Feeling Whole Can Detach You From Your Winning Recipe

YOU DISCOVERED AS a young child that the world was extroverted. You created a winning recipe to cope since you believed you could not succeed or feel safe any other way.  Today the recipe allows you to hide inside a socially acceptable way to be – accountable, controlling, frugal, neat, or righteous. Or any of the thousands of other ways introverts try to be to achieve success.  For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.

In the last two posts we suggested two approaches for detaching from your winning recipe – creating a context of yourself as a straight-up introvert, and choosing a treasured relationship over your recipe. 

This post will cement the detachment by helping you to accept that you have no defect to repair.  The discovery of that defect dates from your childhood; here we will show that such a discovery was a mistake. Seeing it as a childhood error will help to neuter the recipe and make it docile.

Feeling whole was a solution I adopted twelve years ago and never looked back.

How I Discovered The Wholeness Solution

Starting in 2010 I intentionally began working without a winning recipe for the first time ever. 

For decades mine had been to create step by step processes to handle any event in life.  But after reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking I saw that I no longer had a void inside me that I needed to fill. 

As an introvert I was not only OK, but could best succeed in life as an introvert, using my abilities for deep focus, single-minded concentration and thoughtful analysis.  I needed no recipe to do that; in feeling whole I could just be myself. 

An outstanding relationship with a Senior VP at UnitedHealthcare, my supervisor, made all the difference.  Over the next ten years he used my introvert-related skills extensively to rabble-rouse and challenge conventional thinking. 

What resulted were not only the financial success I had always sought – something I jokingly referred to as “baronial splendor” – but also the kind of emotional satisfaction in just being a straight-up introvert that I never thought was possible. 

My compulsion never went away – I still admire cool processes and am drawn to using them.  But the winning recipe no longer runs me.  I am free to be the introvert that I had always tried to hide. 

I still run processes every day, but now the charge is off of them.  They support my diet, exercise, sleep, and other components of health without being a ravenous force in my life that always demands attention.

For me, the solution to detaching from my winning recipe was not to gain freedom from it, but to sever the emotional connection to it that had kept me addicted my whole life.

Unpacking The Wholeness Solution

Your winning recipe is rooted in the lack, fault, or defect that you identified as a young child when you observed the extroverted world and decided you did not have what it took to succeed.  The entire point of creating the recipe was to cover up that void, and compensate for it by being whatever way could prevent you from being an introvert and still could allow you to “win.”

Take away the defect and you begin to feel whole.  You cut the legs out from under the winning recipe.  Or better said, you neuter it so that it becomes harmless and might even be useful.

How To Use The No-Defect Solution To Detach From Your Winning Recipe

Step 1. Read Susan Cain’s book.  If you have not read Quiet, make it a priority.  It will open your eyes to the power that you hold in today’s world precisely because you are an introvert.  You have an innate skillset that society sorely needs.

Step 2. Get in touch with your strengths as an introvert.  Make the no-defect thesis real for you by identifying specific skills that you bring to people around you in your personal life and at work.  Ask yourself the following (this is a recap from Post #1): How can you use…

• Being a good listener to your advantage?
• Thinking before speaking as a strength?
• Expressing yourself in writing to get results?
• One-on-one conversations to further your goals?
• Being able to concentrate easily to achieve solutions?
• Diving into work with few interruptions as a tool for success?
• Not showing or discussing your work with others until it is finished as an asset?

Step 3. Start using these skills openly.  More than anything else. having the experience of being an introvert and winning while you do so, will confirm that being who you are does not reveal a defect – it reveals one asset after another. 

Once you internalize that experience, your winning recipe will have no more power.  In feeling whole you may choose to keep it on a leash because it is familiar, and now is so harmless that it contributes to your life in some helpful way.  Or you may choose just to let it slide into the background as a relic from your past.  Either way you are free to be yourself.

 

Welcome to the relief that comes from realizing that

you have no defect to compensate for, and that

in its place you have a full, recipe-diminished

life ahead of you to enjoy

 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC