Farther to Go!

Brain-Based Transformational Solutions

Persevering Is a Habit

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So Is Not Persevering

Persevering means steadily moving toward your desired outcome regardless of setbacks or obstacles, adjusting course as you go.

Perseverance is the P in IAP. If you don’t create a plan for getting back on track when you (inevitably) can’t or don’t follow through with your intention, one misstep can easily do you in. Your brain essentially reads it as an “end process” command, so that’s exactly what it directs you to do.

Until your brain learns to read missteps differently, you have to refocus and redirect it to get back on track. That requires System 2 attention.

Here are some steps you can take.

  1. Pause. Acknowledge what happened. Check to see if you got some new information from the experience. Maybe you did; maybe you didn’t. If you did, how can you incorporate the new information into your intention or action?
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  2. Consider your desired outcome. Use the Desired Outcome worksheet if you find that helpful. Is this something you really want? If not, go ahead and “end process.” If it is something you want:
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  3. Make a new commitment to your intention. Communicate your intention to yourself by more than just thinking about it. Fill out a new IAP Card (adjusted based on the new information, if applicable). Read your intention out loud or communicate it to another person.
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  4. Focus on your new intention, not on the previous one. In fact, tear up the old IAP card and toss it into the trash. Move forward instead of thinking backward.
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  5. Train your brain to “pause and refresh” by rewarding yourself each time you do it. It’s a habit like any other habit. If your existing habit is to “end process,” you need to reward yourself for changing it to “pause and refresh.”

Setbacks and obstacles are part of life. There’s no point chastising yourself over them, making excuses, or allowing them more power and control than they deserve. Just take a moment to assess your situation, decide what to do next, and take that step.

Perseverance is key to reprogramming your brain’s autopilot. And the key to perseverance is pausing.

Will Satisfying Your Needs Make You Happy?

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The happiness industry wants you to believe you can attain a steady state of happiness and that satisfying your needs will take you there. But happiness is ephemeral and transient, which means you can’t be happy all the time no matter what you do. And if you elect to chase happiness, you might find yourself running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill.

In addition, humans are demonstrably poor at being able to predict how we’ll feel and what will make us happy in the future (affective forecasting). Thus the phrase it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Certainly happiness feels better than sadness, anger, or unhappiness. But feeling better isn’t the point of getting happy. Happiness is supposed to be good for you, leading, for example, to better health and a longer life. That puts it in the same category with other things you “should” be doing, such as eating more fruits and vegetables, stopping smoking, and getting regular exercise—which sucks all the pleasure out of being happy.

But there’s no indication happiness will increase your lifespan and some indication the opposite is true. In fact, research reveals that the bodies of happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.

And per BBC Future:

Good moods come with substantial risks—sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

A Hierarchy of Pseudo-Needs

Satisfying your needs is not guaranteed to make you happy—or at least consistently happy. And it’s definitely a less direct path to feeling good than simply pursuing what you want. At first glance, though, it seems more legitimate and less self-centered. You’ve heard the question and maybe even asked it yourself—of yourself: Do you really need it or do you just want it?

I place a lot of the blame on Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs has wormed its way into nearly all aspects of modern Western culture even though there’s surprisingly little validation of it. He didn’t have access to the information we have available now about how the brain works—but then neither did William James, who was born 66 years earlier and got far more right than he got wrong.

With the help of Maslow’s hierarchy—and perhaps out Puritan heritage—we have turned all kinds of desirable states and situations (wants) into needs. Just like turning happiness into something we should have because it’s good for us, turning what we want into something we need sucks the joy out of it.

System 1, the unconscious part of the brain, treats needs a little differently from the way it treats wants. Its primary goal is survival—and you do need certain things in order to survive, such as food, water, shelter, and social/interpersonal connection. But like the rest of us, you’ve probably convinced your brain you have a host of other needs that also must be satisfied.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Since System 1 isn’t good at making distinctions, it treats both actual needs and pseudo-needs as if they are essential to your survival. As an example, here’s what happens if you convince your brain you need respect.

  1. If you don’t have respect, you’re not OK. (If you become dehydrated, your brain and your body are not OK. They are in distress. It wouldn’t bode well for your survival if you weren’t sufficiently distressed to turn your attention to seeking water. If your brain perceives respect as a need, you experience distress when you don’t get it.)
  2. It’s the job of the people around you to give you respect—and they’re wrong if they don’t.
  3. Your brain will be on red alert looking for any evidence of disrespect because it represents a threat to your survival. It won’t just notice instances of disrespect; it will divert attentional resources to seeking out such instances. And it generally finds what it seeks.

