LinkedIn peeps tell us to think positive, to have a growth mindset and a ‘can-do-it-all-all-of-the-time-forever’ attitude. (OK, I made the last one up).
What if, no matter what you do, your mind doesn’t work like this?

LinkedIn will be quite a demoralising place to be. A quick scroll, and it will have you convinced that everyone is succeeding, everyone has mastered it. It’s only you that doesn’t get it.

Even the posts that begin with an admission that all is not rosy, turn out to be yet another Hero’s Journey. You know the template:

‘This time last year, I was living in a ditch and only had one pair of underpants to my name. Today, I make 7-figures on LinkedIn and you can to … you can do anything you wish, with a positive mindset … blah blah blah’ (it used to be 6-figures. I guess that’s inflation for you.)

And to pile on the misery, the next post you see will tell you that if you don’t celebrate other people’s success, you are not a good person.

Oh s**t.

The desire to learn and keep learning, the impulse to create, and the satisfaction of a challenge well-met, are life-affirming activities. Wanting to grow towards the light is our natural state.

The pleasure dies when this flips over into a ‘must’: You must develop yourself. You must work on yourself, and you must be the best version of yourself (WTF does that mean?) etc. etc.

Buying into this illusion will leave you feeling more isolated. And the mountains you once wanted to climb, now look steeper, higher and more treacherous than ever.

We don’t want to dive any further down that rabbit hole, so let’s move on to how to move forward.

I use the perspective of Rapid Resolution Therapy (RRT) (The Institute for Rapid Resolution Therapy, Inc. ) to

There are many ways to address this issue with RRT, and the one chosen would depend on who was sitting in front of me.

But this is LinkedIn, and I have only a few words left, so I will use one of my favourites, and that it is to apply the hostage negotiator story.

A guy has taken a mother and her two children hostage. He is holding them at gunpoint and threatening to do unspeakable things to them, one-by-one.

You are the negotiator. Your job is to get those three people to safety.

No matter how grotesque this guy’s behaviour, or how ugly his speech, you have one thing on your mind, and that is the hostage’s safety. You cannot react to what the guy says. If you do, you risk lives being lost.

So you don’t react. You are focused on the hostages, you want them free, so you don’t react to him, no matter what.

This is an extreme example, and in RRT it’s usually applied to dealing with angry people.

But just let it take you for a moment.

Imagine yourself scrolling through your feed, but this time you’re like the hostage negotiator.

You are only interested on content that is useful -posts that would be good to read and comments that would be good to make. That’s it.

You see the other stuff, but you don’t react. You don’t need to.