David Teachout's Blog, page 2

The Values of Behavior

Ever wondered what behavior was all about? In The Values of Behavior, we explore Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) through the relational structure of Values – Narrative – Behavior, the guiding philosophy taught at Life Weavings through therapy and coaching. Challenging the usual understanding of behavior, a conscious reaction to a situation, we’ll be looking at how our actions, in consideration of the nature of our predictive brains and our deep need to construct a reality, work for us and makes sense. 

Values are the foundation of every behavior, yet each action does not represent a specific value. Excelling in business for one person may support the value of (financial) freedom, for another it may be for power or control. Caring for an elderly family member satisfy the value of duty for one person and compassion for another. Understanding the value that drives a particular behavior allows you the freedom to explore if there may be another way to better support the life you want to live.

Within any response to a situation, we are always engaged in supporting what we care about, in other words our values. This is important to recognize as we often become focused on our behavior and lose sight of the value we want to support. To use an ACT term this fusion blinds us to the possibility that we an express what is important to us in many different ways. When we focus on what we value the variety of possible actions we can choose from to accomplish our goal.

The post The Values of Behavior appeared first on Life Weavings.

Finding Values in Every Behavior

Ever wondered what behavior was all about? Here we explore Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) through the relational structure of Values – Narrative – Behavior, the guiding philosophy taught at Life Weavings through therapy and coaching. Challenging the usual understanding of behavior that it is a conscious reaction to a situation, instead we’ll be looking at how behavior works in consideration of the nature of our predictive brains and our deep need to construct a reality that works for us and makes sense. 

If you have any questions about any part of this episode, please feel free to reach out at David.teachout@lifeweavings.com. I will respond to each message and it’s possible your question may get an entire episode dedicated to it!

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The post Finding Values in Every Behavior appeared first on Life Weavings.

Conspiracies – Patterns We Create to Feel in Control

“Fear is the mind-killer.” So says the Bene Gesserit, a female-only religio-political group from the sci-fi epic series of Dune by Frank Herbert. The aphorism concerns the tendency for humanity to forget its more rational potential in the face of a lack of control. Because that’s what fear is, the perception of an upcoming loss.

Notice that fear is about the future. Fear is immediately replaced in the present by any number of other emotional assessments. If the loss was personal enough, it’s replaced by depression and/or anger. If the loss didn’t happen, it’s replaced by anxiety that it may still occur and/or relief. There’s another replacement that I want to focus on here though, that of vindication. Such occurs when fear is replaced by certainty. Whether based on an objective critical analysis or the self-serving manifestations of bias, doesn’t matter. Vindication replaces fear when the world moves forward in the way that you believe it will, whether positively or, insidiously, negatively.

Why Patterns

Pause for a moment and consider the feeling the last time something went wrong and you verbalized or thought a version of the phrase “I knew it would be bad.” Remember it? Vindication. It’s a complex feeling combining a perceived sense of control with a self-righteous belief that the world succumbed to your analysis of it. There are few things sweeter than vindication and given this definition, that makes sense, it’s attached to the belief that your singular mind captured the complexity of the whole of reality, if only for a moment. Of course that would be intoxicating. Don’t get me wrong, by “you” I am most assuredly including myself. “You” is humanity writ large. Vindication may be one of the most quintessentially human experiences in the universe.

Control and analysis/assessment are two sides of our pattern-building mental lives. From seeing images in clouds to John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” and the various “Bible Codes,” pattern-building is foundational to how our species spread across the globe and flung machines into the heavens. With control we are applying the immediacy of our emotional system, seeking a gestalt or all-encompassing picture of our experience. It is no mystery that we use the phrase “to grasp,” i.e. to hold within our power, when stating our understanding of a subject/experience. On the flip-side of control, is analysis/assessment, our long-term system, selecting pieces out of our experience to support and further our initial intuitive or unconscious understanding.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

If you paused a moment at that definition of analysis, that’s a good thing, because it’s counter-intuitive. We seem, as a species, prone to the belief that our minds are picking up on or illuminating the laws and systems of the universe. Knowledge is felt to be something “out there,” for us to grasp. See, there’s that word again. Rather difficult to get away from. We instinctively feel as if the world is something other than ourselves, that we are cut off from it in some way and constantly on a journey of discovering its secrets to use for our betterment. When put that way, our hubris or excessive pride in our achievements, seems a tad silly…and inevitable. As Erich Fromm noted, we are the only species capable of believing itself removed from Paradise, of having been taken away from our union with nature. While certainly a sad story and one that lies at the heart of many religious narratives, the true sadness is how utterly and completely false that story is and our seeming genetic drive to embrace it, like bugs to a zapper.

