Читать книгу Mindfulness without the Bells and Beads - Clif Smith - Страница 12

That first skill of being aware of fear and moving forward despite that fear became extremely useful early in my career. When I flew to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the day I left for the Army, it was the first time I ever flew in a plane. I quickly discovered I was absolutely terrified of flying and heights. This was the kind of terrifying experience when you can hardly breathe, you're white-knuckling the arms of the seat, and sweat beads up on your forehead. I can attest that flight attendants ask you if you are okay when you display that level of fear.

Thankfully, I got through that initial flight but realized this level of fear of flying was something I would want to overcome to fully experience this life and our world. So, when I had an opportunity to go to Airborne School and “learn” to jump out of airplanes, I leaned into that fear and volunteered. It was a profound experience to be totally consumed by fear in my body and thoughts, still jump (fall!) out of that plane, and be okay on the other side of the experience. When you learn you can feel high levels of fear and still consistently move forward despite it, no goal is out of reach.

The second skill—being aware of unhelpful inner dialogue/self-talk and not allowing it to dissuade me or negatively impact on outcomes—came to the fore when I was considering reenlisting in the Army as my first term was coming to a close. Of the jobs available, one jumped out at me as interesting: linguist. The Army had a significant need for speakers of a number of languages, including Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and a few more. It was the Chinese linguist position that caught my eye.

Now, if you think the guy who graduated in what was probably the bottom third of his high school class had some negative self-talk about his intellectual capabilities, you'd be right. There were thoughts that arose saying, “You never did well in Spanish!” and “Don't you remember you FAILED high school English, your native language, and had to retake it in order to graduate; do you really think you can learn one of the hardest languages on the planet?!” Yet in that moment I was able to Catch and Release those unhelpful thoughts and attempt to do the thing I wanted to do.

The next step in the process was to take a test to gauge my aptitude, which objectively reported that I had an aptitude for learning difficult languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and so on. However, similar to the staggered start situation, this was another instance when I had objective information saying one thing but internally I still felt the opposite. My mind was still saying, “I can't learn Chinese; I couldn't even learn Spanish.” So, what did I do? I chose to try to learn Chinese. If I could learn this language despite the incessant whining and fear-based thinking that was automatically coming up, I could do anything!

I soon arrived at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California, the military's premier school for turning out fluent linguists. Fortunately, I was blissfully unaware of the 50% to 70% attrition rate, which would have only reinforced all the unhelpful internal dialogue I was already experiencing.

The Chinese Mandarin Basic Course was actually 63 weeks of intense training and was anything but “basic.” I was in a class of 30 people, and we were broken down into individual groups of 10 for our direct instruction; there's no sitting in the back of the room hiding your way through this type of training.

I started this course with a determination and drive I'd never felt previously in my life. I spent the entire first third of the course busting my tail, studying for 2 to 3 hours after an 8-hour day of classroom instruction. It was a challenging schedule but I wasn't going to fail due to not trying hard enough. When I got my grades the first trimester, I was crestfallen. All my hard work, the 10- to 11-hour days, the intense studying in my room without distraction, the hundreds of flashcards I made by hand (there were no phone apps back in 1997) and practiced with for hours on the weekends, had yielded only B pluses across all evaluated areas.

Yes, you read that correctly. Let that sink in for a moment. I tried the hardest I'd ever tried to do anything in my life to learn one of the most difficult languages on Earth. I got B pluses on my first report card, and I was—crestfallen? Wouldn't a better automatic reaction have been an inner thought that said something like, “OMG you failed high school English like four years ago and you just got B pluses in the Chinese course at one of the most premier language schools on the planet!!!” I think that would have been better, but what did my brain do? What all brains do; it looked for and highlighted the negative—I didn't earn a B plus, I missed an A. We'll talk more about focusing on what we are missing versus what we have and its impact later, but at this point, I had become quite wary of the inner critic; it was as if he was primarily operating from a place of fear and worry.

I had a choice to make in that moment. I'd busted my tail and received B pluses and had not really socialized much outside of Friday and Saturday evenings. I had made some awesome friends, who are still some of my best friends today—Eric,³ Chris, and Heidi—but I wasn't really spending much time with them. So, I Caught and Released the self-criticism about being a failure and not trying hard enough, and I decided maybe I was trying too hard.

The analogy I came up with, when trying to understand why my extreme effort wasn't enough, was related to driving. When learning to drive, it was much harder when I was younger and had a death grip on the steering wheel because of the strong sense it would help me be more in control of the situation. It wasn't until I learned to loosen the grip a bit that the ride and my driving became much smoother. Maybe the way I was going about learning Chinese was all wrong? So, I lifted my foot off the throttle a bit and began spending some time with my friends during the week, adding some balance to my life. I still studied each night but my decision not only brought more balance to my life but also resulted in a major shift in how I treated myself while studying.

