My state-required bi-weekly supervision sessions are costly, but they're worth it. Especially last week's hour.

A little backstory: Eight months into my new career and building my own business, I've been fighting a feeling of failure. I've been fretting over my lack of client hours (seriously, why did I choose a career in which it is my job to make my job obsolete?!) and the fact that a lack of client hours results in a lack of experiential learning opportunities. A lack of learning makes me feel largely inadequate. So, I been frettin'.

Frankly, I've moved beyond fretting to full-on desperation. So, with a lack of clients to talk about in last week's supervisory session, the conversation turned toward me and my fight against feeling like a failure. The conversation didn't start out that way. It started with me talking about all the things I was DOING to fix my perceived "problem."

Him: "So, you're scrambling." 

Me: "Yea, I'm scrambling. [thinking] I don't want to be bad at this counseling thing. I can't afford for this not to work."

Him: "Why do you scramble?" 

Me: "I don't want to talk about this."

Why didn't I want to talk about it? Because I can't handle this feeling of failing. I don't enjoy feeling like I'm not in control. I don't like being needy and vulnerable and uncomfortable. What does it say about me if I can't get this done right and well and NOW?

My supervisor, himself a great counselor, knew my answer. He didn't expect me to answer. He knows I know. Then he told me the story again of the research done on what sets the most successful entrepreneurs apart from the scrambling masses ...

Turns out successful people never think of themselves as failures. Things they do may fail (i.e. that failed), but they, themselves, are never failures (i.e. I failed).

So, as of right now, I have this knowledge that I'm not a failure ... but making it heart knowledge is where I'm a little bit stuck. If I don't rock this ... and the money and the acknowledgement doesn't flow ... somehow I have to figure out how to believe that it's okay and that it's not a reflection on who I am.

And there I go ... a scramblin' again .... :) It's quite the ineffective, but instinctual little pattern of doing life I've got going on, ain't it?

Chances are, how you're doing life isn't quite working for you anymore either. How aware are you of your unhelpful habits of doing, thinking, being?

Welcome to the reality of (and the best proof of the need for) counseling:

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it." — Romans 7:15-20