ROW Episode 25

In this episode entitled “Mind the Gap” we expose two prevalent mind traps that hinder our progress in actualizing our potential. We also examine prevalent destructive notions of success and reframe them to be more uplifting and constructive.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode entitled Mind the Gap, we expose two prevalent mind traps that hinder our progress in actualizing our potential. We also examine prevalent destructive notions of success and reframe them to be more uplifting and constructive. I'm happy to be back with you again. It's been a couple of weeks, so delighted to be in your midst. I've been reflecting a lot over the last few weeks about what it takes to change the world and I'm reminded that to create a better, more peaceful, more just world, we have to achieve transformation at two different levels. One is at the individual level, and the other is at the societal level. And we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to be able to proceed on both fronts simultaneously. And clearly, they're both interrelated because society is nothing more than a collection of individuals. Given everything that's been going on in the world the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the fleeting nature of life. So today I'm going to focus on individual transformation, one of the two prongs. I've probably been thinking about the fleeting nature of life because of the number of reports we're getting of COVID deaths all around the world, of failing states and the death and injury caused to folks, for instance, in Afghanistan, natural disasters and injustice that are leading to death and misery, for instance, what's going on in Haiti, famine, as is happening in the Tigray region between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and plain old injustice of various varieties that are really ubiquitous around the world. This realization that life is fleeting has spawned in me a deeper recognition that what most of us really want to have done by the end of our lives is to have actualized the fullest measure of our innate potential. So the question becomes, what is it that stops me and any of you if this thought resonates with you? What is it that stops us from actualizing our potential or actualizing it faster or more effectively? What are the hidden blocks within us, either habits of thought or habits of behavior, maladaptive habits, that hinder our progress and our ability to actualize our potential? As I reflected on this, I came up with two big ideas that I want to share with you. The two biggest blocks are encapsulated in a phrase that I'm going to put up here for you, which is called, Mind the Gap. Now, those of you who have lived in England, in London, or visited it and have been on the underground will recognize this phrase, Mind the Gap. It's a refrain that is played on the loudspeakers as trains arrive at the stations and depart urging people to be careful as they step onto the platform or off the platform onto the trains, not to fall into the gap between the train and the platform and maim and injure themselves. And I started to think,"Wow, we pay so much attention to physical dangers. And we're so careful not to fall into the gap between the train and platform. What other gaps might there be that I'm not paying attention to?" Mental gaps, psychological, emotional gaps. I need to bring those to the light of consciousness so that I can make sure that I don't stop myself from fulfilling my potential. There are two ubiquitous gaps that I came up with, and these are the two big ideas. The first is the gap between where I am, or any of you are, and where we ideally want to be. The vision we have for what a fulfilled life looks like to us. It emerges in a couple of forms. It could either be the gap between where I am and where my vision of success or fulfillment lies, or it can also be the gap between where I am as I try to accomplish a certain goal that I've set myself. How far have I fallen short of that goal, so to speak? Now, the problem with looking at life through this lens of the gap, the how far away am I from either achieving a goal or achieving something greater, which is my full potential, is that it's like looking at the horizon. It's constantly shifting moving. And so we're never satisfied and its very hard to gauge progress, because the goalposts are constantly shifting, so to speak. Falling into this gap is really self destructive. Because it gives us a sense that we are failures, that we're incompetent, that we're unworthy, and it generally leads us to beat ourselves up. A lot of self criticism involved and that act depletes us of the positive energy we need to actually fulfill our potential. Falling into the gap in these ways also leads to us becoming depressed, anxious, losing all motivation, and squandering our energy. And very often it just leads plain to paralysis. We also just simply deprive ourselves of being happy. And in fact, if you look around you, think of a number of highly successful, however you determine success, of people that you know, look at them and ask yourself, how happy are they, truly? And you may recognize this in yourself. You may very well be one of these very successful people and never really happy with yourself or with life. There's some things always missing. We just also, when we fall into this gap, we lose the joy of life. We lose the joy of celebrating our wins and the goals that we do achieve, or the progress we make. How can we avoid falling into this gap? The first thing to do is to replace the habit of looking at how far have I fallen short of achieving my goals against how far have I come from where I was? So measuring our progress. A really good, simple exercise to use in doing this is at the end of each day to bring