so asked me how i reconcile “focus your time and energy on what you want more of” with all the “feel your feelings” stuff i’m on about. it’s a good question and i was hoping to read a few more books and organize my thoughts a bit more but here’s what i’ve got so far:
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i think perceptual control theory suggests that motivation and action arise out of having both 1) where you are right now and 2) where you want to be in your awareness. it’s awareness of the gap between the two that produces motivation and action, which seeks to close the gap
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metaphorically speaking, you need two points to construct a vector that determines the direction you go. that’s not quite how it works bc the optimization landscape can be very hilly and complicated to navigate but it’s not a bad first pass
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so, when is motivation and action blocked? this story suggests it’s if either something about where you are is blocked out of your awareness, or something about where you want to be
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so to unblock motivation and action, you can try to unblock and expand your awareness of either where you are or where you want to be. i see “feel your feelings” as more about awareness of where you are, and “focus on what you want” as about awareness of where you want to be
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the goal of “feel your feelings” and crying etc. is not catharsis for catharsis’ sake although i do like me a good cry. the goal is to allow parts of reality into your awareness that you might otherwise be blocking out because they bring up feelings too painful for you to stand
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you’ll know it’s worked when you start having *different thoughts*, when suddenly you’re having new ideas about problems you were previously avoiding thinking about entirely. being emotionally unclogged literally makes you smarter by unclogging your cognition too
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so, how to unblock awareness of where you want to be? that’s where “focus on what you want” comes in. personally i still need a lot of “feel your feelings” here, because the stuff i want has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it too
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it’s easy for twitter to become an exercise in aggressively placing the scariest parts of where we are now into each other’s awareness. there’s a time and a place for these things but it only leads to paralysis if we don’t also cultivate a vision of where to go afterwards
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a funny feature of this story is i have not talked at all about “figuring out how to go from where you are to where you want to be.” PCT (and other things, e.g. AT) suggests that this is largely unnecessary! the bodymind’s natural creativity should just take care of it
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that’s probably not the whole story but it’s probably a larger part than many people might guess. anyway, this whole thing is just a very rough draft, would very much appreciate more thoughts here
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in closing: perhaps new years’ resolution season is an especially auspicious time to focus our time and energy on what we want to see more of 💪
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application to partnership: do we have shared awareness of where we are? do we have shared awareness of where we want to be?
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Instead of marriage and family as a sort of side dish to the main project of career, our goals were to center the family. Always asking: how does this choice advance our family project?
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