Permission Granted

I get distracted easily. Do you?

Life and the problems in it can keep me very distracted sometimes. Honestly, there isn't even a good reason for it. When I sit down to think about it for a second I realize that most of the problems aren't mine, I can't do anything about them, and the only solution is really to do the thing I'm distracted from which is my work.

That means I have to question the distraction. Why is this pulling me away and why I am waiting for the problems to go away again to give myself permission to do my work? What is that all about? Why do I keep looking for permission from the outside world?

Funnily enough, I wrote a blog last week about this idea that sometimes the only control we have is over what we focus on. Here I am out here getting distracted by all the things. It's funny, but there is also method in the madness.

My focus is attached to my sense of permission. Maybe this is true for you as well, so bear with me here and let's see if I can get us all out of this mess at the same time. The problems make me feel as though the world isn't letting me do what I want to do.

Do you feel like the problems are stopping you sometimes? Like, maybe this is a sign that I'm not supposed to do this thing. You've all felt that before, right? But is that true? Are the problems actually showing you that you're not supposed to or is that just the mind making up a good story?

Well, the truth for me is certainly that the mind wants to make up a good story. It's that old sense of powerlessness coming back to bite me again. The powerlessness makes me ask for permission. Anytime anything around me seems to object, I think I have to stop what I'm doing and wait until I get that proverbial green light to move forward again. That means that if problems come up, immediately it makes me unconsciously think that I have to stop what I'm doing and focus on the problems. For me these days this is an unconscious, repetitive behavior that I created from pain but is no longer helping me and is no longer true.

Maybe you have the voice in your head that talks to you incessantly and tells you how awful you are. Maybe that voice makes up a good story about how those problems are really showing you that you shouldn't do that thing. The idea is to get to the place where you recognize that the story we're telling isn't true.

When problems pop up in life, as they inevitably will, our job is to question whose problem it is, do we have control over it and can we do anything about it? If not, then our job is refocus back on our goals. Sure, the problems can be showing up for a reason, but it's not necessarily to stop you.

Why are the problems here then? Well this time, it's to show me that unconscious habit I have created for myself. The problem serves no purpose except to allow me to recognize the unconscious behavior. So, what's that problem showing you?

The story that it stops you comes from a mind whose sole job is to try to keep you safe. How does it do that? It tries to stop you from moving forward because the future is unknown and everything unknown to the mind is scary.

The unconscious patterns are a really easy place for your mind to stop you. They are the simplest ways the mind can interfere without being obnoxious about it. That's the reason why I wrote Procrastination Station. It's about the idea that procrastination can be an unconscious pattern that we buy into more easily because it doesn't seem like such a big deal. Well, here's another place where the mind can shift our focus really easily and we don't pay that much attention to what's happening. Just like procrastination, it doesn't seem like it's that much of an issue. It's an easy, repetitive pattern for the mind to create that tends to slip under the radar.

So, what do you do when you catch it?

Well, it's easy to just sort of go back to doing what you were doing in that moment, but that actually doesn't solve the problem. The idea now is to question why you got sucked in to begin with. Why is the pattern there and how do I break it?

We break behavioral patterns and habits just the same way we'd break the habit of biting our nails. We have to intentionally and consciously decide what the new habit is and then pay attention to our behavior. If we were working on nail biting, we'd have to pay attention to what we were doing. Every time we caught ourselves biting our nails, we'd have to stop and shift the behavior.

Why do you think people buy all these solutions to put on their nails to make them taste bad? Because people don't pay attention to their own behavior. They need something outside of themselves to block them from biting their nails, otherwise they'll end up biting their nails and nothing will change. That's the importance of being aware of ourselves within the experience.

These kinds of behaviors don't stop because you paint your nails with some kind of solution that tastes bad. You can't block yourself by chewing gum. You actually have to be consciously aware of yourself to recognize these patterns and then change them. If you're not willing to pay attention to your own behavior and your own thinking, then you can't change the behaviors and you get to stay in pain.