ourselves to account in the sense that we first sit down and think about and even write three wins that we had, three ways in which we progressed from where we were in the morning to where we were in the evening, where we were yesterday compared with where we are today and really acknowledge and celebrate and validate ourselves. By doing so, we encourage ourselves. We fill ourselves with joy and positive energy. We increase our confidence, which is so important if we're to go ahead and actualize our potential. So as opposed to getting depressed and anxious and getting paralyzed, we become confident. We're joyful, we feel hopeful about our ability to actualize our potential. The second thing we can do is to change our relationship with goals. Instead of looking at the gap between where we are and where we, where that goal is that we had set ourselves and beating ourselves up for having failed to achieve it, we can instead recognize that goals are simply a tool we use in order to channel our potential, to harness it, and to actualize it. It's a way of us keeping ourselves motivated and excited as we go through life. Consequently, failure to achieve a particular goal is not a commentary on our self worth. I can't emphasize this enough. So many of us tie our self worth to our goals, and if we fail to achieve the goals, we feel like we are unworthy and useless. Related to this is the idea of what we then end up doing when we adopt this new relationship to goals is we also redefine our concept of success. Normally we think of success as successfully achieving a particular outcome, especially apropos of a goal we've set ourselves. It's very out outcome oriented. We want that promotion. We want to get good grades and get into a particular university. What if instead, we started to define success as the progressive realization of a worthy goal? This means that every step we take in the direction of that goal is a step that mirrors success. We are on the way and we are slowly actualizing our potential and growing. Because the aim in life is ultimately to grow and to transform, not to achieve a series of outcomes. The next thing that happens when we change our relationship to goals is that we change the way we think of failure. Instead of thinking of failure as a terrible, dismal thing, we recognize that failure is merely an opportunity to grow, to correct course, and to learn lessons. So at the end of each day, as we bring ourselves to account, we not only look at our wins and encourage ourselves and celebrate the wins, but we also look and see what didn't work so well? And wow, what an amazing lesson I've learned. Now I get to correct course tomorrow. This is a very healthy, constructive way of living life. It helps us to enjoy every step of our progress along the way and to celebrate our wins. If we think of life as a journey, it's not arriving at the destination that is the be all and end all, because as we all know many of us go through life achieving goals and we may be satisfied with the goal for a day, five days, a week, a month and then we feel unfulfilled and want to move to the next thing which is good because we're constantly striving, but if we could also enjoy the journey along the way, enjoy the scenery as we try to scale that mountain and recognize that this is our life. Now, every moment, the sum total of these moments are our life and once it ends, it ends, right? Okay, now the second big gap that I noticed as I reflected is caused when we start comparing ourselves with other people. It's an imagined gap. We look at others, And we say,"Oh, wow look at how far I am from being worthy because I'm so different from them." Theodore Roosevelt famously said that comparison is the thief of joy. And it is so true. Unfortunately, our tendency to compare ourselves with others today is particularly exaggerated and accentuated, because we're seeped in social media, which is all about comparing ourselves with others. Have you noticed that, you look and you see your friends seem to constantly be socializing, enjoying themselves, going on fancy vacations, their kids seem to do nothing but excel and get great grades and go to great universities or get the great internships or jobs. You would think that they didn't have a worry in their lives. And yet, if you actually were engaged in their lives, you would know that what they're choosing to share with the world is really the good stuff. And that there is a whole host of challenges and miseries that they're not sharing with others. Comparison is deadly. It's a dead end road. No good outcome ever comes of it. Because one of two things happens when we compare ourselves with somebody else. We either think that we're worse than someone else, which is self defeating, gets us, again, depressed and completely drains us of the energy we need in order to actualize our potential and achieve growth in life. Or, equally badly, we think we're better than someone else, and we become haughty and arrogant and self righteous. Those are deadly qualities because they undermine our growth in life. We become complacent and those qualities tend to undermine other good virtues that we're trying to cultivate in this life. So there is no good outcome from comparing oneself. Also, when we think about comparison, we realize that it's a nonsensical thing to do, because you're not comparing things that are equivalent. We start off by making a whole host of assumptions about how people are actually doing. As we said, when you look at their social media, you assume everything is just fantastic in their lives. But you have no idea of how fulfilled these people actually feel, or how happy they are, and whether they're truly thriving, and how joyful and serene they are, and how much peace of mind they have. The second thing about comparison