Patterns, whether the stories of mythology, theology, the sciences and governmental systems, are all about us. Not because we’re finding out how the world works, but because we’re actively engaged within and as it. Our felt separation from the world is a result of our capacity for perspective-taking. As “Dr. Jackson” said from the movie “Stargate,” every destination needs a starting point. That starting point is the “you” you believe yourself to be. Pattern-making is our way of seeing ourselves in our experience. By doing so we mollify, moment by moment, the existential dread/fear/loneliness that comes from feeling cut off.

Be Careful of Knowing

While patterns are immensely helpful in a myriad of ways, vindication can be as much a trap as the question of “what’s one more?” can be to an addict. Think back again to that feeling of rightness when confronted with a situation gone wrong. Did it inspire any self-reflection? Did it encourage you to broaden the scope of your thinking to see if just maybe you’d missed something? Of course not. The world made sense. Things happened the way you thought they would. Questions at that point would not only be superfluous, but damaging to your sense of self. Ah, but here’s the thing and you probably know what I’m about to say (feels good, doesn’t it?). For every story we make, we hide as much of reality from ourselves as we reveal.

Take a moment and look up, letting your gaze rest on a single object. Settle your mind upon it and let your eyes go soft and lazy. Notice that everything else starts getting more hazy, less distinct. Welcome to perspective. The more we focus on a thing, the more we lose sight of. That we have coherent “images” of the world at all is because our brain is busy filling in the vast emptiness surrounding the pinprick of light entering our retina. This filler is an imaginative projection based on previous experience pushed forward as beliefs about the immediate future. We know this process is limited every time something “appears out of nowhere” and surprises the hell out of us. If we were really seeing the whole of reality AS IS, we’d never be surprised.

This is where knowing is both enticing and dangerous. To know is to see, as in “I see what you’re saying/meaning.” And just as sight is limited, so is the felt sense of our understanding. The issue here isn’t that we can’t know anything or that the various sciences of our inquiry are not telling us truths about the universe of which we are a part of, it is that all such is tentative and progressive. Thing is, we really, really don’t like uncertainty.

We Are All Conspiracy Makers

In this time of global upheaval, where many of the systems and institutions we’ve built over the centuries are showing their cracks and fault lines, conspiracies are running rampant. Poking fun at them is as time-honored of a tradition as lamenting the burning of the library of Alexandria. Really? Just me? Well, run with me here a bit anyway. We like pointing out the absurd in others, but since they’re as human as we are, it’s good to remember that with a change in circumstance or perhaps even the passing of time, we may find ourselves in a position of being just as wrong about something.

The conspiracy makers/believers are attempting to bail the same boat we are, using the same tools we are. The difference is their buckets are simply filled with more holes. We’re sailing through a storm of fear, scooping uncertainty and throwing it overboard as fast as we can. Just as one group’s cult is another group’s religion, so one person’s conspiracy is another’s knowing. They all exist to address the same problem, a need to control, and are actively engaged in bringing about the same feeling: vindication. Nothing feels better than the belief in our rightness.

Take a moment to ask more questions, built upon a recognition of our shared human desire to feel in control. We aren’t going to remove the silliness, but we just might see something we missed.

Photo by Hari Nandakumar on Unsplash

The post Conspiracies – Patterns We Create to Feel in Control appeared first on Life Weavings.

Behind Conspiracies Are the Patterns We Create to Feel in Control

“Fear is the mind-killer.” So says the Bene Gesserit, a female-only religio-political group from the sci-fi epic series of Dune by Frank Herbert. The aphorism concerns the tendency for humanity to forget its more rational potential in the face of a lack of control. Because that’s what fear is, the perception of an upcoming loss.

