What’s really happening when we “take something for granted”?  We stop noticing a person, a thing, an event or a situation.  We stop being in the moment and experiencing all that it has to offer.  Usually, we experience less of the intense emotion that it first elicited.  In some ways, that’s a good thing.  We wouldn’t want to experience the extreme high spike of emotion we feel on our wedding day, or birth of a child every day. What went up sooner or later, will come down.  It’s lovely to have peaceful non-peak moments with our loved ones. 

Continued exposure to something is the most common reason we first start doing what we call taking it for granted.  When you are crossing the street in a foreign city, you are likely to be acutely present and aware of everything that is going on.  You are not likely to be daydreaming or distracted thinking about what you have to do late in the day.  Back home, you can be balancing grocery bags, or walking the dog as you cross the street without paying much attention and you’re probably just fine.  If we translate that over to relationships, it is easy to see what often happens.  The people that we spend all of our time with are often the ones who get less of our undivided attention.  We basically know their routines and can predict what they think and feel about most things so we think that we don’t have to be fully attentive.  But, of course that is not true and the costs are huge.  

The attention we give to others is not only important because we learn new things but also because we are giving our attention to them.  Our attention, care, concern, and interest in the other is valuable to ourselves as well to the other. We risk losing this special bond and valuable and precious moments when we take it for granted that we already know what they are going to say.   

It’s useful to think of taking things for granted as not being present in the moment.  Our presence and attention is good for us and those around us.  

To being present!

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It’s pretty common these days for people to talk about sitting with a feeling or allowing “negative” thoughts without resisting them.  It is in the zeitgeist, whereas just 10-15 years ago you hardly ever heard it. 

It’s great that it is more common to hear the wisdom of “let it be” more universally spoken.  But, at times, things that are widespread also get diluted.  We think this might be one of them.  Letting things be is very different than just ignoring them.  It is our hunch that sometimes folks are using the wisdom of “allowing” and “letting be” as a way to avoid truly dealing with a challenging emotion or situation.

How can you tell the difference?  Letting things be does not mean that we start feeling good.  In fact, sitting with those challenging emotions sometimes can be quite unnerving.  However, when we let the feeling be, peace is the usual result.  One way to tell if you are suppressing something versus letting it be is how disturbed you become when you are reminded of it.  If you've been trying to keep it out of your consciousness (suppressing) then most likely being reminded of it will feel quite agitating.  On the other hand when we are letting something be, it can remain in our consciousness and we get more and more comfortable with the feelings it evokes.

It can be quite challenging to experience something uncomfortable and not think you should be doing something to change it or stop it entirely.  When we face something difficult, we quickly look for relief.  Which is why, letting it be, is such a challenge.  

Letting it be does not mean not doing something about it, it means not distracting yourself from the experience and feelings you are having.  It also means not picking at it, like a scab.  It means what it says it means…letting it just be, without doing anything to it.

Pay attention to yourself.  Can you start distinguishing the experience of letting something be versus suppressing how you feel?  The downstream effects are profound if you can start practicing letting things be more consistently.  

To letting it be,

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Let’s talk about feelings and tooth decay!  You didn’t know you wanted that, did you?!  If your tooth has decay we can all agree that you are past the point of being able to fix the problem with good dental hygiene habits.  You need a dentist.  We are going to call this the problem solving phase of life.  The problem solving phase is often unpleasant, there is a lot to do, most of it is onerous or down right painful.  The one thing it has going for it is that it is very proactive.  You know what you have to do and it is just a matter of getting yourself up over that mountain.  

Once you’ve conquered the problem, in this case, the tooth decay has been cleaned out and you are basically back at square one with your tooth.  Now you enter the maintenance stage.  Which sounds much, much easier than the problem solving stage.  All you have to do is to keep that tooth cleaned and well flossed and you will never have to experience painful tooth drilling again.  The pitfall of the maintenance phase is that it is much easier to get complacent.  The fire-breathing dragon (aka the dentist) is not staring you down.  There is no problem that needs solving.  Maintenance phase is when you are doing what you know to do to prevent problems from ever showing up.  There is a special type of person that feels just as fired up about maintenance as the rest of us do about problem solving, and thank goodness for them because the world needs them.  For most of us, however, the maintenance phase ends up being the slow deterioration phase, landing us back in the problem phase.  

So, what can we do about this?  We’d all like to be better at the maintenance phase.  The practical solutions are to make lists, follow yourself up, create calendars with regular reminders, but those rarely make the difference.  We can ignore those alarms on our phone.   

