Are you hiding?

One of the things that I talk to the women I coach is to what extent they are hiding within their own lives. Hiding takes many forms and is particularly prevalent in our businesses or careers. Though I can probably apply some of these to my parenting too.

There are various ways in which we hide, including the following;

Perfecting

Perfecting is when we hold off doing something until we have made it better. So a product isn’t launched, or a job application isn’t submitted, a piece of work has too long spent on it, an article isn’t published. Even a facebook post might be put to draft or even deleted before publishing. Because if it isn’t perfect, you can’t share it. But what is perfect? How far does it go?

Having to have your ducks in a row

So you don’t launch your business before you have a perfect (see above!) website, you can’t apply for that job before you have xxx amount of experience, you won’t approach that person to be on their podcast until you have over 10k instagram followers. It’s a really disabling issue, believing that things must come in a certain order and that you cannot move onto step two before you have completed set one – tip: life isn’t a video game, you do not always have to complete a level before you move up!

Keeping things to yourself for too long

Another hiding and delaying tactic is to keep your ideas to yourself and probably ultimately creating issues for yourself because you’re not actively asking for feedback or thoughts as you go along. So you spend ages creating the perfect product for example only to find that no one wants it. Trust me – I have been there! But it feels safer than the rejection, or criticism we face when we share the idea and so we don’t.

Creating too many layers

Hands up who has ever come up with a simple and brilliant idea, only to layer lots of other ideas and add ons around it? You convince yourself that the initial idea on its own isn’t good enough (inner critic, imposter syndrome also playing a part here!) so you look for ways to ‘improve’ it. This is also just a delaying tactic, rather than presenting the simple thing, we add things and tweak things and so, on it goes…

Presenting other people’s ideas rather than your own

With the world at our finger tips via the world wide web, it’s so easy to see what all our competitors are doing, or watch what other women like us do, and then become very tempted to adopt their style, opinions, strategies etc. It’s incredibly easy to convince yourself that these ways are better than yours – it’s also a very handy way of avoiding expressing yourself and risking people not connecting with you or disagreeing with you or simply not liking what you do. This isn’t the same as copying by the way, it’s much subtler.

Do you think you might be hiding? Which of these ways do you identify with? Can you think of any more?

If you feel you have a problem with hiding, why not consider some coaching to help you change your mindset and set new structures around how you live and work?