Let me share an example that actually happened in my own life. In the early ’80s, I was living in Los Angeles with my husband and I’d recently bought a brand-new car. Back then, I was a very pushy and angry person. As a Rebel, I was always on the offensive; that was my default operating style. One afternoon, I was on my way to meet my husband for lunch at a restaurant. First I’ll describe what happened that day from the perspective of being a victim, then from a more accountable perspective that draws on the concept of creating, promoting, and allowing.
Here’s the victim story: I was about to pull into a space in a parking lot when this car came out of nowhere. The man in the driver’s seat started blasting his horn at me. I parked my car and was just minding my own business, when he climbed out of his car in a rage and started screaming at me. He accused me of taking his parking space. So I just walked away and went into the building to meet my husband. When I came back out, I saw that this crazy guy had keyed both sides of my brand-new car!
Here’s what actually happened, from the perspective of taking responsibility: The truth is, I didn’t really know whose parking space it was. It was a parking lot. I had no idea whether he’d been there before me, waiting to get into the parking space, or not. I saw the spot, and I squeezed into it very quickly, not caring whether anyone was waiting for the space. He said he was there first. And, the truth is, I had actually seen him out of the cor-ner of my eye and zipped into the space anyway. I saw a parking spot and decided it was my space. That was my operating style. My behavior had actually created the situation. When he started yelling at me, I yelled right back—so I promoted the escalation of the confrontation by invoking more of his rage. Finally, as I turned to walk into the building, I used foul language, audibly cursing him under my breath. And, as I walked away, I had this strong intuitive feeling that he might do something to my car, and I ignored my intuition. By not listening to my intuition, I allowed him to key my car.
That’s an example of the three different levels of creation at work. When we’re in the victim mode, we conveniently omit pieces of the story. We spin it. We spin the truth to ourselves and to others so we don’t have to take responsibility. We tell ourselves: It wasn’t my fault.
If you consider my parking-lot example, you’ll see that there were many different ways I could have responded. I could have behaved in a considerate, respectful, and less aggressive manner on the front end—aware that there was another driver nearby, ceding the parking space when I saw him. Once the other driver emerged in a rage, I could have responded calmly and apologized, or even moved my car. I could have made an effort not to escalate the situation. By adopting a conciliatory posture, you can generally defuse most situations.
In order to see the role you played in a situation, you have to break it down and look at it from a position of responsibility by asking yourself: What did I do to create the situation, to promote it, or to allow it? Once you start looking at the world this way, you’ll be amazed by what you see. You begin to get a much clearer picture of the role you play in every situation of your life. You can then use this as a powerful tool to live more deliberately. As events in your life unfold, be more conscious of your actions. With everything you do, ask yourself: What is the result I want to achieve? One note: as you go through this self-evaluation process, don’t judge yourself. Don’t beat yourself up for situations you’ve created, promoted, or allowed. Remember, we’re all doing the best we can at any given moment. By understanding your actions and taking greater responsibility for your behavior as you move forward, you’ll begin to see that you are, indeed, the creator of your own life.
Exercise: Creating, Promoting, and Allowing
Think of a past situation in which you felt like a victim. In your journal, write the story out from the victim perspective (playing the blame game and taking no responsibility for how you created, promoted, or allowed it). Then write it out again, this time from a place of responsibility, including what you did or said (or failed to do or say) that created, promoted, or allowed the situation to unfold. Now write down what you could have done or said (or not done or said) that could have produced a better outcome.
Make this exercise a tool for moving your life in a new direction. Instead of blaming others, view the events in your life as an opportunity to take greater responsibility for yourself and your life. When something goes wrong, ask yourself:
• What was my role in this situation? How did I create, promote, or allow it?
• How could I have created, allowed, or pro-moted a different outcome?
• What can I learn from this experience?
• How can I create a better outcome in a similar situation going forward?
Deliberation Versus Default
When you’re living by default, you’re automatically reacting to life in habitual ways, many of which may be limiting you and your life. In contrast, living deliberately means making more conscious and constructive life choices. When you’re living deliberately, you’re living from a position of responsibility; you’re making choices with greater awareness. You’ve taken yourself off autopilot, so you’re better prepared to align your actions with the results you want to achieve.
This is an important step in mastering the art of aloneness because, as you move through this book, you’re going to get a clearer sense of the direction you want your life to go. If you start to live more deliberately now, you’ll be better prepared to make the choices you need to make down the road—every day—to keep your actions in alignment with that direction. By moving through life in a state of consciousness, you have the opportunity to improve your health and enjoy greater emotional and physical well-being. When your actions are aligned with your conscious intentions, you’ll find that life is smoother, less conflicted.
