Tag: mindset

  • How to deal with it when things are going haywire?

    Conversations with The Muse

    Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?

    Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.

    The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
    This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.

    In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.

    In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
    Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.

    Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.

    You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.

    These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.

    Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?

    Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.

    YOU ARE WRONG.

    Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.

    In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.

    Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?

    This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.

    And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.

    Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.

    This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.

    This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.

    Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.

    It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.

    It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.

    Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”

    Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.

    The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.

    This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Fun Killers are Productivity Killers, Part I

    Fun Killers are Productivity Killers, Part I

    Why do you want to be more “productive?” Why are there so many productivity books, products, courses, and gurus?

    If you examine this question, productivity isn’t quite what it seems. Lots of people (moi included) have fallen into the trap of seeking productivity for the sheer sake of “being more productive because that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

    But why?

    If you think about it, this is programming we carry around that is a) bogus and b) fun-killing. If you think about the source of this programming, we can go back to the factories of the Industrial era, with bosses lording over “production” to assure that it didn’t lag.

    Notice the similarity between the word “production” and “productivity?” Yeah.

    You are a tool

    The implication is that you are a tool for cranking out stuff (otherwise known as a “robot”). The more stuff a robot cranks out, the better the robot! The more we reward the robot. Yay! Good Robot!

    Um, no thanks. Not the way I want to live my life. And hopefully not the way you want to live yours. Being someone’s pet robot is not in my life plan.

    I can anticipate the objection now (hey, I’ve done enough grant writing that I am pretty good at figuring out what those objections might be, in advance).

    Your objection may be something like this:

    • If I produce more, I will earn more money and/or other rewards (like promotions or Nobel prizes).
    • If I earn more money and/or other rewards, I will be happier
    • Therefore, producing more means more happiness!

    Yes, I talk to a LOT of people who have this kind of implicit (and almost always unexamined) belief system.

    It’s not helping you…

    Let me count the ways in which this belief system does not serve you.

    1) Producing more does not lead to more money or other rewards. It is NEVER about the quantity, unless you’re on an assembly line or a farm. If you are doing anything even mildly creative in your work, it is about the QUALITY and NEWNESS of what you do, way more than quantity!

    (Imagine if your humble author went on a robot-like “productivity” binge and wrote 3 blog posts per day of blah blah blah blah blah… where would that get her? Um… nowhere! Or, perhaps having a Comp Sci degree, she could use an artificial intelligence program to auto-generate lots of blog posts? um…. blech)

    2) More money and/or other rewards do not equal more happiness. Quite often, the opposite occurs. People often have this ego that thinks these things will make it feel satisfied, but the ego is NEVER satisfied.

    For example, I had a client who recently had few HUGE wins in her life. A few days after the ego-led euphoria of those wins wore off, it was “back to normal” – but worse.

    It was “worse” because the big wins put additional pressure on her to “live up to” the wins and to “not screw it up.” So here she was, less than a week after some things that would create envy among many other people – feeling more doubt and concern than ever. (Fortunately, we worked through that and she’s back on track!)

    Those wins, like money and stuff, never produce lasting joy or satisfaction. So why is it that we often spend much of our lives striving for them?

    Ego programming. The ego is not by itself “bad” (and you’re not going to get rid of it in this life anyway). However, through various experiences with various people in our lives, we pick up ego programming that tells us that seeking fame or fortune or stability or security is for our highest good. And we carry that programming through life, unexamined, it shaping most of our actions and experiences without us even knowing it.

    And so we end up pursuing goals that are shallow, ego-led goals, never finding the long-lasting joy or satisfaction that is our birthright as a human.

    For many of my readers, you may be more in the category of “seeking security” or “seeking stability” rather than “fame and fortune.” You may even have some judgement relative to those people who seek fame and fortune, thinking of them as ego-driven, while thinking of yourself as not so ego-driven.

    I encourage you to think about that for a moment. What generates the need for security or stability for many people? Fear – i.e. not wanting insecurity, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, fear of what will happen, fear of things not going well, etc.

    Where does fear come from? Ego programming! Fear is only and always about ego. It is just a different form of ego programming. Yet it can take over your life in an insidious manner that’s far less than the obvious ego programming that leads to seeking fame and fortune.

    We live in an ego led world, and I am an ego girl…

    Okay, the line from the song by Madonna didn’t fit this expression so well, but I will proceed nonetheless….

    We live in a very ego-led world. It is rare to encounter someone who has seriously undertaken a path of attempting to live at a deeper level, one that strives to constantly go deeper than the ego-programming and to live from the CORE. That means living in the NOW, enjoying each moment, being in the flow, and creating!

    So, we tore apart the notion that “producing more will produce more happiness.” It’s bogus.

    I don’t think that anyone truly wants to “be productive.” (Have you EVER met a small child who says “I want to be PRODUCTIVE today?” I didn’t think so.)

    No, I think that people want to have harmony, adventure, joy, fun, excitement, intrigue, love, connection and similar feelings/experiences. And we need to get rid of the notion that more productivity somehow leads directly to more of those things.

    It often leads to exactly the opposite – especially in our over-jacked, hyped up, always-on society. We often get sucked into “being productive” for the sake of “being productive” and then these other things become ever more elusive. That’s bogus.

    So, in part II of the article, we’re going to do a logical trick that is going to blow your mind (or at least tweak it a tiny bit) – to redefine the relationship of productivity to your fun and to your life.

    Stay tuned……