Well, not to keep banging the same drum, but becoming more resilient to feeling your feelings will also make us better at the maintenance phase.  If we could sit down with each and every one of you and discuss the things in your life that keep getting neglected in that maintenance phase, we would bet that there are some resisted feelings around why doing that thing feels so onerous and unpleasant.  And it is that soup of suppressed feelings and resistance that makes all of the calendars and phone alarms fail in getting you to stay on top of whatever the thing is.

To the wondrous downstream effects of feeling your feelings

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We tend to go on about growing your capacity to feel your feelings.  That might sound very abstract to some of you.  All we mean is simply, allowing ourselves to feel (not necessarily express) our feelings when we feel them.  We think it is a great predictor of success and well-being when a person is willing to feel what they are feeling when they are feeling it.  Equally important can be the great cost, exhaustion, and suffering that comes from all the work we need to do to attempt to suppress what we’re feeling.  

Today, let’s talk about how resisting your feelings can lead to undesirable outcomes.  Here’s how it works: A stimulus comes along that makes us either angry or sad and we get fearful, duck our heads under the covers and hope that it passes.  We are rewarded, because those feelings do pass eventually, but other stuff passes too.  And that “other stuff” frequently needs our attention…but we can’t see it because we are too busy avoiding those emotions and preventing them from coming to the surface.

Let’s talk about a real example to bring this home.  To use something that most of us will be able to relate to having fear about, let’s say you invest a lot of money into a friend's business.  A few months later you stop by his shop and you can tell immediately that he is marketing his products all wrong.  You’re nervous because you have a lot of money invested in his success, but you don’t want to upset him by insulting his marketing plan.  You head home and decide not to say anything, in fact the whole thing has made you so upset that you decide to take an alternate route every day to avoid seeing his failing store.  This is an example of ducking your head under the covers so that you don’t have to confront your feelings about asserting your opinions with your friend.  In the meantime, while you are avoiding that street, he continues to fail with his marketing plan, hires more people, and overstocks, driving the business (and your investment) into the ground.

When we duck our heads under the covers, we often do avoid our feelings for a bit, but a lot of stuff that needs our attention passes us by as well.  Problems that we could have addressed and solved become massive mountains due to neglect. The moral of the story is that avoiding our feelings is often costly. 

To the strength of feeling what’s there,

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If you want to be your own Workability Consultant or you are feeling particularly stuck and can’t seem to figure out why, one massively useful question to ask yourself is, “what am I trying not to feel??”    

A lot of the unpleasant symptoms we experience are actually the direct results of resisting our feelings.  For example, anxiety, hopelessness, and of course, stress.  

You don’t have to take our word for it.  You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon many MANY times.  You’re telling a friend about a worry you have and suddenly you find yourself crying.  Or, you are sharing how hopeless it feels to watch world events and you start to get angry.  Once those emotions start coming out, you usually transcend the feelings of worry or hopelessness.  At the very least, it gets a little better.  Usually at the end of it, you sigh and say, “thanks, I feel better now.” 

We do not suffer our feelings, we suffer our resistance to our feelings.

When you ask yourself the question, “what am I avoiding feeling?” you shift your awareness away from the symptom of resistance and toward the solution.  You might be surprised at the answers that are suddenly revealed to you.  Is this question going to be a cure-all and instantly change your state, probably not.  But it is an important step in the right direction.

To awareness of our resistance

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Winning the daily comparison game (being better than the next person) is like getting Monopoly money.  No matter how much of it you get, it is still useless in the real world.  One day you are better than so and so, the next you are worse and it seesaws back and forth endlessly.  Sometimes you can buy Park Place with all of your Monopoly money and sometimes you are bankrupt.

Much like with Monopoly, at the end of the day, the game gets folded up and put away.  No matter how much comparison capital you have earned inside your own head, it has no real value.  The only sure thing it delivers is suffering. 

We all want to be successful, to be at the top of our game, to produce results consistent with our mission in life, and to have the relationships we desire.  Accomplishing all of those things, requires a wide and deep understanding of yourself.  

Looking outside of ourselves at how others are doing things can be useful, but only when it inspires us!  You risk limiting returns if you spend too long looking outside of yourself.  The value of being inspired is applying it to your endeavors and using it to help you home in on your most genuine expressions.    

Think about the last time you were in a flow-state, truly satisfied, or at least peaceful and at ease.  How much time did you spend evaluating how good or bad you were? Or, comparing yourself to others?  ZERO.

There’s probably a clue there.

To inspiration

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Have you ever heard or thought to yourself, I’m fragile today.  Or maybe you’ve used the words, raw or sensitive.  What do we mean when we think this?  A lot of times, what we are expressing is that we don’t have a good handle on our pretense (or social mask) today, it is slipping from our grip and our sadness or another emotion is showing.  This is very different from being fragile.