Of my three closest friends at DLI, Heidi was a student in the Chinese class a few weeks behind mine. Meaning, when I was on Lesson 10, she was on Lesson 7. We began to study together to get through the homework and learn more effectively.

One of the dreaded homework assignments our teachers inflicted on us regularly was dubbed “rapid-fire.” We had to translate sentences recorded in Chinese on cassette tapes (yes, they were still in use then), but the recordings were not what you might expect in your average Spanish or French class: crystal clear audio and perfect pronunciation. No, these were garbled commands seemingly shouted across a crowded fish market toward another human facing in the opposite direction. It also seemed to be sped up to 150% normal speed. It was brutal. No one liked doing rapid-fire. It's like doing squats; you know it's helpful but it burns like hell and sometimes you throw up. I learned, though, it wasn't so bad doing the rapid-fire homework the second time around with Heidi.

I would do my rapid-fire homework then help Heidi work through her sentences, which I had completed 3 weeks prior. Listening to those sentences the second time around, I wasn't so rigid with stress and striving to make sure I got every single word. I relaxed, let go, and just listened. I soon realized I could capture more of the sentences with less effort, which began to improve my confidence and trust in my abilities. But the real kicker, the powerful insight that changed my life, was I began to notice what I said to Heidi if she made a mistake versus what I said to myself when I made a mistake.

My comments to her were filled with understanding and kindness. They were tinged with encouragement and care. The entire communication from me to her was enveloped in patience, empathy, and warmth, with a dash of humor. In contrast to my communications style toward Heidi, my inner critic treated my mistakes, missteps, and failures as proof I wasn't cut out for learning Chinese, that I'd fail, and was an idiot for making certain “simple” mistakes. I decided to do something different.

After Catching and Releasing unhelpful thoughts that would automatically arise after a mistake or when facing a challenging situation, I decided to follow up with a question. I would ask myself, “How would I respond to this mistake if I were teaching someone else this subject?” The response was never, “Hey, idiot, you're going to fail at this!” It was always a much more compassionate and supportive response. I wasn't trying to delude myself; I still needed to learn the language and graduate from the course. Empty platitudes weren't going to help. However, this approach enabled me to shift from self-attack to self-compassion.

After 63 weeks of people speaking Mandarin Chinese to me for 8-plus hours a day, and a great deal of studying with some of the best friends I've ever had, I graduated from DLI with honors, held the highest GPA of my cohort at 3.7, and scored the highest reading grade on our final test, prompting one of our native Chinese teachers to comment, “I couldn't score that high on a Chinese reading test.”

I proved to myself that my inner critic didn't know what the hell he was talking about. In fact, I decided, if my inner critic says I can't do something, I'm going to go for the most challenging, interesting, and/or exciting option. I basically started treating my inner critic like that guy we all have in our office who thinks he knows everything, he has the “inside track” on how the new policy sucks and it's going to be bad, but when you check on anything he says it's wrong, and so you decide to humor him when he talks to you or warns you about something, and then you just go on with the rest of your day thinking nothing of it again. When you learn you don't have to believe what you say to yourself about yourself, the world opens up for you.

As you might imagine I gained a bit of self-confidence as my grades in the Chinese program improved and certainly later when I graduated. It was at this point in my career I decided I wanted to work toward obtaining a college degree. As I mentioned, I graduated from high school on a Friday and was flying to an Army base on Monday, so I didn't go to college. I had an option to use some of my DLI training to support getting an associate's degree and I could begin while still at DLI, so I took some classes while in Chinese language training and earned an AA degree in language from Monterey Peninsula College.⁴ And later, while I was assigned to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, I looked for a program online that I could take while still working full time as an active duty soldier. No one in my family had a bachelor's degree and I wanted to break that cycle, but the only way I would be able to do it was if I made a sacrifice in some of my downtime to focus on chipping away at this goal. I pursued a bachelor of science degree in business information systems at Bellevue University.⁵ It took me a few years of working at night during my different assignments in the Army, but by carving out the time needed to get the work done, I graduated with honors and became the first person in my family to get a bachelor's degree. When I learned to regularly prioritize time for self-development and self-care, I realized some goals just required consistent application of effort over time as opposed to high levels of natural talent or wealth.