Notice that fear is about the future. Fear is immediately replaced in the present by any number of other emotional assessments. If the loss was personal enough, it’s replaced by depression and/or anger. If the loss didn’t happen, it’s replaced by anxiety that it may still occur and/or relief. There’s another replacement that I want to focus on here though, that of vindication. Such occurs when fear is replaced by certainty. Whether based on an objective critical analysis or the self-serving manifestations of bias, doesn’t matter. Vindication replaces fear when the world moves forward in the way that you believe it will, whether positively or, insidiously, negatively.

Patterns are Always About Us

Pause for a moment and consider the feeling the last time something went wrong and you verbalized or thought a version of the phrase “I knew it would be bad.” Remember it? Vindication. It’s a complex feeling combining a perceived sense of control with a self-righteous belief that the world succumbed to your analysis of it. There are few things sweeter than vindication and given this definition, that makes sense, it’s attached to the belief that your singular mind captured the complexity of the whole of reality, if only for a moment. Of course that would be intoxicating. Don’t get me wrong, by “you” I am most assuredly including myself. “You” is humanity writ large. Vindication may be one of the most quintessentially human experiences in the universe.

Control and analysis/assessment are two sides of our pattern-building mental lives. From seeing images in clouds to John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” and the various “Bible Codes,” pattern-building is foundational to how our species spread across the globe and flung machines into the heavens. With control we are applying the immediacy of our emotional system, seeking a gestalt or all-encompassing picture of our experience. It is no mystery that we use the phrase “to grasp,” i.e. to hold within our power, when stating our understanding of a subject/experience. On the flip-side of control, is analysis/assessment, our long-term system, selecting pieces out of our experience to support and further our initial intuitive or unconscious understanding.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

If you paused a moment at that definition of analysis, that’s a good thing, because it’s counter-intuitive. We seem, as a species, prone to the belief that our minds are picking up on or illuminating the laws and systems of the universe. Knowledge is felt to be something “out there,” for us to grasp. See, there’s that word again. Rather difficult to get away from. We instinctively feel as if the world is something other than ourselves, that we are cut off from it in some way and constantly on a journey of discovering its secrets to use for our betterment. When put that way, our hubris or excessive pride in our achievements, seems a tad silly…and inevitable. As Erich Fromm noted, we are the only species capable of believing itself removed from Paradise, of having been taken away from our union with nature. While certainly a sad story and one that lies at the heart of many religious narratives, the true sadness is how utterly and completely false that story is and our seeming genetic drive to embrace it, like bugs to a zapper.

Patterns, whether the stories of mythology, theology, the sciences and governmental systems, are all about us. Not because we’re finding out how the world works, but because we’re actively engaged within and as it. Our felt separation from the world is a result of our capacity for perspective-taking. As “Dr. Jackson” said from the movie “Stargate,” every destination needs a starting point. That starting point is the “you” you believe yourself to be. Pattern-making is our way of seeing ourselves in our experience. By doing so we mollify, moment by moment, the existential dread/fear/loneliness that comes from feeling cut off.

Be Careful of Knowing

While patterns are immensely helpful in a myriad of ways, vindication can be as much a trap as the question of “what’s one more?” can be to an addict. Think back again to that feeling of rightness when confronted with a situation gone wrong. Did it inspire any self-reflection? Did it encourage you to broaden the scope of your thinking to see if just maybe you’d missed something? Of course not. The world made sense. Things happened the way you thought they would. Questions at that point would not only be superfluous, but damaging to your sense of self. Ah, but here’s the thing and you probably know what I’m about to say (feels good, doesn’t it?). For every story we make, we hide as much of reality from ourselves as we reveal.

For every story we make, we hide as much of reality from ourselves as we reveal.