When you’re not living deliberately, you’re living from your default operating system. As you’ll recall, your default operating system is made up of the core beliefs and habitual behaviors you adopted during your formative years. Living by default is, in one sense, the path of least resistance, because it’s what you already know; it’s part of your comfort zone. But, because most people grew up in dysfunctional families, their default operating systems are often based on patterns that limit them. Their operating systems were designed to help them adapt to life within their families, not to produce effective results as adults. Living by default gives you less control over the results you generate. You’re stuck with whatever you get—and you might not like whatever it is you’re getting.
Here’s an example of how living by default can trip you up. Let’s say you want to have a healthier lifestyle, but you’re an approval-seeker. Your operating style is driven by the core limiting belief: Other people’s needs are more important than my own. You’re always putting your needs on the back burner to take care of everyone else’s. You never say no. And you’re so busy trying to make everyone else happy that you neglect yourself. People who live that way tend to be overwhelmed; they’re under constant stress. Living under stress is associated with all kinds of issues, including health problems. Maybe making other people’s needs more important than your own helped you avoid conflict in your family growing up. But, as an adult, your operating style is interfering with the results you desire.
Here’s another example. Let’s say that you believe people can’t be trusted—that they’re out to get you. If that’s one of your core limiting beliefs, you may have a confrontational and/or defensive behavioral style. You might be difficult and anger easily. As a result, you create conflicts at every turn. You’re living ineffectively because you consistently alienate people around you. Maybe you have trouble keeping a job and getting along with coworkers because you’re always challenging everything and blaming everyone else. Your oppositional style seeps into your personal life, wreaking havoc in your relationships. Your behavior is counterproductive—and it’s driven by an underlying belief that’s been inside of you since childhood.
No matter what your cor
e limiting beliefs are, you pay a high price for letting them run your life. In my own life, I count my divorce among those costs. Many times I’ve thought that if my husband and I had been aware of the dysfunctional patterns we each brought from childhood into our marriage, perhaps we could have transformed it into a healthier relationship and provided an intact family for our children.
A crucial step in mastering the art of aloneness is identifying and shedding those core limiting beliefs and putting a new operating system in place. But that’s something that takes a great deal of work, including the exploration of your family of origin. That’s the work of mastering the art of aloneness. Until you have a new operating system in place that’s based on a more constructive set of beliefs, you’ll need to work consciously and diligently to monitor and redirect your behavior. By living deliberately, you gradually begin to think and behave in new ways that override the default operating system that’s been derailing you.
Aligning Your Actions with Your Desired Results
If you’re living by default, there’s a good chance that your thoughts and behaviors are out of sync with the results you want in your life. You can begin to understand the connection between your desires, your thoughts, and the actions you take by asking yourself three very basic questions:
• How am I treating myself?
• What kind of messages am I sending to myself?
• What kind of relationships am I creating in my life?
When you start asking yourself these questions, you’re apt to find that your thoughts and behaviors are at cross-purposes with your desires. Here are a few examples that often emerge with my clients:
• How am I treating myself? Let’s say you want to have an active social life, with a lot of intelligent, uplifting people around you. You want a high level of meaningful interaction and positive energy in your life. You’re the person who’s responsible for what happens in your life, and it takes energy to live that way. But if you’re tired, if you’re in a depleting job, if you’re not taking good care of yourself, it’s going to get in the way of your ability to live the life you seek. To have a healthy social life, you have to feel good about yourself; you have to possess and project a sense of well-being. So where do you begin? You begin with yourself. You have to think about how you’re treating your body and what you need to do to have the energy you need to live the life you want. This means making healthy choices about what you eat and drink—and what you’re not going to eat and drink—as well as healthy choices about exercise and sleep. By living deliberately, you can begin to change the way you treat yourself.
• What kinds of messages am I sending to myself? It may be that you want to feel good about yourself, but you’re constantly telling yourself that you’re lazy. That means you’re undermining yourself. You’re defeating your purpose by sending a message to yourself that lowers your self-esteem. Imagine that you want to find a better job. Instead of telling yourself how lazy you are, you should be sending yourself messages of love and compassion. Living deliberately means look-ing deeper into the patterns that are causing you to feel unmotivated, but at the same time sending yourself positive, loving messages.
Yet another example might be that you’re thinking about starting your own business, but you’re constantly undermining yourself by saying: I’m not good enough. Or: No one will ever want my services. If you’re sending yourself negative messages, you’ll never be able to get your business off the ground. You have to believe in yourself to be able to sell yourself to others. To be able to be successful in your own business, you have to send yourself positive messages—then you’ll exude the confidence you need to attract customers.
