You are the planet around which your problems orbit.

At an event I attended last week, one of the speakers, Daniel Schmachtenberger, broke from the topics of the talk to reflect on a piece of advice he had received. He looked slightly gobsmacked as he talked about it, reflecting on how its simplicity made him quesiton his mental faculties.

The advice, essentially, was this: if you are looking to form a long-term relationship with someone, first consider the other longstanding relationships in their life. Examine them to see if they reflect the qualities of relationship that you hope to create with this person. If they don’t, it is unlikely that you will be able to create that kind of relationship with them.

They are the common denominator, and whilst it is not impossible for people to change, in the context of long-term relationships, our patterns run deep.

My friend Minor Arias, a coach based in Costa Rica, uses a reflection a little like this with his clients. He asks them to outline the three biggest problems in their lives. (You can do this if you like – pause now to think about it)

Then, he asks them to consider what these three problems have in common.

Amongst what the three problems have in common – sometimes the only thing they have in common – is you. The person with the problems.

At first, of course, this doesn’t feel like a good thing. But in reality it is. We can only affect things we are involved in. As Fred Kofman once said, innocence breeds impotence.

Better by far, to be responsible for the things in our life, even if it is more comfortable to not be. Because if we have some responsibility, we have some agency. We can choose to change things and we probably will.

And so sometimes it might pay to combine these two reflections. To look at the kind of relationships we have in our lives. What do those relationships look like? What do they have in common?

What problems continue to raise their heads, again and again?

What might there be in common between these behaviours?

Could it be you?

Rich Litvin shares an at-first-confusing distinction with his clients. How we do anything is how we do everything. Slow down with that. How we do anything is how we do everything.

If we end one thing in one way – say, conversations with friends after a coffee – then we probably end most things that way – say, our significant relationships.

In my life, this is stark. I always used to be the person at the end of a night out (when I went on nights out) on the street corner having the last conversation as everyone else drifted away, hanging on to the night not wanting it to end. And I have pretty much never broken up with anyone in my life.

Of course we all have agency in our lives. And once we have seen that how we do something is how we do everything, we are given a choice. We can take an active role in how we think about that thing in our lives: we can choose, say, to pay close attention to endings. To battle our nature in order to create a kind of ending that supports and enriches life as much as possible for everyone involved.

Another way of talking about this is a sometimes laughter-worthy sometimes infuriating question: where else does this show up in your life?

Late for a meeting with someone? Where else does this show up in your life?

Spending time agonising over which book to read next? Where else does this show up in your life?

Impulsively said yes to going for a drink with someone even though you need to prepare for something tomorrow? Where else does this show up in your life?

These patterns in how we live our lives run deep. My friend, the coach and psychotherapist Mike Toller, has told me that many of these things form at an early age, creating the hardware of how we operate.

It’s hard not to feel like that tonight, as I set off ahead of workshop I’m delivering tomorrow, wrapped in anxiety. Even though I can see that it isn’t really about this workshop; even though I know not to listen to it. I can feel it in my chest and my throat and my heart and my eyes.

Our option, as we grow and develop, is to create new software. To install programs that allow us to work with the hardware we have.

To do that, we have to accept our role in them. We have to see that we are the eye of the storm of our lives. The planet around which all our problems orbit.

If we do that, then we can choose. 

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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