I come from a family of do-ers.
My mom was a nurse and high-ranking officer in the Army and my dad, a private, owned and ran the family flooring business.
I grew up watching my parents solve problems together, stretch a dollar, have huge financial setbacks and somehow manage to give my brother and me all they could. The 2-bedroom apartment that was home meant that my brother and I took turns sleeping on the sofa while the other had a stint in a real bedroom. We’d swap every year or so.
Our manner of operating as a family was to fix things, chase goals, get better and do more.
On to the next task, project or destination.
Same with you?
Technology in this modern era lends itself to always being on the go. It has us do-ing rather than be-ing. Who hasn’t stood in line at CVS while pruning their inbox or purchased a pet cam while waiting for the movie to begin? Queuing up anywhere has become a reason to jump on email, Instagram, FB or Bumble.
When was the last time you stood still? Took in your surroundings? Noticed what is was like to live in your own skin?
It had been a while for me, too.
I recently came across a study which gave scientific credence to the fact that many people are uncomfortable with their own company and will do almost anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts, including receive a minor electric shock. In the study, feeling the shock was preferable to sitting idle with too much time to think.
Not joking.
What Should I Do?
A question I get all the time is “What do I need to do? Can’t you give me a homework to do?
I understand. Doing something … anything, gives us a sense of control.
Yet, the capacity to know ourselves – to be self-aware – rests with our ability to be present with ourselves. Growth is less about “What do I need to do?” and more about “What do I need to understand?” Experiencing our experiences is key to solving our problems and growing. To make an emotionally intelligent decision about what we need in order to get unstuck, we must first accept the fact that we are where we are.
I know what you’re thinking.
“That’s dumb. Backwards. I’ll feel even worse if I accept my stuckness.” Let me explain.
Have you ever tried to untangle a snarled and braided mass of chain, perhaps necklaces that have all but mated in the back of a drawer? Or try to uncoil a long garden hose whose ends have mysteriously folded in on themselves to form a snaky, knotted mess? Anytime I’ve come at this sort of project with a histrionic desperation, the knots won. In fact, they got worse, tighter and tighter. What to do? I’ve learned with experience to tell myself to settle down, to look at the bundle before me with the eye of a detached observer rather than the mindset of a sputtering electrical wire, popping and sizzling my way through. To use the best approach, I had to let myself be comfortable with the stuckness of it all and not let my frustrations overtake me.
I decided to let my gaze follow the twists and tucks of the intertwined mess with a tiny bit of objectivity. Doing this for a moment or two allowed me to feel that I was bigger than the clump instead of the other way around. I could then coax one chain out, yes, painstakingly, find where it intersected with the next and after some time, thread my way free.
As humans, we face instances of stuckness on a much grander scale.
For instance, one moment we feel excited about the prospect of opening up to new love. The next moment we talk ourselves out of it, our mind fleeing from scary possibilities – the potential that we may feel rejected or the inevitability of disappointment inherent in every human relationship. Or, we take on an exciting work project, one that could quite possibly bring us more visibility, get us noticed by the right people. Suddenly and without conscious reasoning, we derail our enthusiasm. We get distracted, delayed, deflated. We decide to let someone else have the opportunity to be praised. Or criticized. Or judged. We’re not about to take the gamble, so we forfeit our turn.
Stuckness doesn’t feel comfortable. It’s no wonder we find ways to escape it. We reach into the fridge when we’re not hungry, make purchases when we don’t need anything, watch hours and hours of even good television just to numb our own discomfort.
But escaping usually compounds our problems.
I recently learned how Navy Seals “drown-proof themselves” in a blog written by one of my most favorite blog writers, Henneke Duistermaat of Enchanting Marketing, who teaches bloggers how they can become more enchanting with their writing. You may think that what Navy Seals go through is unrelated to anything the rest of us could possibly experience. You’d be wrong.
In her piece, Ms. Duistermaat describes how the Seals deal with getting stuck, how they have to be able to think things through and not panic, especially if something goes wrong in the water. To train for this, the Seals are dropped into a 9-foot deep pool with their hands and feel bound. They have 20 minutes to complete a series of death-defying maneuvers. They must pass all the underwater events, or they are considered a failure and removed from training.
The key to their survival? Is it strength? Endurance? Stamina? Surprisingly, no. The number one factor that this exemplary group of people rely on for survival is their ability to refrain from “do-ing” and simply give into the reality of their situation. They must allow themselves to sink to the bottom without wiggling or thrashing. Once there, they bend their knees and push up, allowing the momentum to propel them to the surface. They can then get a quick breath of air and repeat the process for almost 20 minutes until the final event which is flipping themselves upside down to retrieve a small object from the pool’s floor with their teeth.
Along the way, the Navy Seal candidate will either relax in the water or fail. In essence, survival lies in the willingness to surrender to the difficult and dangerous situation. Surrender in this case doesn’t mean to give up. It means to resist the urge to fight so that every bit of the candidate’s resources can then be harnessed. Our human tendency is to expend our energy fighting, to rip the ropes off, to pull at the tangles, to do something.
But there are times when it’s better to do nothing. When you think about it, choosing to do nothing but surrender is doing something. It is deciding, which is perhaps the singularly most survival-inducing thing we can do. Try it.
The next time you feel stuck, instead of thrashing about in an unwieldy panic, scrambling to find a solution or get something done or say “yes” to someone’s request right away, sit with your discomfort a bit. Give yourself a little room to catch your breath. Think of those Navy Seals. Picture them bobbing, floating, flipping, allowing their maneuvers to take their cues from a calm mind. Picture them surviving and surviving strong.
When we resist the urge to fight and instead, use our mind to accept where we are, we can find an unexpected sense of calm. We can anchor ourselves in the knowledge that self-acceptance is a strategy, one worth choosing. By acknowledging the reality of things, rather than running from it, we can decide how we wish to get through challenging experiences without requiring the experiences to conform to our wishes. They seldom do.
Even during chaos and turbulence, awareness of who we are at our core becomes the stake in the ground that keeps us from getting swept away – swept away by other peoples’ expectations, opinions, unresolved hurts – and our tendency to be defined by them.
So, go ahead and DO something. Decide. Choose. Acknowledge. Remind yourself of who you are at your essence.