Hero’s Journey

With the speed at which we live our lives today, we expect things to happen quickly. When they don’t, we use it as an excuse to dump the idea and move on to the next thing. One of the secrets to success is knowing early on when to dump a project, so in many cases this is the right action; on the other hand, it may just be a habit.

New ideas thrill me. Doing the spreadsheets with all the numbers and seeing the possibility thrills me even more. The reality is always something different. Sticking it out to make them happen is a bit like keeping that New Year’s resolution: great for a week or two, or a month or two, but then the excuses start to flood in. My brief parting of the Red Sea collapses while I’m still making the crossing, and the project drowns in my reasons why not.

It’s seldom the idea, but the execution of it, that leads to success. So dump the habit, the addiction to the thrill of new ideas, and bind yourself to the mast of the one you have, and make it work, no matter what. Out of this commitment, you’ll find what’s missing to make it work.

The decision to give something up is not taken once. It’s taken a thousand times, every minute of the day, or every time that thing comes up, until the new habit is established. So when we fail to keep a resolution, it’s not so much that we make a decision and then go back on our decision, but more that we make the decision only once and then not again – and again and again.

Take cricket, when the bowler tempts the batsman to play a risky shot by bowling just outside the line. If the batsman’s not going to play, he has to make the same decision every ball. As soon as he stops making the same decision, he plays the risky shot, makes the mistake, and goes out.

If I decide not to get angry in a certain situation, I have to make that decision again and again while the situation lasts, otherwise I’ll simply lose it. To do this requires constant presence, awareness, combined with a strong desire for the benefits of the new behaviour.

After the charge of my coffee addiction blew, I saw the next one, perhaps the deepest of all: self-reflection. If I didn’t get time to self-reflect, the tension would rise and rise. Like a true addict, as soon as I knew I was safe (bond paid, costs covered) I would dip into myself; I would stare at my reflection in the lake for hours. Seeing it for what it was –  an addiction, instead of as a defining personality trait – was what caused the charge to blow.

The point is this, although it may be hard to see: many of the defining patterns of our lives are nothing but addictions. If you experience tension rising when you don’t get something – a drink, a smoke, an anger outburst, a bit of drama, a fight, a betrayal – or if you milk the experience for all its worth when it does happen – if you find yourself wallowing in it for much longer than you need to, in other words – then you’re very likely in an addictive self-abuse cycle with that thing. You can blow the charge by blowing all your addictions systematically, starting at the one that’s easiest and most accessible and working through every last one.

Deep down under all our addictions is the presence of self-love. I recently gave up coffee. It’s taken me years, and I’ve finally nailed the sucker, really nailed it. I’m not in some struggle to give it up either, it’s more like I’ve floated free. Sugar went with it, and a whole load of other things. What I was left with was me. No distractions.

It’s taken me years to be able to be present with me – to just look at myself, my life, with all its cracks and holes, all my deficiencies, and just be with it. With each step closer to being able to do that, I’ve lost more addictions, including the addiction to misery, pain and suffering. My lesson is this: if you work on yourself correctly, from the top down, layer by layer, those addictions simply float free. If you have addictions, the answer is not behavioural, it’s spiritual. It’s uncovering your essence until you can love yourself. In that space, addictions don’t hang around. It’s a long journey.

And so, forget the credit crisis, there’s a bigger wave still to hit us: the psychological credit crisis. Yes, all those anti-depressants are like buying happiness on credit. We still have to deal with the underlying issues. We still have to learn to love ourselves.

The tricky thing about analysis is that you think you’re doing something useful – checking, making sure – when in fact you’re simply paralysed and unable to act.

Usually it’s some deep inner voice that holds us there, some core belief we picked up in childhood. In my case it was simply, ‘You’re an idiot, man!’ That sentence is deeply buried and flickers past like the notorious Coke ad spliced into a movie reel, and everything that follows – the other 34 frames a second of thought – seem to make sense: all my arguments appeared so reasonable. When I managed for a few seconds to get outside myself – like Einstein’s man watching from outside the train – I saw that while I thought I was moving, in fact I was sitting still.

To break the habit of analysis is the hardest thing to do, precisely because the very mind that does the analysis justifies itself doing it. It’s like being the judge at your own trial: you’re invested in believing your alibi. To get through it you have to make decisions that go against your mind, and you have to stick to them – you have to distrust your thoughts as mental spew and nothing else, and a good coach will help you to do that.

When we recognise things about our lives that aren’t working, our first response is usually to try to find the fault and change the way we’re doing it. First stop is usually to copy how someone else does it. Often, we do even worse.

There’s a more powerful way. Ask yourself: How can I make this behaviour pattern work for me? For example, if you’re a compulsive organiser, instead of trying to make yourself more laid back, create your life so that you’re always constructively employed organising something.

People can be equally successful whether they’re organised or disorganised, so success comes not from the level of organisation, but from placing what you do naturally into the right environment. So if you’re going to copy someone, copy the person who plays to his strengths, by playing to yours!

This practice can open the doorway to self-appreciation: taking what you do and who you are and making that work for you, instead of trying to change yourself. You never know, your inner genius might just break through.

Bad news can come in any form and in any measure; even the tiniest grain – even an imagined grain – of criticism is often enough to open a giant trapdoor in your psyche and let out every ounce of energy and motivation that you have for a project. (OK, not everyone; there are those who, like some politicians, are so thick-skinned and resilient that bad news bounces off them like bullets off an American tank. It was true for me, though; I had zero tolerance.

I’m glad to be able to report that there’s a way out of that spiral. I had read for years that you could choose your thoughts, and I scoffed at the notion. Your thoughts just flood in and they provide reliable truths about your reality, I argued. An insight, followed by years of conscious practice, got me to the point where I could actually choose my thoughts and therefore my reality, moment to moment, all day long. Next I’ll be working on changing the ones I have when I sleep. Sweet dreams!

If you manage to slow the whole process down enough, you’ll see that habits and compulsions are outer expressions of the deeper habit of not honouring oneself.
It goes like this: you know something’s not good for you. You know you shouldn’t do it. You don’t even want to, and so you decide not to. Then you break down and you do it anyway. What’s the conversation in your head that makes you give in? It’s the habitual one that says, ‘Oh nonsense, it’s not that important.’
When did you learn that habit? When you were a kid, and you wanted something your way; you wanted to not wear socks, or to write with a colour pencil, and you were made to do what you were told instead. At that moment, you didn’t learn that socks are good, or that lead pencils are better. You learned that your unique wants or needs – what that inner you calls for – is not important.
Now, when that same inner you calls for what it knows is good and right for itself, the learned you says, ‘Oh nonsense, it’s not that important.’ Give up the habit of not honouring yourself, and you’ll give up every bad habit in the book. Each time you do it, it gets easier, and each time you open a doorway to a new level of self-respect.