You Can Choose (TPTC Preview II)
In the hope it might support you in dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of the current events surrounding coronavirus, I have decided to share several parts of my forthcoming book, The Power To Choose, a book about growing more skilful at dealing with complexity and uncertainty. This article is part of that; you can read it without having read any of the other parts, but if you want to read the preview in order: click here to read the first part or click here to find links to all the articles and PDF versions of the preview.
When I was a child, I passed many hours engrossed in Choose Your Own Adventure books. In this series, you read a part of the story and then at the bottom of each section you have a choice about where the story goes.
You come to the end of the corridor. To the left there is a door; to the right there is a flight of stairs, going up.
If you want to go through the door, turn to page 43.
If you want to go up the stairs, turn to page 56.
In a normal novel, we get the beauty of learning about how someone else works, reading the story told through their eyes. Here, it’s a different type of involvement: an active involvement where you can affect the outcome.
This is the first part of our journey together: just like in those books, you need to understand that you can take an active role in changing the story of your life. You can choose.
That’s the key idea of this chapter. You can choose your own adventure, no matter how difficult and hopeless things may seem in some moments.
If we are lucky, this belief that we can affect the story of our lives is part of our upbringing and of our early experience of life: the caring parents, the great teachers, the older siblings give us ideas like ‘you can do this’, ‘you can belong here’, ‘you can work to improve the situation you find yourself in’, ‘you can choose’. It isn’t always the case: for reasons ranging from the views our parents hold about themselves or the world, to the environments we grow up in, to random twists of fate, to the stories we or society tells about ‘people like us’, we can find ourselves believing something different. This might be: ‘There is a circumstance in my life I can’t change, that I can’t affect in any way,’ or ‘There’s no way for us, or our lives or society, to be different.’ Whether these beliefs appear deliberately or unconsciously, through individuals or societies, they are insidious. That’s why this work is important, why the stories that each of us tells ourselves about our lives is important: we must offer an alternative to the story that we can’t effect change in our lives. It is in those ways that the work of parents, teachers, social workers, sports coaches and so many more is heroic: because when we are young and impressionable, stories are created for us, through our life experience. Those around us when we are young have the power to help us create a story where we can create change in any part of our lives.
Whether or not the story that we can choose is planted by heroic adults around us as we grow up, as time goes on (apart, perhaps, from some very unlucky ones among us) we gradually find evidence that we can affect our life. We see the consequences of our actions; we see we have an impact on what happens to us. Then, if we are lucky, if we do the right work, we begin to shift out of the sense of ‘life happening to us’ and move to a story where we can choose. Almost always, as we shift out of scarcity and into a story where we are in control, our Higher Selves – the person we are on our best days, when we are at our most skilful, responsive and wise – becomes more available to us. This is a powerful shift to go through and one I have worked on regularly with my coaching clients: taking people from seeing important parts of their world as simply happening to them, to showing them that they can create what they want to create. They can be a creator and not a victim: of their stories, their circumstances, their world.
Helping people see and then hold onto this understanding – the agency of the creator – has within it the power to affect so many of the challenges we, as individuals and societies, face in the modern world. So much of the disquiet, the discontent, the anger and the disappointment we experience in life comes from a sense that we can’t affect the story, from a lack of hope when we feel as though life is outside our realm of influence. This lack of agency and freedom leaves us with a sense of being trapped: unable to express the things we want to express through our actions in the world. A sense of being stuck: unable to move ourselves, unable to change things, doomed to stay exactly here forever. As Frank Turner beautifully said in his song, The Way I Tend To Be, ‘It turns out hell will not be found within the fires below, but in making do and muddling through when you've nowhere else to go.’
In the aftermath of the break-up I mentioned in the introduction – around the same time as The Way I Tend To Be was released – I was making do and muddling through. I was stuck in a place of scarcity and couldn’t see the way forward. Whole parts of my life had been taken out of my control by one of the people I trusted and cared about most in the world. I felt lost and adrift and alone. I felt hopeless.
What shifted – what showed me that there was somewhere else to go – was finding new perspectives on what had happened. And in those perspectives and the insights I uncovered was a sense of ‘I can change this’. That next time it could be different. Then, things that had looked unchangeable – my failure in the relationship, with a series of conclusions I had taken from it about my worth in the world, about my friends, about my failures as a person and as a man – began to appear as something less fixed. Things were within my reach and my capacity to change: maybe I can do things now that I hadn’t been able to do before; maybe I can find a place where my worth can be greater; maybe next time, I can create a better relationship. When something that previously looked completely fixed suddenly seems changeable, then there is possibility and the world becomes a very different place to live in.
