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"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and freedom."
- Viktor Frankl
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Martha Beck did a fabulous column in the 10th anniversary issue of O Magazine, listing the 10 rules she's glad she unlearned. I will replace her past tense with my ongoing "unlearnings", as I find my life these days to be a daily practice of retraining my brain after years of being wired to believe certain thoughts that just aren’t absolutely true.
The only thing bad about mistakes is thinking there is something bad about making them. Being afraid of making a mistake is one of the most paralyzing, unconscious drivers of inactivity, discontent, and generalized resentment among people I've seen. Becoming impervious to what is considered a “mistake”, being open to admitting it, observing that there are no true mistakes in life, and maintaining a cheerful lighthearted ability to keep going, is what I'm learning to do now.
Sometimes, you'll be wrong about something. That's fine, and my experience is usually you survive it. But you inflict another layer of pain to deal with when you make it wrong to be wrong. It's like the double whammy that prolongs, amplifies, and propagates the original pain of just being wrong.
Labels - often the ones that were mentioned in passing during our childhood by a single person who made an impact at that time - can stay with us as beliefs about ourselves long after the fact. They can serve as reasons or excuses that we never try for something we really long to do. I've seen this in countless conversations with people when I tell them that I teach music. Grown adults - some in their 70s - carry around the shame (or pride) of being "tone deaf" or "unmusical". Some actually believe that there's an absolute truth to their label, and want to start arguing with me about the possibility of their claims. I’ve seen from experience with people from 2 years old through 82, that anyone can make music. It is innate to our being, and I want to remind as many people as I can of this.
The number of years of your life does not necessarily correlate with the level of wisdom or quality of your life. People tend to give advice based on what they have done themselves, or what they regret not doing. I've met both cheerful, free-spirited people in their 70s who are learning and active in their bodies, and people in their 30s who have such a resigned attitude and closed sense of possibilities that they have no joy. I’m not convinced that we will all learn to be wise with the mere passage of time. I believe we need to choose learning, choose mentors, choose influences in order to continuously create peace, freedom, and joy as we grow younger toward death.
I've met people with great resumes, high-paying executive positions, at the top of their industries for decades, but who feel a hollow sense of purpose and connection to their lives. At one point in my life, I was fascinated by people who had attained these high positions of status and power. Now, I wouldn't trade places with one of them for anything. On the other hand, spending time with people who are genuinely gentle with themselves through crises, catastrophic losses, and myriad apparent “failures” has been an eye-opening view into the real joy of being able to face the full range of human experience with acceptance and peace.
I used to see life as a linear path of continuous building to some peak, followed by a steady decline or stagnation toward death. I was afraid of taking “steps backward” and therefore felt guilty when I faced loss or departure. Now I realize that creativity and change require SPACE, and often there is something occupying the space that needs to be let go. Realizing that the “letting go” step is as important as - or perhaps more than - the “putting in” is a huge shift in thinking for me. But I've found it to be true!
Similar to above, being afraid to abandon one path in order to start over is such a killer to creativity. There is a freshness and freedom that comes with starting over. Constantly abandoning what's not working, and starting over with renewed energy, is the cycle of life for any living thing, down to the cellular level. I'm practicing being gentler with myself when it's time to start over, beginning with the way I wake up and greet each morning…with gratitude.
There was an obsession in my Harvard and medical school days with the number and types of qualifications people had. I was led to believe that this list of qualifications actually meant something about the person. However in meeting people who liberated themselves from systems that valued qualifications (therefore appearance) over substance, and learning from their generosity of spirit, I've come to trust myself and others more. I don’t jump to quick conclusions based on the number of letters after a person’s name or the number of framed pieces of paper on their office walls. And this is such a peaceful, loving place to be.
I have had to learn how to relax, and I have a newfound respect for actually being able to do it. I also recognize that relaxation is powerful! Truly allowing my entire body and mind to relax actually takes new skills that are not easily practiced in our day-to-day lives. We have to create space in order to relax, and it takes conscious intention to do this. Ever notice that when we take vacations, it’s not until the sixth or seventh day that we completely settle into the sensations of our bodies, and connect with our surroundings? Or that by the time we get home, we may finally feel ready to begin our vacation? I have a newfound respect for the art of relaxation, and I’m noticing that time passes, life happens, whether we are fighting it every step of the way, or relaxing into it with the ease and peace of a yogi. It’s up to us how we want to live. I’ve decided to choose peace.
