Building upon last week’s post…

As there often is, there is another angle from which we can view our persistent unproductive behaviors.  While looking for the payoff is great for finding the hidden addiction or attachment that keeps us clinging to the unproductiveness, and therefore great to open a path for us to unhook ourselves from it, sometimes we need just a bit more nudge to actually do it.  After all, it may be unproductive, but we’re used to it and we’ve survived this long (or so says our calculating self), so it’s just easier to go along, right?

In those moments, we can get present to the cost.

And not just the cost in the unproductive results that we may already see and know, but the deeper costs that, like the payoff, is often hidden from our view.  The costs that cut deep to the core of what we truly want, costs that sap us and our experience of life:  our vitality, our enjoyment of life, our connection and rapport with others, our well-being, our peace of mind, our health, our satisfaction, our self-expression, our fulfilment, or a myriad of other things we become numb to.

Once we open our mindfulness and let ourselves become present to these costs, the balance shifts.  The calculating self begins to see that some of these are threats even to itself, and, even more so, our central and authentic selves gain succor and the strength to assert itself and say, “We are done with that now.”

And lo, we regain our agency and step forward to re-write our history going forward.  The already automatic ways of being and behaving begins to be interrupted, open to our creation towards that which is productive and that fills us with delight and peace and love.

Best of all, as we continue to put that into motion, soon that becomes our already, always, automatic, replacing our shackled downward spirals with ones that we can change anytime and that aligns us towards prosperity for ourselves and those around us.

Often, when there’s something in our lives that isn’t working, or isn’t working as well as we like it to – including our own behaviour and patterns – we try to dig deep and look for the why.  We look for what is it that has it be this way, or has me be this way?

And that can be valuable!  Especially if we’ve gotten some lessons or coaching or experience into the deep workings of who we are (hint: until we’ve done this work, it’s rarely at all what we think it is).  But often figuring out the what or the why doesn’t produce the results we want it to.  We have an explanation, but it doesn’t help us in the moment to cease or alter it.  It’s like that thing about how knowing how to lose weight and actually losing weight are two very different things.

But a more fruitful path is often to forgo the why and instead look at what is keeping it in place?  What are we getting from it being this way such that we, surreptitiously, derail ourselves?  What are we actually committed to, no matter what we may profess?

Put another way, what’s the payoff?

Given we keep doing what we are doing even when we say we don’t want to or don’t like the result, there’s gotta be something we’re getting out of it, something we’ve become, in a way, addicted to.  Almost always there’s a lot of juice there.  One of the most prime payoffs is simply that we get to be right.  Oh do we ever get such a rush from being right!*  And that same kind of rush follows into many other things that often are our payoffs:  validating ourselves, dominating others or controlling the situation, gain some sort of position or perceived advantage, or just plain old we get to, in our minds, win.

And so even if what we are doing is unproductive in 98% of all other areas, we get stuck.  Because, just like the rats who will cross electric fields and ignore food to get that pellet of cocaine, we so want that payoff.

When we get present to the payoff we get to see the groove that has been keeping us hemmed in and, even if we’ve been saying we’re trying to turn the wheel, guiding us down those unproductive paths.  And now that we see it, we gain access to making a choice.  For as charged as the payoff may be, it’s usually cheap, shallow, and unfulfilling, gone in a flash and leaving us with our mess.

We can give up that shoddy payoff to gain freedom, possibility, and results that our authentic self truly desires.

* Which makes sense in many ways.  To our survival-based calculating self, Being right = not being eaten by a tiger.  So we get a neurological reward for being right.