You Can’t Win

You can’t be right, either.

Too bad, eh? And then there’s the famous question:

“Do you want to be right or
do you want to be happy?”

I sup­pose it all depends on your def­i­n­i­tion of ‘happy.’ Many peo­ple equate it with win­ning and being right, so off we go into the wild blue…

It’s an odd one, how many peo­ple think that the rea­son some­thing they are doing doesn’t work is that they aren’t try­ing hard enough. Or, they think that, with a lit­tle extra per­sua­sion (from me, from their part­ner, from their doc­tor or some other author­ity fig­ure,) the non-working thing will mag­i­cally shift.

Maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t work because it’s the wrong approach!

The biggest con­fu­sion I see is the think­ing (or learn­ing) ver­sus act­ing mix-up.

Most folk read, and take courses, go out to The Haven, what­ever, and then the cherry-picking starts. What I mean is that our nature as humans is to ‘pick and choose,’ out of what we are learn­ing, only those things which sup­port what we already believe.

I once worked with a cou­ple. She’d been to Haven, and the issue was ‘com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the rela­tion­ship.’ I saw them together sev­eral times, and then she stopped com­ing. They also attended a Body­work workshop.

Dur­ing the work­shop, I taught breath­ing.

Happy 45^th, Karen Ann! Boy, you’re get­ting old…

I had peo­ple pair up, and one breathed while the other coached. I wan­dered, check­ing in with each cou­ple. When I got to them, she was cry­ing. I asked what was up. “He’s not doing it right!” she wailed.

Nor, appar­ently, could he do any­thing right. Her firmly held belief was that he was bro­ken and it was her job to ‘fix’ him. All that coun­selling, her ther­a­pist train­ing, (yup—she had a degree in counselling—she started a pri­vate prac­tice, then quit when she dis­cov­ered that she’d be work­ing with peo­ple with prob­lems. No. Really…) work­shops and sem­i­nars had led to one thing.

She now had a longer list of skills. She added them to her long list of what her part­ner was doing wrong.

In other words, her pre­vail­ing belief is that she is OK and every­one else is wrong. All this has ever got­ten her is mis­ery. So, she keeps the belief, gets train­ing, and has more things to blame oth­ers for!

Affir­ma­tion Folly

Another client fell in love with the guy who was build­ing the addi­tion on her house. She came to me for help. She wanted to con­struct the per­fect affir­ma­tion she could repeat so that her hus­band would accept her lover as her soul mate, wel­come him, and cel­e­brate with her the direc­tion her life was going. She just wouldn’t grasp that this is a lot to ask even in the best of relationships—her non-functional belief was that pos­i­tive think­ing and affir­ma­tions has the abil­ity to change stu­pid­ity into gold.

DOING it differently

Yes, doing. Last arti­cle, I men­tioned our hair styl­ist. She has made it her mis­sion to change her way of being by chang­ing her talk, her walk, and her affect.

Another client of mine is not book smart, but for the last 4 years he has been learn­ing and doing com­ple­men­tary med­i­cine to deal with a severely blown out back. He’s 54 and going back to school in a few days to become a Social Worker. He has mon­u­men­tally shifted what he is doing in the world, and has reached a point of inter­nal peace and contentment.

You must let go of every­thing that per­pet­u­ates your neg­a­tive states.

By ‘let go,’ I mean ‘lose your attach­ment for.’

Begin by admit­ting how attrac­tive your non-working belief sys­tem is. We have talked a lot in this series about how your mind works, and this is the ‘key dys­func­tion’ for all of us.

I have a con­di­tioned belief, it does not work, yet I cling to it and con­tinue to apply it to every­one and every thing, and all I get are crappy results.
I look for any­one and any­thing that will agree with me that what does not work should work, and will fix it.

You must then embrace what does work.

The sim­ple ver­sion of ‘what works’ is this.

“The way it is, is the way it is.”

Sit­u­a­tions, peo­ple, ‘the world,’ all of it (in Bud­dhism, the 10,000 things), is just there. I can­not change any of it, and whin­ing about it accom­plishes noth­ing.

What I can always change is my approach to the 10,000 things.

• I can com­mu­ni­cate ele­gantly, no mat­ter what oth­ers are doing.
• I can trust com­pletely, no mat­ter who is doing what.
• I can think and act with peace and con­tent­ment, no mat­ter what my circumstance.

This is hard work.

• Many are the harpies sur­round­ing us, who want us to be as mis­er­able as they are. Clear them, lov­ingly, from your life, by refus­ing to listen.
• You core belief in your own inep­ti­tude and inad­e­quacy will remain for life. How­ever, your hand is on the inter­nal vol­ume con­trol, and you can choose to still your mind, push the voice to the back­ground, and not live your life in its thrall.
• You can treat oth­ers with com­pas­sion, let them be, let them walk their path, and walk yours with verve and gusto. You are a much bet­ter exam­ple when you are actu­ally doing this as opposed to talk­ing about it wist­fully, as you wait for per­mis­sion or magic to set you free.

Next arti­cle I think we’ll head in another direc­tion. In the mean time, use the com­ment box below and let me know what you think, what you want to read about, etc.