And in this you can see how choosing your own adventure is affected not just by what we do, but by what we think. Nothing about what had happened out in the world had changed, but a series of insights changed the way I saw things and the way I saw myself. Those insights, which I will share in this and the following chapters, enabled me to see other possibilities for my future. But this only took me so far. I spent most of my life knowing, at least intellectually, that I could take action and from that create change in the outside world, even though it wasn’t always easy. Yet despite knowing that, I still found myself regularly in judgment, in fear and in a place of lack. In scarcity. I knew I could change my job – I was able to effect change there – but changing it didn’t always make me happy. I knew I could effect change in my organisation, in my relationship and in the outside world: in my community and even, if I wanted to, on a bigger scale. But sometimes that didn’t feel meaningful, or good, or fast enough. Or the changes didn’t work out how I’d imagined. Doing more or different things in the outside world can make a world of difference to us, but it isn’t everything. Why, for example, do we see people achieving their ‘dreams’, only to end up unhappy? Making things happen, but still angrier than they want to be? Hugely successful in one part of their life, but not in others? Why are some people able to face challenges and emerge stronger, while others slip and stumble in a downward spiral?
The first possibility that I want to open up to you here is that seeing things differently can help you effect change in the outside world. It did this for me: seeing new perspectives – seeing ways I could change things – took me from a place of hopeless stasis back into action in the world. It empowered me to believe that in my next relationship things could be different, and to believe that I could find work that was deeply fulfilling for me. Second, and here’s the big bit: sometimes choosing a different adventure inside your mind, in the way you think or the way you see the world, can create the change you are searching for in itself. Right here, right now.
One of my clients once spoke to me about her experience of this[1]. Looking to create more autonomy in her life, she no longer wanted to feel trapped and out of control as a result of the pointless meetings she ‘had to go to’. In some cases, she was able to create change in the outside world: to literally stop going to the meetings, sometimes quite quickly and sometimes by making decisions over a number of months to relinquish roles or to decide only to attend regular meetings some of the time. But what she was able to do straight away was to feel differently in the meetings she was going to. One way of doing this was to remind herself of why she was choosing to go to that meeting. In doing that – by reminding herself of the autonomy and control she had, or that boring as the meeting was, it was progressing her towards her overarching goals – she was able instantly to feel the agency she had in the situation. That didn’t always make the meetings exciting, but it did enable her to be more present in each of those meetings and act, in each of them, more from her Higher Self.
It’s All Invented
As I leaned into this idea that I can choose, I came to be able to see more and more these opportunities to change things in the moment even without the outside world changing. Key to this was The Art of Possibility, a book by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. The book, based on Ros Zander’s work as a family therapist and Ben Zander’s experience as a conductor and music teacher, is a beautifully written and deeply touching set of practices designed to help us live, more, in possibility. It teaches, in many ways, the principle of this chapter: that you can choose to live in a place of possibility, not of scarcity or measurement. The Art of Possibility was where I first began to see what a beautiful word ‘possibility’ is for describing a feeling I recognised from my best moments and which I now think of as a fundamental part of living as my Higher Self.
The Zanders aren’t the only thinkers to have shared the idea that we can choose – and I’ll share some others in this chapter and beyond – but the first practice in The Art of Possibility is a beautiful one for demonstrating the sense of what might be possible for us in our internal world. This first practice in the book is: ‘It’s All Invented’. The core of that practice is, essentially, to ask ourselves: what if everything we see in the world is invented? If it is, shouldn’t we invent some things that are helpful to us?
This may sound farfetched, but as neuroscience becomes more and more advanced, we are able to see just how much our brain creates for us, showing us not ‘actually’ what is happening in the world, but an approximation of it. An example of this is in our peripheral vision, which experiments show is a product of approximation on the part of our mind – filling in gaps and making assumptions – rather than showing us what is actually there. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we don’t see everything. Broadly we are aware, when we think about it, that there are parts of the animal kingdom with superior senses to us. We know that dogs can smell things that humans can’t, that bats can hear things that humans can’t. We don’t seem to remember this with what we see, however, so it is important to note that there are also creatures that can see ‘more’ than we can. Not just in terms of distance or clarity, but literally what they see. Bees, apparently, can make out ultraviolet patterns on flowers; owls (and many other nocturnal creatures) can see far better than we can in the dark. So if there are things which other creatures can see which we can’t, and our brain is only giving us an approximation of what is out there anyway, it seems clear that what we see isn’t ‘reality’. It is, to a greater or lesser extent, invented.
