A Rule for Opportunism (Part 2)

I have often heard people express how terrible they feel saying ‘no’ to others, but I think a big part of the negativity that they feel in response to this comes from the internal clarity that they lack around both who they are and what they want in their lives. The capacity to give a concrete ‘no’ is as empowering as the ability to give a firm ‘yes’, and we should be unapologetic in our willingness to close doors that don’t resonate with who we are and what we know that we need to do with our precious energy. I’m reminded of this at least a few times every semester when I receive requests from potential higher degree by research students who want me to supervise them on their PhD or Masters projects. Already having a few students who I need to dedicate myself towards, I won’t hesitate to let these prospective students know that I don’t have the capacity to fill this role, unless they can show that the focus of their project is in strong alignment with my own research agenda.

While these potential students might be disappointed if I say ‘no’ to involving myself in their project, in actuality I am doing them a favour by preserving the space for them to link up with another supervisor who not only has a stronger interest in the topic, but also the availability to give more of their passion and energy towards the project. In taking this course of action, I am actually serving that student in a more authentic way than if I had said ‘yes’ to helping them on a project that my heart was not really in. Here, I think that we need to respect the roles that we and others have been given to fill, and be willing to play a facilitative role when necessary to align others with opportunities that are better suited to them. Something that I was slow to learn, but have come to appreciate more in recent times is that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Despite this learning on the face of it being contradictory to the central maxim discussed in part 1 of this entry, I think it is more complementary in the respect that it requires us to explore and discern our motivations for doing what we do. The reasons why someone might choose a course of action that is within their power to advance are multitudinous. Perhaps they are inclined to do what they do for reasons of personal gain or ego, or it may be the case that what is animating their decisions are more benevolent and selfless in wanting to help another move forward on their path. This doing things for the right reasons (as distinct from choosing the right thing that is aligned with who we know ourselves to be) is also a really important consideration that we need to get clarity on if we are to be committed to that which we choose to pursue.

Just because we may say ‘yes’ to something, doesn’t of itself mean that we are really committed to it. A good exemplar of this are the millions of disengaged people around the world who work in jobs that their hearts are not really in. While they may say ‘yes’ to the work because they want to get paid for it and enjoy some of the other perks that the job may provide them with, we can see that they aren’t really invested in what they do because they have been animated by the wrong reasons in involving themselves in it. This may sound like a harsh judgement, but in most instances it is invariably true. While I understand that for some people, there is an element of need to take on a role because of dire financial circumstances, or a lack of other opportunities in the place where they live, for example, it also needs to be understood that for most people, they aren’t so encumbered in their personal circumstances to have to make a predetermined choice that significantly limits their options.

This is especially the case for people who have the opportunity to study at university and enjoy the prospects for upward social mobility that such an education affords them. Being a privilege that shouldn’t be taken for granted, this is something that I remind my students about constantly. While previous generations, like my grandparents who were immigrants from Italy, may have been confined to needing to work jobs to stave of privation, their offspring and succeeding progeny have many more avenues of exploration available to them that present opportunities to actualise their giftedness and potential. Here, a distinction needs to be made between a job, career and a calling/vocation as what distinguishes one from the other has relevance to the opportunities that people should say ‘yes’ to, or let pass them by.

Boundaries for Beginners (Part 2)

It is only once we grow some physical, spiritual and psychological distance from those who raised us that the journey to becoming ourselves can really begin, but this is not always easy for the people who we are seeking to individuate from to deal with as they may not be ready for our assertion of independence. Finding an identity and strong emotional payoffs in having us stay dependent on them, our move to liberation might not be experienced by these people as a positive development but instead as a loss of both control and a means of support. Having come from a traditional Italian family I have seen this dynamic at play, and while my mother was not that way inclined there were others in our community who promoted this unhealthy enmeshment with their children. As toxic as this may have been, in some ways it was understandable given that this was a migrant community where the primary, and often only, means of support was the immediate family.  

Regardless of whether we come from such an environment or not, we will have to take steps to evolve our understanding of who we are, the limits of control that others have over us and that we have over the world. This growth can come to us through a number of different ways. Self-exploration can do it, as can living independently or overseas for a prolonged period of time. I experienced this personally, when I went to live in the UK for six months in my twenties, and it taught me a lot about how small I was as a participant in the wider workings of the world. The suffering that we experience as we try to make the world conform to the expectations that we have of it can also be transformative in providing this perspective. As I wrote about in Part 1 of this entry, our closest relationships and how we conduct ourselves in them can be quite revealing of how individuated we are. With the individuals concerned holding up a mirror to who we are, there is little learning that we can escape from in that context if we are willing to open our eyes and see how our state of being is having a broader effect on these other persons, or being impacted by their mode of being.