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My Army career took me across the US from the East Coast all the way to Hawaii, with many states in between, and then back to Maryland to work at Fort Meade doing signals intelligence collection work, listening to foreign communications, and translating conversations. This was when I first volunteered to deploy to the Middle East during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. In 2003, I left the Army after nearly 10 years but continued to serve my country by joining the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as a civilian intelligence officer where I served for 7 years.

After successfully working my way through a series of the intelligence community's (IC's) increasingly complex and the single-most-challenging human intelligence collection courses, where I learned to gather intelligence from the most complex entities, humans, I began my career in one of the riskiest professions the IC has to offer: espionage. I volunteered again to deploy and served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq with some of the most selfless and under-recognized patriots our country has protecting us at the tip of the spear.

Although you might think all that seems interesting and exciting, and it was, my crowning assignment with DIA wasn't in a war zone. After coming back from Iraq in 2007, I had an opportunity to go to the Joint Military Attaché School, where DIA personnel go to learn to be diplomats and how to navigate the maneuvering and double-talk associated with diplomacy. On completing the training, I was selected to become a diplomat and represent my country in an assignment at the US Embassy in Beijing, China.

Given my journey thus far, a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks joins the Army as an enlisted soldier, learns Chinese, gets educated, and eventually becomes a diplomat, representing our country with one of the most important strategic and often contentious foreign relationships we have, you might imagine this was the pinnacle of my career up to that point in my life. It was. You'd also probably think I was on top of the world, and I was, outwardly. I mean, I displayed that excitement. Inwardly, though, I still had some of those self-defeating thoughts popping into my head from time to time which still took diligent effort to Catch and Release.

Not long after meeting all the brilliant and highly educated professionals assigned to the US Embassy Beijing, I began to have more and more thoughts making me feel like I didn't belong, like I was an imposter, and that I would soon be found out when I had to face a tough question. These thoughts were a little more difficult to Catch and Release because they weren't coming up in automatic response to some specific external challenge. Instead, they were coming up more subtly in response to an overall awareness that the folks I worked with were pretty amazing, had done so many interesting things, and went to schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and Columbia.

So, when an embassy colleague suggested I apply to Harvard when I began considering attending graduate school, I told him he was out of his <bleeping> mind. I immediately shared, “I barely graduated high school and, oh yeah, I have an online undergraduate degree.” I explained it would be a colossal waste of time and money. Plus applying to Harvard is like doing your taxes in exchange for one lottery ticket and you have to wait three months to hear the winning numbers. But doing your taxes is actually a lot easier than applying to Harvard. My Catch and Release system was offline. I wasn't catching anything; I was totally taken in by the story created by my thinking.

Consider for a moment the arc of my career as I've described it thus far. I don't presume to know how you define success in your life, and I certainly don't think success is merely achievement after achievement (we could have an entire book on the futility of seeking happiness/fulfilment through external achievement). However, it was pretty clear at that point in my life, I had enough evidence showing that even if I was afraid or if some aspiration seemed or felt impossible, it did not mean it actually was impossible. For example, if I had succumbed to fear and believed negative self-talk up to that point, I would have never jumped out of planes, learned Chinese, or done a number of other things I have to leave out due to the security classification level of those activities. Yet, here I was having my brain automatically serve up all these limiting beliefs about applying to Harvard.

Why might my brain serve up those thoughts despite ample evidence to the contrary and a robust Catch and Release system? Well, as I've discovered, and reams of research bears this out, our brains aren't designed to make us happy; they are designed to keep us safe and ensure we survive. So, in that situation, my brain automatically began predicting what would happen if I took the chance to apply to Harvard and the answer it came to was this: “This effort will lead to failure.” What does failure equal? Failure equals pain from our brain's point of view. Therefore, my brain served up the belief that this was impossible and added in self-talk such as “Don't even try; who do you think you are?” “It'll be embarrassing when you fail.” “Let's just move on to something more realistic.” Why those thoughts? Because those beliefs and automatic thoughts might nudge me to take actions (or refrain from taking actions) that would avoid failure (avoid pain) and would serve to keep me in my comfort zone (keep me feeling safe). They would also keep me from taking a chance.

Fortunately for me, my colleague asked a number of times over the following three weeks, whether I had applied to Harvard yet. Thankfully, Catch and Release finally kicked in! I let the inner critic have his say, I let go, and asked myself, “If I was able to meet the previous ‘impossible’ challenges in my life, why not this one, too?” The response I got was, “You may not be able to control the outcome of getting accepted or not, but you can refrain from ruling yourself out and can control the effort you put into the application.” Those thoughts led me to take the leap and apply to Harvard. A few months later, much to my surprise and delight, I opened an email from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on April 8, 2010, and the first word read, “Congratulations!” It really did feel like I won the lottery but the odds were much better than what my mind was telling me.

