What’s missing in your life?
Or perhaps the more accurate question for you might be…
What area in life causes you the most suffering?
In everyone’s life, there’s some area that they just can’t seem to get working. One person might have a great career, happy social life, but just can’t make a relationship work. Another might have a happy and solid relationship and feel a meaningful purpose, but struggle financially. Meanwhile someone else might have money, success and a loving relationship, but just can’t find any meaning or purpose in their life.
Whatever area it is for you, I call it your Emotional Achilles Heel.
Emotions Blind Us When We Care Too Much About A Certain Outcome
Last week I posted about how romance can get in the way of a happy relationship. Today I’d like to talk a little more generally about how emotions affect us and sway our decisions. It’s important because we all get swayed away from what we fear and towards what we want, but often the promise of easy makes us chase fruitless paths. We have most trouble in the area of our achilles heel because it is the area that we have most desire for or fear about. And it is this emotional attachment to a certain outcome that causes us to lose perspective and make stupid decisions that lead us towards what we most fear or hold us from what we most want.
We can all see when other people, blinded by love, greed or anger, act like fools and stumble into danger. Yet we only see it in ourselves in hindsight.
Every day people fall for scams, some ridiculously obvious like the Nigerian Scammers offering a cut of millions that they want to place in your bank account. Get rich quick and network marketing schemes are being eagerly taken up everyday, yet almost no-one will receive even minimum wage for their efforts. Lonely Widows are often in papers and magazines telling how some smooth talking Conman tricked them and ran off with their life savings. Every week rich, old men tell courts how the 18 year old glamour model that they thought adored them for their sparkling personality turned out to care far more for a hefty divorce settlement.
They’re not stupid people, many are successful in other areas of their life, but with a glaring blindspot that leaves them vulnerable to predators. An emotional hunger that gnaws at their insides so painfully that they will themselves to believe that the solution is as easy and obvious as the slick talking Hustler tells them it will be. And so they make poor decisions from desperation, because they so want hope to overpower reason.
But it never does.
Healing Your Achilles Heel Takes Small Consistent Decisions
Every decision that we make, in every matter, large or small is a step either towards a happier and more positive state or towards a more negative and miserable state. Making poor decisions over and over again leads us to more problems and make life a struggle. In contrast making good decisions again and again can lead us to what we dream of. So today I want to talk about how you can make better decisions.
The best long term decisions depend on being able to see the bigger picture. To some degree it’s a matter of raw brainpower and synthesising lots of diverse pieces of information and clearly seeing the implications of different actions or inactions. And so many people believe that the critical factor is intelligence and having lots of knowledge to inform them.
However we’ve all seen the stereotypical Nerd who can calculate every option in seconds, but makes the most naive or ignorant mistakes in personal relationships. Equally we’ve seen atrocious mistakes made by Governments and large organisations who have mountains of pages of information and the best minds money can buy.
In your own life, I’m sure you know someone who believes their Partner when he/she tells them that they won’t cheat, hit them, gamble, drink, overspend again, when anyone with half a brain and a clear head can see that they will.
The problem is that people get swayed far more by their emotions than they do by the facts of the situation. Again and again we tell ourselves that we’ll be more organised if we have that new desk, filing box, book or so on. We’ll stick to our diet if we buy the diet book, slimming club membership, exercise bike etc.
We buy so much junk that we fill our garages and lofts with things that we once thought were going to solve our problems, that now storage units have started opening by the dozen. But problems rarely get solved by money. If you’ve always over-ate, exercised too little, been disorganised, late or whatever it’s highly unlikely that you will suddenly change because you bought a solution from a shopping channel.
photo credit: bradleygee
The Problem is Always Emotional Attachment To An Outcome
The problem is never the lack of a gadget, a gizmo or a 7 step system. The problem is always an emotional attachment to food or shopping, a lack of motivation to exercise or a disorganised brain. Therefore the only way you will change your behaviour is by making an emotional shift. And when you make an emotional shift, your behaviour automatically changes.
