Okay, Miss Smarty Pants, what do you suggest?
I'll elaborate on that in a future post. First, let's make sure we are on the same page where the nature of the problem is concerned so you'll understand where I come from with suggestions I'll make. Part of the problem, as I discussed yesterday, is that we have become numb. Numbed to our appetites, numb to ourselves. We don't know what we need, only what we have a craving for and we give in to it. A coaching client of mine said an excellent thing to me a couple days ago when we were talking about some of the habits he is in that steal away his life. He wants more out of life than he is getting but he had these habits that take up hours even when he's not intending for them to. One is his reflexively turning on the computer. I asked if he could turn it off.
"Sure! Turning if off is easy. Living with it off is the hard part."
Another client admitted admitted that what she was trying to convince herself was happiness was really just justification of staying off everyone's radar screen because she is afraid of failing. She stays at home and continues to go to a job that leaves her feeling dull and drained because at the end of the day, it's a safe place to be. A nicely decorated jail cell is still a jail cell.
Most of my clients are in this boat, trapped in habits that keep them from getting what they say they really want and the 'dread' (their word, not mine) of doing the work of breaking that habit, whatever it is, is absolutely daunting. And they come by this honestly, and I don't think they are that different from a lot of people out there. In this land of quick fixes for pretty much everything, we do not deal with discomfort and the unsatified craving well at all, at least in the U.S.
We are creatures of habit so many of our actions become reflexive. Coffee and cigarettes. Burgers and fries. Waking up and turning on the computer. Crabby kids in the car and stopping at McDonalds. Driving and talking on the phone. Some things just go together for us. They are just habits and a satisfied habit drops the tension level down and stress relief sometimes feels like reward enough. The problem is, we've become so numbed to ourselves that we don't realize, often, just how bad the consequences of our actions have been until very late.
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