This is a huge unlearning for me, and one my brain wants to resist with all its will. In other words, my brain wants me to work hard at everything. Even relaxing takes on epic proportions if I let my brain do the directing. I’m beginning to see that meeting each challenge with minimal resistance, greeting each part of myself with curiosity rather than shame, and allowing life to unfold, in all its mystery, leads to a better experience than any goal I could ever work myself toward.
I recently started following Conan O'Brien on Twitter. I figure it's the least I can do, since I never watched him when he was on at 12:35AM, and I watched a grand total one whole episode of the Tonight Show, AFTER the J-- L--- controversy. I have loved Conan since I read a transcript of his June 2000 commencement speech at Harvard. I remember getting the email of the transcript (this was before YouTube), sent by my Harvard classmate Ann, who was in London about to leave her job at an investment bank and enroll in culinary school in France. I remember printing it out, and highlighting certain passages of it, before posting it on the wall next to my desk, in my Ann Arbor, Michigan apartment. And that's when my love for Conan began.
Not only was it unusual to have Conan's brand of humor in the context of a Harvard ceremony, but it was also unheard of (at that time) to hear a person stand behind a podium and talk about his failures. He went in chronological order, covering each stage of his hopeful steps toward being a working comedian on television. At one point, with nowhere else to turn and his fledgling cable show having been cancelled, he even got a temp job at Wilson's House of Leather. As a Harvard graduate.
The highlighted passages on my faded print-out still ring like a soliloquy by my beloved Conan:
"Needless to say, I took a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it excessive. And it hurt like you wouldn't believe. But I'm telling you all this for a reason. I've had a lot of success and I've had a lot of failure. I've looked good and I've looked bad. I've been praised and I've been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary. Except for Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. That was just stupid."
"I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way. I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good. So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over."
And that message has always stuck with me. I sat on the floor reading it as I entered my fourth year of medical school, wondering how I had ended up there. I pulled it out when I was having thoughts of leaving my job in venture capital, but was gripped with the fear that I would be letting others down. I've since realized that each time I picked up and left, I was still suffering from my own version of the white tuxedo. I wanted to make "clean" breaks with my past each time I left a career. I wanted to shed the identities that I had so carefully cultivated, but I would leave only to start putting on another one. All my life I've desperately wanted to have an identity that other people could understand, while also struggling to be free to understand myself more fully. I always felt that I was more than any job title or industry, but never got comfortable with just being "me". I didn't feel I ever knew my own full potential, and I wanted to live my life trying to find out.
It would require embracing my own definition of failure and allowing the possibility, knowing that I would survive.
I love Conan more than ever now that he has gone through the storm of being booted out of his Tonight Show gig and emerged as an independent roadshow star. Watching his video at Google shows that he has the resilience of someone who doesn't feel entitled to stardom, but has the steadfast belief to put his craft out there for whomever will receive it. Using his name recognition and social media tools, he has jumped headfirst into the arena of internet marketing, selling out his roadshow within a few hours using only one Twitter link to a website selling tickets.
I particularly love his grasp of the whole "smart" crowd that populates the employee ranks at Google, even as he makes jokes at their expense. He can laugh at himself, which is a lesson we can all hope to learn.
I love that he continues to live the lessons he talked about way back in 2000. He continues to get into new white tuxedoes, unafraid of getting splashed with mud. Sure, he gets pissed off like anyone of us would if our brand new jacket were soiled, but he's got an inner source to tap into, a humility and humor reserved from all those years of failing. He isn't afraid to pick himself up, and change jackets.
Maybe this time around, he'll just be happy wearing a T shirt.
“Life begins when you put down the knife that you’ve been holding to your own neck.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love
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Elizabeth was addressing the crowd gathered for O Magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash in New York City, using her signature blend of truth, humor, and self-compassion to remind us that in our quest to “live our best lives”, we can easily fall prey to perfectionism, trying to fix everything that we find broken, and holding ourselves hostage to our own ideal images of who we believe we should be.
It’s a challenge in our culture of extremes to find what feels like balance for YOU. We’re being told by a lot of people what balance “should” be, and given formulas for how to achieve it. Go to a retreat center. Get a massage. Hire a life coach. Read this book. Watch this video. Join this community. Listen to this teacher. It’s enough to make you feel so overwhelmed that keeping the status quo seems a whole lot easier than trying to do something about it.