Yet changing behaviour is very difficult and only a temporary fix unless the mental and emotional infrastructure changes.
If you find the achilles heel in anyone’s life, and we all have them, you will find that their decisions are made with far less regard to logic and reason than to hope and fear. These are areas where people desperately seek to be right rather than happy. They will argue vehemently their case and avoid reason by claiming other people just don’t want them to be happy and so on. We all have these blind spots. By uncovering them and honestly acknowledging our hopes and fears, we can reduce the impact they have on us and start to improve this area of our life.
Why not make a start by sharing your achilles heel below?
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I mght have more than one but what really makes me act stupid is my relation with my ex boyfriend. I get all crazy and say and do really stupid thinks that make me look like a crazy person. I don’t have too many friends and with him… We still go out, try to be friends, but I still have feelings about him. It hearts so much and there are times when I feel like I’m gonna go crazy. I feel stuck. I just can seem to move forward. I lack the ambition to start looking for somebody else. I olso don’t have a job and it’s like they are all at the same moment and can’t seem to handle the situation. I olso am a negative person. I don’t know why is that. I try and I try to change, I read so many books, listen to tapes and they work for a little while and then I go back to the same routine. I feel so lost:(
My achilles heel would be a lot of what was mentioned above, emotional eating, not enough exercise, which leads to not feeling good enough, which leads to attracting the wrong relationship, because I don’t feel that I deserve better.. I have purpose and a fabulous life and so much that I’m truly grateful for. I need to take better care of myself and in doing this will establish a better sense of worth.
Dona, my next post will cover more on what stops a lot of people from fixing their achilles heel. But for now why the tapes and books don’t work is probably because they involve changing your behaviour. What you really need to change is the way you feel about that relationship. Because when you feel differently, all the other stuff will fade.
Another key to making lasting change is to not expect to be over it in one fell swoop. As I talked about with romance, the problem for many people is wanting to go from one extreme to the other. Accept and embrace the pain that you feel and let yourself move through it one step at a time as fast as you are capable of doing so without any expectations or time constraints.
It’s slower than following 7 steps, but it means that you have really moved to a different place and can’t get sucked back into the old patterns.
Gen, we all have strengths and weaknesses, the key is to dwell for so long in our strengths that they gives us the energy and propel us past our limitations. The next post should be useful for you.
I feel often that i am not good enough to make money. I go between 2 extremes of feeling a lot of fear and then feeling empowered. I am trying to make a business for myself and it is moving slow and maybe it is because i am scared that i will fail. Learning to trust myself has become harder since now i am married.
Thank you Rob, thank you so much for responding. I will feel better, I have to. So help me God and myself
Is my emotional attachment to my dysfunctional relationship, to the individual, or to a desperate need to have my own self-worth validated? Let’s say it’s all of those – how do I go about making an emotional and behavioral shift?
Hi James and Kirsten,
Sorry for the delay in replying, I was on holiday when you commented
and I’m just catching up.
James, the critical phrase in your comment is ‘trying to make a
business for myself’.
Some people start a business to make money at any cost. And some want
to provide a service to the world. I suspect that what is holding you
back is a conflict between these.
Successful businesses are usually
founded by people who have a sense of mission. Focus on serving
Customers and developing the service/product for others and you’ll
worry far less about failing. Whereas if it feels like you are doing something for yourself, it feels scarier and as if it’s you against the world.
Kirsten, start by working out where you want to be.
What do you want?
Why?
Get in touch with the feeling of what you want to be and you’ll make the shift towards it.
Thank you for responding.
I am tired of being layed-off from companies and started my own company by saying “i cant let others dictate how i will make money and how much.” Soon after the fear of lack of money came in. I am married and i see my wife working who wants to have kids and I work on my business. It really doesn’t feel good not making money.
I think i am internalizing too much and need to cultivate more faith in life and myself.
Please feel free to give thoughts…anyone can give thoughts.
