I talk to many people who are pursuing work that matters to them. Inevitably, they end up getting stuck or lost along the way. In those moments, the same old stories tend to emerge:

I’m not disciplined enough. I got lazy. I didn’t want it badly enough. I didn’t push myself enough. I’m too weak, too cowardly, too inexperienced. Maybe this isn’t right for me.

These stories are compelling. In the moment, they feel impossible to argue with. But they’re wrong.

If you’ve spent any real time trying to build something meaningful — a creative practice, a business, a body of work you actually care about — you’re probably noticed something strange. The resistance doesn’t show up in a uniform way. Instead, it tends to cluster around the things that matter most.

We get stuck on a three-sentence email we need to write. Or we hesitate before hitting ‘Publish’ on an essay. Or we record a video for social media and then let it rot in drafts, or we brainstorm a really good business idea and then let it sit in our notes…

There’s a pattern here. The old stories about “lazy” stop us from seeing it. But it’s essential that we do.

the underlying beliefs

When you walk too close to the edge of a cliff, your body will react. A few of the symptoms might be familiar: a sudden tightness in your chest, a shortness of breath, a narrowing of your vision, an uncomfortable awareness of how far there is to fall. These are the signs of your nervous system pulling the handbrake.

But your unconscious mind does not distinguish between “real” danger and abstract danger. Your unconscious mind learns from experience, not analysis; as you go through life, it learns “this makes me feel scared, therefore I should avoid it.” Your nervous system isn’t interpreting “how accurately am I perceiving the risk here”. That’s not its job.

If, at some point, you learned to be afraid of being too visible… of being too successful… of being ambitious, or dedicated, or earnest… if you learned that this kind of behaviour was risky, in that it jeopardized your access to the acceptance of those around you… then your body is programmed to respond accordingly. It’s ready to pull the brake.

In older cars, you can still drive with the handbrake pulled. That’s what we’re trying to do when we beat ourselves up for being “lazy” or lacking discipline. We’re trying to slam on the gas regardless. Sometimes, that does the trick. But only for the short-term, and at a cost. It’s not a sustainable strategy. It’s not efficient.

If we’re looking to play long-term games, we don’t want to fight our biology. We want to work with it.

rewriting our beliefs

Your unconscious beliefs about the world are not static. They can be changed, modified, updated. That process starts with intention & curiosity.

That fear that’s keeping you stuck: what is it trying to protect you from? What does it believe will happen if you actually succeed? What did you learn — in a family, a classroom, a relationship, an earlier failure — that made this particular kind of visibility or accomplishment feel like something to fear?

We don’t need to understand your whole history. We don’t need to spend years excavating childhood wounds before you can send an email. But we do want to identify the specific emotional belief that’s generating resistance. We want to understand it, so that we don’t have to just bulldoze past it.

To understand it, we need to set aside judgement, which just reinforces the fear of “I’m doing it wrong.” Imagine a scared child standing at the edge of a dark forest. If we say, “you lazy piece of shit, we’re going in there whether you like it or not!”, what can we expect to happen? The child will dig in their heels and scream and cry. But when we ask, “what do you need to feel safe in this moment?”, then we might make some progress. When we lead with a compassionate curiosity, then we create the conditions for durable change.

ambition needs a container

Our culture lionizes the ambitious. We’re told from an early age to shoot for the moon. Many of us internalize that as “I just need to be ambitious & brave, and all will be well.”

But if you’re pursuing an authentic vision, something that’s deeply rooted within yourself, then it’s probably something that’s been growing for awhile. In this case, it’s more likely that some old emotional beliefs are tangled up in it. To do the work you most care about tends to mean confronting your deepest fears. That’s the journey.

Ambition alone isn’t enough. Forcing courage is a band-aid solution, and puts us back in the same pattern of relying on willpower to see us through. What we need is to nurture a sense of safety that allows us to work with ourselves, rather than against ourselves.

Creating safety isn’t about coddling. It’s not about giving up or doing something easier. Rather, it’s about getting curious about one question: “What conditions would make it easier to move forward?” Then we can talk about cultivating those conditions.

But the first step is recognizing that there’s nothing “wrong” here: your nervous system is doing its job. It’s trying to keep you safe. You can hold that with respect, as you get curious about how to change the underlying belief. You don’t have to be at war with yourself. The work wants to emerge through you. All you have to do is get out of the way.

