Feeling stuck? Listen to the stories you tell yourself about yourself
Everyone has a story :
- I suck at golf because I started too late
- I’m not athletic
- I didn’t get the sale because I’m bad at closing
- I’ll never find someone; I’m unlovable
- I’ll never make enough money
We all have some good stories, but we don’t give much time to them.
No, we invest our emotional energy in our shitty stories; we hate ‘em but they provide some comfort—and a sense of control—because they’re so familiar. We’ve been telling these stories to ourselves most of our lives.
They’re also very handy. Our stories provide us with an out: “I can just keep doing what I’m doing because that’s the way things are.
“Otherwise, I might have to make an effort, get uncomfortable, change my routine, take a risk, make a different choice or, egad, I might have to ask someone for help!”
Nah. That would be a lot of work. And not very dignified. Not doing that.
I was thinking about this recently when I couldn’t find my prescription sunglasses with the very cool $560 frames and newly replaced $188 lenses. (Yes, after checking the receipt, I was a little shocked by my extravagance.)
While I dashed around the house looking for them, I did my usual spiral—berating myself for my carelessness and absent-mindedness. I remembered my mom’s famous line: “You’d forget your head if it wasn’t bolted on.”
I thought about what it would cost to replace them. “Well, you’ll just have to squint all summer. What a loser.” My story was both literal and figurative.
Eventually, I thought: “When did I last wear them?”
Oh yes, at the range at my son Sean’s golf club the day before. I jumped in the car. They were in the club’s lost and found.
Phew. Emergency over.
With the sunglasses perched on my nose, I thought about my unwise emotional investments:
- Make mistakes, lose things, go through my inventory of personal shortcomings = self-flagellation and feelings of misery and woe
- When things are humming along = feel generally kinda OK
Those are emotional investments are plainly stupid. But I do it and I’ll bet you do it.
When I couldn’t find my sunglasses, rather than race around and spiralling, it would have been smarter to simply sit down and think.
You know: what if I responded rather than reacted?
Ah yes, “respond rather than react.” So wise, so mature, so aware.
I used to think awareness was enough. That once we’re aware of the dumb things we do, well, it’s obvious that we’ll change. It makes no sense to do the same stupid nonsense over and over.
Nonsense such as running to the range to find a fix for our swing, scrolling through YouTube for a secret, getting bent out of shape because your spouse is upset at you, or blaming others because the project is stalling.
Awareness is curative, but it’s not enough. We can’t change our story or behaviours without making the appropriate response. By taking right action. By taking personal responsibility to make choices that serve us and others.
I believe this speaks to the spiritual part of golf and our lives, which I explore in my book Getting Unstuck: 7 Transformational Practices for Golf Nerds, as well as in my own reading.
These days, I’m reading about the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who is regarded as one of the greatest theologians and philosophers of the 20th Century.
He wrote that we are always evolving, becoming more complex, and learning more about ourselves through science and psychology, to name a few. As humans, we’re driven to develop a deeper consciousness of who we are and where we ought to be going.
In the book, The New Spiritual Exercises based on the work of Chardin, Louis M. Savary writes: “It is important to remember that consciousness has two essential components: awareness and appropriate response.
“In order to be conscious, it is not enough to be simply awake or aware of what is going on … it requires a response to the stimulus—at least some thought or reflection.
“If you do nothing (with awareness) … you remain unconscious because nothing has happened to you.”
What I get from Savary and Chardin is that to move forward in our lives—whether it’s in our golf, vocations, career or our relationships—we must keep developing our consciousness. That is, we need to wake up, become aware of our stories and then act on what is real.
Rather than tell ourselves the same old story, we could try a new emotional investment strategy: awareness + appropriate response.
The ROI is way better.
