In pursuit of feeling: Part II

After reading a comments exchange between my friends, Faye and Ty, about my recent blog entry on the role of feelings in keeping us from our dreams, I think a good example is in order.

I have a client, Rachel, who agreed to let me publish some of the work we've been doing. Rachel is a writer in her 30s who works as a copy editor 9-5. She has been writing her whole life, and wants to be a novelist, but has started several books and not finished them.

The first thing we did was to figure out, no really, what are you going for in your life? What do you want to build with your remaining time on this planet? Here are excerpts of her knock-her-socks-off dream:

"... I have become a prolific writer. My imagination is robust and thriving, thanks to the fact that I listen closely to my inner voice. Storytelling comes easily to me, and, according to the reviews, I create novels with vivid, unforgettable characters, thought-provoking ideas, a fascinating, engaging storyline, and gorgeous writing. Writing is effortless for me. On the days when it goes more slowly, I keep at it, trusting completely that I’m still moving in the right direction, which I am. I take immense pleasure doing what I know I was put on this earth to do, that I’m letting my talent flourish. Doing this work gives me a great feeling of freedom and joy, and when I finish each book and send it off to my agent (who loves it)—and then see it a year later in bookstores—wheeee!—I feel tremendous satisfaction that I am in charge of my life and I’ve channeled my best self—the Rachel who is a go-getter, who has initiative, who lets her talent shine, who goes after what she wants in a BIG, BIG way!

Imagine my excitement when I receive the call that the film rights have been bought by XX and it’s being made into a movie starring XX! I feel on top of the world, and so proud of myself for beating down any obstacle that came my way!..."

Pretty exciting dream, yes? Over the course of this exercise, her energy shifted from blah to radiant. The writer was alive again! Now, it was time to go for it.

Rachel made a promise to herself that she would write on her novel 1 hour per day. But she would routinely not keep this promise several days per week, instead distracting herself with the internet or other diversions. Now, you would ask, is the internet really more fun than living that dream that she articulated? Of course not. But yet the internet was winning. And so I asked Rachel to do a purge of the thoughts in her head when she sat down to write, and here is what she found:

"I don’t feel like writing. I haven’t written in days and now going back to it feels incredibly daunting. I don’t know where I left off. I don’t know where I am with it. How will I ever finish this book? I’ve never finished a book before, what makes me think I can do it this time? I don’t know how to write a novel. I suck as a writer. I’m fooling myself thinking I can finish a book and have it be something people will want to read. What do I have to say that people would want to read? I’m a total fraud, for years telling people that I am working on a novel, all those years working on something but never finishing it. I am sick of not being able to trust myself. I am scared of finishing this book and having it be terrible. Because then what? All I’ve wanted to do since I was four years old was write novels, and now if it turns out I can’t do it, what a crushing disappointment. If I can do it, then why haven’t I succeeded in doing it yet? The fact that I haven’t made this dream happen is the biggest disappointment of my life so far. I feel like a huge failure."

I guarantee there is not a reader on this blog who has not felt this way about something at some point in time. What resonates with us is the fear. Fear that if she tries and fails, she will be worthless. Fear that other people will reject her. Fear that she might come to find that her whole life was built on a lie. Yikes, who wouldn't be scared of that?

The thing is that as long as Rachel is in this conversation with fear, she is stuck in a rut. Checking the internet sure is more fun than facing down fears like this. And so she runs to the internet whenever the going gets tough.

We have been working on Rachel's fear, and now Rachel is starting to look at her fear the way a child pokes a strange-looking insect. She is experiencing it and working with it and accepting that this insect is going to be hanging around her house. And that's ok, because her dream is on the other side of that fear... there really is no other choice if she's going for the dream.

Now, to address Ty's comments, once you accept the fear and no longer make decisions based on avoiding fear, you can finally enter into the realm of logistics. Maybe one of the reasons Rachel hasn't finished a book is because she is going after subjects that don't really speak to her heart. Or maybe she actually enjoys writing short stories more than writing novels. Maybe the topic of her novel appeals to too small of an audience to generate the popularity and movie rights that she wants. Who knows? Rachel will need to make many decisions about her writing as she travels along this journey, and will probably refine and edit the dream as she goes. That is fine, and part of the process.