If, however, you recognize that respect is something you want:

  1. If you don’t have respect, you are still OK (not in distress).
  2. You’re likely to take appropriate action to generate respect, activating both wanting and liking chemicals in your brain. But whether or not you succeed in getting it, you’re still OK, and you’re much less likely to make others wrong if they don’t give it to you.
  3. Since your brain isn’t looking for evidence of disrespect, it won’t be overly reactive to it, and you will have more attentional resources available.
How Do You Want to Proceed?

Your brain is an insatiable wanting machine.

If you identify what you really want, you can activate your brain’s reward network to help you get it. Unless you’re a horrible human being, that’s a win situation for everyone—you and the people you are close to or interact with.

Your brain is also an excellent threat detection device.

If you are focused on getting your needs met—both your actual needs and the wants you have turned into needs—your brain will be on the lookout for anything it identifies as a lack. That’s a lose situation for you and the people around you.

While it may seem as if satisfying your needs is less self-centered or narcissistic than pursuing what you want, it isn’t. It’s more underhanded, and it keeps your attention focused on you.

Do you want to keep your brain’s threat detector set at red alert or do you want to harness the power of your brain’s reward system?

The answer seems like a (sorry!) no-brainer to me.

Storying: It’s a Lot Like Breathing

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Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying.

Your unconscious (System 1) monitors and manages your physical functions such as alertness, arousal, breathing, circulation, and digestion. Actions you take, including many of the lifestyle choices you make—as well as the circumstances of your life—can affect these functions.

You can consciously attend to some of them—breathing, for example—some of the time. But you can’t attend to any of them all the time. And you can’t consciously control them because you don’t have enough System 2 bandwidth to handle the job.

In addition to maintaining homeostasis by managing physical functions, System 1 also manages things like your sensory perceptions, your awareness of being located in space and time, your immediate reactions to events, and the vast majority of choices you make each day.

You can consciously attend to some of these functions, too, some of the time. But you can’t prevent System 1 from managing your mental processes and your real-time reactions any more than you can prevent it from managing physical functions. Although you might wish to have more say, moment-to-moment, it’s good that you don’t.

Storying Is Automatic.

One of the mental activities System 1 regularly engages in is weaving your experiences into coherent stories. I call this storying, because there doesn’t seem to be a better word to describe it. Storytelling and narrating both describe relating a story in some manner: either something that already happened or something that is—or is being—made up. Your brain is neither relating a factual account of past or present events, nor is it fabricating your stories out of thin air. Editing may be a more accurate term, but that implies the preexistence of a story to be edited.

The process of storying includes interpreting events and experiences as they occur for meaning and relevance, deciding which details are worth remembering, adding or subtracting for effect and coherence, reorganizing sequences, if necessary, and incorporating the resulting story into your ongoing life story based on your current beliefs and model of the world. Your brain is so good at this and does it with such speed that you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying. (Your brain is you, so you are storying, whether or not you’re conscious of doing it.)

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

But just as you can consciously focus your attention on your breathing to calm yourself or remind yourself to be present, you can consciously focus your attention on your brain’s storying, at least from time to time. You can learn to be skeptical of the stories your brain spins. You can allow for the possibility that your stories are often interpretations, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications. No matter how satisfying, they are not true, not fact, not an accurate reflection of reality. Your unconscious may be more or less biased than another person’s unconscious, but everyone is biased to one extent or another.

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Storying doesn’t just help you make sense of your own world; it also helps you make sense of the rest of the world. And you’re not the only person storying. Everyone else is doing it, too. Consider the implications.

Our Similarities Are
as Important as
Our Differences

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We tend to identify and characterize Enneagram types by focusing on what makes each one different from all the others. One of the ways the brain makes sense of the world is by categorizing the things in it, and as Leonard Mlodinow says in Subliminal:

One of the principal ways we categorize is by maximizing the importance of certain differences.

Emphasizing differences is one of the shortcuts the brain uses to help us function and survive in our fast-paced, sometimes dangerous world. And there’s value in exploring those differences, which are actually critical to the survival and advancement of our species from an evolutionary perspective.