As an example, we say of our partners that they get ‘under our skin’, and by this we are clearly not referring to a physical skin but a psychological boundary. By having a hole in a place where we should have a boundary, we let this other person in to violate our psychological territory and this causes us irritation or another negative emotion. But it doesn’t have to always be like this, and in any moment we can go to work on developing a stronger boundary function, by using the word ‘no’ and being more judicious in defining what we genuinely want as opposed to what we think we should want based on the expectations that others have of us.

With this, I must warn you that you are likely to encounter some resistance as you seek to assert your boundaries. This is because the people in your life have become used to dealing with someone who they could unduly influence and take advantage of when it served their interests. In this sense, you will be renegotiating the terms of those relationships. Do not see this as a bad thing, but rather as something that you need to do so that you may develop strength and autonomy for yourself. Be prepared also for others who might try to use the weapon of guilt to have you back down and remain pliable to their will. “Why are you being so terrible or uncaring?” they may declare. When you encounter this, see the game for what it is and don’t relent. Teaching them how to treat you in an assertive rather than aggressive way is going to be a challenging part of this process, particularly for those of us who have a more agreeable personality type.

With the right to say ‘yes’ to life also comes the right to say ‘no’. While some might choose to deny their power with this because they derive a psychological benefit from playing the victim role, don’t be one of these people. It is a very manipulative and dysfunctional way of being in the world, and it almost always ensures that you will never be able to have your most important needs met without feeling like you have compromised yourself or others. Even if in the short term you get your way, what will be left behind are a series of burnt bridges that will be difficult if impossible to mend in the longer term. Our goal thus should be to develop relationships in the world that are mutually beneficial. The best negotiations produce a win-win outcome for both parties. Apply this to your relationships. If you are winning and another is losing, or they are winning and you are losing, then that is going to lead to inevitable tension and the demonstration of passive aggressive or overtly aggressive behaviour moving forward. The preferential exercise of delayed gratification in coming to a mutually beneficial understanding or arrangement is also indicative of a healthy boundary function. It is mature to realise that we can’t always have what we want when we want it and that to achieve something that is more broadly constructive some ground must be given.

Boundaries for Beginners (Part 1)

Good fences make good neighbours, said American Poet Robert Frost. But what did he mean by this statement? In the poem from which it came, Mending Wall, the meaning of the phrase was intended to capture the responsibility owed by those with property to not encroach upon the land of their neighbours to avoid disputes and the like. For anyone who owns a home and has encountered noisy or quarrelsome neighbours, this makes good sense, but is there a broader meaning to the phrase that we can extrapolate on to derive further interpersonal wisdom?

When I hear this saying, it reminds me of the importance of having robust personal boundaries in our dealings with others. These boundaries are like the psychological skin that houses our autonomous being in the world and establishes what our real locus of control is. To function effectively in the world we must have a strong frame of identity from which to operate because if we don’t, we will not have the ability to decipher who we are relative to that which exists outside of ourselves. The outcome of this is that we won’t properly exercise the responsibility that makes for a successful life, and will internalise a lot of the toxicity that is external to ourselves which will subvert our best efforts in progressing forward.

I have known quite a few people who had very weak personal boundaries, and not coincidently it is these people who tend to suffer the most in response to life’s challenges. Draining them of what should be their most precious inner resources, these individuals never seem to be able to keep for themselves what they say that they most want because they leak like water out of a hole-ridden bucket. In relationships for example, these people may want a happy and harmonious union with their significant other who isn’t pulling their weight, but they overextend themselves to make that happen rather than confronting them about the contributions to the relationship not being even. This in turn makes them resentful and desirous of leaving the relationship.

Another example that I often see play out is people losing their confidence because of the opinions that other people have about them. Sometimes this criticism isn’t even about their character but may just be about an aspect of their behaviour, but because they don’t have any solidity around who they are, they are not able to contextualise these comments and put them in their proper perspective. Rather than examining the source of the commentary and testing it against a deeper reality of what they know to be true about themselves and the world, they swallow it wholesale and let it affect their self-concept. This is not only crazy but very sad to know that these people allow themselves to be blown in the breeze of public perception, and it should be no surprise that where many of these people end up is far adrift from the person who they aspire to be in their most introspective moments. While no doubt it makes good sense to listen to what other people may have to say about our behaviour (if they are well meaning actors), especially if it impacts them negatively so that we can learn from our errors in doing that, we should never abdicate our judiciousness in looking at whether these individuals are qualified to offer commentary about us in the first place. This is especially the case in the era of social media where trolling and the offering of hot takes at the expense of others are standard operating procedures.  