Here are some of the self-defeating messages we send ourselves: No one will ever love me. I’m lazy. I can’t do anything right. I’m too old. I’m undisciplined. I’m stupid. I had a client who—every time she made a mistake or misplaced her keys or dropped something—would whisper to herself, “You’re pitiful.” Imagine how you’d feel if someone told you how pitiful you were day after day. Ask yourself: If I want to feel good about myself, what kinds of messages do I need to send to myself? What kinds of words do I need to be using?
• What kinds of relationships elationships am I creating in my life? Imagine that you want to have healthy, caring, supportive friendships with people, but you continually participate in friendships with people who make you feel bad—maybe your friends are not dependable; maybe they’re critical and judgmental; maybe they don’t show up on time or always cancel their plans with you at the last minute. Ultimately, they do things that make you feel bad about yourself. You have to make a conscious deci-sion not to stay in those kinds of relationships or to address those issues as they arise. I had one client who made a simple rule for herself when she began the process of living more deliberately. That was: I’m not going to hang around with anyone who makes me feel bad. That one decision dramatically changed the quality of her life and, of course, her relationships with others.
I’m working with a client right now who’s struggling with whether or not to continue in a friendship with a woman she’s known since she was 14 years old. Together, we made a list of all the pros and cons of the relationship. Her list of pros included only two items: that they had a history together and they both like to shop. Her list of cons was a long one, and included: my friend is condescending; she talks about me behind my back; she breaks commitments; she reveals my confidences to others. The bottom line: my client didn’t like or trust her friend. She felt awful every time she was around her. In order to change her life and feel better about herself, she recognized that she needed to stop seeing this friend. She then began to change her relationships with the other people in her life as well.
I had an identical experience at one point in my own life. As I began my personal-development work, I began to notice that many of my women friends were critical and judgmental. I realized that I was replicating the relationship I’d had with my mother, who would say things to me like: “Your hair is so frizzy. Can’t you do something about it?” Or: “Can’t you put on a nice dress instead of those pants?” Once I recognized the problem, I learned to set healthy boundaries with my friends—to address issues as they arose, to set boundaries around how I did and didn’t want to be treated, and to let go of relationships that were not supportive and healthy.
Mastering the art of aloneness involves changing the way you treat yourself and others. To change those patterns, you have to begin to live more deliberately. The first step toward living deliberately involves recognizing the relationship between cause and effect in your life. The rest of this chapter is devoted to the other four steps that will help you get there:
• Developing your Inner Nurturing Parent
• Becoming the master of your emotions
• Enlisting the power of thought
• Honoring your intuition
Developing Your Inner Nurturing Parent
We are, each of us, a mix of contradictory feelings and thoughts. There may be a part of you that says, “I want to master the art of aloneness. I want to become more complete on my own.” Yet, at the same time, another part of you still longs for Prince or Princess Charming to come along and rescue you so that, poof, all your troubles will go away. Following the same line of thought, part of you may believe that you’re unworthy of love, while another part of you believes precisely the opposite: that you are a loveable and wonderful person. These conflicting thoughts and feelings don’t mean that you’re crazy—they are just part of the human conditions that affect us all.
I was trained in a phenomenal technique called voice dialogue that was developed by psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone. It’s a therapeutic modality I use to help clients break through their defense mechanisms and gain greater awareness of the patterns rooted in the unconscious self. I use voice dialoguing to allow the different parts of my clients to emerge, to help them reclaim their innate wholeness by becoming more aware of which parts of them are
dominant and activated in their lives and which parts of them are underdeveloped or have been submerged. The process involves identifying the various contradictory “voices” that find their home in each of us.
For example, say I have a client named Jane. Here’s how a pared-down version of a voice-dialoguing session might sound. Jane might be talking about the fact that she’s feeling lonely; she wants to have a fuller life and become more independent. Then, suddenly, she might say, “I’m afraid I’m going to be alone forever. I’m afraid no one is ever going to want me.” We explore this part of Jane: Who is it? “This is the part of me that’s afraid I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.” Then I might ask: “How often do you show up in Jane’s life?” “All the time. But Jane’s uncomfortable with me. She doesn’t like me, so she just pushes me away by distracting herself with work.” “Close your eyes and remember the first time you showed up in Jane’s life.” “I was at school. I felt separate from everyone else and left out.” Try to remember a specific incident: “I went home and cried and told my mom. She told me to go do my homework. Just do your work. That’s what school’s for, she told me.” Then another part of Jane might appear: “I know I can be happy on my own. I can focus on my goals and be self-sufficient.” “What part of Jane are you?” “I’m the part that’s strong, that knows what she wants, that possesses self-confidence. I want to start my own business.” This is not a case of a split personality or multiple personality disorder—in fact, voice dialogue would not be appropriate in either of these cases. Jane, like many of us, is simply a multifaceted human being made up of many different parts.
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