Figure 1
This idea of ‘It’s All Invented’ gets even more visible when our assumptions start to play tricks on us. The Art of Possibility memorably reminds its readers of a famous puzzle (Figure 1): participants are shown a square with nine dots (three rows of three) and asked to ‘join all nine dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once.’. (Try it, if you like, before reading further.)
Almost everyone who tries the puzzle struggles with this, because they assume an extra rule without even noticing they do it. They add in, at the end of the task, the words ‘without using the space outside the dots’. This added assumption comes because our eyes show us not simply ‘nine dots’ but ‘a square’. We then assume instantly that the edge of the puzzle is the edge of the square. This happens without us noticing and with this added assumption the puzzle becomes impossible. Remove the assumption – which, again, we can note was invented by us without our even thinking – and the puzzle becomes suddenly possible (you can find a solution in the Chapter One Summary). This also happens to us in optical illusions, where a simple change of perspective can show us something completely different. In one well-known optical illusion, once we have seen both possibilities, we can choose that the picture is an older woman, or we can choose that the picture is a younger woman (see Figure 2, below). This is happening to you all the time. Your mind is inventing assumptions which might be making the puzzle of your life impossible to solve. It is happening across your life: from what you literally see through your eyes, to your interactions with people every day, to how you view yourself, to your relationships, to the worlds of work and politics. What if, instead, you are able to see the multiple possibilities available and invent, as the Zanders suggest, something which actually helps you? What if you can choose?
Figure 2
One of my favourite moments of the ‘It’s All Invented’ practice in The Art of Possibility comes from a later chapter. Ben Zander is teaching a class about leadership to students in a prestigious music school in Boston; he realises that to help the students to think freely and creatively it’s important they aren’t trapped into competing with others due to their worries about their grades in the class. But it’s also important that they attend the class amidst a lot of pressure to get good grades, so he can’t simply remove the grading system altogether. To make it worth their while, he guarantees them an A for the course as long as they write to him explaining why they deserve an A and then come to every class in the year. This, it turns out, allows them to think more freely and creatively: from a place of possibility. But what demonstrates how ‘it’s all invented’ is when one of the students shares what has shifted for him. In his former school in Taiwan, he explains, he was ranked number 68 out of 70 students. ‘I come to Boston and Mr Zander says I am an A. Very confusing. I walk about, three weeks, very confused. I am number 68, but Mr Zander says I am an A student… I am Number 68, but Mr Zander says I am an A. One day I discover I am much happier A than Number 68. So I decide I am an A.’
Before reading that book, I would have thought that one of these was more real: he was the 68th best in the class. The A just for ‘writing a letter and showing up’ isn’t real, that’s just a music teacher playing around. But the book showed me another possibility: 68/70 based on what? Based, simply, on a convention: a mutually-invented story that it is useful to rank students based on their ability, measured by assessment. The school (or rather another school, a long time ago) has invented it and it affects how the student is, how happy he is, the work he does, how he engages and learns, and who knows what else? Ben Zander recognises that in this situation, the way it is affecting him isn’t helpful and so invents another way to grade the class, and the effect on the student is marked. The student then beautifully chooses the assumption that actually helps him: that if he writes the letter and comes to the class, he is an A student in that class and can think of himself as that. He realises he can decide. He can choose.
You can probably imagine what it is like to be 68/70. To know that you are almost at the bottom of the pile. You can probably imagine the pressure of a prestigious school and the sense that you are failing. This can be useful: it can make you resolve to lift yourself up the list (I’ll touch more on the positive sides of competition in Chapter Four). Sometimes, however, the scarcity of competition stops us from seeing what is important, stops us from thinking clearly, stops us from doing our best work, stops us from enjoying life. In this particular case, 68/70 wasn’t even the rank of the student in that school, it was his rank from his previous school being carried by the student as a definition of himself as a person. At the very least, it sounds like it was stopping him enjoying his education in Boston. At the worst it may well have been hindering his creativity, his decision-making, his thinking, his relationships and his ability to act as his Higher Self. And the shift to ‘A’ instead may have opened up his potential. And what possibility there is then: suddenly he can look at these two options and decide which is more useful. Which allows him more freedom or creativity? Which spurs him on to perform better? Which makes him happy? The scarcity of 68/70, for most of us, does not allow us the freedom or responsiveness or happiness we desire. But the possibility of the A and the access to our Higher Selves, that’s something different.
