BTS: Thinking Inside the Box

"What is your box?" Assignment

When I first read about this assignment, I wrote down a few ideas that I thought were my box. I wrote things related to time management and fear before I was hit upside the head with the only thing that I knew my box could be: my VOJ.

I’ve heard my VOJ screaming envious thoughts at me for years, so that was nothing new. However, I never experienced it as consistently as I had this year. It started more heavily last semester when I joined a 400-level entrepreneurship course as a first-semester entrepreneurship student. Right away, I knew these students were more advanced than I was because of previous entrepreneurship classes they’d taken. I thought maybe it would stop once I had landed a pretty cool summer internship, but oh no! I then began to question why I had gotten the internship in the first place, had they made a mistake? I was their second choice after all. Then when I finally got to my summer internship I realized that I was the youngest and also the only female at the company. It seemed to be an on-going cycle that never seemed to end. I became fully aware of how much my VOJ and fear that I was not good enough was affecting not only my work but also my life. I HATED THAT.

It wasn’t until this summer that I could put a name to my voice of judgment, but after that, I finally gathered up the courage to ask my professor how to cope with it.

Here’s what I learned:

-VOJ is natural, normal, pretty much everyone wrestles with it

-“Difference between a brave person and a coward is that both of them are afraid, but the brave people are able to shut it up and move forward.”

-“I’ve learned to communicate with my self-doubt and keep pushing forward.”

-EVERYONE has this

-A book called the imposter syndrome, a book called banish your inner-critic → “your inner critic is a big jerk”

-Awareness is the first step to change

-People are all wrapped up in their problems, they’re not thinking about you

It’s natural, normal, and EVERYONE has it. So here’s to moving forward, to hearing my VOJ, but refusing to listen to it!