The Practice: the next time you notice yourself getting stuck in the pursuit of meaningful work, ask yourself, “What am I afraid will happen here?” Wait for an answer to emerge, rather than trying to think of the answer. Once it does emerge, ask “what happens then?”

An example: hesitation on sending an email. A tightness in the chest. “What am I afraid of?” → “That they won’t like this proposal.” → “What happens then?” → “Then they won’t want to work with me.” → “What happens then?” → “Then I’ll be a failure…”

Continue asking the question until you arrive at the root belief, and then try to hold it with compassion. Don’t fight it & argue with; just acknowledge that it’s here. Notice what happens on the other side.

Thanks for being here,

Scott

🏹 1:1 coaching with me

The ego likes to believe that it can prevent risk & uncertainty. There’s a myth among intelligent people that they can outthink everyone else, and even outthink reality. Smart people are taught from an early age that cleverness is their greatest strength, their secret weapon, and the solution to all problems.

This belief grows when we observe the mistakes of others. There is so much thoughtlessness in the world, which leads to much unnecessary pain. Observe the critical commentary around anyone who takes a visible risk: “these people are idiots. They don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t considered the second, third, fourth-order effects.”

The thoughtfulness argument has merits. If people were more careful, they would avoid a great deal of suffering. We need the ambitious to be more thoughtful, but we also need the thoughtful to be more ambitious. As with any belief about the world, there is a grounded version and an ungrounded version: a conscious version and a shadow version.

The conscious belief: “with careful thought, I can avoid unnecessary suffering.”

The shadow belief: “with careful thought, I can avoid all suffering.”

The first belief is true. The second is not. There is no avoiding suffering in life, even if you control every variable. If you’re trying to do something bold in the world, like building a business or creating art, then the probability of suffering increases. To be ambitious is to court suffering.

From the outside, it’s easy to tell when someone is in the grips of the shadow belief. They hesitate. They overthink. They get stuck, especially when faced with choosing between two bad options. Choosing between the lesser of two evils violates the shadow belief, because the ego insists there must be a way around. There must be a safe path.

What’s more, it becomes a question of identity. If I can’t find the right answer, I’m just not smart enough. If I can’t avoid suffering, I’m not good enough. What an extraordinary belief to hold! And yet so many of us do. Not only are we put into a world where suffering is inevitable, but we also believe that experiencing suffering makes us lesser. “If I’m not smart enough to find a way to avoid suffering, then that means that I’m not good enough, which means I’m going to experience even more suffering in the future.” Thus we’re set up for a spiral into despair.

It happens. People get destroyed by their own beliefs about reality. The temptation here is to rationalize our way out of the shadow belief. But you can’t think your way out of overthinking. You can’t just say, “Okay, I accept that suffering is inevitable; I will now incorporate that into My Inherent Smartness and all will be well.”

No. Your body needs to learn to integrate a paradox: suffering is safe to experience. Making a decision that you regret is safe. Making a bad decision out of a lack of forethought is safe. To escape the shadow belief, you need to feel that in your bones.

Niccolò Machiavelli:

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth.”

And from the biography of John Boyd, an American fighter pilot:

“There are two kinds of mistakes a student pilot could make when delivering bombs or rockets: “pussy errors” and “tiger errors.” Pussy errors are the result of coming in high, shallow, and slow: the pilot is tentative. Tiger errors are the result of coming in low, steep, and fast: the pilot is overly aggressive. Nobody wanted to be known as the pilot who committed pussy errors.”

All courses of action are risky. We only have a preference between what kind of risk we engage with: ambition or sloth, tiger errors or pussy errors.

The paradox: we must accept that there is no safety, and feel safe in that. Overthinking is just one symptom of a hypervigilance in body & mind. Hypervigilance is an attempt to keep you safe from harm, and there’s constant potential for harm, just by being alive. To be alive and to not be hypervigilant is an extraordinary achievement, when you think about it, and that’s the choice that we’re presented with.

How do we reconcile with this paradox? How do we actually feel safety & certainty when there is no real safety & certainty? By realizing that our sense of safety does not come from an external source. Safety is an internal experience, and it can come from within. It must come from within.

To stop believing that our cleverness will save us, to uproot the shadow belief that we can & must avoid suffering, we must feel, at a visceral level, that we can access a sense of safety, no matter what. The prerequisite to that confidence is a practice of creating a sense of safety within ourselves.

