Session Three

Cutting Strings

Objective:
Unlearn performance indoctrination
that breeds unhealthy behaviors.

Pivot toward meta-awareness.

The illiterate of the twenty-first century
will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn,
unlearn, and relearn.

—Alvin Toffler

I
t’s August 2010. A user identifying himself as sociallyinferior1 posted his plight, “my life is taking a downward spiral” on a forum on SocialAnxietySupport.com:

sociallyinferior: I recently never paid any mind to how my life was heading but now that I take a closer look at it, it seems I am going nowhere in life. I have yet to finish college and I am 23 years old, my brother on the other hand is going to graduate next year and he is only 20 years of age. He wants to move out which I think is going to be hard on me. . . . I feel like I really am alone and hopeless and nowhere to go. I feel like I will be a failure in life. I have a job but that doesn’t pay enough for me to move out. . . . I don’t want to end up like a loser, I want to have a career and a life. I just don’t know where to start. I’ve lost most of my younger years doing nothing but working trying to pay off a car that seems like forever. And not even paying attention to my studies. And now is when I am actually giving more thought to my future.

Within eighteen minutes, his screen lights up with lots of advice:

littlemisshy: I’m sorry it’s not going well for you. But don’t think life is not going to go anywhere for you. With life you really do need to “take it by the horns” (so to speak). I know you probably don’t want to listen to someone as old as I am . . . but personally speaking, I left home at 16 years with nothing (no money, no family support) and just had to push myself to finish school, get a job etc. It has paid off at the end, though I’ve been to hell and back on the way here.

kos: You can start by doing the best you can in school. . . . You should be looking forward to this stage in your life. It can be very exciting.

pinkpurplepink: sounds so quarter life crisis. that is something we have to go through, i guess. try to embrace it and embrace life.

spaceghost: Your life looks good. 23 is young. Forget about the past and your mistakes. You are now conscious of your life and where it’s heading. Now you can focus on building your life, career and relationships. Focus on discovering what you want. Then you can determine what you need to do to make a plan.

Such slumps aren’t just the concerns of millennials. We all want to get to the good life, but sometimes we get stuck along the way. People who find themselves in this type of funk are what psychologist Harriet Lerner would call underfunctioners, which is no fun for anyone.

This infamous I’m-a-loser downward spiral is a toxic mix of regret, self-flagellation, and hopelessness: I haven’t gotten very far. I’m done. I suck. Never mind helping someone else. I can barely survive myself.

Chances are if you are the classic, brain-never-shuts-down person who picks up a book called Mentalligence, those slump days are vague memories. The thought of even missing one day of work or school makes your eyes pop. You barely stay asleep all night, you’re so juiced up. Your spiral is totally different.

But any overfunctioner knows that the I’m-out-of-control, sprinting-through-marathons spiral is not without its own anxieties: I’m too busy. Crazy busy. Maybe I’m crazy. I’m too busy to tell. Is there a difference?

There’s no time to be bored, digress, or play. There aren’t any margins in your schedule for it. People count on you to deliver, so you push as hard as you can.

And even with all you’re doing, your view of yourself is skewed. After hitting it out of the park, you still stew in self-criticism. Instead of celebrating success along the way, you fall for the bait of our never-enough culture, with strings pulled in a thousand directions by your phones, bosses, partners, parents, and children.

It would be easy to chalk sociallyinferior’s plight up to pure laziness or even a lack of conscientiousness. He seems to have shut down even before getting out of the gate. But in the face of our revved-up culture, the he’s-a-loser explanation is an oversimplification. Today, many of us are scared off by the intimidating expectation of being college-ready by seventh grade.

The sad reality is you don’t have to be living in your parents’ basement indefinitely, or stuck in a dead-end job, to be beating yourself up royally. In a culture that blares messages of doing and not being, even super-achievers can end up with the same level of doubt as someone who hasn’t quite gotten off the ground yet.

