The Toxic Hope of Transformation

“I Used to, but Now I Don’t”

Those seven words are the toxic fantasy of transformational work.

The hope of transformational work is that, while you may have a certain tendency today?that you wish wasn’t there, if you do the right work, eventually that tendency will fall away.

This post explains the fallacy of that hope, and why it’s toxic.

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People claiming to have eradicated some aspect of their being once and forever is usually a flag for me that suggests they’re not particularly deep in their work.

To begin with, there’s no such thing as a bad strategy or tendency. Our habits aren’t wrong, or bad, or something that needs to be fixed.

The issue isn’t with the habit itself, it’s with its automaticity.

Our leadership becomes hamstrung when we fall into an automatic patterning: any time someone shows up with X, you automatically do Y.

In the early days of our own work, we tend to be largely judgmental towards ourselves.

If you tend to make excuses, or avoid doing something scary, or turn away from your fear, or whatever, you don’t hold this part of yourself with much love.

You regard it with judgment and frustration.

Because of our (early) inability to hold ourselves with much reverence, the correct answer seems to be to eradicate these parts of ourselves.

“If I could just stamp dead the part of me that makes excuses, and never again be stopped by an excuse, then I’d really be good”.

Many coaches and leaders that are fairly shallow in their work don’t make it much past this point. The really unfortunate ones manage to do a version of stamping this part of themselves dead, which sounds good, but actually means that they are forever in opposition and resistance to a part of themselves.

These people are the ones espousing solutions that will help you never again have to be/act a particular way, and it’s also how they present themselves to the world.

It’s all good, but it belies the fact that they are fairly young in their transformational journey.

As you deepen further, you start to learn how to find love and reverence for these parts of yourself.

This can, at first, sound bonkers.

“There’s nothing good about my tendency to make excuses. Why would I want to do that?”

But the truth is that every aspect of who we are and what we do makes sense on some level. As we explore things ontologically, we can get to the heart of why you may be showing up in a particular way, and rather than trying to stamp out the symptom showing up on the surface, we use it as a signpost, guiding us further to a deeper layer of healing.

In this way, your “bad habits” stop being something you try to stamp out, and they start to become opportunities to deepen your own self-discovery, healing and transformation.

Over time, we start to realize that our particular tendencies are simply the tools we learned at a young age to stay safe and to cope.

And as you bring more love and spaciousness to these tendencies, you start to learn that they won’t go anywhere. They’re always going to be your particular tools for when you get confronted.

As long as you continue to play a bigger and bigger game in your life, you’re going to meet with new places of confrontation as well as your own particular flavour of resistance in the face of that confrontation.

Instead of chasing the illusion that you could one day stop being confronted or never have resistance to life, as it shows up, you learn how to meet your own resistance with love and reverence.

You develop the ability to love and laugh at these parts of yourself, and hold them with lightness and ease.

The leaders that have learned to create this within themselves are the ones I find most impactful to spend time with.

They don’t spin yarns about never getting scared, or angry, or having excuses. They don’t sell me the myth that one day I’ll never again have resistance.

Instead, they can acknowledge and share those parts of themself with me, freely.

They allow space for these parts of themselves with a tremendous amount of grace, and their graciousness invites me to practice the same way with myself.

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