The Courage of Being Where You Are (Or Another Lesson in Not Getting Ahead of Yourself)

“To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage. ”
— Henri Matisse

I thought I would get ahead of myself—in the best way possible. I had planned a trip overseas after the Christmas holidays and wasn’t sure of my ability to connect to the internet, so I thought I would take advantage of all of those cool scheduling features in the website/blog/email programs and simply program my blogs to post at certain dates automatically. The blog could keep going, even if I was ‘off the grid.’ I was so proud of myself. It seemed like such a great plan.

Yet, those of you who subscribe to my blog know what happened. My plan bombed. The blogs didn’t post separately on the dates I had carefully assigned them. Instead, they all posted at once, with their assigned dates still intact, and the email program picked up all of the blog posts every day and emailed all of them every day. So that instead of something neatly timed, my email subscribers got the internet equivalent of a weeks worth of newspapers delivered to their houses every day, only, gratefully, much easier to get rid of.   And with sketchy internet and not much knowledge I wasn’t sure how to fix it. I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice: I had just enough knowledge to get the thing going and not enough knowledge to stop it.

So my first lesson of 2016 arrives in bold print: Stop trying to get ahead of yourself.

This is not a new lesson for me. I have been trying to learn it for years. Even I have to admit how perfect it is that it showed up on the first day of the year.

‘Ahead of myself’ is where I am always trying to be. I am in a rush to ‘get there’ –to be competent, to know where I am, to be finished. I have always been a lousy beginner. Like all things this has its drawbacks and it benefits. The benefits are that I am likely to jump in, to try things, to persevere. But the sorcerer’s apprentice is the cautionary tale. I have always disliked the feeling of being at the beginning, and so I rush forward and imagine I can skip over the messy and main part of the work unknowingly releasing chaos as I go.

And it’s not the work that I mind. I’ll work hard at anything. It’s the not knowing. It’s the feeling lost. It’s the awkwardness that comes with the learning or building new skills, or working through a new plan. And mostly it’s that experience of being neither here nor there.

At the beginning of the year this feeling of wanting to get ahead of myself seems to be even more powerful.  It’s a beginning after all—what’s the plan? Let’s get started! And yet this year I can see that the beginning of the year is less about beginnings and more about transitions. And when I frame it as a transition I can see clearly why I try to get ahead of myself. I don’t like transitions. I don’t like the in-between.

And yet I know that if I can just slow down, (and I really do know), that the in-between is where such good work happens. I know this because when I have had the patience and really, the courage, to sit still in that in-between space I have been able to not only begin big changes, but also work them through to a new place. If you can stay in the in-between place you can actually untangle the threads of what you are trying to grow and change enough to figure out what is next.

So the first work of the beginning, or this transition is slowing down and sitting still. Letting go of the grip of achievement enough to let the pieces of last year come back and like pieces of a puzzle--fall in to a pile on my desk. Then I can begin the work of sorting through the work of the last year – what happened? What worked? What didn’t? Where did I stretch myself and grow? Where did I hold myself back? What did I do that helped me feel more connected to myself? My work? My relationships? My passions? And where did I follow others’ voices or expectations instead of my own?

The reflections and answers to these questions help me know where I currently am, and they provide the building blocks of what need to come next. Last year, nature kindly provided me with a series of blizzards in January where work got cancelled and I was involuntarily forced into a reflective retreat with these questions. But it looks like this year I may have to summon the discipline to create the reflection and work time for myself.

The reflection questions above help me begin to get a sense of where I am now, and to that I add other questions and reflections: What is important to me right now? What are my biggest priorities? What are my most important values? What is my noble or higher purpose? What am I in the middle of working on? What are my greatest resources? Where do I need the most help?

What is reassuring about this exercise is that you can’t do it without getting clarity about what is important to you and where your desires are aligning to others. Life is always a balance of both—there isn’t a greater value on one or the other—the beauty is in being able to make an informed choice. The beauty is in knowing where you are choosing to put your time and resources and why you are doing that.

So, if you care to, join me in the task of integrating the work you did last year and getting a sense of where you are now.  Give yourself the gift of slowing down and sorting through what you want and need. Have the courage for the awkward and messy moments, knowing that if you have the courage to be where you are you will be able to tap in to the power to go where you want to go. You can write it, draw it, put it on post-it notes or flip chart paper. I love plain old sketch books as there aren’t lines so the pages can become anything—and the paper holds up to colored markers which just make anything more fun. This work will become a great source of energy and information for the coming year.