Try this for yourself. For many of us, being ranked according to our competence doesn’t happen much when we are adults, although those in certain professions (salespeople, for example) may find themselves ranked in line with targets. But as children and students it was much more common. Take yourself back to a time you came low down a list which mattered to you, a time when you were disappointed with the result. A time when it hurt. Perhaps it was in a maths test or an art exam, perhaps a time you were picked last or near last in sport, perhaps when you were given the smallest part in a play or performance or didn’t even make the cast. Take yourself back to that time, remember being ranked like that, tell the story to yourself: I was 21 out of 22 in football; the best 30 performers were selected and I wasn’t so I am 31st at best; I came 120th out of 140 in my year. Take yourself right back to that moment and see how it feels. See if you can remember how much access you had to your Higher Self. Then, see what would happen if you invented an assumption. Make it one that could be true: if you had to give yourself an A for your role in that situation, how and why would you give yourself the A? See what changes for you as you find that reason.
My story at university was a little like the inverse of that of Ben Zander’s Taiwanese student. At school, I was the best at maths in the year. I learnt this when we had a standardised test aged 14 and I came top, a couple of points ahead of the next student. Being top of the class was my story about mathematics and it served me well. It spurred me on and filled me with confidence, and I scored very highly at GCSE and A Level. I then went on to study undergraduate mathematics at University College London, at the time one of the top-ranking universities for maths in the UK. Something was different at university. It was painful to find out that I wasn’t so talented after all: I struggled with my university work just as much as I struggled with settling into life in one of the biggest cities in the world. I stuck it out and passed the year, limping to mainly Cs and Ds. It was a relief in the end not to fail the year altogether.
Simply passing would not have been acceptable to me of the previous year but I found myself reframing the story. What I can see I did retrospectively was to find the way that I could give myself an A for passing the year: I was a Grade A student because I put in the effort, I didn’t stop despite the shock to the system of the different style of learning required and the struggles I had adapting to life away from home. I was a Grade A student for what I did outside of my course.
The key here is that this story was not about making excuses for my failure, it instead allowed me to see clearly what I was gaining from my time as a student. Is my literal grade all that matters at university? If it is, not being an A-grade student is demoralising and painful and the right decision might be to give up, leave and find something else to study. If my literal grade isn’t all that matters, then I can see the value in how hard I had worked, and the value in the way I had made new friends, made connections and begun to live a fulfilling life outside my studies. This new story was powerful for me: instead of being a literal Grade A student, I can give myself an A for passing despite everything; I can choose what is important to me. This meant that by the time I failed two exams in my second year (I don’t think I’d ever failed an exam before) it didn’t faze me: it was clear to me that that wasn’t what mattered. I was an A Grade student if I was making a contribution to university life, if I was making friends that might last for decades, if I was growing as a person and having lots of fun. And I did all these things. Not only that, but they were what led to me being elected as co-president of UCL Students’ Union, meaning that my first job out of university was as director and trustee of an organisation that turned over £2million pounds and employed hundreds of people. That sounds like pretty good preparation for the world.
So take the time to rewrite your stories of disappointment. At first, test it out: try looking at a situation through your old story and then try finding the ways in which you can give yourself an A: as a footballer who played as well as you could even though you were picked last; as a performer who was vulnerable and courageous to sing in front of people and be judged despite not having the training that some others did; as a student who improved their ranking from 120 one year to 100 the next. Again, the aim is not to give yourself an easy ride: the game is to shift your perspective between different assumptions and see what changes, see if the puzzle of your life becomes easier to solve.
If ‘It’s All Invented’ anyway, isn’t that the obvious thing to do?
The Rational Optimist
Reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley was another important step as I learnt that I can choose. Whilst The Art of Possibility gave me many tools and philosophies to make my shift into a life of more possibility – to shift in any moment towards my Higher Self – Ridley’s book gave me something different.
