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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.

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.

Success: Is It Random or Predictable?

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The two primary definitions of success are: (1) the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted; (2) the gaining of fame or prosperity.

But what do you think success means? Do you believe, for example, that the most successful people are the best in their fields—or that the lack of success indicates a lack of talent or of the personal characteristics that create success? What do you tend to attribute your own successes or failures to?

Is There a Formula for Success?

If you assume the most successful people are also the most competent, you may attempt to find out how they do what they do and try to emulate them in order to become successful yourself. (There’s a huge market for this.)

It’s true that successful people do have some characteristics in common, such as passion, perseverance, imagination, intellectual curiosity, and openness to experience. And of course they are not completely without talent.

But talent, along with positive personal traits and characteristics, doesn’t account for all of the variance between successful and unsuccessful people. Recent studies suggest luck and opportunity play a significant role.

People overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

What Is Talent?

Talent is whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities. It can include traits such as intelligence, skill, ability, motivation, determination, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence. More talented people seem to be more likely to get the most ‘bang for their buck’ out of a given opportunity. But…

Even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune. —Allesandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda, physicists, and Alessio Biondo, economist

In simulations run by Pluchino, Raspisarda, and Biondo, the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

Chance is a more fundamental conception than causality. —Max Born, Nobel Laureate

Why Isn’t Talent Enough?

In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk

We have a tendency to believe, as Mlodinow says, that the combination of our personal qualities and the properties of any given situation or environment lead directly and unequivocally to precise consequences.

That’s a mechanistic mental model that doesn’t reflect reality. We are complex adaptive systems living within multiple other complex adaptive systems. As a result, life isn’t always fair, good doesn’t always triumph over evil, and talent doesn’t always lead to success.

In The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks about the often invisible undercurrents that may boost—or impede—our success, depending on whether we’re flowing with or against a particular current:

When undercurrents aid us…we are invariably unconscious of them. We never credit the undercurrent for carrying us so swiftly; we credit ourselves, our talents, our skills.

Our brains are expert at providing explanations for the outcomes we see. People who swim with the current never credit it for their success because it genuinely feels as though their achievements are produced through sheer merit.

And it isn’t just the people who flow with the current who are unconscious about its existence. People who fight the current all their lives also regularly arrive at false explanations for outcomes. When they fall behind, they blame themselves, their lack of talent. Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers; those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.

When we assess the world, Mlodinow says, we tend to see what we expect to see. We define degree of talent by degree of success—and then reinforce a cause-and-effect relationship by noting the correlation. So although there may be little difference in ability between someone who is hugely successful and someone who is not, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. But our brains aren’t wired that way.

What Can We Do About It?
  • Be clear about our desired outcome
  • Recognize the extent and the limit of our personal agency
  • Develop solid habits
  • Follow through on our intentions
  • Persevere

Craving

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If craving were a person, he or she would definitely be from the wrong side of the tracks. Probably tattooed. Maybe a smoker. Definitely a drinker. A little bit slutty. A silver-tongued devil capable of talking you into doing all kinds of things against your better judgment. Someone your parents would have warned you—in the strongest terms—not to hang around with.

You try to stay away—to be good. But craving is just too hard to resist. Eventually you give in, and it feels so good in the moment, but you always end up hating yourself the next morning. You really want to break up with craving, but you can’t.

At least that’s the perspective many people appear to have about craving. Craving is associated with wanting things that are “bad” (unhealthy, illegal, dangerous, or excessive) or with being out of control. The logical result of this view of craving is to attempt to squash it, eliminate it, beat it in to submission: to conquer it.

What Is Craving?

The best definition of craving I’ve come across is a strong wanting of what promises enjoyment or pleasure.

Essentially, craving is wanting or desiring something. Wanting is driven by dopamine in your brain. But the neurons that respond to dopamine are interspersed with neurons that respond to opioid and cannabinoid neurons that provide the experience of pleasure (liking). In a sense, the brain likes to want, which is why, according to psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge, “we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.”

So even if you could do it, it makes no sense to try to break up with craving. Your life would be so much less enjoyable. But you can minimize your cravings for some things by cultivating cravings for other things.

We often think of desire and the objects of our desire as inseparable. We think it is the indulgence itself—the luscious ice cream, the rush of nicotine, or the flood of coins from a slot machine—that motivates us. To a greater extent, however, it is the expectation of these rewards, the luxurious anticipation of them, that fires up our brains and compels us to dig in, take a drag, or place another bet. —Chris Berdik, Mind over Mind

The unconscious part of your brain (System 1) is always looking for—expecting, craving—the next reward. Untrained, it will go for the most immediate, readily available source of pleasure. Craving is persistent and hard to resist. So applying willpower to avoid indulging in that pleasure, whatever it may be, is an ineffective strategy.

Rejigger Your Pleasure Experiences

“Pleasure is a potent driver of behavior,” as Anjan Chaterjee says in The Aesthetic Brain. But:

Our cognitive systems can reach down into our pleasure centers and rejigger our pleasure experiences.

Rejiggering our pleasure experiences is an essential component of long-term behavior change. You can’t stop your brain from craving, but you can redirect its path from one pleasurable or rewarding object to another. You can only train it to respond to a different reward, however, if it actually craves that reward.

Yes, craving sometimes goes too far in the pursuit of pleasure. Makes you want things you don’t want to want and do things you don’t want to do, at least after you’ve done them. But craving also drives you to take action to get what you want. Craving motivates you to learn and create and expand…to modify your behavior…to effect change in the world…to experience beauty. Craving is frequently misunderstood—but definitely worth the effort to get to know.

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joycelyn@farthertogo.com
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