#192 - You seek change but you resist being changed
Getting out of the rocking chair of your life
For a while I was on a good diet and sleep regimen that was paying off until I found myself in a rocking chair. It’s not the Sunday siesta visual or you bouncing off on your grandfather’s knee while he tells you stories ensconced in his rocking chair visual that I want to evoke in you, dear reader. Nah. Forgive me for I’m going for more déjà vu than nostalgia here.
Despite our willpower and our positive thinking, as Robert Fritz says, our success is based on a fundamentally oscillating structure and it is the underlying structure of anything that determines its behavior. So, we often have the experience of going forward and then swaying back, forward and back, on and on—of being on a rocking chair as we pursue our goals. Fritz is an author and composer who has written extensively about the creative process for both individuals and organizations.
During these oscillations, which can pan out over days, weeks, or months depending on the goal you’re pursuing, energy follows the laws of physics. It moves along the path of least resistance. Ironically, I didn’t spot my own oscillating structure. I first saw the promise of change wiped out all too often in clients and peers I spoke with. Some garden-variety cases of how we tend to oscillate between two polarities—working out and being a couch potato; dieting and binging; or, if an organization depends on you, focusing on profits today versus building for the future.
My attempts to make sense of this phenomenon with the aim to help clients make lasting change in their lives brought me to Fritz’s work and his book The Path of Least Resistance. From that experience emerged two questions:
How can we set up the underlying structure of our lives—unlike a rocking chair that goes back and forth—such that energy flows where we want it to flow without leaving us stressed out and exhausted like so many successful people around?
What does it say about me that I can absolutely identify with the situations described by the clients I was supposed to be helping?
Components of the rocking chair structure
The structure most of us work with has three components.
1️⃣The results we want to create (our aspiration or desire)
2️⃣What is true at current time (our reality)
3️⃣What beliefs we hold, especially about ourselves (our concepts)
Fritz shows the working of this structure with a simple visual.
Imagine yourself in a room, midway between two walls. Tied around your waist are two elastic bands, one connecting you to the wall ahead and the other to the wall behind. The front wall has written on it the result you desire. On the back wall is scribbled “I cannot have what I want.” Why such a belief?
It is a common belief that is a product of childhood conditioning that we can’t have anything we want. That the fulfillment of our desires is contingent on circumstances. When we succeed, we acknowledge the invisible hand of circumstances. When we fail at something, we reinforce the belief that we can’t have it or don’t deserve it. A belief around our unworthiness or powerlessness takes root.
Back in the room, as you move forward toward what you want, the front band relaxes and the back one tightens. It becomes harder and harder for you to keep moving forward to a point where the tension is maximum at the front wall. At that point, the easiest movement for you is toward the wall behind. Going farther from what you want brings you relief as the tension pulling you back resolves. This is called a shift of dominance. The dominant force in your life and your actions has changed. Only this is temporary. It continues until you’re at the back wall, at which point the path of least resistance reverses and you’re pulled forward.
Here’s the thing about what’s written on the back wall. Even though it so powerfully influences our actions, it remains hidden from us. We don’t know why we keep losing ground every time after having made meaningful progress. We give it such names as self-sabotage.
The problem though is with the structure. Where there are two competing tension-resolution systems at work, which is the two bands, there will be wasteful oscillation. What’s written specifically on the walls (the specific desire or limiting belief) may change and yet the structure will produce the same behavior.
❌A writer writes for and as other people but is too conscious to publish and promote her own writing. She believes writers are intelligent and airing out her own writing will cause her to be judged as not intelligent.
❌An online creator who sits on the material she has created for a course on, ironically, making passive income. She believes she’s not good enough to be a creator.
❌A founder desires to be less stressed at work. She believes that it is her OCD-level attention to detail that is her edge and hence losing that means losing her edge.
What is the solution? There is none. Or none within the existing structure. The conflict in each of these cases is structural.
There’s no way to solve or to resolve such a structural problem. The answer is to get yourself out of the structure. As long as you’re in it, no matter what you do or how hard you try, you’ll find yourself swinging back to the same position over and over again until you quit.
What is a good structure—or where I attempt to answer the two questions raised earlier
There’s a difference, a big one, between “I want the thing I want” and “I want the thing I want to prove that I’m not what I think I am.”
The first desire tends to follow a two-part structure: what you want and where you are in relation to that goal. There’s just one tension, pulling you forward. If what you want is clear and compelling enough, the tension will pull you to it. Fritz calls this structural tension. Other management consultants who have riffed off Fritz’s work give it the name creative tension. Whatever the name, the idea is to assign a name for a force of positive change in your life. A tension that is not bad. A good tension where the bigger the gap between your current and desired states, the greater its pull; and the lesser the gap, the greater the momentum forward.
The second desire has a third part to the structure—the wall behind you that you can’t see with the gnarly stuff written on it. It is your belief or conceptions about yourself. You think you’re not enough as you are to accomplish what you want. You need to add qualities to drum up sufficient worth. Since you don’t think you’re good enough, you assign unwanted meanings to success and failure. Failing reinforces it; succeeding makes you anxious about losing what you have gained.
Fritz says that we have creative potential when we’re not thinking about ourselves. If we can get out of our own way and simply do what we want to do without being trapped in notions of worthiness we can change our structure from an oscillating one to an advancing one.
His advice is not to take what you do personally. When you cannot separate what you like to do—writing or selling products or marketing products—from how you see yourself—as writers or salesperson or marketer, you cannot evaluate your work without simultaneously going through an existential crisis. This is the crisis of transient progress, of progress that is paired with an inevitable reversal. This is the crisis of the rocking chair. So, don’t make your work your identity or else you’ll be self-conscious about it.
And what did Fritz teach me about myself? I was on a good diet and sleep regimen for a while and then in the last few weeks I let it slip away. The slide coincided with the family moving houses. Now that things have settled down, I’ll get back to the routine. That’s something I ought to tell myself. But I’ve seen forty. I’m a retired idealist. Often, nothing that is good feels final.
I know that success is hard to achieve. Yet, it is even harder to maintain. Be it weight loss, lifestyle changes, customer retention, or relationships. For long, my strategy—never having been a fan of fear-based manipulation—has been summoning willpower. But exercising willpower, from time to time, feels like being a mahout to an unruly and stubborn elephant.
Maybe what we call middle age, I’m realizing, is a gradual settling into the structure until we’re locked in it. We just have had a lot of time to come up with strategies to compensate for the flaw in our structure. Mine has been willpower manipulation; another common one is fear- or guilt-based action (“hit this target by this time or else [insert your favorite negative consequence]”). I also know of friends who, having given up their joie de vivre, live their lives in an area of tolerable conflict: don’t aim too high, don’t swing too much.
All of this is structural. And none of it is inevitable. So much energy wasted in changing our behavior without considering the structure. So much stress trying to live up to an ideal just to feel worthy of it. If we can say out loud, as Fritz makes a young client do again and again, “I am a complete nothing,” perhaps we can teach ourselves to get out of our own way.
👋Hi! I’m Satyajit and my driving force in life is creating. I have been the happiest when I have made something from scratch. When nothing existed before and then through me something came into this world. Writing is the main medium of creation for me, though I also use my skills as a decision-making trainer to help create leverage in my clients’ careers and as a coach to create shifts in perspective in my clients’ lives.