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Why You Absolutely Must Share Your Long-Term Plans (Even If It Hurts)
Earlier this week, I stumbled across an interesting article by Lark Morrigan entitled Why I Am No Longer Confiding In People About My Long-Term Plans Again. The basic idea behind the piece was that Morrigan was going to stop telling people about her dreams.
Morrigan had an accurate point about the fact that, much of the time, people see others who talk about their goals and vision as “annoying, flighty, and worst of all, always starting but never finishing things.” And she aptly assessed why — the bulk of people honestly don’t follow through, so our instinct and habit, based on experience, is to be irritated at their lack of realism or groundedness.
But as I continued to read Morrigan’s piece, something else became clear. Because others had reacted negatively to her expressions, made her feel bad and shown themselves capable of violating her trust, she concluded that the best thing to do was “stop confiding in people [she doesn’t] trust anymore. And also stop announcing things too early.” She urged people to “work in secret” and warned them that they’d have to “endure giving out uninteresting answers for whenever people ask what you’re up to these days” and “pretend that [they’re] just happy with an ordinary life”. The fact this was her defensive coping strategy/mechanism for the pain is evident when…
