Pick an area of life that you would define as a problem. Is it a relationship (or all your relationships), money, career, health or procrastination? Maybe it’s a feeling of depression or worry around some issue. Now look closely at how it makes you feel. Do you get angry at the fact that you constantly worry? Maybe you feel unfulfilled by the life you currently lead. Are you overwhelmed by all the things you tell yourself you should have done or ought to be doing? Powerless, apathetic, lazy, uncaring, lonely, and bored may be a few of the words you would use to describe how the problem makes you feel.
Now look at what you are telling yourself about the problem. What is the dialogue that goes on when your partner, child, or asshole boss doesn’t do what you thought they should? When you start a project for the thousandth time and don’t finish, what do you tell yourself? Or maybe you begin the dialogue before you ever begin the project or before you even enter the conversation with your spouse, thereby sabotaging it before your desired outcome had a chance. Perhaps you tell yourself the problem is everyone else. Something like, “The reason my relationships always fail is because everyone is so stupid, or selfish”. Regardless of the conversation that you run through your head it is time to get brutally honest with yourself.
If you look at your life, you will likely find that “the problem” has always been there in some form or fashion. What is the story you tell yourself about it? You have been divorced three times and you tell yourself you just married the wrong person EVERY TIME but when you really sit with this internal justification that you run through your head and begin to analyze it, to go deeper, you realize that at the core you feel unlovable. You chose not to start that business because it would have been too risky or taken too much time from your family but in reality, when you really get honest, you didn’t believe you had what it takes to accomplish it in the first place. Maybe deep down you don't feel you deserve to be successful. The bottom line is there is something deeper that is keeping you stuck.
The problem is rarely the problem.
In other words, what you continually define as the problem is often not the real issue. The real issue is much deeper. It is easy to ignore the deeper issue and in some cases not even realize it is there. We just tell ourselves we are flawed human beings. But it is these beliefs at the deeper level that we often pretend aren’t there that keep us stuck. The reality is that we have learned to tolerate the problem. In some cases the problem is actually beneficial. If I find myself in relationship after relationship with unhealthy people and I continually tell myself that the world is full of unhealthy people and I will never find someone to love me, what I may actually be doing is avoiding the fact that at a deeper level I don’t believe I am lovable. In that case the problem supports my belief. A person that does not believe they are lovable will find it impossible to prove otherwise by entering into a healthy, intimate relationship.
This is where therapy and coaching can be very beneficial as well as activities like journaling and mindfulness.
Learning and utilizing these tools on a regular basis can helps us to get to the real issue. They help us to gain awareness of what it is we are actually avoiding that is keeping us stuck. I recommend people begin to practice mindfulness and journaling as a start to discovering these core beliefs. Don’t be confused by all of the ways people package the concept of mindfulness in order to sell you the “right” formula. In a nutshell, actively engaging in mindfulness means to sit back, become aware of your thinking, and just observe those thoughts. It is not shutting out thoughts, or forcing anything. You don’t need to wrestle with them or “figure them out”. You are simply watching where they lead. I recommend you check out drdansiegel.com/resources/wheel_of_awareness/ and look at his guided meditations as a place to begin.