is that it fails to take into account the reality that we are each unique beings born with a preordained capacity. We see this when we look at children within one family. You'll see one child has the capacity to be good at music and the other child may be tone deaf but great at maths or physics or sports and another at poetry and so on. To compare them and their capacities with each other is truly nonsensical. It makes no sense. What actually seems to matter is what ratio or percentage of my individual God given or life given capacity I am actually developing. Imagine when you and I are born, I may have the capacity of a teaspoon, you may have the capacity of a cup, somebody else the capacity of a bathtub, someone else the capacity of a river. Now, if I fill my teaspoon and you who has a cup only fill say three quarters of the cup. Even though it consists of tens of teaspoons, who do you think has done a better job with their lives? I think I have, because I've actually taken the full measure of my potential and actualized it. Whereas, although quantity wise you may have done better, in fact you've only achieved a half or a three quarters of your potential. And yet in today's world we tend to gauge everything in absolute terms. What grades did you get? We compare each other. Oh, you got an A and you got a B plus and so you must be more intelligent or have mastered the materials better. It doesn't necessarily follow. The other idea that flows from this is that what matters is what we make with what we're given. Again, a great piece of advice from Teddy Roosevelt was this,"Do what you can with what you've got where you are." A simple example will illustrate this. Let's say there's a girl called Nina. Who's born in circumstances of poverty, has to share a bedroom with five siblings. They have sporadic electricity, Nina's malnourished because her family doesn't have enough money to feed the kids properly, she has to wake up at 4 a. m. to help her family on the farm or at home with the younger kids. Maybe she has to even walk down to the river to get water for the family, all before going to school. Meanwhile, let's say there's Andrea, and she is a well to do young girl comes from a wealthy family, has every comfort, has her own bedroom, plenty of electricity, has a computer, fewer demands on her time and energy. She doesn't have to help around the house. In short, she's pampered. Now, if Andrea, the pampered one, gets an A, and the, and Nina gets a B plus or an A, are these truly equivalents? No, they're not. Nina had to go through so much more, and she had to overcome such odds in order to get her B plus that if we were fair minded, we would say that it is worth more than the A that Andrea got. What can we do to avoid slipping into the second gap of comparison? We start to develop a new habit, which is that we compete against ourselves only. And we come back to the idea with that first gap that we fall into, that instead of looking at the difference between where we are and where we hope to be, we measure our progress. So if we measure our progress every day you're measuring against what you did the day before, not against what someone else did. Because that's nonsensical and just is illogical and doesn't make sense. If we do that, then we won't fall into this second gap. In short, we should judge ourselves if we think that when we're born in life, we're given certain threads, right? We're born in certain circumstances, not of our choosing. We're born into a poor, rich family. Our ethnicity, our nationality, the country we're born into, our circumstances are out of our control. These are the threads we're given in life. We're not judged on those threads. We should only judge ourselves on the basis of the pattern that we weave with the thread. The thread may be coarse wool or it may be silk. That wasn't something we did. It wasn't as a result of choices we made. So we don't get credit for that or we don't get discredit for that. And the colors may be very different. Again, that is out of our control. However, we can decide what we do with the thread and what we make. And it's on that basis that we should gauge our growth. If we were to do these two things and Avoid falling into these two big gaps that we've talked about today. I am convinced that we will feel incredibly liberated, first of all. This feeling of freedom, because we're just trying to focus on being the best we can, being the highest expression of who we are on any given day. We're freed from the scourge of comparison, jealousy, and gossip. because that's what we do with gossip. We tear other people down to make ourselves feel better. We don't need to do that anymore if we're only competing against ourselves. Another welcome byproduct is we'll find that people who are negative won't want to be around us, because they want to continue to be negative and they realize when they're around us and we're so positive that we're not interested in negativity. So that's a plus. Beyond that, we'll find that we're actually attracted energetically to people who are similarly motivated and who are interested in growing and progressing and competing against themselves and not against us. In short, the gains from adopting these new habits and avoiding the gap, minding the gap, are freedom, joy, creativity, positive energy, and the ability to actualize our innate potential faster and more effectively. Those are my thoughts for today. I hope you found them useful. I was very excited as I went through this journey of self reflection and trying to tease out these ideas and I thought that they might be useful to you. I hope they resonate with some of you. I'd love to hear comments if you have them. Alrighty I think that's it for today. Take care. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.