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Clarity Comes Before Consistency

July 6, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

should what?

Consistency is a concept that has developed a bad rap, at least in some neighborhoods. I’m not sure why this is but I suspect it’s because consistent has become another thing we should be, at least in regard to developing those habits that are good for us. Right off the bat, labeling a habit as being good for us automatically makes it a tough sell. If it was something we were going to enjoy, we wouldn’t have to persuade ourselves to do it on a regular basis, would we?

For some, consistent = boring, repetitious,predictable, even regimented. It connotes a lack of spontaneity and freedom and engenders an instantaneous desire to rebel. It evokes, for those folks, the mental image of swallowing an evil-tasting pill.

For others, consistency is nearly as elusive to achieve as locating the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It seems like a really good idea. At least they’ve heard that it is. Not being consistent at maintaining good-for-them habits makes some of these people feel bad about themselves and what they perceive of as their lack of will power.

For yet others, consistency is but a speck in the rear view mirror as they speed past it all the way to rigidity. Good ideas, good-for-them habits, personal goals or intentions—all are transformed into self-imposed rules that must—and will—be adhered to no matter what.

Maybe we ought to look a little closer at those things we think we should be more consistent about. When you hear yourself say I know I should be [fill in the blank], stop and ask yourself why you think you should be doing—or not doing—whatever it is. Because it’s good for you isn’t a good enough answer. And that’s certainly not enough to motivate you to do it.

What Do You Really Want?

If you can’t come up with a better answer, maybe you’re putting the cart before the horse. Maybe you’re trying to make some positive changes without having clearly defined what you are aiming for in the long run. What do you want to get out of being more consistent about [fill in the blank] and why do you want that? What is the overall positive outcome you’re trying to achieve?

If you’re aiming for something you really want, and you identify the steps it will take to get there, it’s a lot easier to be consistent about taking them. I don’t mean to imply it’s that simple or easy because it isn’t. But if you have gotten to this point and you know the what and the why of the habit you want to change or begin or improve, there’s a process, outlined by Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit, that can help you do it.

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense. –Charles Duhigg

Since some of the formation and operation of habits is outside of our conscious awareness, we might as well stop beating ourselves up over our track record. We don’t need to keep sparring with our inconsistency. Instead, we can learn how to work with what scientists call “the habit loop.” Duhigg’s book is a great place to start.

(originally posted 1/13/13 as The Consistency Hobgoblin)

What’s Choice Got to Do with It?

June 23, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What’s the difference between the things you want to do that you’re actually doing and the things you want to do that you’re struggling with doing?

It often comes down to this: you think you have a choice about doing the things you’re struggling with.

If you’re clear about why you’re doing something (or want to do something) and you’re committed to doing it, you don’t waste ongoing time and effort choosing whether or not to do it each time the situation arises. What kind of sense would that make? It’s something you want to do, you know why you want to do it, and you’re committed to doing it. It may not be easy, but that’s a separate issue. The point is that there’s nothing to be gained—and something to be lost—by not doing it.

If you have a kid in school who you pick up every afternoon, you don’t think I really should go get Josh, but nah, I’m going to stay home and watch this movie.

If you have a job you value, you don’t wake up each morning wondering Hmmm, what should I do today? Go to work? Check out the horse races? Maybe drive out to the coast for a leisurely lunch?

If you have a pet you care for, you don’t ask yourself Should I buy food for Fluffy this week or spend the money on a bottle of wine?

Picking up your kid after school every day may be inconvenient. Getting up and going to work may be an effort some days more than others, even if you love you job. Caring for a pet can be expensive (and maybe Fluffy needs to be on a diet, but still…). There may be some struggle involved in all three situations—but the struggle isn’t about whether or not to follow through on your commitment. It’s a given that you will.

So if you think you have a choice about whether or not to do something, you probably aren’t clear about why you want to do it and you aren’t committed to doing it.

~ ~ ~

Thanks to the participants of the Create Your Own Story! course for inspiring this post.

Unclear or Uncertain?

February 13, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

There’s an enormous difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that might be getting in your way.

When your mind is confused at the outset, it’s probably not a good time to act. If you are weighing one action against another and making lists of pros and cons, you’re unclear. As counterintuitive as it may sound, thinking about the situation more or harder won’t make it any clearer. When you’re clear, the path to take is obvious. Only the details remain to be worked out.

But if you’re waiting until you’re certain of the outcome of your action, you will likely never act because the outcome is never certain. We can’t yet predict the future. And why would we want to? As Ursula Le Guin said, “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

The unconscious part of our brain is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, too. But trying to avoid uncertainty is tremendously limiting, not to mention a fool’s game.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong.

Mental focus, the foundation of feelings of certainty, distorts reality by magnifying and amplifying one or two aspects of it while filtering out everything else. You might discover more detail about the one or two aspects you focus on, but what you discover will have no contextual meaning, because you have isolated those aspects from their dynamic interaction with the rest of the reality in which they exist. In other words, focus magnifies things out of proportion and blows them out of context. —Stephen Stosny, Ph.D.

What is certain is settled, known, and impervious to change. Uncertainty may be frightening, but…

Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities—for success, for happiness, for really living—are waiting. —Martha Nussbaum

2014: Time to Start Shoveling?