© 2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Other resources for Reflections and Beginnings:

 

Parent's Corner: How Children Learn to Say ‘I’m Sorry.’

Parents I know or parents I work with are always worried about whether they have done something wrong. And usually the thing that they are currently worried about isn’t a big problem or they handled it just fine, but as to the question of whether they ever got it wrong? The answer is yes. Here’s the thing: It’s not possible to get it right all the time in ANY relationship—child or adult. It’s just not. So why do we even expect it? Of course you will get it wrong. And of course you will get it right. But by worrying about what it means when we get it wrong we often miss the gift in it.

Keep in mind that what creates a secure attachment between caregiver and child isn’t getting it right all the time. It turns out that parents of all kinds seem to make the same amount of mistakes. What differentiates a parent who creates a secure attachment is the awareness that something is amiss, and the capacity and patience for repeated attempts at mending it.

When you think you have done something wrong, or when you are confronted with feedback where it felt wrong to someone else there is something you can do.  You can simply say you are sorry. Often it will not feel like enough. To you, or to the other person. When your child is disappointed and you say you are sorry, it will not fix it right away. This lack of immediate feedback may be what makes sorry so difficult to learn and believe in. Often in that exact moment nothing really happens, which can be puzzling. Something happens, someone feels bad, someone says “I’m Sorry.” And for a bit, nothing really happens. It takes a while for bad feelings to dissipate or for the situation to slow down.

Sorry is something that is learned. It takes time and practice. And it is best learned (although painfully) as a feeling and not as an idea--and we learn that feeling by feeling hurt and being apologized to. If you never say you are sorry to your children, how do you imagine they will learn to say it to you or to someone else? How will they understand the complicated give and take of what feels broken and how it gets repaired? So when you worry that you have gotten it wrong—rejoice. It’s the chance for your children to learn the necessary dance steps of relationship. If you never get it wrong, or believe that you never get it wrong, and therefore never practice repair—then your children won’t learn this important skill- one of the most important relational skills there is—the ability to stay in a difficult situation and mend it.

I worked for many years with children in the juvenile justice system and so often heard “that girl has no remorse for what she has done.” Or, “He never apologizes.” But I can tell you that these children had lived very difficult lives and I am fairly certain that no one ever apologized to them. Where on earth would they have learned this? I am not excusing the behavior for which people wished they had remorse, but I am saying that these kids wouldn’t have felt ‘sorry’ because they never learned to feel the hurt in a relationship and have it mended. Sorry is something you need to learn in relationship.

In some ways ‘sorry’ is both a feeling and a contract or an investment in the future. One way to think about it is the way we handle breaches of trust in sports. When someone does something in sport that is against the rules—they receive a penalty which requires some form of restitution. If they push someone, or hold them, or trip them their team is required to give the other team something in return that is helpful: they get a corner kick, or a shot from the foul line or they get to move half the distance to the goal line. In essence, this ‘payback’ from the other team is a version of “I’m sorry.” The corner kick doesn’t fix the transgression. It doesn’t make it better, or make it so it never happened. The corner kick is an acknowledgement that something went wrong and an offer from one side to the other to stay in the game. To keep going.

“I’m sorry” doesn’t fix the problem, but it is an invitation to the hurt party to stay in the game, to keep playing. It is a humble request to try again. Sorry doesn’t say that what was hurt is all better, sorry says that the relationship is big enough to hold the hurt.

And don’t get hung up on whether or not you or your child ‘feels’ sorry. Feelings are complicated. Sorry is the acknowledgement that something is amiss, not necessarily a complete understanding of what the situation meant for the other person. Don’t require that your child ‘feels’ sorry before he or she says it. Often they won’t feel sorry about what they did because that’s not the feeling they are having at the moment. When I was in kindergarten we had these mesh screens that we got to use to make paintings by sticking toothbrushes in paint and brushing them over the mesh to make splatter paintings. I totally got in to it and in my excitement splatter painted my classmates new dress. I didn’t feel sorry. I felt confused. I had done exactly as I was told and had no idea what the outcome could be. And I was frustrated that they made me stop painting because it was really fun. And I was sad that everyone was mad at me. But I was asked to apologize to my classmate and I think it was a good idea because that is the social interaction of “I’m sorry.”

