#oscillating tension

[malcolmocean]

so familiar are the tensions of my own invention

The title is a riff on some lyrics from Survival by Way out West. Part of the chorus goes “I have been burned, but I am not discouraged.”

It’s on my mind. I’ve grown so much in the past year, and there are still so many things that are stuck! And it’s a bizarre experience to realize the extent to which most of the obstacles I face on a day-to-day basis are literally inside my own cranium. Err, well, there’s a debate about the extent to which oneself exists inside one’s own body as opposed to being inherently embedded in environment/context. But that aside, I contain the majority of my own blocks.

It is tempting to hear “so familiar are the tensions of my own invention” with a kind of tiredness, or exasperation, and at times there has been that. At the moment, though, there’s a kind of leaning-in familiarity: I know you. I know how to work with you. And we’re making progress.

[malcolmocean]

you can’t win a war against yourself

[During the recent Goal Crafting Intensive, several participants were torn in an internal conflict where they would uninstall the facebook app from their phone, then reinstall it, then uninstall it again, and so on. This was my response:]

The general principle I apply is that you can't win a war against yourself. you can win some battles, and you can sometimes stalemate the war, and sometimes you can remove the stimulus altogether (eg an alcoholic who is fine if they just don't keep booze at home and don't go to bars, and doesn't experience a struggle about doing those things)...

...but otherwise, if you're experiencing an ongoing struggle like that, then continuing to fight it as such just reinforces the dynamic: getting past your obstacles angers the part of you that sets up the obstacles, and the obstacles themselves anger the parts that want to check facebook. All of this erodes self-trust, which makes the oscillation even more extreme.

I’ve written about how to build self-trust instead: Building self-trust with self-referential motivation.

(Let me know if you’d like me to write a longer article on specifically how to approach these kinds of oscillations!)