Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes

2 December 2020

In pretty much every SMART meeting I’ve facilitated, someone is asked: Are you being led by your values or emotions?  It may be helpful to examine this question and its terms.

The idea is that, if you’re being led by values, you have examined your life, plotted out some goals, found some means of achieving those goals, and set some rules of conduct, at least for yourself.  If, on the other hand, you are being led by emotions, your days may well be victim to whatever the wind blows your way i.e., you not only fail to move in a valued direction, you spend your life reacting to situations others bring to your attention.

The terms at the heart of this issue are actor versus re-actor.  The first is self-directed, the second, not so much.  As regular readers know, this blog spent a fair bit of ink on the notion of perfection (23.ix-14.x), a practice that locks people into inaction.  Action, the result of being a self-directed actor, takes guts because the minute you declare yourself headed in direction A, B, or C, you risk the horrors of failure, ridicule, and shame.  My bet is that failure, ridicule, and shame are worth the price.

When my father died, I engaged in my typical bibliotherapy and one of the chosen texts was Bronnie Ware’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.  The first, most prominent regret, was stated thus: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.  That is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read because, when you’re dying, it’s too late for correction.  So the question becomes, do you continue to drift through an emotion-based life or do you risk failure, ridicule, and shame so that you can look back on your life with the satisfaction of saying, I bloody went for it! 

The title of this blog is my favourite 12-step aphorism: Nothing changes if nothing changes.  A fitting corollary to that comes from The Daily Stoic (22.vi).  Holiday & Hanselman state that trying the same thing repeatedly, and hoping for a different result, is the on-the-street definition of insanity.  But they follow this up with an astute observation: Hope is not a strategy!  While hope is essential, it does not plot paths, identify means, or set rules.  Values can.

Lead with values and you’ll probably find that hope joins you along the way.

Dan Chalykoff facilitates two voluntary weekly group meetings, as well as one-to-one individual appointments, for SMART-based counselling services at danchalykoff@hotmail.com