First, it showed me that there is another way of looking at our world. I had learned and been taught in all sorts of ways, including by the bias of news media towards negative stories over their positive equivalents, to look on the modern world as one of depravity and greed, always on the edge of disaster. Throughout The Rational Optimist, however, Ridley paints a different picture. In it he tells story after story (with convincing, rational, broad-ranging arguments and plenty of evidence) which opened my mind to alternative viewpoints on topics that had felt closed to me. Ridley’s clear and rational approach showed me that it’s possible to make different assumptions to the ones I was making on everything: from trade, to economic problems in Africa, to politics, to climate change, guided and backed up each time by evidence and highly qualified thinkers. You don’t have to believe all (or indeed any) of the stories he tells, but if you can read them as possible, suddenly it opens up the idea: what if some of these are true?[3] I had thought these issues were fixed, complete and settled. Ridley’s storytelling and research opened me up to the possibility that they might not be.
So, if there is a different way of looking at the world which gives such a different story, then how do we know which is right? And what is the impact on you – your life, your happiness – of choosing to believe a different one? Does one leave us in scarcity, and does one open up our Higher Selves?
In one particularly memorable section, Ridley describes a cosy, Dickensian family scene. Children and parents huddled round a fire in their living room, one of them reading, perhaps, and a bird singing outside. It is the kind of scene that makes me smile, reminding me of costume dramas on the BBC, of a simpler time without my phone buzzing or emails unanswered. It sounds idyllic. He then opens up statistically what might have happened to that family: the father likely to live into his 50s only if he is lucky; clothes ridden with lice and the baby to die of smallpox; toothache for the mother and no light other than the fire because candles are too expensive; the bird to be trapped by the family and eaten the next day because they are hungry and food is scarce.
Which is true, then? Is it an idyllic, simpler time, or horrible and painful compared to a modern fireside scene? Perhaps both? Or neither? The question you might want to consider is: as you consider each of those stories, what happens to how you feel about your life in each case? What happens to how you feel about the world?
In another reframing of assumptions in The Rational Optimist, I had believed that one of the challenges facing the world was that of overpopulation: that we could not continue to use resources at the rate we do because the world was impossibly crowded and due to get more so. Further, I had believed that we were likely to run out of food and other resources because of this. I learned from Ridley that, although no one knows for sure why, population growth is slowing, and that people have been saying we would run out of resources due to population for centuries without food running out (although with, of course, many people who still do not have enough). To demonstrate just how false my assumption of the planet being impossibly crowded was, it is worth pausing on a rather illustrative story: if we gave every person in the world a house of average size, all of those houses would fit into the area of the US state of Texas. This is so counterintuitive that I have checked the maths on it several times and – to my continuing surprise – it seems to add up[4]. If we all lived in Texas, it wouldn’t allow for much space to move around in terms of roads or gardens, though. We’d need two Texases for that, and a bit more space for when the population reaches 9 to 11 billion (where experts say it is likely to peak), but suddenly the planet doesn’t seem so small.
And so, what happens when you shift between two different perspectives about the population of the world? You can do this, just like you might switch between the view of the young woman or the old woman in the optical illusion, or from being ‘68/70’ to being ‘A’. One point of view is that the world is massively crowded, people are bound to starve and there are just too many people around. Another is that there is an enormous amount of space to fit 7.5 billion people in and we haven’t run out of food – despite centuries of worrying about it – because, essentially, we have become far more efficient at creating food from the resources we have available. In fact, we seem to be successfully feeding more and more people every year.[5]
I give the examples above – about the Victorian fireside scene and overpopulation – not to try to persuade you of a particular viewpoint but to show that there are assumptions taking place in each moment, about things as notable as history and the population of the planet. You can choose which story to believe and choosing differently can change how you see the world and how you feel about it. It’s important that you know this, so you can choose what best enables you to create what that you desire.
Suffering is Never Caused by What is Actually Here Now
I am lucky to have learned from many great teachers. One of those whose work almost instantly shifted the way I thought was Jim Dethmer, co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, who I have been lucky to be on several online workshops with through the coach training organisation Coaches Rising. In one workshop, Dethmer took my fellow students and I through a practice he teaches to all the leaders he works with. It is to set up an app (Mind Jogger for Apple users or RemindMe for those with Android) to ask a certain number of times a day: ‘Robbie, what is actually here now?’
