To change an old habit, keep an old habit
So often when we feel that something isn’t working in our life we think that changing one or some of our habits would solve our problem and when else is it more apparent at the beginning of every year with New Year resolutions?
For many people change means getting rid of an old habit and replacing it with a new one, a sense of ‘New Me’, which can be exciting and daunting at the same time.
There are plenty of programmes out there to help people achieve their goals except that many of these programmes talk about stopping specific behaviours and adopting new ones. Not easy and not always useful. If we bear in mind that apart from addictions and behaviour that inflicts pain and suffering on others (this is a completely different set of rules), most of our behaviour is there to assist us in one way or another and maintaining old habits promotes a sense of safety and maintains a sense of who we are. So why would we ever want to give these up? And there is always the risk of getting stuck in new habits just as much as old ones.
What if we could expand our range of response to include our old habits as well as new ones? Old ways of responding combined with new ones? I believe we will then be better equipped to handle what life brings our way.
How?
Here is a thought and an exercise:
- Divide a page into two columns
- Think of a habit you are not happy with, say ‘being passive’
- Use the bottom part of the left column to write the downside of this habit; how does it hinder you? Of course, we are never truly passive
- Now write the upside at the upper part of the left column; how does it support you? For example, when we are passive, we take less responsibility for our actions.
- You now have a clearer picture of this habit, how it hinders and how it supports your daily life. It’s there for a reason so stick with it.
- Use the right hand side column. Think of a new habit which you’d consider as the opposite of the habit, say more active
- Write down the upside of this habit in the upper part; how will it support you?
- Now write down the downside of it in the bottom part; how will it undermine you in your life? For example, it means more risks
- Try to experiment with mixing the top part of both columns, this will enable more flexible response. Can you move in the space between passivity and aggression?
- And that’s a new habit already.
This may feel strange at the beginning, after all, how can we be both passive and active? The trick is to stay away from labelling habits and behaviours, labels can act as self-fulfilling prophesies. When we think of a specific response, such as saying what we need to say, asking for what we need or want rather than what it means about us, we can engage more flexibly with our environment.
I have chosen a very simple example, passive and active; life is much more complex than that and often opposite behaviours and habits are not so simple to detect, yet, I believe it is worth the exercise.
Gilead
Recipe series: let someone change your mind
Part 1.
Purpose: resilience and fun
Duration: life time
Who: anyone with firmly held opinions
By: someone in the margin of our life
Topic: of your choice
In many ways, we are all inside experts in our own lives; we have established our views, perceptions and opinions based on our experience and often we are holding on to them firmly if not fiercely. Holding on to opinions can be a good thing; it helps us go about life without having to assess every situation anew. And this is where the limitation is, we stop assessing and we definitely ignore a lot of new information that doesn’t fit our worldview (as supported by many psychology studies).
No revolutions needed, they are rare anyway. Most change is subtle and sometimes obscure and often happens in our safe zones. What really matters is the debate, not the perception, so pick any. And enjoy a bit of a shock to the system, it may not feel comfortable at first but just imagine the consequence: living in a bigger box.
Part 2.
Talk someone out of their opinion.
Purpose: sheer fun
Duration: a few good hours
Who: anyone with firmly held opinions
By: you
Topic: of your choice
No revolutions needed, they are rare anyway. But influencing someone and changing their opinion is good fun. What really matters is the debate, not the perception, so pick any. And enjoy seeing that person grow in front of you. Alternatively you can offer them to share your new big box.
I hope you have as much fun as I do.
Good enough as a premise
In my last post I wrote that when we accept that we are good enough regardless of our actions, be it success or failure, we can feel stronger to take risks and seek new experiences in life. Otherwise, we only seek experiences that do not shake our stability.
While accepting that we are good enough can be a goal, that is, we can aspire for that, it is more useful if we use it as the premise from which our goals can evolve.
What I mean when I say ‘good enough’ is not the stage before perfect but the opposite of not good or even bad. When we believe that we are somehow at the core not good, we limit our choices in life and therefore our growth.
If, on the other hand, we can see our “good enoughness” as the foundation of our activities, all our experiences help us to grow, because whatever might be the outcome of the experience, it will still contribute to who we are.