We have so many tabs open in our brains that we stumble around in a state of constant vertigo. Whether we’re in a mode of under- or overfunctioning, these downward spirals have the following effects:

In his groundbreaking work, psychologist Daniel Kahneman illustrates the dangers of jumping to conclusions in the middle of our negative thought spirals. Errors in judgment known as confirmation bias lead us to only pay attention to evidence that support theories we erroneously develop out of raw emotions. The amygdala, a small structure in the brain that regulates fear responses, takes over, instead of giving way to the frontal lobe, where reasoning happens.

Drive Your Brain

Kahneman relates much of our levels of awareness to brain functions he calls System 1 and System 2. (Dr. Seuss would be proud.)

System 1 travels highway style, unconsciously relying on the automated limbic system, which allows us to make snap decisions for survival. It steers behavior intuitively, no questions asked. System 1 is all about the shortcut.

Thinking shortcuts can be very useful. If we weren’t agile enough to think quickly, we’d find ourselves in harm’s way. Our primitive instincts and reflexes serve us well in many situations. But when we constantly cut corners, we become more vulnerable to dangerous blind spots. Shortcuts aren’t always the best route to take.

System 2, the more back-roadsy, conscious, rule-based side, likes to take its time. With the frontal lobe in full force, it paves the way for logical, controlled thinking. It relies on heuristics, the general rules and methods that we tend to follow to make decisions. System 2 is like a careful over-the-shoulder check to catch what our rearview mirrors miss. It helps us notice blind spots more readily, avoid potential crashes, and redirect ourselves. It helps us navigate through even the thickest of traffic in our busy brains. Move over, Waze.

System 2 allows us to draw upon an amazing process that only human beings are capable of, known as metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Meta means beyond. Metacognition helps us engage in complex self-
reflection to take us past basic, limiting ways of seeing to become more meta-aware.

Metacognition

Academic Definition

Metacognition, the ability to think about thinking, is an amazing feature of the brain unique to the human species. It helps us to avoid falling prey to blind spots that jeopardize our engagement in an active process of conscious cognitive behavioral monitoring and refinement.

Street Definition

Metacognition gives us needed reality checks. We are the only creatures on the planet cool enough to be able to think about our thinking. Metacognition helps us find missing pieces to the puzzle. It gives us the right tools for the job so that we don’t get yanked around. #thinkaboutthinking #sowoke

Use Metacognition to Avoid Downward-Spiral Thinking Types

Since our minds can quickly spin out of control and we can accidentally mistake puppet strings as necessary tools to keep us in check, we first need to understand the common types that send us into disarray:2

Downward-Spiral Thinking Types

The Preemptive 911 Caller. Something happens, and you see it as a total emergency. When your amygdala is in full force, it’s likely you are only able to see red and hear alarm bells going off. You spin into a place where you see reality as being nothing but a full-out crisis. Panic sets in, and everything gets blown way out of proportion.

The Saboteur. Difficulty strikes, and you automatically engage in self-sabotage, taking everything personally and blaming yourself for occurrence of events, even those over which you have no control. Your thoughts interfere with reasoning, and instead you beat yourself up incessantly, diminishing your sense of value and worth.

The Zero-Shades-of-Gray Thinker. When looking at a situation, you only see extremes or absolutes. You define things in black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms. Your view is that something is either this way or that, and it’s hard to see the possibility that it could also be a both/and situation.

The Labeler. You look at behavior and label it in negative terms. Even though hard to deal with, you believe it is a universal defining trait versus a behavior or situation that needs modification. This trap can lead to self-labeling as well as judging other people.

The Tunnel Visioner. When evaluating what’s at hand, you only zoom in on the negative details, ignoring anything that is positive and worth appreciating. When something goes wrong, you have trouble identifying the things that have also gone right. Downward-spiraling tunnel vision focuses on deficits and injuries rather than lessons and strengths.

The Broad Brusher. You paint a very broad picture, make loose connections between past or present instances, and make sweeping overgeneralizations to describe what’s at hand. You use phrases like “I never,” “This always,” and “Everyone” to make big assertions of what you see happening.

