Nicola - Great piece! I like how you look at the way practical questions can function as a type of protection rather than a step toward doing something different. The way you frame those questions as attempts to prevent a predicted outcome makes a lot of sense. It helps clarify why insight and preparation can go on for so long without anything actually changing for us.
What’s useful is your focus on creating a contradiction to that prediction. When we take small steps and find out that the feared outcome doesn’t occur, when it doesn't, it often begins to update what we expect in a good way moving foward.
Those practical questions feel so logical, it can be a challenge to see the elegant avoidance tactics hidden inside them. Once aware though, taking strategic small steps = big impact in updating the outdated predictions.
In my case, I felt crippled because I was hooked on irrational fears, just like Cassie was.
One fear was more prominent than the rest—the fear of success.
"If I actually get better, then I'll have to do this, be that, keep doing that, become responsible for things I don't want to...So, I'd rather stay a mess."
I'm not proud of this but this was my stare of mind several months ago.
I was rationalizing staying stuck and shooting down any attempt at getting out of "stuckness"—even when my body was begging me to move.
It was only when I started listening to my body, I was able question my wrong predictions.
Nicola - Great piece! I like how you look at the way practical questions can function as a type of protection rather than a step toward doing something different. The way you frame those questions as attempts to prevent a predicted outcome makes a lot of sense. It helps clarify why insight and preparation can go on for so long without anything actually changing for us.
What’s useful is your focus on creating a contradiction to that prediction. When we take small steps and find out that the feared outcome doesn’t occur, when it doesn't, it often begins to update what we expect in a good way moving foward.
Thank you, Bronce. I appreciate you! 💛
Those practical questions feel so logical, it can be a challenge to see the elegant avoidance tactics hidden inside them. Once aware though, taking strategic small steps = big impact in updating the outdated predictions.
In my case, I felt crippled because I was hooked on irrational fears, just like Cassie was.
One fear was more prominent than the rest—the fear of success.
"If I actually get better, then I'll have to do this, be that, keep doing that, become responsible for things I don't want to...So, I'd rather stay a mess."
I'm not proud of this but this was my stare of mind several months ago.
I was rationalizing staying stuck and shooting down any attempt at getting out of "stuckness"—even when my body was begging me to move.
It was only when I started listening to my body, I was able question my wrong predictions.
Thanks for this, N. 💙
The ability to see underneath the trance of fear, to recognize how you’re creating it - this is huge. It allows you to rewrite the story.