I know we can’t switch on and off our beliefs; sometimes life brings tough choices our way which force us to reconsider our concepts and sometimes it doesn’t. And we can be proactive and seek experiences that offer us a glimpse into our true capabilities, not only those we imagine we have.
How? The traditional way would suggest that we work on changing our concepts about the world. This is based on the idea that our life experiences create our concept about the world and if we change our concepts we will be able to experience the world differently. But if we observe life, what changes our concepts most profoundly is not more new concepts, but what we do with them.
In other words, it is the difference between learning by doing and learning before doing. To me they are not mutually exclusive but can be both used as strategies to enhance how we engage with life. Sometimes we will need the safety of learning first and doing after but mostly, we can only change our experience by changing our experience.
And why change our experience? So we can make choices, it is only when we can make choices that we truly know we are free.
On wisdom and being good enough
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest”. Confucius
“No, I am telling you what I have discovered. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers”. Siddharta by Herman Hesse
Nothing that I write about in my blog or talk about in my practice can replace your experience, it can only add knowledge to what you already believe about the world. Nothing that other people have written could change my own experience, although it has enriched it. And yet, I have spent a big part of my life trying to learn from others and replace my experience with their knowledge.
There is something safe in seeking knowledge rather than experience, we can decide without taking any risk whether we accept or reject other people’s actions and choices, while we remain unaffected (to a degree, I believe everything that we come into contact with affects us one way or another).
The thing is that we cannot not experience, life can only be experienced.
What we can do is choose the experience. I am careful with the word choice as choice is not always available to us. Sometimes we feel as if there is no choice and other times choice really is not available to us, just talk to someone who is addicted to alcohol or drugs and ask them to tell you about their choice. But, if we accept that we are free to choose and that our choices create our experiences, then we can make exceptions to the rules that keep us from growing.
So what is it about the experience that’s so risky we prefer knowledge to it? Why do we read books and see films about other people’s successes and failures? I accept that we can be inspired and learn from others, but this is it really, it won’t change who we are at the base. What can change us is experience.
To me, what feels risky is the outcome and the possibility of failure because so many of us have learned that when we fail we are not worthy of… (love/living/society) make your choice.
What can we do? First, I believe we need to separate being from doing. Second, accept that we are good enough regardless of our failures or success, that it, accept that our actions can bring about many outcomes, more desirable or less so and yet, we as beings, at the core, remain good enough.
And with that seek new experiences, even at the price of failing because this is how wisdom and growth are achieved. Sometimes, we need to walk on our own hot coals to call the experience ours. Interestingly, the words experience and peril are closely related.
What’s the relevance?
The relevance is new year resolutions. Whatever yours are and whether you achieve your goals or not, I hope you can accept your ‘good enoughness’ (or ‘bestness’ if you dare) and the wisdom that can follow from it.
Letting it out
For some reason, anger got itself a bad name, it lives in the same neighbourhood we avoid along with fear and sadness and it seems to be the real bad guy in the gang. The thing is that when we avoid contact with something we tend to create whole myths and legends around it and we stop seeing it clearly for what it is.
When we are unable to express our anger we deny ourselves of a richer social experience. We tend to think of anger as an internal event, something that happens inside us, but somehow it always involves the environment; like many other emotions, it is in relation to something outside us.
When anger is frowned upon, as in many societies, it is being driven underground, but as it is so dynamic, it finds its way out in different ways; like graffiti appearing overnight in an attempt to communicate social and political messages.
Most societies try in different ways to stifle angry behaviour and even the slightest expression of it is met with disapproval. When stifle angry expression, we way get ‘social order’ but we also diminish spontaneity and the ability to express ourselves fully and honestly, leaving us with dull experiences of a much richer and complex environment.
And in this process, we also create a class system that excludes who can be angry, leaving the experience to very few of us. Just think about how ‘unladylike’ it is for women to get angry and how we label and avoid our youth. I know there are exceptions, but the risk some women and teenagers take for expressing their anger can often make them targets of violence and isolation, to give an example.
So what is it about anger that feels so risky? If it is relational, then it means that we are trying to get something that we need or want from other people or our environment. That something can ironically include distancing ourselves from the environment when we feel hurt, in any case we relate to something outside us.