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Take a moment and look up, letting your gaze rest on a single object. Settle your mind upon it and let your eyes go soft and lazy. Notice that everything else starts getting more hazy, less distinct. Welcome to perspective. The more we focus on a thing, the more we lose sight of. That we have coherent “images” of the world at all is because our brain is busy filling in the vast emptiness surrounding the pinprick of light entering our retina. This filler is an imaginative projection based on previous experience pushed forward as beliefs about the immediate future. We know this process is limited every time something “appears out of nowhere” and surprises the hell out of us. If we were really seeing the whole of reality AS IS, we’d never be surprised.

This is where knowing is both enticing and dangerous. To know is to see, as in “I see what you’re saying/meaning.” And just as sight is limited, so is the felt sense of our understanding. The issue here isn’t that we can’t know anything or that the various sciences of our inquiry are not telling us truths about the universe of which we are a part of, it is that all such is tentative and progressive. Thing is, we really, really don’t like uncertainty.

We Are All Conspiracy Makers

In this time of global upheaval, where many of the systems and institutions we’ve built over the centuries are showing their cracks and fault lines, conspiracies are running rampant. Poking fun at them is as time-honored of a tradition as lamenting the burning of the library of Alexandria. Really? Just me? Well, run with me here a bit anyway. We like pointing out the absurd in others, but since they’re as human as we are, it’s good to remember that with a change in circumstance or perhaps even the passing of time, we may find ourselves in a position of being just as wrong about something.

The conspiracy makers/believers are attempting to bail the same boat we are, using the same tools we are. The difference is their buckets are simply filled with more holes. We’re sailing through a storm of fear, scooping uncertainty and throwing it overboard as fast as we can. Just as one group’s cult is another group’s religion, so one person’s conspiracy is another’s knowing. They all exist to address the same problem and are actively engaged in bringing about the same feeling: vindication. Nothing feels better than the belief in our rightness.

Take a moment to ask more questions, built upon a recognition of our shared human desire to feel in control. We aren’t going to remove the silliness, but we just might see something we missed.

Photo by Hari Nandakumar on Unsplash

The post Behind Conspiracies Are the Patterns We Create to Feel in Control appeared first on Life Weavings.

Anxiety is Obnoxious and Mindful Acceptance Can Help

The old saying that nothing stays the same except death and taxes is about as useless during tax season as it is when faced with a global pandemic. Both situations induce anxiety to varying degrees and both are subject to change given the degrees of governmental involvement in our lives and what we’re dealing with personally, socially and, globally. What is fundamental to both and to our lives in general, is change and the accompanying feeling of anxiety.

Please note, anxiety is, like any emotional word, a label we apply to give structure to a biological experience we otherwise have no direct personal understanding of. We don’t experience our neurophysiology at the level of neurotransmitters and the cellular interaction with our environment, both external to our body and internal with our organs. Instead, we have words.

Use Your Words Wisely

Words are the building blocks for civilization as we know it. They are the means through which we manifest thought beyond the barrier of our internal world. Attempt to imagine a world without them. You literally are incapable of even considering it without a parade of sentences, paragraphs and dissertations. Behind the curtain though is to see that words are arbitrary, without any intrinsic definition or particular meaning. Examples exist throughout history, both in social evolution (like in the Internet slang of LOL) and groups actively engaging with it differently (like with the word gay).

When it comes to words for emotional experiences, we’re describing complex biological and environmental interactive systems through a simple verbal mechanism. This is both amazing and a requirement for communication. Imagine for a moment attempting to have a conversation with someone where you had to detail every neurophysiological change as it occurred. You’d never get anywhere. For that matter, use the term ‘tornado’ and everyone knows what you’re referring to despite very few people being able to describe the meteorological mechanisms for its creation and activity.

Where we get into trouble is when we take words and apply them backward, falsely reducing or removing complexity from our experience. To use the ‘tornado’ example again, it would be extremely unwise to attempt mapping the path of one by simply referring to the term itself or a simplistic definition of ‘spinning air.’ There’s a host of complex systems in play that the term hides to make communication faster.

Similar happens for our emotions. An increased heart-rate and perspiration, with slight skin flushing and pupil dilation could mean you’re frightened of an approaching wild animal or it could mean you’re sexually aroused. For that matter, it could mean both fear and arousal. Now perhaps you see the problem of working words backward to our experience. It would be quite unhealthy to apply arousal to the first experience by limiting yourself to one word and equally (though with different outcomes) problematic if the only thing you allowed yourself to think was fear when approaching sex.

