Mind Gym (9 page)

Sometimes these thoughts can be very sensible and prevent you from wasting time or following the wrong path. But sometimes, unfortunately, they prevent you from both spotting and taking opportunities that could dramatically improve your life. The trick lies in recognizing the internal conversations and being able to make an informed decision about whether to listen to them or to ignore them and move on.

Action produces results. Doesn’t it? That’s what most of us were led to believe. However, you might miss out on great things in life because an internal conversation has convinced you that all dreaming is bad, that it’s a waste of time. Maybe, when you find yourself dreaming, you tell yourself something like this:

   
•   
I must get on with things
.

   
•   
No point in dreaming. I’ll only be disappointed
.

   
•   
I should be grateful for what I have
.

   
•   
I have my feet on the ground
.

   
•   
Let’s deal with today
.

These are some of the internal conversations we all have that stop us from contemplating and bring us straight back to doing.

They struck a particular chord with a participant at one of Mind Gym’s workouts, who, on seeing the cycle, realized that she had never really left the doing stage, or at least she had only ever reflected on the mundane issues of daily living rather than the big questions about her life.

Her cycle looked like this:

“I don’t think I have ever asked myself how my life could be different or better,” she explained. “I only thought about how to make sure it keeps going as it is. That’s not to say I’m unhappy, only that I’ve never really thought about what I could do that would make me happier.”

This woman—in her early forties, married, financially secure, and in a successful career—has a strong internal conversation that keeps her in a constant state of doing. When significant changes do occur in her life, they are likely just her responses to external events. And even then, her efforts would be geared toward getting her back to doing as quickly as possible.

A couple of years previously, for example, she had been laid off from her job. Instead of wondering what opportunities this opened up or how to use her severance package to possibly pursue a new career or learn new skills, she immediately rushed into looking for another job, one that would be almost identical to the one she had just left. Here’s the kicker. It wasn’t that she had loved her job and didn’t want to do anything else, but she felt guilty for not just following the quickest and most obvious path back to staying busy.

Oftentimes, this conversation is the most confusing. It’s that little voice in your head that tests reality. It’s familiar if you’re the person who dreams of being a filmmaker or an author or of starting your own business. You might not know any filmmakers or authors, therefore it doesn’t seem real to dream of being one. You might know a person who started their own business but failed. So, you deem your dream impractical. Your internal voice might say something like this:

   
•   
It would never work in practice
.

   
•   
Nice idea, but I’d better get on with the day job
.

   
•   
Someone else has probably already beaten me to the punch
.

   
•   
There’s no way I could do that
.

   
•   
It’s too much of a risk
.

Even when you get past the dreamers-are-losers conversation and reach the contemplating stage, the doing magnet is still very much there and just as powerful. At this stage, however, it works in a different way: You put up a string of practical objections to explain why your dream won’t work in reality.
It’s a shame, but it’s just not practical
, you might decide, and then you get back to doing. As a result, your cycle looks like this:

The Rubicon is a river that marked the boundary of ancient Italy. Any army that crossed it was declaring war against the Roman Republic. So, when Julius Caesar—who at that time was still a general—crossed the Rubicon with a legion in 49
BC
, there could be only one of two outcomes: he and his army would conquer or they would be destroyed.
³
This is the origin of the phrase “crossing the Rubicon,” which has come to mean taking an irrevocable step.

In the existential cycle, an irrevocable step occurs when you move from preparing to experimenting. During this stage of the cycle, you might be telling yourself something like this:

   
•   
Even though I don’t know the result, I have to try
.

   
•   
I hope it’s worth the risk
.

   
•   
I might fail, but I’m going for it
.

This is when you turn ideas into action, when you hand in your letter of resignation, tell your husband that you want a divorce, throw out all your old clothes, sign up for the Foreign Legion, or stop using contraceptives. It is the most difficult stage in the cycle and the one where the doing magnet is the strongest—because you know that once you move forward, there is no turning back.

You can see in the next illustration where the Rubicon lies within the cycle. You might also notice something else: a conversation that could stop everything.

The most common reason why some of us don’t cross the Rubicon is that we create what are called “catastrophic fantasies.” A catastrophic fantasy is a bleak prediction of what would happen if we experiment with something new—if we do cross our own Rubicons.