I think you are internalising too much. It’s a natural response, it’s a brave and scary thing to do. Yet to make it successful you need to be able to access all your resources.
When we react to events we sometimes push against things. So in your case you have started up a business to solve your problem.
But businesses make money when they solve other people’s problems.
You need to love either the work that you do or the people that you do the work for. When you spend the same energy focused on making their life better, that is now internalised on whether the money will come in, you’ll open up your creativity and find the ideas and solutions that will make them choose your business.
I am living with this wonderful man now.we both have come out of divorce and have our kids with us.now we live together as one family and our teenage kids have accepted us respectively..My problem is he dosnt belive in love..he says he lives for kids and he want to do every thing to make them happy. I am a very emotional person so i am finding it hard to accept the fact. when i start talking about emotions he thinks i am selfish and self centered trying to make myself happy and not think about the kids..i find it really hard when he says i can move out anytime i want and that it wont affect him a bit..my question is do i go on hoping that that things would change some day or leave him and try to find someone who is emotionally availabe..i really love him alot and we have been together for almost an year now…but it really lows my spirits when i realise that he would never say those love words to me..
Hanaa, to say I love you is to say words. They are often said without being meant. Other people may never say them, yet their actions demonstrate that they feel them.
As you say, you are emotional and your Partner isn’t, so you have different ways of relating. The question for you is do you want someone who you describe as wonderful or do you want someone who maybe isn’t so wonderful, but says nice words?
If you want to stay in this relationship you have to recognise that words don’t mean the same thing to different people and that people relate and demonstrate their feelings in different ways and so you have to recognise the deeper meaning of love that doesn’t need to be spoken.
If you can do this, you can appreciate love in all of it’s forms. If you can’t then you need to find a more emotional relationship, which by it’s nature will involve more drama and all that goes along with that.
So recently me and my significant other have been having issues. They don’t really even have to do with our relationship. I have been completely over the top with my emotions. I can’t remember the last day where I was just happy.. Given, there is a lot of stress in our situation right now, I just don’t know how to handle it all. I have so many things that I want him to know about my past and my present, but all of it seems to come out negatively. I can never find a positive thing about my experiences. I want to know what I can do to sort of subdue my feelings so they aren’t so intense. I don’t know how to accept them, because I don’t know what is really wrong. He asked me if I would be comfortable going to see a therapist, if it would help.. Should I?
Maybe.
You really don’t want to subdue your feelings or you’ll just end up like a zombie. Listen, what you are experiencing isn’t uncommon. A lot of people feel like this and go through times of crisis. However you do need to move past it, because it is horrible to experience.
What you need to do is make friends with your feelings and listen to them. Don’t run from them or you’ll make it worse. Maybe it feels like they will drown you in their intensity, but the only way to get past this is through their guidance.
The reason for your strong emotions and your stress comes from a deep seated fear. Follow the trail of your emotions. In other words, what do you feel? Why? What would happen if? Until you can trace what the real issue is.
What you’ll probably find is that it comes down to some flawed idea you have that you’ve been too scared to really examine honestly. If a Therapist can help you do this quicker, then great
Best of luck, Kaydee.
Email me if you have any more questions.
I have felt really anxious recently about my future. I have done two years of a foundation degree in I.T but I did not pass it. I have had the opportunity to start a course from year 1 in the area of i.t i prefer or to do the second year of a foundation degree to make sure I get a qualification and then I could try and build my web design skills by doing short courses. (creative I.T is what I think I enjoy).
However, after swapping from more than two courses for the past two months. It is now to late for me to join this year. I am very aware the student fees go up to double next year and I am already in a lot of debt with student loans. I dont know if a degree is the best option for me. But my future feels very gloomy now, Im just looking for jobs, and it is so hard in todays recession.
I am thinkin that my whole life (I didnt want to say “rest of my life”) is written in stone and I am miserable. I am only 22 years old and I dont want to spend the next 60 years or how many years thinking I have made the wrong decision.