Life on earth is chancy. In the pursuit of successful reproduction, every animal must navigate the equivalent of cats trying to eat you, weasels trying to cheat you, and a flood carrying away your winter’s supply of food. Life is risky. And the key to personality is that there’s no single solution that answers every risk.

Two things distinguish the human personality from that of a mouse. One is our profoundly social lifestyle. Most mammals evolved to fend only for themselves, but a few species found that the benefits of cooperation outweigh (if only by an ounce) the self-centered simplicity of a solitary existence. Our social life is etched into the personality of our entire species. Instinctively, we communicate. Biologically, we’re built to share. Without ever meaning to, we care. Not everyone cares equally, but even the nastiest person you know cares more than the nicest weasel or bear.

Our other distinction is the sheer size of our brain. Our tremendous wattage, plus the social instincts, yield nuances of behavior that we don’t see in other creatures. And when the nuances mingle and collide, amplifying or offsetting one another, our personality becomes complex. —Hannah Holmes, Quirk

As we explore each type in the Enneagram classes I teach, we talk about what that type has to offer that the rest of us benefit from. We acknowledge the value of each type’s differences.

Even so, focusing exclusively on our differences can be problematic—especially in light of that other set of shortcuts we use known as cognitive biases. It can be a very short hop from different to bad or wrong or undesirable, whether those we categorize as different share a nationality, religion, age, political affiliation, or personality type.

So I’ve always appreciated the fact that the Enneagram symbol and system doesn’t just differentiate individual types, it also delineates their relationships and interconnections and encloses all of them within a single circle.

Although it’s our differences that tend to get played up; there’s equal—if not greater—value in exploring our similarities.

Find the Common Ground

You can easily identify what you have in common with the other types by locating yourself on the Contact Points chart below. If you’re a type 2, for example, what you have in common with types 3 and 4 is the Feeling center. What you have in common with types 5 and 8 is being part of the same triad. What you have in common with types 1 and 6 is taking the Compliant stance. And what you have in common with types 7 and 9 is having the Positive Outlook coping style.

The patterns of connection within the Enneagram make it clear that we aren’t really as separate from each other as we sometimes imagine we are.

To quote Lennon and McCartney:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

Who Are You?

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June is right around the corner, and June is Enneagram month at Farther-to-Go!

Learning about your Enneagram type can help you answer the question who am I? by providing you with a window into your personal model of the world. It can also help you understand others while developing the self-awareness that’s essential for creating positive and sustained change.

You Are Not One Thing

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks says that neuroscience shows there is no center in the brain “where things do all come together.” Instead of a control center, there are lots of different processes in the brain, most of them operating independently. Journalist and philosopher Julian Baggini, author of The Ego Trick, agrees that there isn’t actually a “you” at the center of all your experiences. He then asks, “what is there, then?” and answers:

Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth. But what happens is these things exist, and they’re kind of all integrated, they’re overlapped, they’re connected in various different ways. They’re connecting partly, and perhaps even mainly, because they all belong to one body and one brain. But there’s also a narrative, a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things.

We do things because of other things. So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing what we know. And so really, there are all these things, like beliefs, desires, sensations, experiences, they’re all related to each other, and that just is you. In some ways, it’s a small difference from the common-sense understanding. In some ways, it’s a massive one.

That massive difference, Baggini suggests, is the shift from thinking about ourselves as “the thing which has all the experiences of life” to thinking of ourselves as “simply that collection of all experiences in life.” He appears to believe we are the sum of our parts, the same way a watch is the sum of its parts. However, a watch is a mechanical system and we humans are complex adaptive systems—which is a very important distinction! Complex adaptive systems are dynamic (not static) systems able to adapt in and evolve with a changing environment.

So a better way to think about personality or temperament is the set of tendencies inherent in it to process, organize, interpret, and even choose our experiences. How we process, organize, and interpret the experiences we have affects, in unpredictable ways, how we will act and react to our future experiences.

As Baggini says:

There are limits to what we can achieve. There are limits to what we can make of ourselves. But nevertheless, we do have this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover. You don’t sort of look into your soul and find your true self. What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self.

For more information on the Enneagram, visit ninepaths.com or farthertogo.com.

Contact Me

joycelyn@farthertogo.com
505-332-8677