The reason why you're in pain is not because of that thing that happened when you were 5 years old. It's because you created a bunch of behaviors to cope with what happened back then and you still live from those behaviors. Your job now is to break them. You're in a habit of living from pain even though you're not in pain anymore. That's what causes your focus to shift when things happen; it's because you're in a habit of focusing on problems and the thinking is that the problems are there to stop you instead of to show you the patterns you need to break.

I've been aware of this in myself for a long time actually. But like all things healing, there are layers to it and I've had to work through those layers one at a time. This layer had me question why I was looking for permission still? That's a little different than what I've done in the past when I've worked through fear and focused on understanding my role and my work in life. Here I am now questioning why I'm asking my problems for permission to not focus on them.

Permission is usually tied to the external world in some way. We're looking around us at other people or our circumstances to determine whether we're allowed to do something. Every time the world or other people object we stop ourselves from moving forward.

There are a few layers to this idea of permission that we need to work through. The first is giving ourselves permission internally, which has nothing to do with the external world. This is focused on our commitment to change within ourselves. It's what keeps us going when things get tough. Am I willing to allow myself to heal?

The next layer is usually focused on the people around us. What messages do we get from other people? Are other people projecting their own pain, intentionally or unintentionally trying to stop us? How can we reconfigure the boundaries in those relationships so that they can't stop us anymore?

The third layer is our circumstances, which we may not have the ability to change. What happens when our circumstances aren't ideal or they feel limiting in some way? How do we make it work anyway? How do we shift from feeling like we can't move forward because of our circumstances?

The final layer to permission is the feeling of being allowed to do the thing. What usually happens is we base our sense of being allowed on other people and outside circumstances that we don't have control over. When we put control outside of ourselves, we stop feeling like we have permission to move forward because we're waiting to get dragged back into the problems. We're waiting until we feel like we're in control again, and that may or may not ever happen.

I started this blog with the idea of being distracted by my circumstances. What was I really being shown though? It wasn't actually the circumstances that were the problem. It was my sense of being out of control causing me to feel like I wasn't allowed to do my work. I found the pattern that was keeping me stuck and now I have the opportunity to break it. How?

Well first just writing this allows me to break the stalemate with my reality. The second piece is that I now have to pay attention to my own behavior. You already know I'll do that because I focus on my behavior all the time. I won't allow this pattern to happen again because I can see it quite clearly now. There is no story in the mind because I shut down that voice in my head a long time ago. The mind may have gone underground, but that doesn't stop me from gaining control over it.

You have to be able to do the same thing for yourself. When things like this come up, no matter how they get shown to you, the way out of the pattern is to recognize the pattern early and stop yourself from repeating it. If you have that voice in your head, tell it to jump in a lake. Change the narrative in your mind to something that's actually useful to you. Learn to drop the story you tell yourself.

This isn't an excuse to beat yourself up. It's not that you should have caught it 6 months ago. It doesn't matter that it took you years to find it. The fact is you found it and now you have the ability to break it. You just accept it without arguing with it. You allow it to be there, recognize it doesn't serve you, and drop it. Don't take out the hammer and decide you didn't do it soon enough. You'll see what you need to see when you're ready to see it and not before. Trust that timing and don't worry about it.

It doesn't matter what the behavior is that you find. You deal with them all the same way. Honestly, once you get good at this, it's easy to do, it doesn't take very long, and you can move on really quickly. It's not scary and it doesn't have to be painful. There is no deep healing to do, just break the pattern and then see what happens.

We usually miss a very important step by not paying attention to the outcome. What happened when you allowed yourself to move forward anyway? Did you land on your feet? Did you survive it? Was it as bad as you thought it would be? Paying attention to what happens next is how you manage any fear that might show up. That's how you show your brain there is nothing to be afraid of and that the unknown doesn't have to be scary. Paying attention to the ending allows you to tie up the loose ends in your thinking. It makes it okay to change things. It's part of recognizing that you didn't really need permission; that there was nothing really stopping you except yourself.

The cool part in all of this is that you get to be okay. That's what life keeps trying to show you. You're allowed to be okay right where you are. You don't have to do anything to get that except acknowledge what already exists, which is the freedom to move forward on your own terms.

We're not powerless. When we heal it enough to recognize that more fully, we can move forward without feeling like we need to wait for life to be stable and problem-free to do it.

Love to all.

Della