Right now, I’m in a deep practice of rethinking my thoughts, observing how my responses to situations are governed by a few deeply rooted beliefs that I never had an awareness of until my own experience with burnout led me to my training as a life coach. For me, I have noticed that by believing three main thoughts, I experience most of my feelings of stress, overwhelm, and resistance to what life brings my way.
As I write them and look at them now, they still cause me twinges of pain. They are the three different knives I’ve been holding to my own neck, to borrow Elizabeth Gilbert’s image. Maybe you can imagine similar thoughts that you’ve had, and how they land in your body as sensations – a knot in your stomach, a crook in your neck, a clenching in your jaw. When taken to the extreme, any one of these thoughts feels like the threat of my imminent demise. It can cause me to freeze up, become silent, and wonder why I bother to say anything at all.
When I first started to notice these thoughts, the first thing I did was disbelieve how powerful they were as forces in shaping my life. “It’s only a thought,” I thought to myself. I blew it off as no big deal. I tried to take big, bold actions to show how free I was of these limiting beliefs. Limits, me? No way! And what happened? The same thoughts came back in different situations, causing me to behave in similar ways and feel similarly to the way I did in previous situations.
The second thing I did was to be a very dutiful student of the process, coming up with “perfect” turnarounds that showed how skillful I was at mastering the tool. To the first statement, I said, “It’s always enough.” I basked briefly in a moment of triumph for stepping into such power with an abundance-filled affirmation about how the universe always provides, etcetera. But, as my coach pointed out, that is a bunch of baloney if you don’t genuinely believe what you’re saying. Until you look for the evidence in your own life that shows how a turnaround is true, it’s only words on a page.
Busted!
I found this other turnaround to be just as true for me: “I’m never enough for me (my own standards).” Yet another proverbial knife to the neck that I’ve been holding. I can find the truth that I’m never enough for my own standards, and my mind proves that true by preventing me from taking the risk of stating what I really want. If I never set that lofty goal, then I’ll always have a reason to say I haven’t met it. I’ll never be enough for me, as long as that’s what my mind still believes.
For me, the hardest challenge - the thing I think I cannot do - is doing less. And being OK with that being enough for now. Not taking responsibility for other people's feelings or fixing them. Doing my best in each moment, and trying to learn. Now I see that every time I say, "This is enough!", I am one step closer to believing that I can be enough for me. Each time I say, "This is enough!", I am closer to putting down the knife. And it ain't easy!
When you’ve been walking around holding a knife to your own throat, you don’t just drop it when someone tells you to do so. You may recognize that you don’t like the sensation, but you also don’t know another way. You’ve grown accustomed to “living on the edge”, motivated by the fear of never being enough, running out of time, or being responsible for other people’s opinions of you. These thoughts have gotten you to a certain point in terms of getting a certain job, the approval of family, the image of success, or the apparent ingredients of happiness. To question them may feel like something you might not survive.
Well, you’re right. Part of you – the ego identities associated with those beliefs – will die. But if you’re willing to go through the “death” of disbelieving your painful thoughts, what’s left is the clean, clear mind that gives rise to peace, no matter what circumstances you find yourself in.
So it’s not a new set of instructions, rules, or formulas to follow that will give you what your soul wants. It’s not another idol to worship, or a teacher to please, or a parent to plead for love from. The soul’s nature is to be free and at peace. All you need to do is clear the obstacles.
And put down the knife.
In her June 2008 commencement speech at Harvard, JK Rowling reminds fledgling Harvard graduates that they may be driven as much by a fear of failure as a need to succeed. She describes her own failure, finding herself seven years after college graduation a divorced single parent living in poverty, as the "rock bottom which became a solid foundation upon which I rebuilt my life." In our quest to climb the next career ladder, to appear "put together" in all aspects of our lives, to create images of ourselves that measure up to our ideals, what parts of our humanity do we miss? A beautifully written talk.
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
If you have behaved yourself into a situation, you must behave yourself out of it! The behavior in this case is the behavior of the mind. As a physician, you went through systematic training of the mind to get you to believe certain thoughts. When was the last time you questioned one of these thoughts?
Learning that the mind's natural tendency is to attach to certain thoughts and believe them; and observing that the root of all painful, stressful feelings is believing certain thoughts, was revolutionary for me. I uncovered a system of thoughts that I believed without question, and realized that I already had all the freedom I was longing for. I simply had to question my thoughts.