To form a solid boundary in adulthood, we must, at one time or another, come to challenge the various forms of conditioning that have informed our understanding of who we are. Only when this is done do we individuate and reach maturity in psychological terms. As children born into the world, we have very loose boundaries that conjoin us to what we encounter in our environment, hence why a child will react with strong negative emotion if you take their toy away. Having neither the experience or knowing about how the world works and who we are in relation to it, we rely on who and what we encounter to teach us who we are. Our parents as our guardians have the greatest influence in this respect, and to help us develop they endow us with their values and ideas about how the world works. Incorporating these into ourselves, we then move out into the world but our boundaries are still tenuously weak because we have just taken what we have learned from our parents and other authority figures and applied it without really integrating this understanding with self-knowledge. By continuing to carry around our parents’ conceptions of the world (often into adulthood), we are not really separate from them, and remaining bound to them in this respect, we become dependent on them and the broader culture that these conceptions represent for recognition and acceptance. This dependence is thus born through the holes of our unformed identity.

A Greenlight of my own (Part 2)

As I began to read through Wayne Dyer’s classic Manifest your Destiny, I started to feel not a comfort but a homeliness, in the sense that where this was leading was a place that the soul of my being could find rest in. Despite being ready to take the journey, this journey, like others of a transformational nature, started with trepidation at the prospect of walking into the unknown. It has been said that the spirit brings solace, but not immediately. As I worked my way through those first few chapters, I started to gain a greater understanding that I would have to work for any pearls of wisdom that I would come to.

Like many other self-help books of its genre, the implicit task of Dyer’s book was to apply what you learnt from its lessons to the context of your own life. Requiring of me an honesty and introspectiveness that I had not yet cultivated, I found opening up to being able to commence that work a formidable barrier. Without having really connected to myself prior to that point, my focus became more about absorbing as many insights as I could from it and then trusting that this opening into a deeper realm of consciousness would take place. Despite not knowing when these learnings would begin to impress themselves, I persisted in making it through to the end.   

While it was a very intense read, especially for someone who was not familiar with the spiritual mode of writing and the concept of ego that was explored throughout the work, I did feel as I was reading it that the work was speaking to me in a way that other books hadn’t done previously. Knowing now what my vocation is to connect others with their spiritual calling so that they can be led by that spirit to lead in the world, I had a core resonance with the teachings of the book that in essence was the spirit of it leading me to a more intimate relationship with my true self. Even as I was reading it and learning more about what the ego is, I started to see its presence in my life, and how it controlled so much of how I perceived the world and interacted in it.

From this, I began the journey of becoming conscious to my unconsciousness, which was a progressive step away from being unconscious to my unconsciousness. In this space or distance that was created, came the opportunity to look at myself anew in a purer light that was untainted by all of the conditioning that had informed who I understood myself to be up until that point in my life. While not necessarily perceiving myself to be a victim of my father’s death which had happened a few years earlier, I was still carrying a lot of emotional baggage that I had yet to process around the pain that the event had generated for me. As I learned about Dyer’s fractured relationship with his father and how he only came to reconcile his suffering from that after his father’s death, I found a hope that not only could I heal the wounds that I had suffered, but that I could emerge on the other side as a more integrated human being.

Despite the fullness of this healing not being completed at that time, one of the initial things that I took from his teachings on this was that we are not the pain that we (or the ego more specifically) identifies with. While no doubt it is there in our being as a consequence of the adversity that we have experienced, it doesn’t have the power to consume us and drive our behaviour unless we let it. To someone of my age at the time, that was transformative because I didn’t have the perspective to see myself as in some sense separate from the pain, and because of this the negativity that I felt so intensely became a guiding force in how I interfaced with the world. Why I think that my coming to these books was such a godsend for my mother was because prior to that time I was rebelling against her authority quite furiously which was causing a fair bit of tension between us. After reading that book, and others with similar themes, like Meeting the Shadow by Jeremiah Abrams and Connie Zweig, I could see the connection that this rebellion was an externalisation of the inner pain that I was harbouring. While being somewhat of an obvious insight now, at the time, in that well of suffering, it carried a larger weight and latent impetus to climb out of that well and experience freedom.