What I learned from that entire experience was that we can either be pushed around by and blindly believe every thought that bubbles up in our head or we can see thoughts for what they are, just thoughts. Sometimes thoughts are true, sometimes partially true, and sometimes they are totally false. I also learned that engaging with others is a great way to check our automatic judgments and benefit from other perspectives we may be overlooking. This inspired me to become an executive coach and to teach mindfulness, because they are such powerful tools to uncover and transcend our limiting beliefs and other psychological barriers to success, which opens us up to the opportunities we all come across throughout our lives.

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This is one journey I hope can show you: it's not the past that determines the future; it's the present that determines the future. Mindfulness keeps us in the present moment when we can fully interact with and affect our lives. Where you came from, what your mom or dad said to you when you were little, your socioeconomic status as a kid, or what other people had that you didn't or don't have don't determine whether or not you thrive in this life. It's what you choose to focus on, to develop and do today, in this moment, that determines the quality of your life.

Sure, we can go through life believing thoughts such as “If I had what she had growing up then I'd be where she is” or “Of course he's successful; he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth” or “There's no way someone like me could ever achieve that.” But the cost of indulging in the “comparing mind” and believing those self-limiting thoughts is that it will keep you miserable, in a victim mentality, and in your comfort zone. Is your brain keeping you in your comfort zone? Your comfort zone is where your dreams go to die. It's only by pushing to the edges of our comfort zone and beyond that we can set and achieve goals that stretch us to grow beyond what our thoughts typically tell us about what we can accomplish.

The Army was the first place I got to test out those three mindfulness skills. My time in the military also played a big role in helping me develop a healthy level of self-discipline. It enabled me to connect with individuals with high standards I could aspire to emulate, it showed me the relationship between effort and outcome, it gave me an additional framework of values from which to guide much of my behavior and decisions, and it helped me see the amazing benefits of a life in service to others.

You can start to cultivate those three mindfulness skills wherever you are; you don't have to join the military. Joining the Army just happened to be my first decision on a journey in which many might say I was dealt a “bad hand” from initial life/family circumstances and I could have just folded. I don't think anyone would have blamed me, and I could have used my socioeconomic status as a kid as an excuse to stay small and complain my entire life away. Instead, over time, I learned to play the hand I was dealt and have learned to enjoy the journey, including the ups and the downs. I've tried not to spend too much time complaining about the dealer (God, the universe, parents, bosses), blaming the shuffle (fate, randomness), or looking at other people's cards (people more fortunate than me). None of those things ever helps in the long run.

Instead, enjoy the game, bluff on occasion, and don't be afraid to go all in from time to time. Life does deal us a set of cards in the beginning that we cannot change, but we get to make our own decisions about how we are going to respond to life; mindfulness moves us from automatic reaction to thoughtful response.

Furthermore, we all, every single one of us, get dealt opportunity cards from time to time. We can use those opportunities as catalysts for change on our journey if we are present enough to see them, mindful enough of our internal talk to go after them, and compassionate enough to dust ourselves off after our inevitable stumbles, missteps, and failures (aka learning opportunities).

Like my Uncle Howard, who shared his insights with no strings attached, I promise to do the same. I won't lecture you on what you should or shouldn't believe. I won't subtly imply your political views aren't the right ones. I won't suggest you need to buy a bell, a little statue of the Buddha, or a string of rudraksha beads to learn and benefit from mindfulness. I offer you the following knowledge, insights, and practices to plant seeds and give you tools that can enable you to transcend limiting beliefs, achieve your dreams, and navigate life with a bit more ease.

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FIGURE 1.3 CATCH AND RELEASE.

Source: From 99designs.com/Konstantin. Reprinted with permission of 99designs.com.

Many people never finish the books they start reading. If you are one of those people, no worries, but I want you to walk away with the three key takeaways from this chapter that, if adhered to, will greatly affect your life. You must learn to focus and control your attention. If you don't, someone else will (or already has control of it). It is the foundation on which everything else rests. You must learn to become more aware of internal dialogue and how it affects your state of mind and life. If you are lost in your internal dialogue, you are ruled by it. Finally, use Catch and Release to break the chains of control your inner dialogue has on you. These three skills are mutually reinforcing. Increased ability to command your own attention helps you notice unhelpful internal dialogue, noticing allows you to Catch and Release it, loosening its grip on you, which enables you to more easily command your attention. See Figure 1.3 for an illustration of this process.