And to help your children with “I am sorry” I think it is often helpful to help them find a way to make restitution if the transgression was big enough—help clean up the mess, re-do what was done poorly, do something kind or helpful after something unkind. Restitution isn’t punishment—it’s a chance for the both parties to experience trust in a relationship again.

I’m sorry is learned from both sides: from feeling hurt and being apologized to as well as being the one who needs to say I’m Sorry. Both sides need to be learned and practiced in order to fully learn the dance steps necessary for working through difficulty in relationships. Good news for parents and children alike: If you are wrong or have made a mistake: you are creating a chance at an even stronger relationship.

© 2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

Understanding Change Part III: I have tried everything and I can't change it...

What if the thing you are trying to change is the thing you have tried to change before? Tried to change AGAIN and AGAIN? Why can’t I change this? Especially if I complain again and again that I WANT IT TO CHANGE?

This phenomenon of feeling totally stuck with a behavior you hate has some different names. I call it a pain in the ass. Psychologists would call it ‘resistance to change.’

Resistance has been defined as ‘the motivational forces operating against growth or change, and in the direction of maintenance of the status quo.'** The psychiatrist Martha Stark simplified this description in her book Working with Resistance even more to a tension between “yes” and “no” “Yes, I want to change” and “No, I want to stay the same.” And she beautifully breaks down the experience of working with this resistance. If you lean more in the direction of talking about or working with the ‘yes’—wanting to change, you will feel more anxious and uncomfortable. If you lean more in the direction of avoiding change or not talking about it, your anxiety will go down. So psychologists might also call these things defenses in the sense that the behavior we want to change is protecting us in some way—at the very least, it lowers our anxiety more to keep doing it than it does to change it.

So how do you shift such stuck behavior? How do you take a goal that you keep saying you want to do and find out how to make it happen?

The best technology for unlocking the  resistance to change that I have found is the Immunity to Change model that Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey have created. In their model you start with the goal or change you are trying to make and you walk it (and yourself) through a process of looking at what you are doing that is getting in the way, and more importantly, how these roadblocks may be serving you. For example, I say that my goal is to be more disciplined with my writing writing every day. Then I make a list of all the things I am doing or not doing that is getting in the way of this goal. And I discover that I say I want to be disciplined about writing, but instead I am doing favors for people with the time I would be writing. So rather than be committed to writing,  I am protecting my identity as a “good friend or good person.” In their lingo I am more committed to being liked than I am committed to being disciplined about writing.  This model helps you see the obvious: that if being liked is really important to me then of course I wouldn’t change my writing behavior. DUH. My behavior makes perfect sense. It just doesn’t match my stated goal.

Kegan and Lahey talk about resistance in terms of ‘immunity to change’— they articulate perfectly the dilemma of wanting change—wanting to do something differently. And, the reality that while we say we are committed to change, really, we are often committed to protecting ourselves. And behind these protections are big assumptions: If I don’t please people, I will be abandoned.  The solution according to Kegan and Lahey is to create small tests of our big assumption—kind of chip away at it so that you can see it for what it is—an old rule that isn’t objectively true, and isn’t serving you anymore.  Their model of change essentially has you come at the problem backwards. Instead of heading right at your goal: write every day. They would have you chip away at your big assumption: What if don’t please people?

I use this model in a coaching program I teach in to help people understand change and resistance to change, and with clients of all sorts and I have taken to giving a verbal warning label when I teach it: only pick something to work through this model that you really want to change, because it really works. Everything I have taken through this model has shifted.

I will warn you, it’s not a quick fix, but I think that’s okay. Generally the thing you are trying to change has been with you for a long time. There’s a New Yorker Cartoon with a man standing  in front of a mouse hole in his wall, and there is a mouse-sized garage door next to the door and a mouse-sized swimming pool and deck chairs in front of the doors. Next to the man is a handyman in overalls with a toolcase, and the caption states, “You should have called me sooner.”

If the mouse has already put in the pool, it’s going to take a while to get the mouse to move out. So it will take some work to move through your immunity to change and to shift the behavior—but this process helps untangle it the best.

I will also say that this model is really for things that are resistant to change, the things that are stuck, the things where you say to yourself: HOW DID I GET HERE AGAIN?!? There are plenty of things where you can take a more straightforward approach and where you can go straight at the problem. But if you have already tried all of that. This will really help.