When we get angry – I prefer to see it as an action rather than a thing because it is something that we do – it is normally in response to situations in which we feel afraid, loss of control or power, sadness, shame and despair in various social settings.
Being angry is a source of energy, a force that propels us to do something about a frustrating environment. There is much injustice in the world and we cannot keep a neutral stance towards injustice, some things could be fought for.
We can express our anger by complaining, whingeing, being sarcastic, gossiping and bitching about and although it might feel satisfying for a short while, it rarely allows for a rich and full experience that promotes growth.
We can also be violent, attack and destroy but that too, leaves a very short-lived satisfaction and definitely doesn’t promote growth, unless it is used to save lives.
And we can express our needs, when possible and without risking our lives, by saying how we feel, what we need and what is our experience firmly, without patronising. We can separate the person from the action and talk about what a person did rather than what the person is. ‘I am angry about what you did just now or yesterday or whenever and that doesn’t affect how I feel about you’.
This way of communication expresses both respect for ourselves and others and offers richer experiences and relationships. Expressing our needs can feel risky in itself, even without anger, but, it’s worth practising, slowly and safely first, we might be able to paint our graffiti in brilliant colours and in broad daylight.
In all instance we must make space for feeling angry and acknowledge when we do so.
Gilead
The plan (and the unplan).
I started blogging in summer 2009 because I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas about life and my journey. My experience, albeit unique, is also shared by and with many people around me and opening up allowed me to get other people’s perspective. Sharing also gives me a sense of belonging; keeping this in mind is so important as whatever I do, I am always in context and in relation to other people.
A few years back I decided to change my career, this came about as a response to the realisation, that what I had done before, did not satisfy me anymore and also as a response to external events; one such was losing what seemed like a safe job. At that point, I understood how much in life is unknown.
Often, we find the unknown frightening, when we stop doing what we always did, we can get a sense of falling apart. And although it is not we who are falling apart but simply some of our ideas, the feeling is very valid and real.
At that stage, life seemed unsafe and I thought that a good plan would bring safety back, and so it was launched, I was going to re-train as a psychologist.
Plans give us a good sense of control, purpose, direction and continuity as well as beginnings and endings. The thing about plans is that they can also be limiting, if I stick with a plan too rigidly I tend to block opportunities for growth.
Not having a plan on the other hand, can feel like drifting without a purpose. This reminds of the conversation between Alice (in Wonderland) and the Cheshire cat:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat. “I don’t much care where—“ said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the cat. “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation. “Oh, you are sure to do that,” said the cat “if only you walk long enough.”
(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
And so not knowing how to balance planning with unplanning my journey into the unknown continued. It’s an odd illusion to believe that when we plan we know things better. Our plans are based on rules which are based on assumptions and we expect the world to behave according to our rules – until it doesn’t. And we make new rules.
Rules are an economical way of making decisions and good for keeping some structure around us. However, the downside of rules is that they inhibit inevitable progress.
What can we do? Keep them and remember they will only work some of the times and for some events and then rehabilitate them. That is, if they don’t work for one thing, they might work for another.
I am now a psychologist (according to plan) and am in my final stages of qualifying as a Gestalt psychotherapist (not according to original plan) and doing two different jobs (not planned for) and am in the early stages of starting a new business after the previous one failed (never been planned).
I still make plans and they keep changing; I make new rules and I have to constantly rehabilitate them, and I try to create order but life insists on being messy and unpredictable. In short I am doing what to me being human is all about (until I reach the end of the plan).
I plan to keep on blogging and sharing in my next post, I will try to write more about rehabilitating rules (if I manage to keep this plan).
It’s good to fail
In August I wrote a post about resilience. Since then, I have worked with a few clients on how to actually become resilient. The main question was whether resilience is a trait that some people are born with and some aren’t and whether it can be cultivated.
What emerged from the work was that while some people are resilient naturally, that is, they strive and thrive in the face of difficulty, the rest of us can cultivate resilience.
We become resilient when we fail. There is something tricky to work out here. Often, if we believe that our capabilities are fixed, for whatever reason, so we would only seek interactions and activities that would prove us right, that is, we will only engage with tasks in which we cannot fail. This behaviour represents our limitations and also our sense of capability.