Dethmer says there are only three categories of things which can actually be here now: sensory experience (including emotion); thoughts; and a sense of a personal self. (In essence, this categorising is, of course, invented and what is present in any moment could be split in other ways. These categories, though, are a particularly useful split for this exercise.) Once you have noticed what is actually here now, you ask yourself questions such as ‘Can I accept what is here now?’ The reason for these questions lies in ancient wisdom: that psychological suffering is never caused by what is actually here now. Instead, it is caused by resisting what is actually here now.
This is a big idea. In Chapter Three I’ll come back to this, because this idea introduces the concept that our psychological suffering is not caused by things which happen outside us. Instead, this idea gives us the possibility that psychological suffering is caused by our response to what happens in our lives. And the key here is that if ‘It’s All Invented’ – if it even might be all invented – then you have a choice. You can assume that your pain is caused by things (including people) outside you and your control. In this case, you remain a victim, with your pain or struggle outside of your sphere of influence. Or you can assume that by responding differently you can reduce, remove or change your pain and make your experience of life better. The adventure I am inviting you on is the latter: choose that your pain – the feeling you have of being trapped, the times you don’t behave how you wish you had – is caused by your response to what is actually there in those moments.
When Jim Dethmer shared this idea in the training course, I had a moment of ‘ah, this one again.’ Because I’d heard it before, several times in fact, through popular culture or perhaps other books and learning I had done. I had always found it hard to grasp. But this time, I was able to grasp it and hold it with a deeper understanding. That was because earlier that year, with the ideas in this book in my mind, I had decided to test the principle of this chapter – you can choose – when I caught a cold.
I am someone who in my life up to that point really hated being ill. It affected me mentally and physically. My frustration at not functioning at 100% was enormous and had been for years. I hated that I couldn’t make the most of my time because I was ill. I hated that I was missing out on things. I hated that I couldn’t even enjoy the things I enjoy: a beer, for instance, or reading a fantasy novel. I couldn’t enjoy them because beer isn’t a sensible thing to drink when you are ill, and I wasn’t able to focus enough to lose myself in my book. I started to develop a cold while writing a draft of this chapter, so I decided to try applying what I was writing about to my life in a new way: what would happen if I chose to enjoy being ill? And I was genuinely astounded at the result. I felt better. Not totally better – I still had the physical symptoms of a cold – but it suddenly became clear to me just how much of the bad feeling when I was ill was because I was resisting the cold. I was resenting it. I was wishing it wasn’t there, wishing it away. My mind was full of thoughts of scarcity (‘I’m missing out’, ‘I’m wasting time’) and regret (‘I wish I didn’t have this’, ‘If only I could drink a beer guilt-free’). By this time, I was reasonably practiced, through the ideas in this book and my work on developing myself, at shifting perspectives and trying something new, so I just did it: I stopped resisting. It’s interesting, in some ways, to reflect that really that’s all there is to it: there isn’t a secret. I just shifted my viewpoint, just as I am able to with the visual illusion of the old woman and young woman, or with the story about the Dickensian family. However, that isn’t quite the full story.
Whilst the core principle of this chapter is simple, it is not always easy. What made my shift of perspective about my cold stick so well was that I had a constant and regular reminder of what I was choosing. What happened was that every time someone asked me how I was, I told them the story I am telling you here. I would say, ‘I’m ill, but I’ve decided to stop hating having a cold and it seems to make it a lot better!’ I’m not sure how many people believed me, or tried it for themselves, but each time I told the story I found myself smiling, laughing even, at the ridiculousness of it all. And they were laughing, too, at how I had spent almost every cold up to that point in my life, resisting – and suffering more as a result.
This is what Dethmer’s practice using Mind Jogger or RemindMe does: it gives a regular reminder not to resist what is actually here now; it is an invitation to accept what is actually here now instead.
If you want to choose an adventure which doesn’t reducing the suffering you go through, another powerful practice is to ask yourself the question, What is the gift in this situation? This question opens up the possibility of a different adventure to the one that you are initially experiencing. Perhaps the gift of a different cold is to be able to stay in bed and watch Netflix, or to make you slow down, or to allow you the chance to not work yourself to the bone. This is not to say that the physical symptoms disappear: this is simply to give yourself the chance to choose an adventure which includes those symptoms and perhaps some gifts, too.