Let’s explore anxiety. It’s an assessment about change, any change, that is occurring in the complex interplay of our external and internal environments. Often this change has an unknown source and/or unknown consequences. Have you ever felt anxious and were confused as to why? That you quickly created a story to explain it doesn’t make the confusion any less real. As well, neither does the story mean the provided explanation is fully accurate. This lack of fully capturing the experience within a word is where the potential for freedom resides. What you have to do is pursue it.

Move Your Body

The mind/body “problem” is about as useful as the nature/nurture “debate.” Both offer a false choice when looking at complex situations and any thought to having one influence the other in a one-way direction is equally unhelpful and inaccurate. We do not have a mind and a body, we are an ‘embodied mind.’ That means what we think is integrally related to bodily systems and, by extension, to the environment our bodies interact with and within.

This perspective is exactly why words cannot be used to contain our experiences fully and why attempting to do so results in unhealthy behavioral habits. Take the sensation of hunger, where the vast majority of the time you’re actually just thirsty, but because we’ve constrained a physical experience to a word with a single definition, we behave towards it by eating when we don’t have to and thus contribute to unhealthy weight gain. Further, any idea of mind OVER body is also removed because they’re not separate. Instead, think of mind INTERPRETING body.

Interpretation means using your imagination to expand your reactions to your words.


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Interpretation means using your imagination to expand your reactions to your words. Just because you feel anxious doesn’t mean you have to react to it in the same way each and every time. In fact, if you reflect a bit on your past, you will quickly realize you already don’t. This is not a new skill to learn. Rather, it’s a skill to use more broadly. This is what is actually happening when people say mind OVER body; it’s not telling your body that the sensations aren’t what they are, it’s training yourself to react to them differently.

When feeling anxious, grabbing the nearest comfort food is not a necessity, any more than when feeling angry doesn’t require punching something or someone. One of the first behaviors to learn when expanding how you respond to your emotional assessments is to take a walk (or similar). Yes, I know, this may sound ridiculous, but it really is that basic, if not that easy. We have trained ourselves through a lifetime of connecting words to actions to believe one necessitates a particular form of the other. Unlearning this is not an easy or quick process, but we need to start somewhere. Here’s a set of directions to get you started:

Name the feelingThink of other situations you may have felt similarlyList how you responded differentlyConsider your context and select a healthier reaction

Example:

Anxiety during pandemicWhen late for a meeting, paying bills, approaching an anniversaryCalm breathing, think of what you have instead of what you lack, consider the needs of the other personFocus on what you have, rather than what is absent

The selected reaction does not have to be perfect. It can even be repetitive if such is healthier than the alternative. The point here is to expand your reactionary toolbox. Remember the wisdom of “when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”? Well, here is the application. If you only have one way of dealing with an emotional assessment, more and more situations start being dealt with in the same way.

Accept Your Responses

We’re inherently lazy creatures. By that I mean we like simplicity and similarity. It’s why change is so difficult and gets assessed as anxiety, because we like when things are consistent. Honestly, much of our behavior can be seen as attempts to shape the world to conform to our view of it. Frustration happens when the world, or any part of it, doesn’t acquiesce to our demand.

Unfortunately the desire for consistency and simplicity leads us to make and then never challenge the connections between words and experience. Here is where acceptance comes in.

Acceptance is about broadening awareness to then rest in the space between seeing and doing.


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Acceptance is about broadening awareness to then rest in the space between seeing and doing. This is the difference between acceptance and wallowing. The latter is about diving into a particular reaction and dwelling there. Acceptance sees our profoundly human way of assessing our experience through words and slowing down our felt need to respond immediately. This is why mindfulness/meditation training is so helpful, because it is a great tool for building the space between thought and action.

In this time of individual, societal and global anxiety, expanding the space between thought and action is how we move forward in healthier ways. Anxiety is both inevitable and completely natural, there is no shame to be had in feeling it. Thankfully our humanity allows us to feel it and then learn to react in new ways.