You can check out their website here. It exists as an EdX course, and the book is below.

But if you take nothing else from this whole blog, I hope you take this. When something sticks around for a really long time, it’s because it is serving an important function. Important isn’t the same as good. You may not like it. But your system believes that it is an important piece of infrastructure—and so you have to honor it in some way. And you have to be kind to yourself about the fact that you haven’t changed for good reason, and that you will. When you don’t need it to do its job anymore, and when you can see that it isn’t the thing that is holding your world together. 

**Ghent, E. (1990, 1999). Masochism, Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a perversion of surrender. In S. Mitchell and S. Aron (Eds.) Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a tradition. Hillsdale, NJ; Analytic Press

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014


 

Understanding Change Part II: Are You Ready for Change?

“Those that cannot change their minds cannot change anything”
— George Bernard Shaw

Many years ago, researchers looked into how to understand why some people engaged in behavior change when others didn’t. These researchers, Prochaska and DiClemente, found that not everyone who needed to change, or even wanted to change, were in the same starting place.

The thing about change is you can only start where you are. Through their work and research Prochaska and DiClemente established the Transtheoretical Model (or Stages of Change) of change. This model describe how people go through various stages as they move through change—and most importantly that at any given time only about 20% are in place of action around change—which flies in the face of a lot of what we believe and understand about change. This small bit of information should help all of us stop lecturing people about change: stop lecturing our clients or patients, stop lecturing our family members and loved ones, and even stop lecturing ourselves. What we all need is a good dose of curiosity…”I wonder what would happen if?”

The stages of change are Pre-Contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action and Maintenance. Each of these stages of change has its own needs and is best served by different supports. This is often why some people do really well with one sort of program or book or support and others don’t. It’s often not a matter of motivation or willpower—it’s a matter of the resources matching the stage of change.

Pre-Contemplation

Pre-Contemplation is the stage where you actually aren’t interested in changing something. Often others around you are more interested than you are. In this stage the best support is information you can take in on your own terms: books, videos, stories. Action oriented programs often backfire, and the frustration of not being ready can prolong your own resistance. This is a good time to just take in information and begin to imagine the possibility of change. Or even just to reconnect with goals that are important to you, which might be served by such change.

Contemplation

In the Contemplation stage you have moved to thinking about changing in the next six months. You have gotten enough information to know about the pros of changing, but you are also very aware of the cons. This is still a time of gathering information, but also a time to explore your values, your passions, your motivations. It’s a time to question what will be gained if you change, and what will be lost. And perhaps most importantly—what is the cost of doing nothing? This is important time to gather energy and motivation for the long process of change. People do get stuck here, but it is also important to take the time you need to.

Preparation

In the preparation stage, you intend to change in the next month. Often you are moving towards action. You are finding the right resources: a course, a gym, a nutritionist, a therapist. Perhaps you have experimented with change and pulled back. In the preparation stage you would be well served to gather as much information as you can, not about the impact of change as you did earlier, but about what supports the process. Talk to others who have tried—what worked and didn’t work for them.  Think about what might support your work as you begin to change—do you have what you need? In this stage you don’t have the work or stress of change, so you have more energy and resources to do some of the prep and building work.

Action

This is the stage that everyone recognizes as change: in this stage you are making the change: you are going to the gym, you are changing your diet, your are in the process of quitting smoking. In this model you are in the Action stage until the new health behavior is habit (or until the old behavior is gone, ie. you no longer smoke at all). In this phase it is important to value your strength and courage to continue in your efforts and to experience confidence in your continued work—to get the sense that “I am a person who can make changes like this.”

Maintenance

Depending upon the behavior change—Maintenance can last from six months to five years—and maybe even longer for some. In this stage you are attending to the new habits and working to keep them solid. You are likely even working on other goals and other things that you want to change. And to support the maintenance stage you are consistently working on increasing other behaviors and habits that support you so that there is less likelihood that you need the old behavior that you worked so hard to change. If you used to smoke to relieve stress, you are consistenly working on stress management strategies so you have a wide range of options that doesn’t include smoking.

So, take amoment to think about that New Year’s Resolution again in the light of stages of change. Where are you? What can you do to support yourself in the stage that you are in so that when it is time for the action stage you have you feet solidly beneath you to spring from? You can read more about Transtheoretical Model here, they have lots of descriptions and an entire section on their research. And below you can get the link to their book.