Category: creating

Prioritizing: Step 3Getting Specific

I recently saw a video that said you should always do the thing you hate most to do first. My first reaction was that this was the worst suggestion I ever heard. For me, it seemed to be a recipe for oversleeping in order to avoid doing THAT THING.

My second reaction was that maybe it was a good idea. If you’re going to spend all day dreading that worst thing, you’re not going to get a lot of pleasure from doing the things you ordinarily enjoy. That messes up the day.

At the same time, I don’t want to do any worst thing if I haven’t worked my way up to it. By that I mean:

I’ve gone through Step 2 (in the previous post). I figure out why it’s the worst thing. I hate to make a dental appointment because they’re going to hurt me, and it’s going to be expensive. I’m going to feel victimized and angry.

Notice these are my expectations. Regarding the dental and financial pain, I can choose how I react to each. I’ve noticed that I’ve learned a lot about my attitudes towards by money whenever I experience pain about spending. So I can tell myself I’ll be learning a lot from the experience. It’s not the most lighthearted experience, but I look for what value I can get from it.

I have control about whether I feel victimized and angry. Here’s where I go back to the subconscious mind. What benefit do I get from feeling victimized? If you ever had a sibling hit you and you ran to your mother to blow the whistle on the perpetrator, you might find some clues. Anger can protect us from the vulnerability that gets aroused by pain.

I conclude that doing the worst thing first is only a good idea if you’ve taken some of the charge out of it. Otherwise, it’s like turning on your car engine in subfreezing weather and revving up to a high speed immediately. Bad things can happen. Don’t let them happen to you.

Priorities, Part 2

In the last post (June 27), I wrote about how a sense of priorities can get distorted by what we learn about our parents’ and other significant adults’ expectations of us in that area.

Because so much of what we learn as children resides in our subconscious minds, it takes awareness to recognize that programs are running us that we absorbed without any selective sifting. Because of that, we may not recognize that we have two basic sets of responses to accomplishment: the desire to please and the desire to displease.

The desire to please is the desire for approval and reward. (Sometimes the approval is the reward, but sometimes we’re looking for more substantial and material gratification.) Essentially, we don’t know we did well unless we get the gold star, the gold ring, or some other form of outside approval.

The desire to displease is the desire for autonomy. We don’t want our accomplishments to depend on the approval of others. We do everything we can to make sure we don’t get that approval. However, that resistance is as much a reaction to outside forces as the submission of the approval seekers.

I think that most of us have both kinds of reactions in varying degrees. Some may be approval seekers most of the time, with occasional moments of rebellion. For others, rebellion dominates.

Neither mental condition leads to making sensible and creative choices about what we want to accomplish.

This is step two of prioritizing: Ask yourself why you want to or don’t want to do whatever is on your agenda? For example, does the idea of paying your bills makes you want to gag (assuming you have the money to do so), or do you feel such anxiety that you pay all bills weeks ahead of time? The advance payment is fine, but the force that drives you to do it might be a problem. Are you either compelled or revolted by a grim parental voice telling you that responsible people pay their bills?

If you hesitate about the creative writing course you want to take, do you hear a parental voice saying that creativity will never pay the bills?

Listen for those voices. They have a lot to tell you.

You Don’t Have to Know What’s Wrong to Make it Right

You Don’t Have to Know What’s Wrong To Make It Right

The other day I was trying to fix a page on one of my web sites. (I do my own html coding.) No matter what I did, the correct version of the web page wouldn’t upload. It was getting towards the end of the day, so, despite my temptation to beat this problem to the ground, I left it for later.

The following morning I fixed the problem with no difficulty. I never figured out out what technical problem had caused it to not work the day before, but I decided it didn’t matter, as long as the issue was resolved.

Now I have to learn how to apply the same casual attitude to life’s problems.

Maybe because so many of us are indirectly influenced by Freudian thought, we believe that in order to solve a problem, whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional, we have to burrow down to the deepest roots and discover the what, when, and why of the original problem.

Sometimes that’s a good idea. A person who becomes traumatized every time she has to drive on a bridge will most effectively overcome this issue if she can discover and dissolve the original trauma. (This is a foundational practice of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which I employ every day.)

Sometimes, though, rooting around in the past and reliving just how awful it was can have a negative effect on our ability to create in the present and the future. I’ve known too many people who decided they were so irreparably damaged that no amount of self-help, rehabilitation, or positive thinking could pull them from the quicksand of personal history.

To get stuck in such beliefs robs us of our creative abilities. It says that forces outside ourselves have greater power than we do. It stains the bright colors of possibility with the dark hues of what was.

I don’t recomment pretending the past never happened, but letting it pull us back prevents the future from pulling it forward. Don’t let the past overshadow the promise of what is to be. Yeats said it far better than I could in the poem, The Two Trees:

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while.

(The complete text of this poem is at http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_two_trees.html

Gaze instead into that which inspires and encourages you. Again quoting Yeats:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

At any time, we always have two choices: fear or love. Fear shreds our ability to joyously create. Love is the great enhancer of all creativity.

What are you choosing today?

Creating Can Be Easy

Recently I listened to an interview with Carol Look, who teaches EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and who has created some very useful teaching tools in audio and DVD form.

In the interview she described how, if you’re in a negative mood, you can shift your focus. Some of the methods she listed were petting your cat or dog, taking a walk in nature (which can include a city park), and listening to music you love.

This may sound simplistic, and I’d rather say it’s simple, by which I mean easy. Because of its ease, simple methods for changing one’s mood get overlooked. We are so trained to believe that only the complicated and difficult methods can help us change our lives. That’s another way of saying we must struggle and suffer so that we appreciate the achievement of our goals.

The trouble is, after a long journey of struggle and suffering, we are often too exhausted to be appreciative. We’d rather take a nap.

When we, instead keep it simple, we’re able to enjoy the journey. The purring cat or tail-wagging dog, the pleasure of watching birds fly, or the pure enjoyment of music you love are their own rewards. When we change our focus, we aren’t waiting to be happy. We are happy and ready for more.

What could be more creative?