Practice is the key word here. The ego wants to immediately solve the problem by saying, “Okay, I will now choose ambition over sloth every time.” Not going to happen. But we can start to lean into tiger errors, and to see if we can help ourselves feel safe in the act of doing so. What does safety feel like in our body? How can we access & create that experience even when taking risks? When we do so, what happens on the other side? What does courage feel like, and how can we practice that feeling over and over?

That’s no small act. To pursue courageous action, to embrace the uncertainty & inherent risk of reality, to create the love & belonging & safety you seek within yourself, in the face of terror of mortality… I think that’s the highest calling of a human being.

As you embrace this practice, you will notice the limits within you. You’ll notice the places where it’s impossible to feel safe, where your body clenches and grips around that shadow thesis, where it refuses to let you take a step. You’ll notice where the hyper-vigilance overrides every other thought. If we get caught in trying to “solve” our own fear, then we’re right back in the ego’s domain.

Can you relax into your overthinking, rather than trying to get it to relax? Can you embrace courage not as a solution to fear, but as its companion?

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With love,

Scott

🏹 1:1 coaching with me

Why do we read fiction? There are many superficial explanations we could offer: for the pleasure of stepping into another world, the opportunity to better understand the human condition to which we all are subject, or a chance to peek into another’s mind.

All these are valid and good reasons—I don’t think there’s a bad reason for reading literature, even if it’s just “to look worldly in public.” We all do performative things at times; might as well do something performative that also enriches the soul.

But I’d offer that there is another reason we read literature, even if we are not quite aware of it. I’d offer that this motivation is exactly what helps us differentiate between “good” and “bad” fiction, and is the source of that vague feeling of dissatisfaction when reading a not-so-great book. What we are seeking is something small but resonant: a personal identification with symbols.

symbols in the world

The type of symbol I’m talking about here is not your generic sort of symbolism e.g. “the blue curtains symbolize the character’s depression”. What I am more interested in here is the personal symbol, which I would connect to Jung’s theory of synchronicity. So let’s go there first, first to synchronicity, and then back to the symbols themselves.

A synchronicity, in Jung’s definition, is an external event that matches an internal state1. A rather basic example from my life is that my favourite number is 23, and I find when I feel I am “on the right path”, I tend to see 23s everywhere. A more striking example is that when Jung started focusing on a particular figure in his imagination, associated with the kingfisher, he found a dead kingfisher on the shore of the lake near where he lived. That area was not known for kingfishers, so it was a striking coincidence.

Now, the obvious objection to this is that it’s mere confirmation bias, or a cognitive distortion, or just simply coincidence and nothing more, etc etc. For the purposes of this essay, it’s not necessary that you believe synchronicity is real2; we can accept a much milder definition of “sometimes, things happen in the external world which reflect what’s happening within us.”

But whether or not a synchronicity is “real”, it does feel significant. It feels like a wink from the universe, or from God. It imbues a moment with a personal meaning which, while small, leads to a sense of self-recognition.

symbols in literature

We could say that a synchronicity is a “meaningful reflection of the Self out in the world.” In literature, then, a personal symbol would be a meaningful reflection of the Self in the text. We see ourselves in the text, if just for a moment. It is the same effect as when a song lyrics seems to pierce our soul: “ah yes, that’s how I feel, that’s it.”

But why I think this is significant, and why it goes beyond just a moment of “I feel seen”, is that such personal symbols can often bring an unconscious idea into consciousness. For example, when I see a 23 figured prominently, the thought “perhaps I am going in the right direction” leaps into consciousness, whereas before it might have been in the background. Similarly, something that stands out to me in a book might bring an unconscious realization “into the light.”

A symbol is thus not just a reflection of what we already know, it’s a reflection that brings something unconscious into conscious awareness.

surfacing the unconscious

I recently wrote about how I first read the Odyssey in my early 20s3, and I felt enormously impatient with the “homecoming” sequence. For context, at this point in the text, Odysseus has been away from home for 20 years, and his home has been taken over by a bunch of nasty folks trying to seduce his wife. He’s finally returned to take back his home, and the implicit promise of the text is that there’s going to be a big climactic fight.