Featured image/photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

Further reading and support:

Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

The post Anxiety is Obnoxious and Mindful Acceptance Can Help appeared first on Life Weavings.

Sleep is the Cornerstone of Healthy Habits

It all starts with sleep.  How you finish your day determines how you start your day. A good night’s sleep is the cornerstone of healthy habits and healthy habits are the foundation of self-care.  

No matter what your objectives are, it is difficult to implement new routines when we are tired.  I have discovered through trial and error that having an evening routine helps me get for sleep.  My routine begins much earlier in the day.  

Evening Sleep Routine: 



Avoid caffeine after 12pm1 hour before bed if I still feel awake, I drink a relaxing cup of herbal teaPreview the coming day – make list of appointments, organize items needed, plan wardrobe30 minutes before sleep put away all electronicsHygiene and ready for bedContemplative reading of a physical book or meditationSleep

At a sleep seminar I attended, the professor encouraged us to not drink coffee after 12, because it’s half life was 5.7 hours.  Caffeine interferes with our sleep cycles and prevent us from entering deep restorative sleep.

It has been shown a a drop in body temperature happens before sleep, so if you still feel awake a cup of herbal tea make help.  Use this time to preview your upcoming day, so that your sleep will not be disturbed by thoughts of things you may forget.

I avoid external stimulation at least 30 minutes before bed, such as tv, exercise, or a book I can’t put down (reading is one of by obsessions) because when I get caught up in a book, game or show, all my good intentions fly out the window.  It is much easier to avoid temptation than to interrupt it.

Creating a consistent way of getting ready for bed will send your brain the signal it is time to slow down; include skin care and other hygiene practices.

Once I am in bed I mentally think of what I am grateful for, I may read some contemplative book, one with short entries or meditate for 10 minutes.   Then I’m asleep ready to embrace the adventure of a new day.

What steps can you take to improve your sleep and build the cornerstone of your healthy habits?

Loving wholeness,

Christine

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The Secret to Self-Care

I don’t know about you but I am always surprised by how difficult I find it to maintain my self-care routine. I know how much better I feel when I do 30 minutes of cardio or 30 minutes of mobility exercise (which is stretching/strength training in motion), and mindfulness practice every day, yet one little bump in my plan and my routine crumbles.

It’s disheartening when my routine crumbles. My self-talk turns nasty and I know I have let myself down. Often breaking my wellness routine leads to a cascade of poor choices. I didn’t walk, so it doesn’t matter if I have pizza, or sit and binge watch “Lost in Space”. Keeping commitments to myself is the foundation of self-care.

I’ve been listening to a book by William Ury called, The Power of the Positive No, which says that for many of us, our biggest challenge is to say NO to the things which take us away from our YES. I understand this idea. If I am deeply committed to my YES of self-care, including good food, lots of movement, and meditation, then it is easier to say NO to the behaviors that interfere with these intentions.

Today I am spending some time journalling, visualizing, and exploring all of the underlying benefits of my self-care YES. I will condense my new knowing into a short statement or symbol which I will use to remind me of why my YES to self-care is so important, and then study it before bed, upon waking, and a few times during the day. I will add at least one gratitude to my end of day practice about self-care to acknowledge that I treated myself well today.

How will you add self-care to your day?

Featured photo Courtesy of ABMP

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Self-Control Is A Conversation With Who You Wish To Be

Situations come and go more often than we are usually comfortable admitting, in which we wish we’d done other than what we did in fact do. We may attempt to pass the behavior off as a result of hunger, sleep, another person’s actions towards us, the weather, hormones or a mental diagnosis, but all of these are simply pointers to some version of the common phrase: “that wasn’t who I really am.” In other words, we are quite comfortable with imaginatively projecting a version of ourselves who acted other than what actually happened. We empathize with, and perhaps even envy, a version of ourselves that exists only in our mind.