Of course, life knows how to hit you and it can be incredibly difficult to do this, at least in the moment. A serious illness, for example, could affect you physically and psychologically for a longer period and make it very hard to find gifts in the situation. But even then, many people tell stories about how a risk to their health was the catalyst they needed to change things for the better: finding the gift in their involuntary stops like I found the gift in mine.
Above all, though, I tell these stories about physical illness because they illustrate that the options for choosing our own internal adventure are almost endless. They can have an almost instant effect on anything from our ability to solve a problem – like the ‘nine dots' puzzle – to the way we see the world – like changing our story about overpopulation – to something as tangible as how ill we feel. It’s up to us to play and to practise.
Thought Taking Form in the Moment
Jamie Smart, a coach and bestselling author, explains in his work how he believes everything about our experience of life is caused by thought taking form in the moment. Even your emotions start from thought, and with a full understanding of this, you can change the way you experience life beyond recognition. He and the many people whose lives have been changed by his work – and work along similar lines by others, such as Michael Neill and Sydney Banks – think the realisation of this and the ways it can help people out of their psychological problems will be a psychological revolution. Smart, in particular, believes that in this idea lie the principles to end psychological problems and that, one day, people will look back at us like we do people who believed that the world was flat, or who treated disease by bleeding the infirm. This, again, may seem like a big idea, but it is clear that therapists, psychologists and coaches across the world work with the beliefs and assumptions we have – the thoughts we have – all of which take place inside us. I do this work with clients: we work on the way they see the world and how much this is affected by the way they think about the world. As the old saying goes, we see things not as they are but as we are. I see the change in my clients and the results that follow as their stories about themselves and others change, just as I see the changes in myself. This is truly amazing if you think about it. In essence, all that happens in coaching or psychotherapy is that our stories about ourselves change or become more conscious and yet the feedback that a great coach or therapist gets can be extraordinary. One of my friends, for example, talks about how psychotherapy saved his life.
Our assumptions and beliefs have a huge hold over us and they are things that we can change. You can choose what goes on in your head far more than you think.
How Do I Do This?
It could certainly be argued (and has been by many self-help books over the years) that the ideas in this chapter are all you need: away you go and get on with it, happy forever more! My experience has been different, though. In fact, the idea that ‘I just need to think differently’ has at times been infuriating to me.
An insight is only as good as the way it is used, and the insight that we can choose to think differently must be used repeatedly throughout our lives in order to have the kind of effect that will be transformative. We have to choose to think differently so many times that it becomes our instinct to think in ways that are more useful to us, to think in ways that allow us to live more and more as our Higher Selves. Yes, for some people and in some cases, the insight that we can choose to think in a different way can have an almost instant transformative effect. That has sometimes been true for me, and it will be for you, if you start to experiment. For me, however, the power of you can choose has been as something to practise every day. It has taken extensive experimentation across my life to find the methods that make the biggest difference. And then it has taken practising over and over again to embed those into the way I am. I expect it will be the practice of a lifetime. As you embed this into your life, you will regularly be faced by choices: choices of whether to continue in the patterns of behaviour that have been yours up to this point in your life, or to choose something different. Each time you are ill, or late for a train, or someone upsets you, you have the power to choose.
If you want things to be as they have always been, think as you have always thought.
If you want things to be different, choose a new adventure.
We Can Choose
I have learned that I can choose through the stories I have told here, through experiences like those described in the next few chapters, through my work with clients and through extensive reading and learning about people. Through all this I have grown my understanding of what it is to be me and what it is to be human. I’m still learning about it in different parts of my life but this chapter contains, really, the underlying principle that will enable you to change your world. We do not have to be victims of our lives in the outside world; when we see possibility, when we have the right support, we can choose to change our situation, change our job, change our relationship. We can take charge and be the creator of our lives. And even more importantly, just as we do not have to be victims of circumstance in the outside world, neither do we have to be victims inside our minds, inside ourselves. We can choose how to respond, inside and out.
People are born into and live through incredibly difficult challenges, challenges that express themselves outwardly and inwardly. There are times we have to buckle up on the inside as well as the outside in order to get through testing moments. Sometimes some of us may even need to put the power and the blame outside of us, to be a victim, to get through the most difficult moments. But even then, I believe that transformation, recovery and growth all start with us taking responsibility as the creator of our lives.
