I was recording a session with my trainer so that I can review the videos and see my form. As he moved the camera to get a better angle, he commented:
You’re not gonna want to watch this video.
My reply:
You’ve got to watch the bad shit.
He laughed, then conceded that I was right.
You’ve Got to Look at the Bad Shit
It’s hard to look honestly at what’s not working. The cultural pressure to stay positive often keeps us from looking at what’s wrong.
And this is why change — whether systemic or personal — is so hard.
One of the main reasons we don’t change is that we don’t “look at the bad shit” for long enough to generate the uncomfortable emotions around it.
Too often we are unwilling to answer “what’s not working?” because we want to stay positive. Even if we look at the “bad shit,” we don’t look long enough to feel the “negative” emotions about it.
We don’t sit in the stew of the “negative” emotions generated by “what’s not working” for long enough to reach a threshold where the current situation goes from “good enough” to “no longer tolerable.”
We want to focus on what is working, on building from strength.
What Drives Innovation and Change
There’s no debate about the benefits of looking on the positive side. Building from strength helps generate momentum in the right direction.
If you live in the place of “what’s not working,” it drains the energy and resources you need to initiate change.
On the other hand, most innovation is catalyzed by the people who are willing to look at what’s not working.
The people who accept the status quo as “good enough” rarely harness the motivation and drive to innovate.
People who lie to themselves and others that “everything is fantastic” rarely push themselves to solve problems.
We need to strike a balance.
Holding 2 Contradictory Beliefs
If you’re always looking at what needs to be fixed, if you don’t acknowledge the wholeness of how things or people are, or what’s right with the world right now, it’s going to lead to a very unhappy existence.
For one thing, you’ll find that people may not want to hang out with you much.
You’ll also live in a constant gap between where things are and where you’d like them to be. You’ll eventually feel stuck and stagnant.
On the other hand, if you’re always accepting what is as “good enough,” you may wake up one day wondering what happened to your dreams. You may eventually feel betrayed by your willingness to settle — to “satisfice” — when deep in your soul you know you could have created something different, better — perhaps even world-changing.
One of the core practices in life is to strengthen our ability to simultaneously hold the contradictory beliefs that
(1) things, people, situations, circumstances are whole, perfect, and complete as they are; that nothing and nobody needs to be fixed;
and
(2) we live in a world with systems and structures that are inequitable, ineffective, or otherwise incapacitated, and that can use a complete or partial restructuring.
How to Straddle this Tension
While we are building our capacity to hold these beliefs simultaneously, we can resolve this tension by dedicating specific times to looking at what’s wrong, with the aim of using that information to spark us to change what’s broken.
This is one of the functions of Mercury retrograde, especially in Capricorn.
- What systems and structures are no longer supporting us, collectively and individually?
- What is broken and needs to be fixed?
- What never worked in the first place?
Armed with the information we gather from this period of review, we can embark on building new systems and structures to support us in rebuilding from a stronger foundation.
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