Handling Being Laid Off
According to the Alaska Department of Labor, being laid off includes acknowledging and coping with an entire series of stressors, including the loss of:
· Wages and benefits – the basic livelihood for our lifestyle
· Your role as a worker and provider; independence
· Dignity and self-esteem of work
· Expectations we had for the “American Dream”
· Trust in our economic system
· Feelings of control over your life
· Your daily pattern and comfortable, familiar routines
· Your “work family” of colleagues
· Feelings of patriotism and collective strength
These losses can cause symptoms of stress. But for every stressor, there is often a recommended resource and response. For example, for:
- Getting sick more often? Practice self –care of good food, exercise, and rest
- Feeling tired all the time? Sleep regular hours, eat balanced meals, do some cardio
- Sadness and depression? Seek counseling/therapy, especially cognitive-behavioral therapy
- Eating more or eating less? Eat a regular diet, small regular meals
- Having trouble sleeping? Ask your doctor for a prescription sleep aid, consider relaxation CDs
- Feeling shaky or dizzy? Consult your doctor, practice meditation, guided imagery, biofeedback or yoga
- Sexual problems? Cuddle, hug, take the pressure off “performance”, seek couples counseling as needed
- Not interested in anything? Seek therapy for possible depression; get outside of yourself and volunteer to help others
- Increased use of drugs or alcohol? Practice harm reduction; reduce or eliminate these; find alternative “treats” and indulgences
- Getting angry more easily? Forgive yourself and others; practice relaxation
- Feeling out of control? Identify things you can control; do 2-3 things per day in support of yourself; say “I could _________” over and over; volunteer for a cause; keep a journal of your small successes each day
Coping with a layoff also involves dealing with the obvious financial crisis this often brings. Various time-honored tips for financial crisis management include the following:
- Evaluate your financial situation – know your monthly expenses and any income or resources; make a budget and stick to it
- Pay minimums on your credit cards and other debts, but keep every debt current
- Negotiate your “exit package” with your employer before you leave your job – severance pay, job search “outplacement” or resume service fees, extended health and other benefits beyond date of separation
- Try to take copies of important documents before you receive notice of layoff or the day of, if you are allowed to according to your company’s intellectual property policy – such as your Rolodex or Outlook contact files, important memos you wrote, brochures you made, photographs of projects, PowerPoint presentations, successful proposals or reports you wrote, – things that would be part of a “portfolio” of impressive work product samples to show new potential employers
- Get recommendation letters from colleagues, and a letter from Human Resources verifying that you were laid off, not fired
- Enroll in COBRA quickly to preserve your health care coverage for emergencies and routine care
- Make personal/professional business cards on VistaPrint.com to network with – give them out constantly after your layoff
- Pretend you have to live on much less than you actually have – try $10/day for everything
- Use social networking sites – Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Craigslist
- Sell any unused stuff in a garage or yard sale – (Avoid Ebay; its owner is a major Prop 8 supporter!)
- Go back to basics – food, sleep, exercise, stress management, family/peer support
- Brainstorm cheap entertainment – games, books, discount theatres, home-made dinners
- Separate “you” from “you in the job” – you are/were NOT your job – recognize that you have a professional self that transcends any one organization or title
- Research public benefits – Enroll in CA Unemployment, or if you have a physical or psychiatric disability (stress, depression), consider talking to your doctor about enrolling in SDI, the CA short-term disability program (which pays more than Unemployment).
- Register with temporary agencies or make yourself available for consulting. Always network with others with a, “How can I serve you?” attitude, not a, “Give me a job” one.
- Make your job-hunt your new job – Follow a Monday-Friday, 9 to 5 schedule.
- Get new training or go back to school for new work skills, if necessary.
- Be open to taking what you can get job-wise, and make the most of it. Read Jack Canfield’s, The Success Principles for a detailed description of great attitudes to adopt.
- Grieve and vent a little; you have to get these feelings off your chest with someone.
Supporting a Partner Who’s Been Laid Off
Maybe it’s not you, but your partner who has been laid off. What do you do then? Here are some other tips:
- Offer support as he wants it – not how you want to give it. Does he need you to just listen? Give advice? Make jokes? Talk about it? NOT talk about it? Help him with job networking? Role-play “mock” job interviews to build confidence?
- Discuss the issue as a two-person family – don’t think in terms of you/me; it’s “US”
- Review your household budget and try to make some sacrifices evenly between the two of you
- Try to boost your partner’s self-esteem by giving sincere compliments and recognition of things he does well outside of work (I bet you know a few…*ahem*).
- Discuss how if one partner picks up more expenses, the other “contributes” in non-monetary ways such as more domestic duties; discuss what might be fair in terms of money, chores, and other contributions to the household
Handling Laying Off Employees
Perhaps it’s not you, or your partner, who has been laid off, but you’re the one doing the laying off as a manager or director in your company. This is a thankless, unpleasant, and guilt-inducing task, but at times it must be done for the good of the company you represent.
These are ways to cope with this chore:
- Separate your role as a manager/officer of the company from your relationships with colleagues
- Keep in contact with your supervisor and HR – use them as resources so you follow proper legal protocols and not feel isolated in this process
- Focus on your role to keep your whole department “sound” – it’s not about individual employees when you are a manager
- Find trusted “buddies” to vent to – preferably on the same management level (don’t vent to subordinates or superiors)
- Balance the number of “bodies” on your staff in terms of quality versus quantity of workers
- Be quick, firm, but compassionate – offer to write letters of recommendation or take reference calls, if your company allows that
- Don’t be omnipotent. These people are going to sink or swim, with or without you. You can’t take credit if someone leaves and is a success, and you can’t take blame if they leave and have hard times. There are too many variables besides you affecting that person’s success, and they have to take responsibility for their own lives
- Motivate the employees you have left – keep up morale with low-cost recognitions. The book 1,000 Ways to Reward Employees can help.
- Stop feeling guilty – most laid-off employees do just fine, relatively shortly
Finally, remember that economic recessions are inherently temporary. These downturns are to be expected at several points in the long span of your career, and it might help to evoke the ancient wisdom of, “This, too, shall pass.” And then, my friends, the party is ON!
Reflections on Labor Day: Have the Work Life You Want with Executive or Vocational Coaching
Labor Day was designed to be a holiday where we take time to celebrate the accomplishments and the sacrifice of the American worker. Recently in my psychotherapy practice, I have begun to offer more and more sessions on executive or vocational coaching, because a rewarding work life as part of a satisfying career is a key component of a person’s mental health. Read the rest of this entry »