by Lisa Kentgen
The fear of being overwhelmed or unable to protect yourself against unanticipated events can lead to a preoccupation with trying to get control over things which are beyond your control. When this happens, you might spend more time trying to avoid a bad outcome than making decisions that will lead to life-enhancing change. This might show itself as a fear of risk-taking. Or, paradoxically, you might take unwise risk by making compromised choices that are likely to turn out bad, which then confirms the perception of needing to protect yourself from risk-taking. If the fear of being unable to take care of yourself holds sway, it undermines your ability to take charge of what you do have control over, which is your response to the outcome of your decisions.
The second kind of fear, that of not being enough and its offshoot, fear of mediocrity, is fueled by two pervasive habits of mind. The first is comparison mind which is the unfortunate habit of viewing yourself relative to other people. The other related habit is being judgmental. Feeling both better than and less than others, both inferior and superior, are two sides of the same coin. Either way, you are making choices from a small and disadvantaged place. Comparing yourself to others is different from looking to others for inspiration. Comparison mind diminishes a healthy sense of self and leaves you feeling separate from others. For example, you might believe that other people don’t struggle as much, or know more clearly what they want to do, or are able to find love more easily than you. Even when comparisons are objective, they don’t lead to effective movement toward your best self. Comparison mind leaves you feeling disconnected and isolated.
Being judgmental interferes with feeling free to experiment. When you are judgmental, whether self or other-directed, you feel a need to justify or prove yourself. Perfectionism, a relative of the judging mind, chokes creativity. Self-criticism doesn’t motivate you to do better. Just as children don’t learn how to do things in new ways by telling them what is wrong about them, the same is true for us as adults. When you aspire to change, free of judgment of yourself or others, then the choices you have are not as emotionally-laden and limited to a preexisting bar that you need to live up to—a bar that is impossible to reach.
The third fear that impairs decision-making is the fear of not having enough or of losing what you have. This fear can lead to holding tight to what you have because you don’t trust that the future holds abundance. It leads to a distorted view of what you need. Money becomes overvalued rather than playing a healthy supportive role to what is actually most important. The fear of not having enough is pronounced in a consumptive culture that reveres wealth for wealth’s sake and admires rich people over creative and generous people. In order to transcend limiting beliefs, it is important to understand how your culture influences, and limits, your choices.
The fear of not having enough also inhibits generosity because giving to others can feel like you are giving too much away. The fear of deprivation can lead to keeping a tally of investment in relationships rather than giving freely in them. It interferes with the ability to develop mutual and generous relationships with others.
Right now, you are enough and you have enough. Make decisions like you believe this to be true.
Hostage to Fear of a Disastrous Outcome
Jonathon visited his parents in London at least twice a year. His parents were divorced. Jonathon was grappling with whether to make a quick trip to visit his father for his 70th birthday without contacting his mother. His relationship with his mother was fraught and had been for years. His two siblings had cut off ties with her. His mother was angry at him every time they spoke by phone because he didn’t call as often as she would like. Jonathon, who had begun practicing intentional choosing, came to understand that his decisions in relation to his mother were strongly influenced by a deep fear that something would happen to her. And now, he feared he would carry the weight of guilt for not visiting her on this trip. Jonathon had difficulty making a decision because he could not discern chosen obligation from guilt. As a result, he was resentful of his mother and dreading the trip entirely. He didn’t feel free to celebrate his father’s birthday without seeing his mother. He believed he would experience remorse if he chose the trip he really wanted.
Placing awareness on how he approached choice helped Jonathon see that he was hostage to fear. He had experienced fear that something would happen to his mother ever since he was a small child.
Now practicing intentional choice, Jonathon was clear that he didn’t want to visit his mother on this trip and that it was OK not to see her. He wanted special time with his father. He now could emotionally distinguish between chosen obligation and guilt. He recognized that if something were to happen to his mother, it didn’t happen because he chose not to visit her on this trip. Jonathon let go of the niggling thought that allowing himself time with his father unencumbered by a visit to his mother was selfish. By allowing himself the option of taking the trip in the way he wanted, he was able to feel compassion for his mother and her way of suffering that pushed everyone away from her. Feeling free to choose, Jonathon was more able to be present to his mother in a way that didn’t feel overwhelming to him. He freely chose to have more frequent phone contact with her.
Befriending Fears Helps You Make Better Decisions
If your choices are overly influenced by fear and efforts to avoid fear, then your decisions cannot add to your life in substantive ways. Choices driven to alleviate fear—of being overwhelmed, unworthy, or not having enough—are mostly unconscious. Even when the choice made from an intentional practice is identical, the consequences of a choice based on fear enriches you less. Practicing intentional decision-making addresses fear directly, offering the possibility of making wise choices even in the presence of fear.
