Some time ago, when I began looking for a job as a psychologist, people told me that I would need to know the right people. That without knowing the right people, nothing could happen.
And yet, I did find a job as a psychologist. Without knowing the right people.
Fifteen years later, I left that job to look for another one that better matched the identity I had developed in the meantime. I wondered why I could not find such a position despite the CV I had. I shared this with a colleague, and she bluntly asked me, “Are you falling from the sky? Don’t you know that it won’t work if you don’t know the right people?”
The same situation was repeating itself, this time coming from someone who worked professionally as a psychotherapist and whom I considered close. I felt her words like a cold shower. I didn’t know what to say. Only when I got home did I understand why: she had touched my weak spot — the same one that made me experience my difference as inadequacy and my idealism as naïveté. Over time, I had begun to express this difference more openly, but during that period I felt vulnerable. I was without work, my money was running out, and no new source of income was taking shape.
What helped me then was the same thing that had helped me before — to keep believing in myself and not to give in to the discouraging advice of various “well-wishers.” Messages like: if you don’t know the right people, you won’t find a job. Back then I told myself that even if this were true — even if they were right — there must still be some percentage of exceptions to that rule. A percentage in which the rule of knowing the right people does not apply, and in which I could try my luck. I decided that this percentage was one percent, because I felt very alone against those messages. That is why I called it “the one-percent rule.”
Today I would rename this rule the ten-percent rule, or even more than that. But back then, the only thing that sustained me was my faith that there had to be exceptions for people like me. There had to be.
Years later, I came across the book by Robin Skynner and John Cleese, Life and How to Survive It. In it, I found what I had known back then only with my heart. The book presents the scale of mental health as something that differs among different groups of people. In the middle of that scale stands the average person — the same one who had been giving me discouraging messages. The problem is that the average person has an average level of mental health, while higher levels of mental health are connected to values that I also shared. And reaching those levels happened in exactly the way I had intuitively formulated for myself through the one-percent rule: by walking uncharted paths, staying faithful to your values, taking risks, and paying the price for it.
After that conversation with my colleague, I did eventually find work. More precisely, I created my own work — I started my private practice as a psychotherapist. I know that I would not be doing what I love most today if it were not for the one-percent rule and my decision to follow it. I also know that when it is difficult for us to adapt, it is because we are being asked to dare to walk new paths, following our own star.
So:
The one-percent rule says that even when the facts show that in the vast majority of cases things happen according to certain average rules, if you don’t like those rules, you can always choose to enter the group of exceptions. These exceptions are for people who cannot adapt to environments and relationships that are not in harmony with their deepest values and needs. If they make the sacrifice — which means taking the risk of the unknown and then working very hard — they pass through the narrow opening of the exceptions and discover that they are not alone. That there are many like them.
Times are changing — and so is the percentage of exceptions.
It is rapidly increasing.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
