Slowing Everything Down
Low Expectations
I went into person-focused therapy without too much confidence in how much I could get out of it. As someone who tends to barrage friends and family with any and all things on my mind, the idea of me leading the conversation with a more passive listener didn’t sound distinctly different — I want something I can actively do to improve myself rather than a cathartic hour that doesn’t lead to answers.
In contrast, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) sounded like the absolute dream. This methodology is all about a proactive approach to addressing your mentality, with homework and exercises to change negative patterns and correlations. My boundless capacity to push through difficult issues and stay optimistic means I would much rather have something I can do to actively help better myself as much as I can.
My first person-focused therapy session showed me how everything I just said above is the problem.
A Results-Oriented Mentality
There’s an emphasis on constant self-improvement and proactivity that is intrinsically tied to entrepreneurial pursuits.
It makes perfect sense, you’re trailblazing into a new field which most people (including yourself) generally don’t know about. The ideas of failing fast and improving yourself from the mistakes you make are gospel. Ignore our natural inclination to come up with excuses to say we’re not ready and just do it.
This doesn’t just apply to work. Anxiety (which this really is) can hold us back from the best experiences in our lives. CBT attacks this perfectly by the idea of exposure therapy, actively doing the thing that scares you to realise that it’s not as terrifying as you initially made it out to be. For someone who used to frequently stop themselves because of internal concerns, this concept was both terrifying and liberating.
This talk explains the topic in an incredibly accessible way:
So what’s the problem?
When the measure becomes the goal
Following this mindset, you want to push yourself past your self-made limits to become a better person.
However, it’s quite easy to fall into a trap of constantly analysing what you’re doing and determining some sort of velocity, stating whether you’re growing at the same rate that you were in the past.
When you don’t consider the job you currently have as at all productive in your personal development, and a lot of the things you wanted to do are hampered by external factors (say a pandemic) it’s easy to take a look at yourself and think that you’ve stepped off the gas.
That thought naturally leads to asking questions as to why you’re not pushing as hard as you did in the past, what deficiencies have come up such that you can’t do the very thing you were so proud of in the past. You start to romanticise the growth you had before and thus the person you were before — it gets to a point when you’re convinced you’ve actually gotten worse over that time (at that point say sayonara to your self-esteem).
The thing is, it’s okay to be a worse person than you were before. Beating yourself up for not improving yesterday, today or tomorrow doesn’t help you change that behaviour. There’s a level of respect you need to give yourself in the fact that sh*t happens. It’s not a linear process and you shouldn’t take ownership for everything bad that happens in your life.
The very thing that was used to attack the anxiety holding me back became the root cause of insecurity, fixating on the past and putting myself down for not being the go-getter I had been up until this point. There are actual practical measures to help to reframe particular situations that give you anxiety, but the methodology for that would make this article even more tangential than it currently is.
I would actually recommend taking a look at the Reddit post below (it feels hilarious recommending a Reddit post) that frames your current self alongside your past and possible future, in a kind of positive way? I can imagine this could sneakily hinder people almost as much as it helps but I think a lot of people who struggle with how they’re doing right now could find it useful.
The post above talks about forgiving your past self and trying to do favours for your future self, but those two points are inherently in constant conflict — where you draw the line is down to you. I was so focused on working on myself to be the best version I began to mentally freefall as soon as my trajectory started to falter.
It fundamentally leads to an approach that relies on external results to prove self-worth, and lacks self-compassion when things aren’t going as well as you’d hope.
Individual Approaches
I’m still working out how to best approach this. It’s this impossible task of wanting to do things that actively benefit yourself while being okay with not doing those things all the time, or even at all at some points. Just because things aren’t as good as they used to be that’s not a reflection on your character, or even if it is that’s okay — you’ll bounce back.
So, I came into my first person-focused therapy excited to attack all my problems and knock them out the park, I left it with one big lesson — I need to slow down.
I push so hard to actively pursue what I want that I have a tendency to rush into things, and some things just naturally take time. He even pointed out how throughout the session I spoke as if I wanted to throw every word out as fast as I could, a reflection of the cacophony going on in my head.
In Conclusion
I’m slowly learning to be okay with being slower, and not expecting so much from myself. The inner peace I’m looking for will take some time to get there but I suppose I won’t have it until I’m okay with that very fact.
Completely as an aside I think this is why I find meditation either impossible or groundbreaking. If I’m actually able to focus on the present it gives me a level of mental clarity that I rarely have.
I do still think that CBT would be incredibly helpful for me to stay present — it has a specific point of focusing on dealing with current problems rather than issues from the past (the exercise I sent above is distinctly CBT).
When you want to work on yourself, it needs to come from a place of compassion and self-love, that won’t fixate on going as fast as possible, and won’t respect yourself any less because you’re not on the trajectory you’d hoped right now.
Thanks for reading.
This has been a really interesting article to write for me because it’s felt constantly in conflict with itself, and connected to so many other topics. I could’ve gone down a rabbit hole about any of the number of points I discussed in my hour-long sprint on the 10th September.
Well anyway, I hope this hasn’t ironically come off as rushed as it felt