We all create catastrophic fantasies, particularly when contemplating big decisions, and quite often they scare us into sticking with the status quo. Most men planning to propose marriage, before they do so, create catastrophic fantasies about married life. These may include a nagging wife, gorgeous women desperate for their attention whom they will have to resist, limits on being able to hang out with their buddies, the end of bachelor freedom, and so on. The men who do propose recognize the catastrophic fantasies as nonsense and appreciate that the likely outcome will be very different. The men who don’t spot that they are creating catastrophic fantasies may miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

There is, of course, a third group: those who make a realistic assessment and decide that they do not want to commit to one person for the rest of their lives, or that the particular person they would be committing to is the wrong person. There is nothing wrong with that. Crossing the Rubicon is not always a good thing. In reality, some of our fears and worries may be accurate.

I dream about being able to swim an Ironman distance of 2.4 miles. However, I also believe that I’m not in good enough physical condition. I might get out there and end up too tired to make it the entire distance. Rather than risk drowning, I decide not to swim at all. The challenge we all have when venturing around the existential cycle is knowing whether our decision not to experiment with something new, and instead go back to doing, is realistic and sensible or ill-founded, damaging, and based largely on irrational fear.

While there is no definitive way of knowing for sure, there are some telltale signs to help you gauge whether your decision not to cross a particular Rubicon is based on rational concerns or irrational fears. Here are five signs that you are probably right not to cross the Rubicon and your decision is probably based in realism and sense:

1. You have considered the arguments for both sides and have decided that your decision makes the most sense. If pressed, however, you could make the case for the opposite view.

2. You are confident that you won’t regret your decision later. You have thought about what the realistic best outcome is, and either it isn’t good enough or it isn’t likely enough. Basically, the reward isn’t worth the risk.

3. You have thought through the worst-case scenario (as opposed to the catastrophic fantasy) and it is something you want to avoid at all costs. (To cross the Rubicon you really need to have decided that the worst-case scenario is worth the risk.) Basically, the risk isn’t worth the risk.

4. You can imagine advising someone else in your situation to do the same. We’re all much more levelheaded when it comes to someone else’s life—their pleasure or their pain.

5. You are relieved to have reached a conclusion and also pleased about the journey you have taken to get there.

Here are five signs that you should not leave the banks of your Rubicon yet, so that you can continue to explore your decision:

1. The worst outcome that you are imagining is extreme, verging on the absurd (you’ll not just fail to swim 2.4 miles, but be eaten by sharks).

2. You feel nervous and unsure about your decision. You keep putting it off, and you aren’t doing anything constructive to help make the best choice.

3. You can imagine circumstances in which, looking back, you would deeply regret your decision.

4. The decision to keep things roughly as they are doesn’t fit with how you see yourself. Maybe it seems cautious, whereas you see yourself as courageous, or it feels contradictory to some of the values that you hold most dear.

5. Everyone else may disagree, but you are still excited by the prospect of the change.

Irrational exuberants are those people who are forever saying things like
I wish I hadn’t rushed into that
or
If only I’d thought about it first
. Rather than never crossing the Rubicon, they’re happy to head over far too easily—without ever considering the size of the army on the other side. In terms of the existential cycle, their doing magnet is relatively weak—the centrifugal momentum of the next new thing is stronger than the gravitational force of the status quo.

If you find that you can’t hold down a job, you can’t keep a relationship, you spend money on a whim, or you haven’t gotten around to making your home into a place you like living in,
and
you regret it, then you may be suffering from a form of irrational exuberance. The best advice in this situation is this: spend longer at the preparing stage before wading across your Rubicon.

For example, consider one of these choices:

   
•   Think through all the possible disadvantages of taking this course of action as well as the advantages—really make an effort to present the case for caution on this occasion.

   
•   Contrast the allure of the new situation with how your existing life might improve even if you don’t make this big change. People who are always moving on to new jobs often fail to consider how their current jobs could get better. A new job may be attractive, but it is wrong to assume the old one will stay the same. New possibilities could open up. What happens when your boss moves on?

   
•   Contemplate the bigger and better gains and pleasures you could have if you didn’t always go for instant gratification. Could the gratification get more gratifying?