What Hot Pot Are You Hanging Out In Simply Out of Habit?
A coaching client who has habitually experienced major stress underlined by a sense of urgency in her work life reported in a recent session that she was starting to see how this habit has felt like *the frog boiling in a pot of water where the heat is turned up so gradually that he doesn’t notice how hot it’s getting until he slowly boils to death in the pot. (*The veracity of this widely shared parable is questionable for sure, but the felt sense it evokes powerful nonetheless.)
She's been dialing up awareness around how her previously unconscious stress response – which made perfect sense based on her early conditioning and the ways her system brilliantly learned to keep her feeling safe and connected when she was young – had been contributing to her frequently feeling frustrated, resentful and burned out at work.
Through our coaching explorations together over the past few months she’s been increasingly seeing – and, most importantly, now really feeling – just how painful that old habitual pattern of often exerting more effort than truly required on work tasks just because that was what she was used to doing was.
This led us into a conversation about how the messy middle portion on the path toward living an increasingly embodied life often involves a ton of new awareness without necessarily a ton of external change right away.
Before we can make outer shifts, we have to first get in the habit of just noticing how “hot” it is in the pot we’ve been habitually jumping into and start to get curious about why we’re still jumping into these same hot pots;
about whether this is the pot where we actually want to be expending so much of our time, thought, attention, and energy; about whether there might possibly be some other more fulfilling or rewarding “pots” out there for us.
So if you sometimes feel frustrated because you have SO much awareness of how “hot” certain “pots” in your life are but feel like you just haven’t seemed to be able to get out of them into a new pot yet, know that that’s actually a great sign.
You’re starting to truly understand – in and through your body – just how painfully misaligned with your values and energy the pot you’ve been assuming is the one you just have to live in is.
And that conscious awareness is the jumping-off (or jumping out, in this case) point toward making some new, more conscious and Self-nourishing choices once the awareness saturates fully enough into your being to almost effortlessly initiate a change in behavior.
Because once your brain fully gets the updated message that the old way of doing things actually isn’t getting you the results that the old habit was intending to achieve for you, it will upgrade to the new, more rewarding (“healthier”) pattern. We just have to give that part of our brain enough exposure to some upgraded alternative ways of operating that get us better results enough times that it can start to understand that it’s safe to release its grip on the old pattern.
But know this:
You don’t have to stay unconsciously boiling in a pot that’s gotten too small or too hot for you forever.
Start to notice how it feels in your body to be in that painful (*note that I didn’t say uncomfortable because the old habit likely does feel comfortable in that it’s so deeply familiar) place.
Then see what conscious new choice you’d like to make moving forward from there, one step at a time.
With Love,