The Superhero. Your cape is always on, working hard to never let anyone down. You pride yourself on doing all and being all, at all costs. You “should” and “must” yourself to the nth degree, but when something goes wrong, you come crashing down and your self-esteem goes plummeting. When you can’t save the world, you experience extreme disappointment.

The Imposter. Because you constantly engage in social comparison, you magnify the positives you see in everyone else, but downplay your own strengths and talents. You think you’re going to be found out, and that you really don’t belong at the level where you find yourself. You worry that people will soon see through your façade and come to their senses on the trust they’ve placed in you.

Metacognition provides us with the tools to counteract these very human downward-spiral tendencies. It helps us plan, check, and evaluate our thinking and behavioral patterns, allowing us to:

Of course, when we’re trying to become epic thinkers, we can overdo it. If we don’t have the proper tools that metacognition provides, we can take a detour and end up anxiously and obsessively overanalyzing every detail of our lives, which is known as rumination. We become unproductively fixated, oblivious to context, and lost in our own heads.

Know the Difference Between Metacognition and Rumination

Metacognition is solutions focused, paving the path to behavioral change through a specific and structured process designed to help us pinpoint opportunities toward improvement. It’s like a sander that helps buff and polish thinking practices.

Rumination, on the other hand, is a power drill that probes too deeply, haphazardly hitting delicate optic nerves, leaving us blinded from seeing positive and productive courses of action. Rumination is like a bad roommate who never stops nagging but fails to deliver possible remedies.

Metacognition helps us progress along our upward-spiral course, while rumination propels us downward, breaking down our fabric and capacity for forward momentum. Metacognition allows us to realize that one fixed lens won’t help us see everything we need to. It helps us avoid rumination detours and stay on a path that keeps us moving upward.

Kahneman says we must come to terms with the flaws of our thinking to truly make progress. We have our work cut out for us to pry ourselves away from destructive traps of the mind that send us spiraling downward. There’s plenty of room for unlearning. Thankfully, our brains are capable of changing throughout life because of what’s known as neuroplasticity. Through experience, we can learn to drive our brains away from unhelpful behavior traps.

Let Go of the Puppet Myth

Our distorted thinking patterns and resulting downward spirals are in part caused by what my research revealed as the puppet myth, the belief that what we do is who we are.

Whether we are like Gloppy from Candyland, caught in a swamp of inaction, or an EF5-level tornado, emanating chaos, our spirals are heavily influenced by the puppet myth, thinking we have to perform our way through life. Get it right. Don’t be such a crybaby. Try a little harder. What’s wrong with you? You’re gonna miss the boat.

From an early age, we’re given a script to follow. Our puppeteers—our parents, teachers, coaches, siblings, and friends—egg us on. They cheer wildly and applaud when we comply with their string pulling. The attention is addictive.

Then there’s the radio silence when we go our own way. We quickly learn that compliance win friends. Groupthink sweeps us up. We go along to get along, and we’re left with contingent self-esteem, waiting for our validation fix to calm our nerves and set us free, even if for a fleeting moment. Our worth is always based on the applause from our last trick, which is inevitably drowned out in today’s noisy arenas.

This transactional way of performing for acceptance is something we all deal with—across time, space, and culture. This puppet myth—that we can do it all, singing and dancing our way to so-called success, without falter—leaves us hustling for approval, living in the extremes of being either too exhausted to think about anyone but ourselves or so consumed with everyone else that we neglect to consider our own needs.

Angelo, one of my students, told me he’s sick of trying to live up to these ridiculous expectations. He says, “It’s not living.” When the lights go out, he told me, he feels cheapened and alone. There’s so much more to Angelo than what’s being celebrated in our culture.

This way of living is dangerous since it leaves the door wide open for imposter syndrome to strike, the feeling that we’re not good enough and someone’s going to find us out—that we’re not as competent, talented, or grounded as people first think. I don’t deserve to be at this table. I better work my tail off. Pretend I know everything. Never admit a mistake. I hope no one catches on to me.

Historically marginalized groups—like women, people of color, first-generation college students, and those known as straddlers, those of us brought up with humble beginnings, who’ve worked their way up to high-stakes roles and arenas—are more prone to imposter syndrome than those with more privilege from the get-go.