People who have conflicting feelings in certain situations, can understand this. By conflicting feelings I mean wanting something to happen so we feel valued and at the same not wanting it so we can confirm our negative beliefs about ourselves. Think about love, relationships, promotions and blind dates as examples.
But, failure is also where we meet our potential to learn and to me learning is growth. When we learn, we enter a state of mind in which failing or succeeding become less relevant, what is relevant is the information we absorb and that we feel smart by just learning.
So what’s the trick? Adding activities into our lives in which we have a 50/50 or larger chance to fail, regardless of what the activity is as long as it has a sense of risk taking and as small as it may seem. And fail and fail and fail. The more we fail, the more resilient we become and if we maintain the element of learning in the process we can see ourselves as being successful.
Open source relationships
Under Perens‘ definition, open source describes a broad general type of software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent copyright restrictions. The principles, as stated, say absolutely nothing about trademark or patent use and require absolutely no cooperation to ensure that any common audit or release regime applies to any derived works. It is an explicit “feature” of open source that it may put no restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user. It forbids this, in principle, to guarantee continued access to derived works even by the major original contributors.
Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organisations.
(source: Wikipedia)
Our relationships with other people in many ways operate as open source code. We put ourselves out there in the world and let others add, change, impact, subtract and copy our behaviour. There is little we can we do about it. At times we believe we have a copyright on what we say or do, only to realise later that our actions or words have been edited or misinterpreted altogether.
When we hold on to what we believe to be the copyright of who we are, we actually limit the level of interaction we allow ourselves in any given relationship and by doing so we also limit our resilience and ability to bounce back after tough exchanges.
What if we freed ourselves from our need for copyright of who we believe we are and allow others to add freely? I believe we would then open ourselves to fulfilling our potential and to a greater flexibility. We would allow others to contribute and share with us honestly how they experience us. We can let them impact on us and accept that their experience can bring about change in us.
This can be frightening at times and of course there has to be some measure of protection in place, our core values and what we stand for are important, and like Wikipedia, while anyone can contribute, only trusted and genuine sources are accepted.
It is true that some people only see us through their own fears and by doing so would only offer us a partial view of how they experience us; this is an experience we all share. But if we create a trusted environment with the people who are close to us, we can create a beautiful and dynamic collage of us which would allow us to change and adapt to new realities. Not only will we be stronger and more robust but also enjoy richer experiences.
We don’t always get it right with others, as others don’t always get it right about us, but I believe that an open source state of mind allows for mistakes and corrections to be made in a more experimental mode rather than a threat-resisting mode.
Two short stories
Heaven and hell
A Japanese warrior approached a Zen master searching for an answer to a question that was troubling him.
“Tell me master” asked the warrior, “are there heaven and hell?”
“Ha!” snorted the master in what seemed to be scorn for the warrior.
“What makes you think you could understand such things?” “You are only an uneducated soldier who is wasting my time.”
The warrior immediately froze in shock, no one, but no one, ever spoke to a warrior like this. It meant instant death.
“You are still here” said the master. “Are you too stupid to understand what I said?” bellowed the master. “Stop wasting my time and get out of here.”
The warrior was overtaken by rage; his hand flew like lightning to his sword and swept it aloft for the kill. But just before the sword descended on the master’s head, he heard the master say “this is the gate to hell.”
The warrior froze in astonishment. His own rage brought hell to him and to those he attacked and the master risked his own life to make this point inescapably clear.
Sighing deeply, the warrior placed his sword back in its sheath and bowed humbly in awe.
“And this is the gate to heaven” smiled the master.
The town’s people
An old woman sitting by the roadside just outside her town was approached by a traveller who asked her “what kind of people live in this town?”
“What are the people like in your home town?” asked the old woman.
“Oh, they were terrible, all liars and lazy, you wouldn’t trust any of them, that’s why I left.”
“You will find the people in this town just the same” said the old woman.
Not long after, she was approached by a second traveller who asked “what kind of people live in this town?”
“What are the people like in your home town?” asked the old woman.
“Oh, they wonderful people, honest and hard working” said the traveller “I am sorry I had to leave.”
“You will find the people in this town just the same” said the old woman.
leave a comment