To show you how this process works, it's best to use real examples.
Each week I’m going to take a stressful thought that is central to the physician’s belief system, and question it. Follow along, and even listen in on the audio podcast as you do your own work on the same thought.
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*This process is based on The Work of Byron Katie. For more information, visit www.thework.com.
A list of physicians’ common stressful thoughts:
“I need to take care of patients.”
“I am surrounded by illness, suffering, and death.”
“Patients demand my time.”
“People need me to respond.”
“I need to fill out paperwork.”
“There is too much paperwork.”
“My job is stressful.”
“Medicine is a stressful profession.”
“I don’t have enough time.”
“I have too many patients.”
“I am responsible for my patients.”
“I am responsible for keeping my patients healthy.”
“I am responsible for alleviating my patients’ pain and suffering.”
“I can’t make a mistake.”
“I need to do the right thing.”
“I work too many hours.”
“I don’t get paid enough.”
“I don’t get enough respect.”
“I need to be more efficient.”
“I already paid my dues.”
“I sacrificed myself to become a doctor.”
“I’m dealing with life or death issues.”
“This is more than just a job.”
“I need to find meaning in my job.”
“I’m too busy.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“I trained all those years to be able to do my job.”
“I’ve worked so hard already.”
“I can’t give up my job.”
“I need to put my training to good use.”
“I need to put the patient first.”
“My needs are secondary to the patient’s.”
“The system needs an overhaul.”
“I am a doctor.”
Can you come up with any more, based on your own experience?
Make your own list, and follow along as I question each of these thoughts.
The questions:
Now turn the thought around, as I have done below. Find three genuine examples in your life for how each of these new thoughts is as true as the original thought.
Take the time to find examples that feel genuine to you, and that come from your own life.
Notice where you are facing resistance to this process, and when your mind wants to "speed up" rather than find the examples.
Today I was asked by an interviewer to describe the greatest obstacle I’ve faced since deciding to leave medicine. I responded, “The fear of disappointing other people.” As I said it, I realized that this “obstacle” has felt very real to me at various times in my life. But when I look at it now, I can see that this fear is no more than a simple thought. In my mind is the story, “I can’t disappoint other people.” Why? “Because it will mean that I’m a bad person.” And why is that bad? “Because bad things happen to bad people.” And so on.
When I count the number of times I know that I have disappointed people, and imagine the number of times that I don’t even know about, it’s amazing to notice that I’m still alive and well, sitting here typing on a keyboard! The point is, when we examine our deepest fears, we will discover that they are no more than simple, unexamined thoughts.
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We move through our fears as we move through life, and when we stay stuck in the story of a fear, our lives get stuck there as well. The more we become aware of this, the more freedom we can experience in any situation. Learning to observe our thoughts, and play with them, as a regular practice, will help loosen the grip of fear in our minds.
I’ve been moving through fear after fear in my life, without having words to describe my process until now. If I had learned earlier to recognize my “fear of disappointing people” as a mere thought, and not a reality of the present moment, I might have gotten to this point with less guilt and more joy.
In 2001, I graduated from medical school without a job (disappointing many professors and especially my parents), but within a few weeks was interning for no pay at a venture capital firm, which hired me six weeks later and eventually promoted me to partner (I guess bad things didn't happen to me because I disappointed people). Three years later, having achieved some “success” and status in a high-profile industry, I wanted to follow my heart. I risked disappointing my partners, and took a step for my own life anyway when I moved across the country to California to open a violin school for children. This had been my dream since the age of four.
In January, after five years of successfully teaching three-year-olds to be more like grown-ups, I faced a huge looming fear of disappointing many people, and I brought my violin teaching to an end. I know that I disappointed many people for many different reasons, and I also know that this is the work I need to be doing right now.
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I now describe my work as teaching adults to be more like three-year-olds. As a speaker, writer, and life coach, I am on a quest to remind adults that we each have creative power within us that simply needs to be practiced in our everyday lives. We need to develop flexibility, strength, and balance in our minds, much like we do for our bodies on a yoga mat.
Try this process – it’s powerful and simple, yet requires the courage to look at what’s really going on in your own mind. You might have that strange, unfamiliar yet exhilarating feeling you get when you’re trying something new (and fun!) for the first time.
With practice, you might even discover what every three-year-old already knows…anything is possible!
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Copyright Lisa Chu, The Music Within Us, 2009-2023.