The wall between your innermost feelings and thoughts is effectively your defense or pretense.  We are not saying this in a pejorative way.  Simply, we show certain aspects of ourselves to some and not others.  What we are arguing today, is that the thing that has become fragile, when your emotions don’t seem to be under control, is your pretense, not YOU.  

So, instead of thinking “I’M fragile today”, perhaps it would be better to consider, my pretense is fragile today.  Expressing your sadness (or any emotion) is not fragile, rather it usually has us feel stronger and more centered in ourselves, and often takes courage to do so.   

While you might think this is a minor distinction, or semantics, we think it is essential to highlight, because associating expressing emotion with fragility is inaccurate.  Emotional strength comes from being willing to feel what you are feeling when you are feeling it.  Associating feelings with fragility or weakness gets in the way of our ability to strengthen those muscles. 

To emotional strength

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Have you ever noticed that at times, anger is more motivating than joy?  The other day a friend had a bad experience with a retailer and wanted to give a bad review.  I overheard him struggling to find the correct screen to place his review.  I could tell it was becoming quite cumbersome to submit his bad review.  But, he persisted and persisted because he said that he wasn’t going to let them get away with it.  I have never seen him withstand this level of inconvenience to leave a positive review.

It got us thinking. Why is anger and expressing displeasure sometimes more attractive and motivating than sharing joy and appreciation?  We have a number of answers, and if you’ve worked with us, you will know our approach to this, however that is not the topic of this newsletter. 

Instead, we want to leave you with that curious thought.  Can you identify a time or two when you jumped over hurdles to tell someone, or an organization, or the world, your displeasure?   Can you think of some examples when you went out of your way to say “thank you”, either verbally or in writing?  I’m sure many of you have examples of both.  Perhaps, it’s a matter of degree.  Really, really unpleasant things get our attention and really, really good things get our attention.  Most of our life is spent in the middle of those extremes.  What would life be like if we appreciated all the little positive things that occur around us daily and looked to improve and give constructive feedback about the negative ones?

Like we said, this letter is not about leaving you with a conclusive thought, but rather encouraging  you to think about how this shows up in your life. 

To gratitude over complaints (or at least in balance)

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Do you ever wonder why you keep repeating the same behavior over and over, even when you know it doesn’t work well or create the results you want?

If you think of your mind as having been installed with computer programming, instructions, the answer becomes clearer.  Our “conscious” mind (for lack of a better descriptor) holds the instructions for all of the ways we want to be.  It is rational and charts a course from where we are to where we want to be with clear logical steps that the best how-to writers in the world would sign off on.  BUT, our actions are not always motivated by our “conscious” mind alone.  

Sometimes, our undealt with past, things that caused us upset, loss, fear, anger, etc, come up and drag us into behavior that is, at times, in complete opposition to what we say we want.  Usually this happens without us even being aware that our fears are diverting the course we charted.  

If you have a particular pattern in your life that keeps getting replayed over and over, it might be time to ask if there is some faulty “computer programming” that is operating during critical moments.  Sometimes, achieving certain results might threaten some of your thinking, or cause you to feel things that you do not want to feel.

It explains why a simple behavioral approach to unworkable patterns has limitations.  If you don’t understand your "computer programming," no matter how many times you adjust your path to success, you will keep hitting a wall.

Sometimes things beyond our “conscious” minds can cause us to repeat what doesn’t work in our lives.  Becoming aware of what lies beneath the surface can make a huge difference.  When we know more, we can make better decisions.  Our work for over 40 years has been helping people transcend or simply update the program generated by their “computer.”

To consciousness!

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Have you ever noticed that things are really never as good as we remember them and usually never as bad as we imagine them? 

That’s interesting isn’t it? 

What do you make of that? 

One thing we make of it is that we spend a whole lot of time experiencing the world through our imagination.  We stop ourselves from doing certain things because we IMAGINE bad outcomes.  We obsess over having particular situations or things because we IMAGINE how great we will feel.  

So, if we want to have a good life.  A happy life.  A successful life.  A purposeful life.  It follows that we also need to get a grip on our imagination.  We need to have an imagination rather than our imagination having us.  Of course another option would be to simply live in the moment.  And, deal with life as it is, not with our interpretation of it. Easier said than done.

What we help our clients do is to have more autonomy and sovereignty over their imagination.  Sometimes, that is as simple as being able to recognize that our thoughts are not facts.  Other times it is taking responsibility for the fear we cause in ourselves with imagined outcomes.  If you want to better understand how your imagination is limiting your potential in some areas and creating disappointment in others, reach out to us and learn more.

To having an imagination!

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