Can you treat your fears that limit you as if they are misguided children? If a frightened child is acting out, do you shame him? Do you let her avoid what she is afraid of, when doing so gets in the way of her development? These aren’t effective strategies. The best solution is some version of showing love and making room for the fear, while helping the child soothe herself and navigate her fears. The same applies to your own adult fears.
Don’t berate yourself for your fears. Don’t judge them. Respect them and be open to them. At the same time, don’t allow them to rule the roost. Treat your fears with compassion while setting limits around them. Understand them without giving them free reign. Learn how your fears influence how you make decisions. How do you protect yourself? How do you best take risks?
Knowing your fears intimately, without giving into them, allows you to test out whether they are really true. If they are true, does it have to be that way? And if the fear is your reality, can it become less limiting for you? Softening around your fears enables you to be see choices more clearly, and feel more comfortable around choices that you make.
Only by befriending your fears can you make wise and effective choices. How do you begin to do this? By practicing fearlessness.
Fear naturally arises because you have the capacity to reflect upon the human condition and all its uncertainty. But by practicing fearlessness you come to trust your ability to cope with all outcomes, to learn from them, and to make future decisions increasingly in line with what matters most and your core values.
Fearlessness is possible when you accept that you are good enough and you are lovable enough, right now, regardless of your flaws and regardless of how things turn out. Fearlessness is not the absence of fear but, rather, a quality of courage where you open up to what you fear. It is a practice. To be fearless, listen more to yourself and less to external messages about what will make you worthy, happy, and loved. Fearlessness lets you—slowly and patiently—let go of the need to defend. You defend less because you now trust your ability to protect yourself and make wise decisions that serve your interests.
Implement Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty
“If you can dream it, you can do it” is Walt Disney’s famous
adage. For many of us there is a perceived paradox in how to realize our dreams. On the one hand, the clearer and more vivid we can conceptualize dreams, the clearer the steps we can take to realize them. Vagueness is not our friend, specificity is. On the other hand, our dreams are developing as they unfold. They change as we move toward them.
Without making choices in relation to your dreams, they remain in the realm of fantasy. Practice choosing concrete steps, and implementing them, in order to evaluate how to keep moving in purposeful directions.
Dreams evolve as you create them. You evolve along with your dreams. It is a two-way relationship. Your dreams cannot evolve without making intentional choices.
Choose to focus on decisions that have the greatest chance of enriching your life. Be willing to take risks in the service of your core values. Don’t limit yourself to the options you can envision in this moment. Learn what you need in order to create desired options. Be aware of your preferences without being bound to them. Become aware of what you fear and how your fear limits your ability to make bold decisions.
By learning to meaningfully expand your range of options, while understanding current external givens, the best way forward for embodying your most authentic life will become clearer over time. This doesn’t mean you will have certainty regarding what decisions to make. It doesn’t mean that your daily reality will neatly line up with your dreams. But you will trust your decision-making more, trust your capacity to choose well, and shape your decisions in a way that enables you to move toward what you value most, regardless of the outcome of any particular decision or action.
Part IV
Acting
Chapter 11
Wise Effort is the Best
Kind of Action
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Anaïs Nin
How do you take action in ways that create the kind of life and world that you want to see? How do you act in alignment with your own interests and in collaboration with others? By practicing intention in action, your actions best reflect your core values and make you an effective actor. Acting is a dynamic verb. While an action takes place in a circumscribed period of time, the practice of acting is fluid and continuous. It extends in time from before the action is taken to well beyond the visible results of the action. Bring your awareness to the entire continuum—doing so will positively influence the way you approach and take action.
How to Act with Greater Intention
To practice intentional acting, it is important to understand the difference between acting and doing because they are often conflated. When there is no distinction between acting and doing, unnecessary or misguided action is sometimes taken, often with a very different effect than we intended.
You cannot control how the external world responds to your actions, but you can take ownership of the spirit in which you act.
Action is most effectively taken in response to a conscious choice. What percentage of your actions is intentional? 5 percent? 10 percent? 20 percent? These may sound like low numbers, but think how much of the time your actions are automated and unintentional. How much of the time do you engage in distracting, time-passing actions that are not clearly chosen? Automated actions aren’t a problem as you perform the mundane tasks of your life. Yet it benefits you to bring greater awareness to these tasks as well. Without a practice in intentional acting, a high percentage of life slips into going through the motions. When this happens, your experience of being a meaningful actor in your own life is diminished.
In order to act with intention, it helps to distinguish intentional action as distinct from doing. In many people’s minds, they are one and the same. Here, doing is defined as action that is not conscious. We are programmed to do, to be busy, to take action regardless of whether it is even needed. Both intentional action and doing require expenditures of time and energy. Lack of discernment between the two results in chronic doing, which interferes with your ability to effectively shape your life.