Explore Your Future Self

Thankfully imagination is not tied only to a past of recrimination and self-doubt. It can move into the future as well and bring with it versions of yourself that indeed do exactly what you desire to do. The same mechanism can be a tool for leaving us stuck in a past of impossibility, where we get caught up in a world that now never could be, or allow us to explore a future that we in fact do want to live in.

The nature of the present rarely allows us to consciously select what we supposedly find most important. Only in contemplating what we wish we’d done differently or in looking to how we’d like to be, does what we seemingly most highly Value come into focus. That Value is used to color an entire situation in what has become fixated as being most important.

Narrow Perspective is A Trap

There’s a trap here though, one of narrow perspective-taking. Bring to mind those occasions when something seemed to suddenly appear out of your peripheral vision. When driving and paying attention only to what’s in front of you, suddenly to have an animal dart from the side. When focused on a task and startled by someone suddenly being next to you. Perspective-taking is powerful, but it is also extremely limiting. We lose sight of what is around us. While this is great for pushing behavior in service to a goal, it is incredibly poor for keeping in mind the broader world and all its influences.

What you’re doing when using the past to pass judgment is funneling it through a present already mired in its own limitation. Values guide the selection of behavior to support them. When you say you should have done otherwise you’re effectively saying you should have cared about something differently in that moment. But that’s the problem right there, you’re no longer in that situation which existed. Further, you’re no longer the you that existed then. You’re someone new, someone who has more information than previously, someone who has the capacity to judge what has come before because there is now a ‘before’ to consider.

A Value Always Exists

The fact is that the you in the past did care about something, a Value that called out a behavior to support it. The behavior was something which, in that context, was seen as the only possible thing to do. If you pause and reflect for a moment, odds are you’ll be able to see what that Value was and perhaps acknowledge that it’s still something you care about.

Here is where the imagined you of the future can be greater than the past. It simply has more to build with. The future can be one of recognizing how in every situation is a Value that may be selected to guide behavior, yet acknowledging how there are always more Values that matter to you. Rather than getting caught in the trap of narrow perspective and risk behaving in a way that undermines or ignores a Value, you can take the time to contemplate what all there is you care about and how best to support them.

Self-control is not about control or shaming or manipulating yourself through a technique. Self-control is the flexible mental space to see the many Values that exist in a given moment and act within that greater appreciation towards the best version you believe yourself capable of being.

The future awaits the you that you want to be.

Further Reading:

Yong, Ed. Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self. The Atlantic. December 6, 2016.

The post Self-Control Is A Conversation With Who You Wish To Be appeared first on Life Weavings.

Getting Buy-In for a Vision

The game of ‘telephone’ was great for giggles when a pre-teen. However, the real-life effects of communication failures as adults rarely get the same response. Certainly the consequences tend to be larger and often longer-lasting, though this is an indication of the added weight placed on our stories as we grow up.

Such consequences are keenly felt when having difficult conversations with loved ones and when attempting to get multiple levels of a business to connect with a new message. The two situations may at first appear completely contrary, but the level of intimacy involved is no different. The message you’re trying to share in either is an extension of your Values and hence who you believe yourself to be. The context may be different, but not the process.

Vision Must Be Reciprocal

Being caught up in a vision, personal or professional, can be intoxicating. Often the trainings involved for instilling a corporate vision can have similar props to, and feel like, a religious revival meeting. Special speakers, games that induce a feeling of connection through shared levels of mortification, and dress-code. The most ingenious is name badges, as the sweetest thing a person can hear is the sound of their own name, only increased by the belief: ‘a complete stranger knows me!’ That we so often forget our names are emblazoned in colorful marker right on our chest only points to a passive blindness in the face of the desire for recognition.

All of these strategies are targeted to get buy-in, the individually felt ownership of a collective vision. How this plays out between the conference and the day-to-day living in the office is where the proverbial rubber and road meet.

Photo by Hayden Walker on Unsplash

When middle managers were aligned with top management’s strategic vision, things played out as the widespread view of visionary leadership would suggest: the more these managers engaged in visionary leadership (by communicating their vision for the future and articulating where they wanted their team to be in five years,) the greater the shared understanding of strategy in their team, and the more the team was committed to strategy execution.

