If you are depressed, you live in the past. If you are anxious, you live in the future. But, if you are at peace, you live in the present.
For those of us who love to play with possibilities and think of all the iterations of wonderfulness that can occur from great ideas and initiatives, we have a tendency to fly off into la-la land like a helium balloon released into the atmosphere. Possibility-gasm™, weee! We can stay lost in the ether, which is fun and exciting and energizing but it can also be impractical and ineffective. Instead, we have to come back to earth and play in the moment, because being present can serve us in so many ways.
Betty, one of my colleagues, is a big idea thinker. She is always raising the bar on ideas, thinking about bigger and better possibilities and she tends to wear some people down. I was listening to some folks lamenting about Betty’s compulsive idea generation, and they likened her ideas to beach balls at a concert. She would lob an idea (AKA beach ball), and then the idea would get bumped again and again never touching the ground but instead bouncing around in the air. People tended to roll their eyes at Betty’s ideas. Even though some her ideas were great, her unfocused and disorganized approach lacked traction. Just like at the end of a concert, Betty’s ideas would lay motionless on the ground, left behind with nowhere to go and no one to take them on.
It seems that having the ability to dream up new ideas also needs a system to build a strategy and plan around them. Just bouncing from idea to idea isn’t terribly helpful. For example, there are programs in schools and universities where businesses send a problem to students to solve in new and innovative ways. The kids get to think about all the options, throwing all their ideas on the table and dreaming big. The business receives the ideas for consideration and then does the strategic planning around the ones that are plausible for their organization. This process is effective and exploits the strengths of each group. Students are not typically concerned with all the minutia required to promote an idea and push it through an organization. Businesses know the process of creating systems around ideas but aren’t always strong at thinking outside of the box. Win-win.
If you are an idea creator who loves lobbing new ideas into the crowd, then you may want to consider finding a strategic thinker to pick up your idea and make it a reality. If you are really brave, you can toss your ideas to a person who isn’t fond of new ideas. For instance, I used to work with a colleague whose first answer was always no. Part of him loved to argue and the other part didn’t like to consider new ways of doing things. By having to defend my great ideas to this idea blocker, I was forced to find multiple ways to defend my ideas. The result was that my ideas had a finer filter, which yielded more reasonable options.
There are two kinds of what ifs. One is what if bad thing happens. The other is what if an even better thing happens. People who think outside of the box can get caught up in the second kind of what-iffing. Picture this. You are in a board room. Someone presents an idea. You like the idea and state as much verbally. Then you build on the idea, tossing out what if scenarios at a rapid pace. You’re floating away from the group and are now lost somewhere between the troposphere and stratosphere. C’mon back, you. This is the type of what-iffing that can get many of us ignored, scoffed at or just plain shot down.
Let’s use an example from my personal life. Our daughter suffers from anxiety and depression. As a young teen, she goes through periods of great difficulty. In order to help her find ways to build her self-esteem and confidence, we’ve discovered her gift for understanding animals. She has a dog, a cat and 5 guinea pigs. She volunteers at the local humane society. She is the go-to person in our neighborhood for pet sitting. After completing horse therapy with her therapist, she started taking horseback riding lessons. I shared with my husband how wonderful she did with her first riding lesson and then began “what-iffing” all over him. I started with -- what if I took lessons with her and we learned to care for and ride horses without an instructor. We could lease a horse or buy a horse and get some land in the country. We could even build a barn… Off I drifted, blabbering about running a farm/school for girls with anxiety and depression while my husband looked at the unwashed piles of laundry on the floor and dirty dishes that we couldn’t keep up with.
This isn’t to say that elevating visions is a bad idea. It’s just that for some of us who love to run off on tangents of what ifs and possibility-gasms can build some awareness of our tendencies. It’s wonderful to have big dreams. If I want to build a farm school for anxious girls someday, then I can keep that beautiful vision in my mind as I make day to day decisions. I can also be cognizant of our family’s immediate needs and do my best to stay present and live in reality. And do some laundry once in a while. Living in the future can be a distraction, so coming back to earth and being in the moment is a good skill to hone.
When we start to consider what could be, we can easily become infatuated with a utopia that doesn’t and cannot exist. Think about the issues that our culture argues about: taxes, free trade, net neutrality, common core standards, standing for the national anthem, immigration. These are complex issues with lots of moving parts. We might wish, imagine, fantasize about a world where these issues are easy to solve, but if that were the case then they’d probably be solved already. When we get frustrated at the pace or the rejection of new ideas, we can remind ourselves to take a big dose of reality.
When our daughter was hospitalized for depression, I suffered greatly. I frantically searched for the thing(s) to blame for her illness. It’s those darn cell phones and social media and our immediate gratification culture and public education and the economy and I grabbed her really hard when she was two years old out of frustration. As I sat in my sadness and fear, I wondered how we could get her back to “normal”. How could we help her to clear out the distorted thoughts that swirled around in her mind? How could we keep her from going in the deep, dark hole next time? How could we cure her, control her, fix her? Then I got a big dose of reality from my coach. She said, “Allison, she will never be normal.” It felt like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. The reality is that she’ll always have distorted thinking. She will always suffer from depression. She will never be cured. Gulp. That reality is a large, dry, bitter pill to swallow. The sooner I choke it down, the sooner I can get on with coming up with better ideas.
