The adult in you

Oscar works as a systemic coach. A couple of times during our conversation, he mentioned that “you have to become your own adult”. When you’re a kid, you’re dependent on your parents. You’re depending on them for safety, love, and belonging; all of your basic human needs.

In a healthy upbringing, you learn more and more to become self-sufficient in fulfilling these. You become an adult. Meaning that you don’t put the main responsibility and power to fulfill your needs with someone else. But you take ownership of your part in your stability, self-love, and recognition. But that’s tall order.

It’s of course always the easier way to blame someone else for your problems. Lost your job? Is the housing market too frenetic? Is your boss doesn’t value you enough? Is the System against you? Do you always get in fights with certain people? Of course, we are all interdependent with each other. It’s never just you. But you can take ownership of your part.

As an entrepreneur, we might not have a boss, but there are still plenty of traps to fall into. Is the economy in a downturn? Is your client a jerk? Is your best employee leaving? Or, is your job less glamorous than you want? Are everyone else’s posts getting all the likes?

All ways to put either the blame for hardship outside of yourself. Or ways to put the ownership of recognition with others. But those are all for you. You are your own adult (or inner parent). You get to improve your business strategy. You get to choose your clients (or communicate boundaries with them). You get to set company culture, job satisfaction, or hiring mechanisms. And perhaps you became an entrepreneur because it’s seen as hip, but the reasons should stem from what your value and what you can do for others.

What are ways you could grow into adulthood more? Where can you take more ownership over what’s yours to do?

Of course, Oscar is the expert. In our conversation we talk about these mechanisms. But we also talk about stopping a company — even when everything was going great — because he and his partner had outgrown it. And about how he ended up in exactly the place where the pain and loneliness he himself knows so well is so omnipresent.

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Originally published at https://www.studiogeorge.nl on May 28, 2021.