But the point is that when she was making decisions solely based on avoiding fear, she wasn't even in the realm of making rational, thought-out decisions about questions like these. She was living in the world of "I want to be a novelist, but I just can't seem to finish my darned book. Yuck!" And she was stuck. Deciding that it's ok to feel fear means that she is now in the game of designing and creating what she will do with her talents.

Thanks, Rachel, for letting us all learn from you! Waiting for your novel with baited breath :)...
Image courtesy of http://api.ning.com

Back in my graduate school days, I had a young, ambitious advisor. He was a good advisor--he cared about my growth as a person, listened deeply to what I said, and taught me a variety of lessons about how to do science.

But one thing that drove me batty was how he would sometimes blow off commitments he had made to the people in his lab. If he told us he would read a draft of our paper by next week, we would be lucky if he had read it by next month, and that was WITH persistent pestering. One of my fellow graduate students, Duane, even posted a sign that said something to the effect of "Go away: I'm reading papers!" on his door in the hopes of scaring would-be distractions away.

I asked my advisor how he organized his time, and his response was that "a consequence of success" is that you have way more balls than you can possibly juggle, and so you need to let some hit the ground. I left that conversation feeling resentful that I was a dropped ball in his world.

Fast-forward a year. I am in a career that I am crazy passionate about, and with that excitement has come a bevy of ideas, opportunities, and fun project ideas. I want to do it all, but would need several lifetimes to do so.

I used to make decisions about what to do and not do by asking myself what was fun and what wasn't... but that system breaks down when most things are fun and exciting. Instead, I now make decisions based on what is most important to me, knowing that, after reeling in some beautiful fish on my fishing rod, I have to release some back into the lake. It's a lot harder to release a fish when it is a beautiful, fat, shimmering trout than when it is an anemic little minnow. But that's what happens when you live on a lake of abundance. Would you have it any other way? The skill to learn, then, is how to be razor-sharp about your priorities and goals, and have the discipline to catch and release.

The other day, I was talking with a fellow ex-labmate, who echoed these same observations about life post-lab. And we both realized that we now understood the world my advisor lived in. He wasn't slacking off, or thinking our papers and projects were inconsequential. His world was one of abundance, and we were two of in sea of shimmering trouts. Given that we were often thrown back into the lake, he must have been reeling in some amazing catches :).

Now, my advisor should have been honest with us about what was really going on: that he wasn't going to read our papers for another few months, for example. And, you could argue, graduate student trouts should be automatically kept, and never thrown back. But at the same time, I feel like I now better understand the world that my advisor lived in, and can appreciate the abundance he must have been experiencing.

Image courtesy of http://naturalpatriot.org/

In pursuit of feeling

When you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, any time we are not living the life we claim to want on paper, it is because we're avoiding feeling. A businessman wants to start his own business, but is afraid of feeling the sadness and hurt of defeat if the business fails. A journalist wants to write a book, but is afraid of feeling the sadness and hurt if people reject her work. A boyfriend wants to have an open and intimate relationship with his girlfriend, but is afraid of the sadness and hurt that would come if the girlfriend rejects him for who he is.

The thing is, as much as we try to hide from it, being a human means feeling. Feeling the ups, feeling the downs. It's part of the deal--we get the tremendous highs of feeling wonderful, but also must feel the lows, sadness, and hurt. But most of us don't want to feel the lows, and so we try to ward them off. How do we do this? Usually by either finding a replacement emotion (anger is a popular one) or just not putting ourselves in situations where we'd have to feel them. Don't start the business, don't write the book, don't give yourself completely to your partner.

Except then we feel numb, disconnected, and ultimately unhappy, because our hearts yearn for the business, the book, the openness.

The solution? Let yourself feel the lows. Let the feeling wash over you for a moment in time. It won't last forever, and it may be painful. Like childbirth, as I am told. It may be a painful couple of hours or days (let's hope not!), but just accept the pain for what it is, knowing that it is part of the journey. I'd like to share with you one of my all-time favorite quotes, written by Alan Ball for the play/movie American Beauty, that can be applied to both feeling high and low:

"It's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... "

Thanks to Laurie Gerber of the Handel Group for the conversation that inspired this post.

