A Personal Insight

Today I learned something interesting about myself. It happened while I was exercising this morning and listening to the NPR Invisiblilia podcast “Fearless.” This is going to take a little setup, so please bear with me.

The insight came while I was pondering what I should write for today’s blog entry. I recently went to an open house at HCH Institute, where I am going to have my clinical hypnotherapy training, and I was thinking about writing about that. But I was feeling kind of squirrelly about that. In fact, I finally confronted that fact that I was kind of avoiding anything to do with my new profession. I have been doing that more and more of late, and feeling rather guilty about it.

I had assumed, without really thinking about it, that I was procrastinating out of some kind of fear. But that wasn’t it, so my efforts to handle it that way weren’t very successful. Maybe it was something about the people on the podcast talking about conquering fear, but, when I really looked at what I was feeling, I realized it was a feeling of “deer in the headlights.” What’s the difference? Well, I wasn’t trying to run away, but, instead, whenever I looked at the subject I would mentally freeze. And then I couldn’t get my mind working again until I turned my focus to something else.

This is a big deal for me. It finally gives me a way of thinking and dealing with the one thing that has often kept me immobile when dealing with problems in my life. What’s really interesting is that when I considered my options about what I should write about, this one got me moving. I could have “gotten around” to doing something today, one way or another, but this leaped out and said “Do me first!” The apathy around the whole subject is completely gone. I worked on this idea while I was on my morning walk, and I was thinking I should write about something else today so I would have to delve and meditate on this for more insights. But every instinct said “No! WRONG! Do it now!”

It’s funny how just knowing that my apathy came from this mental “freezing” has freed up my excitement again. It’s like there was an invisible, teflon coated dome over the subject, and I could only stay focused in it if I stood precisely on the top and didn’t move a muscle. No even a twitch. For if it did I would immediately slide off into another subject.

Is it totally gone? No. But I think that I now have a better handle on how to deal with it, and, through that, great many things. I see that I was also avoiding thinking of, and effectively dealing with, lots of related areas, like finances and self promotion. I was approaching them with a, timid, “don’t rock the boat,” “do as little as possible” attitude that left me in fear. Fear and worry about the future and whether it will all work out. Creating my own self-fulfilling prophecy of failure through inaction.

Maybe the exercises we did at the HCH open house had something to do with shaking this lose, maybe not. But, all in all, the apathy has lifted and I can work again, so I call it a plus.