Chronic doing is what happens when you have difficulty pausing and being still.
By practicing intentional action, the proportion of time and energy spent in conscious and deliberate action increases, and the proportion of non-mindful doing decreases. With continued practice, non-mindful doing is no longer a default position and your actions become more focused and effective.
Wise Effort Understands When and How to Act
Wise effort is the whole-hearted commitment to consciously direct your energy towards what matters most to you. It is a cornerstone of living an intentional life. Wise effort asks the question, “What, if anything, can be done now?”
If effort broadly represents how you direct your energy, what is action in relation to effort? Wise effort is not synonymous with action. It is the ability to know when to act with intention as well as when inaction is the best option. Wise effort clarifies when action effectively serves your goals and values. Through wise effort, your actions are aligned with your values and they shape a life of purpose regardless of the outcome of any one particular action. Wise effort helps guide your thoughts and choices in a way that allows your actions to be responsive and flexible rather than reactive and inflexible.
Wise effort includes both intentional action and restraint from action, and non-doing.
Sometimes wise effort requires restraint from action. This is true both when you are reactive and when you determine that the time is not ripe for meaningful action. Understanding effort as related to, but distinct from, action is important because it helps you discern between refraining from action and disengaging from what is happening. Refraining from action is a conscious and intentional act. Disengaging from what is happening is inactive and leads to non-intentional acting. It is not wise effort to adopt a nihilistic stance, (e.g. “Why bother?”). Avoidance of taking action is not a strategy of wise effort.
It is easy to think of times when we have been reactive and it would have been better to hold off from taking action. For example, when someone said or did something that hurt us and the only thing that came to mind was to say or do something that hurt the other person in return. We may have tried to cloak harmful comments in elaborate language and justifications but the end result was not helpful. At the moments where the only way you can act is to react, wise effort requires that you refrain from action. When you practice wise effort, you don’t experience this restraint as inhibiting your voice but, rather, as choosing to rest in your real strength.
Non-doing, here, means an engaged restraint from action or effort. It is a form of stillness and quiet, a special kind of pausing. Non-doing is not inaction nor is it disengagement, zoning out, becoming distracted, or wasting time. Because non-doing is foreign to many, it can feel inactive. This is because we can have limited perceptions of engagement (i.e., engagement only as productivity) or moving toward a goal. Cultivating non-doing is an important skill that creates internal spaciousness. The actions that arise from this place are enacted with greater ease and clarity.
There is a concept in Taoism called wu wei which describes a paradox of “action without action” or “effortless doing.” It is a natural state of non-striving that is cultivated. In this state, you let go and stop trying to achieve. It is not that you don’t set goals or take purposeful action, but you try to cultivate a state in which you take yourself out of the central role of your life, in order to more fully understand the nature of things around you. You understand not by quickly trying to make sense out of things or by placing your stamp on them, but by simply taking them in.
So, what does non-doing look like in daily life? How do you begin to create an intentional practice of non-doing?
A non-doing practice starts by incorporating stillness and quiet into your day. The activity itself is not so important, though some activities lend themselves to non-striving more than others. It helps
to identify activities that quiet you down rather than ramping you up, where you are engaged yet relaxed. What is important is the spirit of the undertaking. Can you set aside time in which there is nowhere to be, and nothing that you have to do? This is the spirit of non-doing, of wu wei.
Generate one or two such actions for yourself. Carve out small blocks of time, starting now, every week. In the beginning it is helpful to schedule it. Non-striving can be one of the most difficult things to make time for. Here are some possible exercises in non-doing: drawing, strolling, meditation, listening to music, meandering, slowly preparing a meal, gazing with gentle attention. It is helpful to be away from your phone. Though some people may make the argument that listening to guided relaxation or meditation apps are a helpful form of non-doing, if your phone pulls for your attention, put it away.
As you create space and time for the spirit of effortless doing, you are heightening your awareness of noticing times when you act mindlessly, or without intention.
I personally like to take walks without any thought of where they will take me. I try to commit to one daily walk, even if only for ten minutes, where I am not trying to get somewhere. I try to walk without getting lost in thought, which is a continuous practice. While in a state of non-doing, I constantly discover things. The same street, even if I have walked it dozens of times, reveals something new. I try to notice with all of my senses. I notice what it feels like to walk in all seasons, in weather I like and weather that is difficult to go out in. Now it is more challenging to practice non-striving as I walk because I have established a goal of walking at least 10,000 steps a day, which creates striving. Still, while intentionally engaging in non-doing, I do not look at my step counter as I am walking. Adding a goal to walking, even if healthy, makes me appreciate how easily I tip over into striving!