Image courtesy of www.rocbike.com

Leveraging our short-term memory

Based on the recommendation of one of my clients, I recently finished reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity." It's a really great book for people who want to kick their organizational skills up a notch or two; I highly recommend it.

One very striking point that David makes is how inefficiently we use our short-term memory. Our short-term memory is ideally suited for focusing on a task at hand: brainstorming the right phrasing for an upcoming speech, creating and building a clay sculpture, reasoning through a logic puzzle. When focused on any aspect of our lives, our short-term memory is a formidable force to reckoned with.

But most of us use our short-term memory as a big To Do list: pay my estimated taxes by Monday, figure out who to invite to the barbeque this weekend, make sure to spell-check that memo before sending it out. Don't forget! As a result, we don't have any computational power left over for the creative tasks that really need it. And the kicker is, our short-term memory does a pretty poor job of keeping track of our To Dos. If it were smart, our memory would remind us to send in our rent checks when we are sitting by a computer, and not when we are laying in bed about to go to sleep. Or when we are in the stands at our daughters' softball game. But our short-term memory is not built to do such tasks, and as a result we have random To Dos spilling out all over the place. What a mess.

The solution, says David, is to free up our short-term memory by developing an external organizational system that captures every uncompleted task, or "open loop," so that our mind doesn't have to. And then practicing practicing practicing until we can rely on that system to capture everything that our minds normally would. In this capacity, the human mind is used as a processor that evaluates information, and stores it externally. Which is what our minds are good at, afterall.

I have been playing around with David's organizational systems for a few months, and I must say that he has a point. There is a certain sense of freedom and creativity that comes about when you have your mind at your disposal, ready to crank on whatever topic you choose.

Image courtesy of http://spacesuityoga.wordpress.com

Another great speech from Obama

From Obama's speech in Cairo yesterday:

"But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.' That is what I will try to do — to speak the truth as best I can."

This guy makes my job so easy.

The full speech:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09/

Image courtesy of www.pbs.org

Resisting the Marshmallow

In a lot of the work that I do as a coach, I help people develop systems to resist doing things that bring short-term rewards, but that have long-term negative consequences. A dieter who wants to eat a brownie instead of an apple. A spouse who wants to jump to judgment and blame instead of compassion and patience. A nervous public speaker who convinces a coworker to give her presentation instead of giving it herself.

Last month, the New Yorker featured an article with an interesting twist on the skill of resisting. In the 1960s, Dr. Walter Mischel performed a set of experiments with four-year-old children, in which he told them they could either have one marshmallow immediately, or wait for a few minutes while he stepped outside and then be given two marshmallows when he returned. The catch: while waiting, the marshmallow sits temptingly on a plate in front of the child. Some children gave in to temptation and ate the marshmallow, and others waited. Mischel followed these children throughout their lives, and found that the children who did not wait for the marshmallow tended to score lower on their S.A.T.s, have behavioral problems, and had difficulty maintaining friendships.

The ability of the children to resist the marshmallow, Dr. Mischel reasoned, boiled down to their ability to "strategically allocate attention." In other words, the children who successfully waited for the marshmallow were able to divert their attention away from thoughts of the marshmallow. Some covered their eyes, others played games by themselves (such as hide-and-go-seek), and some sang songs. The children who sat, fixated on the marshmallow, tended to eat the marshmallow.

There seems to be nothing innate about a child's ability to direct their attention; Dr. Mischel proposes that parents unconsciously teach their children how to distract themselves. Looking back on my own childhood, two events stick out in my mind as having taught me how to distract myself: 1) the agony of waiting for Christmas morning, starting around December 20, and 2) tolerating getting loose teeth pulled and splinters plucked from my hands and feet. Without focusing on my toys, the spot my dad missed while shaving that morning, or the latest episode of Sesame Street, these events would have been much more onerous.

So the key to resisting the temptations of our grown-up lives, according to Dr. Mischel, is to become better at metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Instead of thinking about the brownie, how much you hate your spouse's parents, or how scared you are of making that presentation, think about last night's episode of The Office, how cute your dog is, or what you are going to cook for dinner.