Sometimes change is easier if we experiment rather than analyse
Transcript of this video:
Have you ever been told to get over yourself? I know I have, and I know I didn’t like it. But in talking about the idea of getting over ourselves, I do want to stick up for the idea of us choosing to do it when it suits us based on our own insights and discoveries rather than being pushed around by somebody else.
I remember years ago reading the work of a German psychoanalyst called Otto Rank, a contemporary of Freud’s, who talked about adult life as a process of from time to time discarding less useful versions of ourselves and discovering new ones.
He pointed out that great artists, like Rembrandt or Picasso, had this capacity to reinvent themselves. And you know, that makes it sound like something that great people do, but I think it’s something that we all do as human beings as we make our way through the world.
But it’s also possible, I think, to get stuck in the old versions of ourselves. And sometimes when we’re faced with a difficult situation, we think, “Ah, why is this happening to me again? Is it because of the thing that happened at a certain point in my life?” You know, and I have my own, you know, history of those things in my life.
I’m not saying there’s no value in reflecting on them, but I think they can sometimes keep me stuck in, “Oh, this again,” as if I can only respond in this way.
I think our creative potential is refreshingly better than that. And I remember years ago working with someone who’d been put on the board of a company at quite a young age.
He was obviously very capable, but the trouble was that the other directors, many of whom were 20, 30 years older than him, would often respond to him quite aggressively or very sarcastically.
He didn’t really know how to respond when they would say something like, “Oh yeah, well that’ll really work.” And typically the way he responded, he told me, was to be defensive or to be sarcastic back. And clearly that wasn’t working for him.
So rather than go into his life story, I said, “Well, let’s just experiment with different ways that you might respond to that sarcasm.” And he tried lots of ways of responding, but they tended to stay in that groove of being very defensive and long-winded or being very sarcastic back, and we knew that wasn’t working.
And then I think I said, “Oh, well, just try a version where you just let rip with what you think.” And he lent forward and said something fierce to his imagined adversary.
I thought, “Well, that’s interesting. I quite like the leaning forward. Maybe lean forward but say something else.” And then he leant forward and he said, “Yes, it will work.”
In the moment he said it, we both had a light bulb go off ’cause we realized, “Oh, that feels like a much more effective way of responding.” Takes a lot less energy too.
And in that moment, he’d kind of let go of this old defensive version of himself and discovered a new way of being in the world.
I think sometimes we get there, we get to that breakthrough, by playing with our behaviour rather than getting stuck in a lot of analysis. And it’s one of my favourite ways of working, possibly because I’m the one who most needs to remember that when I myself are getting stuck in old versions of myself.
Photo by Benjamin Wedemeyer on Unsplash
