In this series of posts, I’m putting two ideas together—the idea that smart, creative, sensitive individuals are confronted by special challenges and the idea that journaling is a valuable self-help tool—and turning them into a set of journaling prompts designed to lead you on a personal journey of discovery.
I hope that you enjoy these prompts. Here are five more challenges, and four journal prompts to go with each challenge. Engaging with any one of them may well serve you. I hope you find these valuable! And I hope you’ll take a look at Why Smart People Hurt and at my latest journal, Affirmations for Self-Love.
Just as a tall person can lord it over shorter people without really noticing what he or she is doing, a smart people can act special and incline in the direction of arrogance, grandiosity and narcissism just by virtue of being smart or believing himself to be smart. This might sound internally like “I’m surrounded by such fools!” or “People are such gullible idiots!”
1. The challenge of alienating friends and family. For example, maybe you regularly and dismissively reject the ideas of a loved one because you’ve consciously or unconsciously labeled him or her as “just not that bright,” in the process angering and alienating that person.
+ Do you wave off the opinions of people you consider not as bright as you?
+ Are you aware whether that behavior alienates and angers the people you dismiss that way?
+ Has this dynamic contributed to relationship difficulties in the past?
+ Is this dynamic contributing to relationship difficulties in the present?
2. The challenge of alienating coworkers. For example, you might regularly dismiss out of hand the opinions of a particular coworker whom you’ve internally labeled as slow or shallow, even if those opinions might have merit.
+ Are you quick to dismiss the opinions of coworkers?
+ Does this dynamic negatively affect your relationships with your coworkers?
+ Have you gotten labeled at work as arrogant, as someone who won’t listen, or as not a team player?
+ Are you comfortable with this dynamic or might a change benefit you (and those around you)?
3. The challenge of feeling too special to actually do the work. For example, an arrogant writer may presume that his rough first draft is all the work he has to do and that “someone else” (maybe the publisher privileged to purchase this great work) should polish it for him; and that everyone should be able to see its brilliance, even if it is only a rough first draft.
+ Do you never quite finish things because doing the work required to finish things is “beneath your dignity”?
+ Do you claim to be a “big ideas” person for whom the details are too petty and too boring to bother with?
+ Have you been regularly told that you should “grow up” and finish things?
+ If this is you, are you interested in changing this dynamic and beginning to do all the work necessary in order to satisfactorily complete things?
4. The challenge of an unearned sense of entitlement leading to mischief. For example, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the main character talks himself into the believe that, because he is so intellectually special and because he has such good work in him that will “serve all mankind,” he is entitled to steal from the local pawnbroker so as to pay his rent—leading to a double murder.
+ Do you possess the sense of entitlement we’ve been discussing?
+ If so, has that lead to mischief?
+ Has it lead to some other unintended negative consequence?
+ How might you go about honoring and safeguarding your intelligence without, at the same time, letting your sense of entitlement get you into trouble?
5. The challenge of an unearned sense of entitlement leading to serious ruptures. For example, maybe that estrangement from your siblings or those past broken friendships can be traced back to this unfortunate dynamic?
+ Can some of your ruptured relationships be traced back to you “lording it” over people?
+ Are there relationships of this sort that you’d like to repair?
+ How might you go about doing that?
+ What are your headline thoughts on the subject of “an unearned sense of entitlement”?
More to come! Enjoy!
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This post is republished on Medium.
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