Imposter Syndrome

Academic Definition

A form of intellectual self-doubt in which a high-achieving person struggles to internalize accomplishments, marked by a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud.” The person often suffers in silence, questioning not only their abilities but whether they belong or not.

Street Definition

When you feel like you’re a big phony and that it’s a matter of time before people catch onto you. You hesitate to speak up, because you don’t want to expose your greatest worry—that you’re a fraud. #imposter

Ironically, most of us are born with plastic spoons in our mouths, not silver spoons, but when you’re a straddler, someone with feet in both worlds, it’s not uncommon to think everyone around you has a leg up, igniting insecurity and driving energies to the never-ending auditions we’ve lined up for so that we won’t blow our cover.

It’s one thing to have strings orchestrated when we’re kids. We can’t do much about that. But why do so many of us dutifully hand our strings over to our bosses, marketers, social media feeds, partners, parents, and even our own kids?

We suck up to ideals of being rock stars from the delivery room to the boardroom to the bedroom. We marinate in guilt and shame against the tyranny of the highly romanticized versions of success swarming us, which seem to be celebrating hard work but really are infecting us with images of perfect that are well beyond our reach—unless we’re part of the elite, with our very own concierge, masseuse, makeup artists, and entourage. Well-meaning words like work-life balance dominate our business and social vocabularies, but balance is really code for we’re expected to excel at everything.

Our compulsiveness fires up. The pressure overwhelms our thresholds for coping, and we become more apt to make rash, fear-based decisions, instead of accessing our wisdom. Cutting our strings from these unhelpful ideas takes skill. They’ve become painfully lodged into our identities. If we yank them too quickly, we might unravel.

Life has become a giant audition where our part is never secure: we overwork, super-parent, scramble to score our roles, and pull off our gigs. Then we’re met with harsh criticism from the peanut galleries and judges’ tables, and the gnawing doubts in the bowels of our own brains, nudging us to compare ourselves obsessively to a gold standard that doesn’t even exist.

Cut Your Strings

Most of us are walking around in desperate need of soul surgery. Careful pruning is needed so that we can rescue our inner voice without cutting off our air. We’re not shaving down to apathy, folks—just a little more sanity, please.

I think we hold onto our strings and jump through hoops because we’re scared. What will people think? What if I let someone down? What if I’m ostracized from a community of which I really want to be a part? What if I’m left behind? What if I’m not enough? What if I’m too much?

We wonder why we’re the most obese, addicted, medicated group in history. Our salaries, hips, and lips are never big enough. (Thank you, Kim and Kylie K.) Keeping up with this never enough lifestyle costs us a lot. A report from the World Health Organization warns that, by 2030, the pressures will be so intense that most of us simply won’t be able to cope with the demands of life.

One of my favorite movies, Admissions, illustrates the puppet myth perfectly.

I nestled in to watch it with my daughter, Tori, when she was a senior in high school. Everyone said we had to watch it. Who can say no to Tina Fey? It was the perfect cap-off to the whirlwind two-year journey we’d completed stomping across several states and at least a dozen college campuses. Tori had finally finished her final application to reach, mid-line, and safety schools. It was a far cry from my admissions process of the early 1990s. The institution I attended didn’t even require an admissions essay or charge a fee.

Throughout the movie, colleges reject candidates left and right, despite being champion gymnasts, chess players, and prodigies with 4.0 GPAs and perfect scores. We laughed out loud while we squirmed inside, knowing that this level of competition is today’s reality.

The pressure doesn’t stop once the admission letters arrive. Across our schools, workplaces, and homes, stress is at an all-time high, and our day is even being called the Age of Anxiety. Our strings can eventually start to choke us. Cutting them first requires metacognition—catching ourselves in the act of being puppeteered, then bravely letting go and driving our own brains and lives.

Strings aren’t our only problem. Besides the rampant performance mind-sets flooding our consciousness, there’s more to contend with. Unfortunately, one extreme often leads to another. We must watch out for bubble wrap and trophies, too, as I explain in the next session.