Blog 7: the thing that stops everyone - psychology

[Miniseries - 'Groundwork', step 2/2 from a growth framework - piece 2]

where this sits in the framework

Do you realise that the first time you stop yourself while using this framework, you're going to be convinced it was something practical? You know, like that running is hard or whatever it is. But to cut short what could extrapolate into the 'pivot' topic which comes later in the framework, practical is never the problem, theres always a next step. There's always a way to break it down, pivot, try again etc. The grease between the wheels though, is whether you decide if you can. Once you decide that you can, you'll then look at how. Because deep down, if you don't think there is a 'how', you're not even trying to find it. Herein lies your psychology.

[Your culture creates your narrative]

The 'can', is in the narrative you're living. The narrative is how you've defined your character's story already. When you do that, you dictate the bounds of your own behaviour in order to fulfil it. Therefore, 'can' is the confirmation of the direction of your narrative, and 'can't' is a redirection from things that would disrupt that narrative's realisation.

Everybody has a narrative, whether you choose it or you let it be chosen for you, one exists. Just like a culture. When there is human emotion involved, a culture forms. Either intentionally or not, it is the result of emotion and intellect coalescing. It develops when feelings become embodied by representation of thought, speech, physical bodies, and so on. you have a culture among the groups of people you exist around and you have a culture with yourself as your feelings reach cognition. Think of the narrative of your life as the culture you have with yourself, but with a trajectory. Your narrative is your culture played out into a progression of a lifetime. If you took an existing culture, and said, 'extrapolate this over time', you can predict to some extent what could become of those people (this really makes me think of Malcolm Gladwell's work around thin slicing!). You could predict certain types of fitting arguments that would occur between certain people, what problems they would find with others, how and if they would be resolved based on who's involved in those particular conditions. Depending on how far forward you progressed the narrative, what extra contexts you added in, you could more or less see it through to each of their deaths. Of course this isn't definitive, because we haven't considered each persons capacity for free will or say, potential advents that could hurdle them onto wildly different trajectories.

What we've done is said, 'if you took what it presents as now, and replicated it, what would it become?'. And if we did the same for you; took your existing culture, and extrapolated that into your own narrative; one exists for you too. Only this time, the culture doesn't exist as a combination of multiple parties, it exists within the relationship you have with yourself. I think of this as what happens between those two sides within us that I've referenced in (the manager an the artist stuff), the manager and the artist - again, just the idea of emotions and intellect coalescing like multiple parties.

With this phase of the framework, we can begin to understand what our own narrative currently is and where it looks like its going.

Then, we can decide if we're happy with that. If you're happy with that, you can continue onto the next steps of the grwoth framework.

If you aren't happy with the existing one, you can continue deeper into this step, where you can learn to unpick the narrative that exists for you, and re stitch a new one. Ultimately, what would be a desirable outcome is that first, in the case that you are living a narrative you hope not to continue, that you do indeed become the character whom decides to exercise their free will to make sure it is no longer so. And second, that you're able to progress faster along that narrative trajectory and so to experience more of it in this lifetime.

Remember, whether or not you examine it and or become intentional about it, your narrative, and therefore your future, exists for you in some form or another. Added to that, regardless of where it's going, your life is what's happening here and now, everyday, and that's what really matters. It's just that seeing where it goes over time gives you some better awareness of the gradual downward trajectory it may be slipping along day by day without you realising or thinking it's all too bad.

['Can' is the confirmation or redirection of the narrative, consistent with your existing culture]

So, back to the 'can'. The 'can', is defined in the mouth of the person performing in & so confirming, their own narrative. Problems we face in our lives present to us a choice of either stopping (like living trapped in a maze as Phil Stutz talks about in one of his tools!), or moving through them in order to proceed on your way.

 In a way, those moments can be reduced right down to a question in theory, that is, 'can you proceed, or can't you?' In theory, the way you answer any question that's presented as a cross roads for your momentum, is essentially with either 'i can' or 'i cant', with context to follow. The answer will be based on what is consistent with the culture and thus propels the narrative along. Let's look at two examples:

First, have you ever watched a show or movie, and after you find out a person is evil, you not only see them totally differently but if you watch it again, its never the same because you see them as evil from the start? In the end they're just actors, but the story we're told about them makes us decide that what we watch, even as they make a coffee or do anything perfectly innocent, that the story is a negative one. You could more or less answer for the actor playing the role of the protagonist here, whether they can or cannot proceed via a selection of different behavioural options that would progress the narrative accordingly. When we veil everything we do with a certain narrative, it changes who we are, what we are capable of, what we predict we ourselves will do, and therefore controls the narrative. For better or worse, we are telling the story. Whats the genre? What role are you playing? 

As a second example, let's look at someone in your life. You can go ahead and ask yourself now, of a person you know a decent amount about, and propose a question. Lets say - you just missed a bus and you were already running late to something important - does the person you're thinking of most likely react in a way that seems derived from 'i can' still make it, or 'i can't? Do they keep their energy high, begin brain storming, suggest other forms of transport, start googling, or even start rationalising that regardless of arriivng late, that there will still be value to it etc? Or are they more likely to shut the project down, look defeated and begin to confirm that regardless of other possibilities, they are simply no good because you are late, and that is so?My point here is just to say that, you are most likely able to predict a likely course of action (a portion of their narrative) of this person based on what you know about their culture so far. This is of course only in one aspect of their life as a micro example. So again, the things that you 'can' and 'can't' do are also predetermined based on your own culture, and will present a narrative for your future, assuming it's uninterrupted by freewill or a freak advent as suggested earlier that could disrupt its' path. So, 'can' is the confirmation of the direction of your narrative, and 'can't' is a redirection from things that would disrupt that narrative's realisation. In order for us to discover if you are happy with that narrative unfolding, we need to examine the culture. We've discussed that it comes of the emotions and intellect interacting, but what provokes those components? So the question next is, what makes up our culture? This to me is where the most power for personal change comes from. While many of us know or have heard that our problems are merely psychological, it often then becomes more harrowing to be given such an idea and then not know where it is hiding. We can do our best to add on the positive psychology, but if we knew what was actually holding us back in the way of the derailing psychology, it would never even get to stopping us - we wouldn't be holding onto it!

That of course in itself is how we confirm that the thing stopping us is psychology, because if we got really down to it to try to find the clear problem, we'd find a tangible next step. But when it's psychology, it jumps each time we try to grab it. And that is a good thing really, because its' remedy is to know that nothing really is stopping us from working out 'how' to proceed, we just need to find out which part of us believes that we cannot, and have a little re-negotiation.

So then, in order to find who we need to renegotiate with, we must find who's in charge, and our next clue is back to that question from a moment ago - 'what makes up our culture?'.