I listened to a podcast this morning about being needed. It described how people who don’t feel useful often get depressed. This can even lead to suicide or early death for some.  For example, when men retire and don’t have enough to do, they often lose their sense of purpose. Their health sometimes suffers as a result.  For some people, if they don’t feel they matter to someone, they wonder “would anyone even notice if I wasn’t around anymore?”.  

Where Else Does It Apply?

I had a conversation with a highschool coach about handling kids that would normally sit the bench during most games.  My opinion is it’s better to cut a player than put them on the team and not let them play in games.  I’ve seen kids lose their passion for the game when this happens faster than if they were cut.  He agreed. When he coaches, he looks at what each kid is skilled at, even if small compared to other players. This coach finds a way to bring out that skill in players and consider when he’s going to need it during a game.  He would make a point to help the player develop their particular skill and  put them in when it was needed.  This helps the player  have a sense of purpose.  And  it helps the team overall.  It also helps build team cohesion.

Need for Purpose and Parenting

All this made me wonder if parents could do the same thing with kids.  What if we make each kid aware they serve a useful purpose within the family so they feel needed.  This could  be something like certain chores, taking care of pets, babysitting, running errands, and so on.

Gary Watson provides Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan and Ada, Michigan.  He counsels couples, teenagers, and adults.  He can help with anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, relationship problems, and more.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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I thought about it for a few minutes before responding to his dilemma.  Although it’s hard to make mistakes and feel the embarrassment of them, it’s an important life lesson to own your mistakes and learn to be better.  If you can’t admit when you make a mistake you’re just failing to take accountability for yourself.  It’s a fool who can’t admit they make mistakes or screw things up on occasion because you still know you did it and so do the people who are involved. 

So with my son, he walked me through what went wrong, how he made an error in judgement and what he thought he could do to prevent it from happening again.  We talked about how to approach his teammates who got on his case about his mistake.  For example, he could admit it didn’t go well and ask them what he should do differently.  He might get some good advice and learn something.

We also went over events that resulted in the mistake.  For example, the coach had him play defender, which he hadn’t played before.  He misread cues from the goalie since he’d never had to do that before.  These are reasons for the mistake, not excuses.  Doing this is about figuring out how the mistake happened and it can help you feel better, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t  make the mistake.  He came up with a plan to talk to the goalie at the next practice so they both know what to do in future games.  

It takes courage to admit you’re wrong but it also builds integrity and honor.  It’s impossible to go through life without making mistakes, some of them downright embarrassing.  But to earn and keep your self-respect and the respect of others, you have to deal with them.  This means sitting with that feeling of feeling like an idiot for a while, but then brushing yourself off and trying to fix it.

I provide a lot of counseling for teenagers and young men and women and this is often one of the topics we address. How to develop self respect and earn the respect of others. How to conduct yourself at work, school, and in relationships. They are relatively easy lessons to understand yet few of us put them into practice. Even many of my fellow clinicians placate their clients by telling them their life choices weren’t their fault. They tell their clients their problems are caused by society or those “other” people. They say people should just accept you the way you are and if they don’t then there’s something wrong with them. Sometimes this is true, but most times if you want to find the person responsible for your misfortune, just look in the closest mirror. But that’s not so bad because it’s a lot easier to better yourself than to fix someone else.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, teenagers, and adults.  He can help with anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, relationship problems, and more.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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For example,  if you’re socially anxious, I want to know how you want to see yourself in the future.  If you see yourself as fearful in social situations, worried about how people will judge you, then how will you view yourself when things change for the better?  Maybe you’ll see yourself as brave even when you make mistakes at work.  Maybe you want to be someone who is comfortable in stressful situations.  Or, maybe you want to be someone who can take calculated risks.

We don’t just want to change behaviors, we want to change your identity.  We want you to change how you see yourself.  You probably have a lot of negative things you think about yourself and this affects how you interact with the world around you.  When you make a determination about how you want to be different, you start changing your identity for the better.  

Change Your Identity with Small Changes

James Clear, in his book, “Atomic Change”, comments that there are three areas of change, 1) Outcomes, 2) process, and 3) Identity.  Most people start with trying to change the outcomes.  For example, they may want to quit smoking cigarettes.  However, starting with the outcome in mind, can make it hard to change the behavior of smoking.  Changing the process (how you will quit smoking) can be a step closer in the right direction.  But changing your identity is probably the best way to change the process, and then the outcomes change on their own.

Let’s take another example.  Let’s say you want to get better at keeping your house in order.  Cleaning the house over the weekend is an outcome.  Putting things away, vacuuming, doing the laundry etc is a process.  However, what if you decide to start thinking of yourself as a fastidious person who likes orderliness?  Then you will find you can keep this new identity about yourself going all day long. 

Start With Small Changes

You may start noticing those things you tend to leave “undone” around the house and start taking small, frequent steps to keep things put away.  You walk through a room and notice some dishes on a table and grab them as you walk into the kitchen.  Once you’re in the kitchen you notice the box of cereal you left on the counter and decide to put it in the cupboard.  Feeling good about what you just did, you walk out of the kitchen and take something from the kitchen that can be put away elsewhere.

Changing how you think of yourself—changing your identity— can lead to small sustainable changes in your behavior.  These are new habits you develop that start to add up to bigger habits and behaviors.  Soon, you can be that new identity you were afraid couldn’t happen.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, teenagers, and adults.  He can help with anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, relationship problems, and more.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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