Regardless of the issue, it’s an effective strategy to stand back, look around and ask yourself, “What is the reality here?” There is a saying that suffering is caused by our mind’s refusal to accept reality. By accepting what is, you can get on with life. The resentments, blaming, and shoulding can stop. If my daughter is never going to live a normal life, then I better get on board and adjust my expectations. Once I’ve accepted reality, I can come up with ideas that are more harmonious and useful for the situation at hand.
Soaring above everyone in the room in my possibility bubble can be a really helpful way to sidetrack myself. I have noticed that I can use futurizing, which is the act of thinking about the future, to keep me from being present. When discomfort arises, the emotional kind, I love to jump right into the future and think about all the things that will be better out there in the future. Futurizing can be the same as eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon; it feels good in the moment. By being an outside the box thinker, I am really good at coming up with ideas that prevent me from feeling the discomfort of my present reality. Yay me!
In the process of writing this chapter, our daughter was hospitalized for anxiety and depression again. At the tender age of 13, I cannot stomach the idea that our little girl has to undergo so much. After an 8-day hunger strike, our daughter reported that the staff would be inserting a feeding tube in her in order to provide her body with some nutrition. As you might imagine, the pain and discomfort I am currently sitting in is overwhelming. While we visited her, we supported her fully and listened to her distorted thinking without judgment. We were present with her. We were in the dark hole with her. As my husband and I got into the car after our visit, I blurted out that I will start looking into different schools for her when she gets out of the hospital. I took off running into the future of when our daughter would return home. I placed myself in that future vision of her going to a great school with loads of support and nice children who wouldn’t treat her differently and a program that would address her emotional needs. With one sentence, my husband brought me crashing back to the present moment. “I’m just thinking about how our daughter hasn’t eaten in 8 days.” It was a good point. It was direct. It was stating reality. It was focused on the present moment. And it hurt. A lot.
Serendipity would have me believe that this chapter of the book came at the right time. Whether it’s divine intervention or simply coincidence, I can think of no other example that speaks to the tendency to slip away from the present and into the seductive utopia of the future. I know I have this tendency, yet I’m still surprised when I find myself doing it without even thinking. We, humans, don’t do well with discomfort, so I can give myself a break for being human. It makes sense that our minds will look for an escape(s). If you are an outside the box thinker, like me, then maybe you too find yourself using the future as an escape.
Awareness of the urge to futurize is one of many ways to keep an eye on my thinking. I also use deep breathing, sitting in stillness, petting the cat, working out really hard and writing to bring me back to the present. The way we get back to the present isn’t as important as the acknowledgment that we need to do it. The present is full of all sorts of joys and delicious life morsels that we miss if we are somewhere other than this moment right now. Yes, the present can be full of discomfort, but running away from it doesn’t make it disappear. I’ve found that being present to the emotions and allowing them to float to the surface has been the key to managing them. Yep it hurts. Yep I cry in public. Yep I still eat Nutella from the jar. But I can shake off the discomfort faster and am less anxious about the next painful moment because I know I can handle it. Just like a pushup, it hurts when I’m doing it but I’m stronger afterward.
In Chapter 7, I talked about being at our Maximum Operating Capacity (MOC), which is when we showcase our strengths, live in alignment with who we are and make decisions based on what is important to us. I’ve learned that being present allows me to be at my MOC. Even when I have Nutella smeared on my face and my eyes are bloodshot and swollen, I can quickly switch to a moment of joy when I hear my daughter’s guinea pigs wheeking or watch the sun rising over the lake or feel the warmth of my fireplace on a cold autumn day. Being present means feeling it all, ALL the time, AT the time. This puts us at our MOC, because we aren’t distracted by the past or the future. We are here and now.
An acquaintance of mine, we’ll call her Ann, owns a local art business and works for a large security corporation. She uses the corporate gig for income and the local business to express her passion. She was sharing with me during a coaching conversation that her life had become unbearable. She was feeling like she was being crushed by the weight of her soul sucking day job coupled with the poor performance of her local business. Ann was squarely focused on her future debts, like mortgages, university tuitions and retirement savings. She couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to afford these items with a failing business and staying in a job she abhors. When I asked her how long she could last if she no longer had any income, her response was “not one day”. I challenged her belief that she couldn’t last one day without a paycheck. After reflecting on her finances, she reported that she did have millions of dollars tucked away in investments, but it was for the future. It was as if she couldn’t see the present reality because she was too busy looking out over the horizon. She had inadvertently placed herself in a dark hole by fixating solely on her future budgetary needs. While I would never advocate that we ignore our future needs, I would also not advocate excluding our current ones. Ann was not taking care of herself physically, emotionally or spiritually, so she of little good to her family, friends, employees and community. On an MOC scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being high, Ann was at a 1 or 2. She wasn’t practicing her strengths. Most of her daily work was not in alignment with her values. She spent a majority of her time dealing with issues that were totally unimportant to her. To the outside observer, all of this pain was caused by not living in the present. Ann had missed out on the plethora of joyful moments.
If you are a big, bold thinker, it’s easy to think about the “I’ll be happy when…” scenarios. For instance, I’ll be happy when my daughter gets out the hospital, we have enough money saved up for college or I can buy that adorable little sports car. Here’s the big secret. I can be happy right now. Even though my daughter is hurting, we don’t have enough money saved for our kids’ tuitions, and I drive a 10-year-old SUV, I am at my MOC because I am present to what is happening right now. Being present has freed me to be able to shift my mindset quickly. Having an agile approach makes me more adaptable and better able to discover multiple moments of unexpected enjoyment each day. These little joy titbits have carried me through the most difficult times.