December 22, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

clutter

Wherever we are and whatever we’re doing, we all have the ability to Step It Up. The quality, impact, effectiveness—and maybe even the length—of our lives depend on it.

So why don’t we do it? Why do we keep playing small when we know we’re capable of so much more?

We may think our reasons are personal and unique, but I suspect that in most cases the real reason for not Stepping It Up is the same for everyone. And it’s so basic and mundane it’s almost always overlooked.

The culprit is clutter, plain and simple. Or rather, it’s the mountain of clutter we’ve spent our lives constructing: physical clutter, mental clutter, emotional clutter, the clutter of things left undone or not being attended to. It doesn’t matter how few or how many categories we have for it or how different one type of clutter seems from another. Clutter is clutter is clutter.

We can’t reach for the stars by climbing that mountain of clutter.

We may manage a few steps, but inevitably we’re sucked back down into all that…stuff. We won’t get anywhere by trying to manage or rearrange our clutter, either. Let’s face it; we have developed the habit of creating clutter. We have become clutter junkies. We’re convinced we can’t live without it.

So we rationalize, justify, and explain it away.
Or we deny we have a problem.
Or we admit we have a problem but insist we’re working on it.

The result is always more clutter. Yes, our attempts to deal with our clutter add to the mountain of clutter. So do our failed attempts to Step It Up. In my experience, this is the real “law of attraction”: clutter attracts more clutter. It’s as if the mountain of clutter has magnetic properties. The more undone, unfinished, messy stuff there is in our lives (the bigger our mountain of clutter), the more likely it is that we’ll just keep adding to it.

Clutter is not innocuous; we pay a huge toll for keeping it in our lives. Clutter not only takes up physical space, it also uses precious mental resources. Clutter that preoccupies us taxes our brain’s bandwidth and can literally make us dumber, at least temporarily, by as many as 10 to 14 I.Q. points. The effect is like being sleep deprived all the time. This kind of preoccupation also negatively impacts the brain’s executive function, which results in diminished ability to focus our attention and a decrease in self-control.

The absurd thing is that whatever we’re not doing or not dealing with is likely taking up more of our attention than it would if we were actually doing it or dealing with it. But habits are hard to break. For clutter junkies, there’s only one way out: we have to get rid of the mountain of clutter. Pick a corner, start shoveling, and keep going until it’s all gone. No excuses, no rationalizations, no explanations. Just do it:

Clean it out
Fix it
Address it
Replace it
Finish it
Toss it out

Then declare yourself a clutter-free zone!

If you’re in the market for a New Year’s resolution, this trumps the usual suspects. Not only is it simple, straightforward, and all-inclusive, but the results are guaranteed to surprise you and may even provide you with a brand new view of the world.

Clarity

September 22, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

After I finished clearing out my garage three weekends ago, the path ahead (my path, that is) suddenly became so much clearer.

The garage clearing was the culmination of a purging and cleaning process I started at the beginning of May. I went through every room and every closet or cupboard in my apartment, getting rid of things I thought I’d still be holding onto when I died, things I’d never, ever considered letting go of before. A few times I woke up in the middle of the night imagining the contents of a closet and thinking, “That can go, and that can go, and that can go.” The next day, all of it went. Into the garage.

I amassed so much stuff to give away it filled a quarter of my garage. I couldn’t park my car in there during the hottest month of the year. Animal Humane came to pick it all up in July, and I haven’t missed a thing. In fact, I keep finding more stuff to let go of. Now I keep a box in the garage for items I’m finished with. Once it’s filled, I drop it off at Animal Humane.

The whole thing started spontaneously one Monday when I glanced down the hall into my bedroom, noticed something, and asked myself why the heck I still had it. One thing led to another, momentum grew, and soon I was tackling areas I’d been avoiding for years. I even replaced all the shelf liner in the kitchen cabinets. I got rid of the contents of three two-drawer filing cabinets—and the cabinets. I tossed decades worth of personal journals, donated eight or nine bankers boxes of books, gave half a dozen flower pots to a neighbor, and found new homes for drawers full of art supplies that need to be used, not stored.

Just Do It!

It felt great to lighten the load. It also felt great to attend to all those nagging things, large or small, I’d been noticing several times a day (again, for years) that needed fixing or changing. I took care of all of them. I had a whiteboard in my office, and as soon as I thought of something or noticed it, I wrote it down. Had I been putting off making an appointment or checking something out? I put that up there, too. Sometimes I’d take care of something so quickly the ink from the dry erase marker was still wet when I erased it.

I had expected it would feel good to have accomplished so much. I had expected to feel a sense of satisfaction. What I didn’t expect was how much clarity getting rid of all this stuff would create in my life. I’d like to believe that if I’d known, I would have done it much sooner. But no one can see into the future. I don’t think I would have believed it if anyone had told me it would be like this.

Last winter, I came across this quote from Krishnamurti:

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

I wrote this post about it in February, but only now am I really getting it. Only now do I see that having all these messy, undone, or unfinished things taking up space in my head actually creates confusion and distortion. Suddenly, there are very few choices I need to make. I’m not having the usual mental debates about what to do or rationalizing why I’m doing or not doing something. The path ahead is clear. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or guaranteed. But it is clear. Clarity is a game-changer. It’s also a huge payoff to get for doing nothing more than taking care of business.

What Do You Really Want?

Just Do It!

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