Because each of us is in the middle of a story we don’t know the ending to. We all have farther to go.
Why “Farther to Go”?
Write Your Way Out of the Story
The left hemisphere of our brain includes what Daniel Kahneman calls an “interpreter.” The interpreter is constantly trying to…well…interpret everything we experience. Since we find it easier to understand stories than details or information, the interpreter spins many a story to explain things to us. We tend to believes that these stories accurately represent reality. Occasionally the stories may come close to doing that, but much more often they miss the mark by a wide margin.
What’s worse, sometimes these stories get stuck in our head and continue spinning out of control, taking up headspace and essentially hijacking us by claiming a portion of our attention. There’s a simple three-step writing tool I’ve found to be really useful in such situations. I call it “Writing Your Way Out of the Story.”
Step 1:
Set a timer for 10 minutes and flow write (write without stopping to reflect, keeping your pen moving across the page). Let it all hang out. Don’t censor or edit. You’re not trying to look good or be reasonable. Think of it as emptying onto the page everything that’s been spinning around in your head.
Step 2:
At the end of 10 minutes, take a highlighter pen and skim what you just wrote looking for actual facts. “Jim didn’t tell me about the meeting” is a fact. “Jim is trying to sabotage me” is not. Highlight only the actual facts. The rest is your story about the facts.
Step 3:
Reread only the highlighted sentences or phrases. Alternatively, copy them on a separate page.
Separating the facts from the story about the facts often has the effect of dismantling the story, draining the emotion from it, and freeing you to either let go and move on or—if there’s an issue or problem to be resolved—figure out what to do about it.
The longer and more frequently we give free rein to the stories spinning around in our heads, the more we come to believe they are true, the less control we have over ourselves, and the harder it is to see things from any other perspective. These stories tend to color our worldview and they contribute to a cascade of stress, anxiety, and a myriad of other problems. Taking 15 minutes to separate the facts from the story has always been time well spent for me.
Self-Talk Radio: It’s Always On the Air
Our monkey minds are constantly chattering away, leaping from one thought to another, unchecked and unguided. We have many conflicting wants, needs, and goals but little available headspace in which to sort them out. Most of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are not even consciously generated. They’re the result of what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls zombie systems and alien subroutines. In addition, we’re unaware of how vulnerable we are to influence from the environment. We are reportedly mentally AWOL at least 50% of the time. If you don’t believe that, just try tuning in to your own self talk. But be prepared to be appalled.
You’re engaging in some variation of self-talk whenever you:
- Explain yourself to yourself
- Explain external events and other people to yourself
- Assign blame
- Rationalize
- Justify
- Judge
- React to events and other people
- Rehash events
- Mentally argue with yourself or others
- Come to conclusions
- Recall past events
- Berate yourself
- Make comparisons
- Make predictions about the future
- Encourage yourself
- Give yourself directions
- Remind yourself or keep a mental to-do list
- Rehearse for the future
Most of these categories of self-talk are not very productive or what anyone would call positive. It’s part of the human condition. But self-talk can have a very powerful effect on us—especially when we’re tuned in to it unconsciously rather than consciously. On the other hand, tuning in to your self-talk is a great way to find out what’s going on in your unconscious.
- Notice the ongoing stream of self-talk. Some of it is productive, some of it is neutral, and a lot of it is counterproductive.
- Notice your inclination to label, judge, or try to change it—which creates additional self-talk.
- Notice what kinds of themes your self-talk has. Does it bolster a particular mental, emotional, or physical state? Do particular events or situations hook you more often than others? Do you find yourself rerunning mental tapes?
- Notice your emotions. What’s the relationship between your self-talk and the way you feel?
- Notice your physical sensations. What’s the relationship between your self-talk and your physical state?
Instead of judging or trying to change your self-talk, try these gentle tools.
- Ask questions. (Is that true? What do I want? What actually happened? etc.)
- Empty the trash. If a particular situation or issue has hooked you and you want to get it out of your head, set a timer for 10 minutes and flow-write (keep writing without lifting your pen from the paper and without reflecting) about it. When you’re finished, do not reread what you wrote. Just toss it.
- Focus your attention. Choose a word or phrase to focus your attention in the moment so you can redirect your thoughts.
A great way to pay attention to your self-talk is to get a pocket-sized notebook to carry with you. Each time you become aware of your self-talk, jot down the date, time, and a brief summary of your self-talk. The notebook is a cue for you to pay attention, and the more often you write in it, the more aware you will become of how you talk to yourself, what you talk to yourself about, and what effect it has on you.
Remember that Self-Talk Radio is always on the air—so you can tune in any time.
A Shortcut to Self-Awareness
If you aren’t yet convinced that much of what you do is completely outside your conscious intentions and control, the Enneagram might change your mind. At the time I wrote the following introductory post (Know Thyself) for my Enneagram blog Nine Paths, I had yet to learn just how much of our lives we spend on autopilot.
When you identify your type, you may find that the Enneagram knows you better than you knew yourself. It isn’t the personality equivalent of a Theory of Everything, but it gives you a place to look, a way to pay attention to what you’re doing, thinking, and feeling. It’s absolutely the best tool I’ve found for demonstrating how habitual and compulsive our behavior is and for expanding self-awareness. Unless we develop self-awareness, we have little chance of changing or overriding our compulsive behavior.