Far more than we think, we can create the change we want to see in the outside world, even if only a little at a time, if we can live a little more as our Higher Selves, feeling possibility. And we can create the change we want to see in the inside world, too. In fact, our power is even greater inside ourselves.
And even if you don’t quite believe me, ask yourself this: wouldn’t you prefer it if I were right? Wouldn’t you prefer it if you could choose to be less of a victim or choose to feel that feeling of possibility more often? And isn’t that a story worth trying on, an assumption worth inventing?
You will see over the coming chapters that so much of this book is based on this principle. At each stage of my journey, as I have developed ways to understand things with greater perspective, I have been able to choose more and more which perspective serves me best in each moment. Each chapter to follow will give further guidance on the kinds of ideas and attitudes I believe are worth choosing if you want to live more as your Higher Self and create more of the life you want.
Above all, I want you to take away from this chapter that we can choose what we think and – more than that – we can choose how we think. All we have to do is decide to choose our own adventure.
Chapter One Summary
Key idea: The world isn’t as fixed as you think: we see often see things not as they are but as we are. Given this, it is important to understand that you can control what goes on in your head far more than you think. You can choose, inside and out.
Exercises and Practices:
What if everything we see in the world is invented? If it is, what if you are able to choose a different adventure and invent, as Ros and Ben Zander suggest, something which actually helps you?
What am I assuming here? What else could I choose to believe? What else could I choose to think? Is there another assumption that would be more useful? In particular, is there one that would allow me more of whatever I feel I am lacking, or more access to my Higher Self?
Give yourself an A. Next time you find yourself scored low on a list, see how it feels. See how much access you have to your Higher Self. Then, see what would happen if you invented an assumption. Make it one that could be true: if you had to give yourself an A for the part you played in finding yourself scoring badly, how and why would you give yourself the A? See what changes for you as you find that reason and ask someone for help if this is difficult.
What is actually here now? Set up Mind Jogger or Remind Me to ask yourself this question at random points throughout the day. Then, once you have an answer, ask yourself, ‘Can I accept what is actually here now?’ See what happens if, instead of resisting, you accept what is actually here in this moment.
What is the gift of this situation? Perhaps, by choosing to see the gift in a challenging situation your perspective will shift and your experience will change. This is best done by yourself, as advice from others on this can feel patronising. But sit with the question, and see if you can find the gift no matter how small it seems. When you see it, what is different?
Remember: you can choose. In each moment, you have far more choice about your experience of life than you think you do.
Further Reading and Learning
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer
Clarity by Jamie Smart
A possible solution to the 'nine dots' puzzle:
FOOTNOTES
[1] When I tell a story about a client in this book, details have been changed to preserve the confidentiality of the client – sometimes several clients experiences have been amalgamated – or I have asked permission from the client and they have kindly given it. In each case, this is done to maintain the spirit of the experience whilst preserving the vital confidentiality in my work.
[2] You can find a solution in the Chapter One Summary.
[3] The seed of doubt which can result from questions like this is vital to shifting from fixed perspectives and opening possibility to ourselves. We will come back to questions like this over the course of this book.
[4] This article from Which? suggests the average size of houses built in the UK since 2010 is 67.8m2 (https://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/04/shrinking-homes-the-average-british-house-20-smaller-than-in-1970s/). Rounding that up to 75m2 and then multiplying by 7.5billion (the 2017 population) gives us an area of 562,500km2. The area of Texas is 696,200km2.
[5] The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, for example, declared that in 2015 there were 200 million fewer undernourished people than there were in 1990, despite the population increasing by more than 2 billion people in that time (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/world/united-nations-reports-global-hunger-down-since-1990.html). Although data seems to show a slight increase in the proportion of undernourished people in the world between 2015 (10.6%) and 2017 (10.9%), total population has increased by so much that there are still more ‘nourished’ people in 2017 than there were in 2015. Data on this and much more is available on the amazing website www.ourworldindata.org. None of this means, of course, that we don’t need to continue to do important work to support the poorest people in the world to have enough to eat.
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In the hope it might support you in dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of current events, I have decided to share several parts of my forthcoming book, The Power To Choose, including this article. PDFs of the preview are available to download here, in case you want to read it all in one go. The rest of the preview is available via the links below: