Recently I said to someone "you can't think your way out of what you want to think your way out of". If that sounds confusing, this scenario likely will feel familiar: After a particularly intense meeting at work, a year-end review perhaps or a heated meeting with decision-makers, you go home and ruminate. You call your friends, and at worst, write cryptic social media messages where too many people know what you're alluding to. Then you go to bed thinking about what you shoulda, coulda, woulda said and what you might say or do tomorrow to change it. The thing is you are now in a place that is very different from reality and you're simply playing with fragments of the original situation. In short, you are playing a game with (and fooling) yourself.
How do I know this? I'm a life-long ruminator. Starting with years of classical music training where I learned to be hyper-critical of every mistake, a missed note in a public performance led to days of worry and negative thoughts until the next publicly made mistake. My own bubble of perception of my playing (and then as an adult in meetings) impacted every encounter, every situation, every friendship I had until this method of beat-yourself-up-to-be-successful just didn't work anymore.
So, how did I eventually accept that my own perception of reality was not possibly not what others experienced? I began to do the following things:
- Interrogate reality. This is a phrase from the book Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, although I think I use the phrase slightly differently from the author's intention, which is to look beyond the surface from what is being said to uncover truth. I use it to ask myself - is what I'm telling myself about what happened - and what that means about me - really true? How can I separate facts from imagined reality?
- Stop trying to fix problems through thinking. Most of the time we are using the very thought process to examine a problem as we used in the situation itself. If we are naturally critical in a meeting, we'll be critical with ourselves in the rumination. If we are shy and avoid a tense moment, we will continue to be shy in our own reflection, continuing to feed our egos with affirmations of why we are right, rather than why you might only be 5% right. We love to look at our own problems, polish them until they are worthy of a gold shelf called "MY PROBLEMS".
- Breathe. Perhaps more important that interrogating reality, or almost any thinking we can do, is to BREATHE. Breathe slowly and intentionally. I did this reluctantly as part of performance anxiety practices, and how I wish it had been taught to me with as much vigor as scales or book knowledge. Breathing with intention, meditation, calm focus, prayer - whatever you want to call it - activates the power of your body to interrupt your thought patterns, and interrogate reality by being in the present right NOW. It's amazing how many books, how leaders throughout millennia have taught us to breathe, and how often we decide one more moment on social media is going to be more powerful than one moment of breath with eyes closed.
- Draw, paint, write, walk, play. Non-verbal processing of our own psyche allows the real issue - not the thing that happened but the FEELINGS it brought up - space to process. We give our precious thoughts a plush throne to sit on as long as we like, but we give our feelings not much more space than the point of a stiletto heel. Think about all the pressure a stiletto has on it and how we expect wobbling on tiny points of contact to hold up grace and weight. We treat our emotions like that, however our emotions need space - a nice flat-footed Birkenstock - to really trust that the feelings can be felt, seen, heard, and allowed to exist. These feelings are what need to be processed, and I'm a believer that the words we use in our mind can be so tricksy, that we can even fool ourselves into believing we feel better when our emotions are still stuffed down.
I hope this rambling gives you pause to say - hey, maybe I do need to stop thinking through that thing my boss said, not because I'm justifying their position, but because I cannot think my way to a solution. This only works if you do #4 - give it space. You can't decide to not think about problems for 5 minutes, although a daily practice of 5 minutes even WILL help. I hope this post meets you at just the moment you need to read it, because we've all been there. Life is not a thought-experiment, it must be felt.
#arts #wellness #leadership #success #mentorship
