Make Discomfort Your Ally Part 3 I’ve enjoyed considerable success assisting people beyond this self-imposed boundary by encouraging them to shift their relationship with their discomfort. If the disquiet of moving into new terrain becomes our justification for maintaining old thinking and old behavior, we need to alter our relationship with this anxiety. Begin to look at the discomfort as your ally, as a signal that you’re venturing out of the familiar zone. If you’re comfortable, you’re likely stuck in the groove of old thought. Therefore, being comfortable needs to become problematic. When I’m working with someone who may claim that trying to change their thinking makes them uncomfortable, I might say, “I’m happy to hear that.” What I’m proposing is that we need to embrace the disquiet in order to progress. Just as working out and training our bodies into shape requires a certain discomfort, so does learning to free our thinking from the groove. Many people are prepared to engage the discomfort of working out strenuously for the anticipated benefit to both their health and vanity, yet we’re inclined to be more tentative surging beyond our familiar zone on emotional and psychological levels. If we put as much effort into our internal processes as we do our physical and material states, we’d be rather surprised at how different our reality might look. At times, when I encourage people to make this stretch they might protest and say, “That’s not easy to do.” I ask them how they come to believe that if they’ve never been taught how to accomplish this. The very thought that “it’s hard to do” something is an illustration of old thought defending its territory. That thought becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and impedes the process. As always, we must ask what informs our thoughts and beliefs. From a meta view, the belief that it’s hard to change would make perfect sense in Newton’s mechanistic universe of fixed objects. Yet, the emerging worldview is one of flowing, unfolding movement in which change is constantly happening. The familiar zone acts as a literal boundary, which limits and constrains our experiences. I recall having a walking therapy session with a young woman at the beach, not far from my office. She was seriously challenged with social anxiety and self-protected by being reclusive. The very consideration of socializing with peers overwhelmed her and provoked acute stress and anxiety. Rather than engaging her fears, she succumbed to the avoidance of encountering such stress.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:50:47 +0000
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