Glass Ceiling

In a recent email from ‘The Tonic’, they introduced us to the work of Peter Sage as they posed the question he opened his TED Talk with, ‘Why is it that intelligent people procrastinate?’

Having unpacked James Clear’s premise of Motion vs Action in All Stitched Up! issue #327 – where motion could easily be interchanged with procrastination – we were eager to read more.

Peter’s answer to his own question is that we’ve all formed a subconscious glass ceiling above ourselves and that no matter the number of new skills we try to learn, many of us simply find different ways to achieve the same level of success.

But why?

For most of us, it’s not because we lack resource or opportunity, but more because our nervous systems have been hard wired for comfort. Peter believes we need to find a way of managing the tension between our comfort zone and the innate calling of reaching our fullest potential. Or, as we shared in All Stitched Up! issue #331 as James Clear likes to term it, ‘The Goldilocks Rule’ whereby we should be operating in a zone that’s not too easy and not too hard, but just right.

Also, as we are innately creatures of habit, we tend to do what we’ve always done.

Therefore, Peter suggests that each day or at least week, we need to ensure we deliberately expose ourselves to the kind of information that supports who we want to become and where we want to go.

Peter believes that once these things happen, ‘we give ourselves the best shot of becoming the best and greatest versions of our self that we can be.’

And that glass ceiling we’ve inadvertently set for ourselves? As that will no longer be our upper boundary, the sky’s the limit!

In regard to our time with needle and thread, it means that our current ‘level’ of stitching may not be all we’re capable of, and if we’re brave enough to step outside our comfort zone all the while exposing ourselves to new stitches, techniques and projects, we’ll achieve far more than we ever thought possible.