There’s a movie that you may have seen. It’s been very successful, and a lot of my fellow personal development bloggers are into it.
It teaches you to fantasize obsessively about material possessions, to deliberately delude yourself into relentless positivity, and to blame yourself whenever things go wrong.
Why any personal development blogger would promote this claptrap is beyond me, particularly since the research is so consistently against it. (Fantasizing about outcomes reduces your chances of achieving them, trying to remain relentlessly positive arguably leads to worse outcomes than realism, and self-blame is, surely, a problem, not a solution.)
And yet, the Flaw of Distraction has made millions, not just for its originator but for many other promoters who know an easy sale when they see one. Tell people to do what they were going to do anyway (dream about the impossible), promise them that they’ll get what they want without doing any actual work, and then leave yourself the out that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because the process is wrong and completely flawed, it’s because they weren’t doing it perfectly? That’s a formula for success – not for the suckers, I mean customers, who buy it, of course, but for the hucksters who sell it.
Now, there are some people who promote this idea who genuinely believe in it, of course. Most of them, though, have probably adapted it and added to it to make it work – put the nuance back in and realigned it with actual reality. What they’re selling is not the original, pure snake oil.
Anyway, I’m going to tell you about a completely different, in fact opposite, secret. This one actually works.
The secret to success and happiness is holding your outcomes lightly.
Easy as ABCDE
Let me introduce you to Albert Ellis.
Ellis was a very strange, but very brilliant man who founded Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, basically to deal with his own issues, which were numerous.
He introduced a very simple mnemonic – you’d strain to make up a simpler one – for the process of his therapy. It goes like this: ABCDE.
A is for Adversity
Adversity (or the Activating Event) is any challenge that we face in life. It might be getting turned down for a date, an extra demand at work, a near-miss on the road, being eliminated in a competition - anything.
In itself, it’s just a thing that happens.
B is for Belief
We think the problem arises from the event, but it doesn’t. It arises from our irrational belief about the event.
The Adversity is just a thing that happened. The Belief – that that thing should not have happened, must not happen, is the end of the world, cannot be allowed to stand - is what converts a thing that happened into a crisis.
C is for Consequences
Beliefs have consequences. If we believe that the thing that happened is a horrible, terrible, wrong thing, we will be angry, sad, afraid. We will think things and do things and say things in response to the event – or rather, in response to our belief about the event.
The things we say and do and feel and think are the actual problem. Not the adversity – that’s just a thing that happened. Not even the belief, though that leads to the problem, the consequences. Because those thoughts, feelings, words and actions, arising from our irrational beliefs, don’t change the situation for the better. Instead, they make it worse.
D is for Disputing
photo credit: Alex Barth
Ellis’s method was to dispute the irrational beliefs. He was very confrontational about this in his own practice, swearing and shouting and talking over his client to challenge their thinking. You don’t need to do this. All you need to do is question the beliefs that lead to the consequences.
There are three key questions to ask about a belief that is causing you distress.
- “How’s that working out for you?” Whatever else I think of Dr Phil, this catchphrase of his is pure gold. If your belief is making your life miserable, it definitely needs to be challenged. To take an example from my own life, I get annoyed and frustrated when other people use my kitchen and leave it in a mess. That doesn’t help me in any conceivable way.
- “Where’s the proof for that?” What basis do I have for believing that other people “should” treat my kitchen exactly the way I do – put things in the right places, clean them up immediately when they’ve used them (and in the way I clean them), et cetera? Where is that written?
- “Is this logical?” Here you’re looking for proof that your belief is not just a reflection of your preferences or desires. If I rewrote my belief as “I would prefer that people who use my kitchen leave it as I would leave it”, does that completely represent my belief, or is there some logical remainder that isn’t just a preference?
E is for Effect
The intended effect of disputing your irrational beliefs is a change in your thoughts, feelings and behaviour that used to arise from those beliefs. You’re able to adopt a response that is less distressing to you (and possibly others), and more likely to result in a positive change to the situation – if such a change is even called for.
You can say, “I would prefer,” or “I would like”, instead of using words like “must” and “should” – as if your preferences were moral laws of the universe.
Your preferences, and my preferences, aren’t any kind of law. They’re preferences.
Holding your outcomes lightly
Rather than obsessing about your desired outcome – imagining it, putting up pictures of it, writing about how great it would be – what if you held it more lightly?
What if you just acknowledged it as something you wanted to happen, and preferred?
What if you put your effort into imagining how to bring it about, and taking action to bring it about, instead of pretending it had already happened and that this had therefore become the best of all possible universes?
What would happen, then, if you achieved it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and commend yourself for your hard work, which had earned your achievement. Not by magic, but by a real process of transformation that you brought about in ways you can point to and replicate in the future.
And what would happen if you didn’t achieve it? You would be able to look back on a process – a process you’d paid attention to and participated in and enjoyed for its own sake and been active in – and learn from it so that you could be more successful in future. You’d be free from self-blame, because even if your actions had led to the result you didn’t want, that was a learning experience for you. (You can’t learn from magic.)
Your world would not have come crashing down around your ears because you didn’t get what you wanted. That’s for two-year-olds. You might be disappointed or annoyed, but not devastated or enraged.
And next time round, you’d be able to look out for the same issues which prevented you from achieving your goal last time.
Because you’re allowed to think about the possibility of things going wrong, and plan for it, without it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Perhaps you might even decide that your original goal wasn’t important to you any more, and you could stop trying to reach it. Perhaps you learned enough just from the process.
Next time, I’ll talk about the effort we put into undoing our pasts – and what might happen if we stopped. But for now, I leave you, as always, with action to take.
Action now
Identify some things that happen that get you upset to no good purpose.
Consider the consequences of the beliefs you hold about those adversities.
Dispute your beliefs.
What was the effect?