For managers that were misaligned with the company strategy, however, the dark side of visionary leadership became evident. The more these misaligned managers displayed visionary leadership, the less strategic alignment and commitment were observed among their teams.

Why Visionary Leadership Fails – HBR

The focus on middle management is key here. Visionary leadership at the top all too often becomes an extension of the conference/revival mentality, where the mere presence of a dynamic and charismatic person is thought to be sufficient. Unfortunately what’s missing in this standard view is a recognition of everything else that went into the initial training. The collective feel, as it were, gets lost.

This is why middle management is so important. They become the signal-boosters for the visionary hub. For this reason, middle managers need to be strong leaders themselves, possessing the capacity of sharing a vision. However, this very strength, when unbound from the greater vision, starts a business version of ‘telephone’ that gets ugly. The process happens in two stages:

Without reciprocity, without consistent communication between the governing vision and middle management, the strength needed to spread a message gets used to fill in perceptual gaps.Those perceptual gaps will inevitably be filled in by what is felt to be important by the person in their individual space. Ego always trumps vision when a consistent message is missing.

How does one escape this destructive game? By building on Values.

Values as Messaging

External behavior is primarily concerned with aligning the world with an internal desire or vision of ‘what should be.’ We act in ways we’ve learned from past experiences, will result in people and circumstances shifting to what we want/expect. These desires are grounded upon a set of Values, signposts for what is important to us in a given situation/context.

How do you ensure that managers are aligned on your company’s strategy? Our experience working with companies around strategic alignment suggests it starts with creating strategic alignment among middle managers before strategy execution efforts begin. This should not be one-time communication but a dialogue; people will only take ownership of strategic change if they are consistently persuaded by its value. 

Why Visionary Leadership Fails – HBR

The “strategic alignment” spoken of above should start with an identification of those Values which support the ‘Governing Vision.’ As noted in the image below, Values are the bedrock for making sure a vision is accepted at every level of an organization.

Copyright: David Teachout

This process works for several reasons:

Values are universally understandable, stemming from the shared experience of being human.A ‘Governing Vision’ is supported by Values through an articulation of what those Values mean in practice, i.e. Principles. This keeps each level of management from filling in the gaps of what Values mean. When uncertain, refer to Principles.Principles are the support beams connecting Vision and Values. They keep a Vision from being too vague and too specific, resulting in either the chaos of competing visions at all levels, or an inability to be flexible within changing contexts.

A ‘Guiding Vision’ fails when there are too many voices clambering to be heard. To make these voices turn from being a disparate group of instruments into an orchestra, individual buy-in is a must. As when we gain coherent and consistent direction in our individual lives through what we care about, our Values, so too can organizations.

Featured Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

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Weaving A Story of Food and Acceptance

I recently had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Jared Levenson from “Eating Enlightenment” for a podcast interview. We covered a lot of topics, including shame, it’s relationship to eating disorders, religious ideology and my own journey from fundamentalism and how Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can be used in therapy and life in general.

I want to take a moment to look at how ‘tunnel vision’ works. We’ve all heard of bias and, if you’ve been reading me for any length of time, will recall I am at pains to remind people that bias is not only inevitable, it’s not something we can ever get away from. The best hope we have is to set up habits of introspective critical thinking as a counter to bias, to engage consistently with those habits and construct our lives around them. This means actively engaging with people and ideas you may not agree with. It means, when in dialogue, learning the other person’s perspective such that you can present it to them in the best way possible that they would agree with. It means recognizing how no single position or idea defines the whole of who a person is. Ideas matter, but so does intention. We can appreciate how a person wants to make the world better from within their own perspective, even as we condemn the real-world consequences of implementing their ideas.

The core of a healthy society is our collective ability to wrestle with big ideas, to learn how to be resilient in the face of difficulty, and to recognize that thoughts are changeable. To do the latter, we must engage with them, even if, when it comes to our own self-destructive habits, we do so for the purpose of letting them go.

Was a pleasure chatting with Jared and I encourage everyone to not only listen to our chat, but take a look at the services he has to offer.

How To Question Your Assumptions and Get Out of Tunnel Vision

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