Know Thyself
Was the ancient Greek sage who inscribed those words at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi exhorting us to understand ourselves? It isn’t entirely clear. But it is clear that Socrates, who insisted the unexamined life is not worth living, meant exactly that when he used the same words. But how do we examine our lives? How do we get to know ourselves?
The Enneagram is one means to that end. It is an apparently simple, yet rich and complex system that reveals our strengths and weaknesses, our deeper-level motivations, and most importantly, the compulsions that often rule our (unexamined) lives. We move through this world under the impression we’re making authentic choices, but most of the time we’re just blindly following our compulsions, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. We’re living our lives on autopilot; asleep at the wheel.
Only after we become aware of our habitual patterns of behavior and responses can we turn the autopilot switch off and freelychoose what to do or how to respond. The better we know ourselves, the less likely we are to be ruled by our compulsions. The less we are ruled by our compulsions, the more open and authentic we are. Gaining this depth of personal knowledge and understanding has another benefit, also pointed out by Socrates: it helps us understand other people better, too. In fact, Socrates believed we have to understand ourselves before we can truly understand anyone or anything else.
At the simplest level, the Enneagram can be viewed as a personality typing system, but don’t think recognizing and accepting your Enneagram type will strip you of your unique sense of identity or individuality by lumping you together with every other person of the same type. Far from being a narrow one-size-fits-all box, each point has plenty of room for subtleties and variations.
Since it doesn’t simply pigeonhole people, but is a comprehensive and multifaceted system, it takes a bit of effort to fully grasp. Numerous books are now available on the Enneagram, written from various perspectives. Below is a very basic overview of the key elements.
Enneagram is a Greek word that means nine points. The Enneagram symbol is composed of a triangle and a hexad within a circle.
The resulting nine points represent nine basic, or core, personality types, each of which has a unique perspective and approach to life. The theory behind the Enneagram is that we each polarize at one of the nine points. We then overdevelop the characteristics associated with that point, while leaving the characteristics associated with the other points undeveloped. So each point also represents a particular type of imbalance. Our core personality type doesn’t change over the course of a lifetime, but as we become aware of our imbalances, we gain the ability to moderate them. We are no longer ruled by them.
Read the rest of the post here.
Intentions: Mistakes Were Made
Creating an intention seems like something that should be pretty straightforward. So why isn’t it? There are three common mistakes almost all of us have made when we’ve set out to do something.
Mistake #1
The clue to Mistake #1 appears in the first sentence of this post: the word should. We have many concepts about the way things should be, but even more about how we should be and what we should be able to do. In the context of creating intentions, the word should needs to be banished. It isn’t helpful, and it sets us up to have unrealistic expectations. Why start out by pitting your actual self against an idealized self who can easily do whatever it is you’re currently struggling with? That makes absolutely no sense, yet we do it all the time.
If you have created an intention to do something because you think you should do it or you should be able to do it, let it go. You’re not going to be able to commit to something you should do, and you’re probably not willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish it since you think you should already be doing it. The fact that you aren’t doing it means you’re just not trying or you’re lazy or incapable or have no will power. You’ve prejudged yourself as somehow lacking, so you’ve lost before you’ve even begun.
Mistake #2
Sometimes there are entire areas of our lives we want to revamp, so we create an intention to do just that. No baby steps for us; we’re going for the gold! But trying to tackle too much all at once is another recipe for failure because the chance of succeeding is miniscule at best. When we take baby steps we have a much better chance of accomplishing what we set out to do. Then we can build on our success. When we aim to do it all at once and miss the mark, we end up with nothing but a reinforced sense of ineffectiveness or inadequacy.
Another thing to remember is that when you try to do many things at the same time, you’re giving yourself many opportunities to fail. If you want to develop a habit that involves doing something multiple times during the day, start out by creating an intention to do it once or twice a day—or even every other day. Once you’ve succeeded with that, you can expand on it. This is the kind of mistake we often make when starting an exercise program. Add Mistake #1 to the mix—the belief that you should be exercising for a certain number of minutes every day—and you might as well just pick up the remote and head for the couch.
Mistake #3
The third mistake we make when creating an intention is that we are vague rather than specific. Maybe we aren’t consciously trying to give ourselves wiggle room, but that’s what vagueness does to intentions: it paves the way for us to wiggle right out of them. There are a lot of reasons we’re vague. Maybe we think just creating the intention should be sufficient. (Is there a voice in your head that says if you really want to do something, you’ll do it? Tell it to shut up.) Or our schedule is too variable for us to be specific. Or we want to maintain our flexibility. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.
The reason for being specific when creating an intention is that vagueness simply doesn’t work so creating a vague intention is a waste of time. If you want to do something twice a week, decide on the days of the week and the time of day you will do it. If your schedule varies, make appointments with yourself and write them on your calendar or in your planner. Treat your appointments with yourself the same way you would treat an appointment with someone else. Give yourself a little respect. If you know what result you want, think through the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it. Make the steps your intention and the result will follow.
Creating an intention really is pretty straightforward, but only if we know what works and what doesn’t work.
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