But that’s not what happens, at first. There’s a long sequence where Odyssey is disguised as a beggar by the goddess Athena, and enters his home and bides his time, waiting for the right moment to strike. As he waits, he has to endure insults from the suitors, and he has to see his long-missed wife without being able to tell her who he is. It’s quite agonizing. One is dying for Odysseus to finally draw his sword and get to work.

This sequence stuck out to me then, in my early 20s, but I didn’t think too much of it then. But I’ve recently been going through a phase in my life which I’d call a “humbling” period, where I’ve had to really grapple with what my ambitions are and how long it will take to achieve them. During that time, Odysseus came back to mind.

What bothered me about that homecoming sequence, in retrospect, was the fact that Odysseus has to submit to humility to such an extreme degree, putting aside his pride and impatience… which was exactly the thing I was wrestling with. But it was reflecting on the Odyssey that helped crystallize that for me: “ah, what I am struggling with is humility.” I saw myself in the text, in a way that made me aware of my unconscious problem.

the benevolent mirror

We can thus say that literature can function as a benevolent mirror, reflecting aspects of ourselves back at us, through these symbolic moments4. I would go so far as to say that when someone complains that a book didn’t really “land” with them, they mean that they didn’t see any of themselves in it, consciously or unconsciously. There’s nothing wrong with that (not every book needs to be for everyone), but it does say something about why the classics are the classics: they speak to many of us across the expanse of time.

I call literature a benevolent mirror, but the process can be quite uncomfortable. I think that’s why we have a slight bias to view reading great books as a “noble” activity: not only is it sometimes technically difficult, but it also requires us to confront unconscious parts of our psyche.

collecting symbols

Not that everyone submits to the process. I loved this take from Joyce Carol Oates about how some commentators use the Odyssey as a normative patriarchal story, as a source of comfort. The text is showing them something in themselves, that they are attached to the idea of the patriarchal “daddy” but they are not yet conscious of it.

But we can’t blame them for that, because we all do that (indeed, my own experience with the Odyssey is not so far removed from this framing!). The symbols we encounter in literature take time to ferment. They rest in our unconscious, and then emerge when the moment is right. Odysseus sat in the back of my mind, dressed in rags within his own palace, until he last emerged again over the past year.

Reading a lot of books, then, is not for mere pomp. It is to collect a storehouse of personally relevant symbols. It is to read a book and say, “I saw myself in that, but I’m not sure how”, and to let that sit for ten years until you finally say, “Ah, I see it now.” It is a process of noticing our own discomfort and our own resonance, and pause for a moment and ask what that’s all about.

Reading literature is a process of seeking ourselves in the world. We are still bound by the commandment of the Oracle of Delphi: “Know thyself.” When we submit to the process of reading literature, when we allow the symbols to work on our unconscious, then it can become another way to bring the hidden aspects of ourselves into the light.

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Depression is a classic “freeze” response in our nervous system. Freeze is a state of “wait, don’t move just yet”, and is thus defined by a combination of lethargy and tension. Our body perceives that there are no safe paths forward, no place to flee, no way to fight, and so it keeps us still.

I see the freeze response in my cat whenever I’m vacuuming the apartment. She hates the vacuum, but has no choice but to “wait it out”. Her body stiffens, her head lowers, her ears go back, and she stays in place until I’m done. She is tense but unmoving. She’s unhappy. She’s stuck. For that brief five minute period, she’s manifesting something very similar to depression.

Fortunately for her, the experience passes quickly. My own depressive periods were more prolonged, and more existential. I was miserable, and I was angry at myself for being miserable. I was in despair about my own inability to move out of misery. There seemed to be no way to move forward, no safe path out of the depression. Thus, I was stuck. Thus, I was tense but unmoving.

Depression is a deep sense of “there is no way out”. Sometimes, this is true: sometimes we are stuck in situations beyond our control, and there truly is no way out, nothing to do but wait and suffer. But my own depression wasn’t like that. There was a way forward. I just didn’t like it, because it involved the one thing I didn’t want to do: face the truth of who I was and what I believed.

the avoidance of suffering

Carl Jung wrote that “neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” In my coaching work, I find we are frequently searching for the “black hole”, the one belief (or set of beliefs) that their entire being is contorted around. The ego wants to protect us from suffering: it wants to feel in control. As a result, it will try to deny and repress any truth that makes us feel out of control… but that denial and repression has a cost.

When we are denying a truth, then we must hold a necessary tension to keep it at bay. We must avoid anything that reminds us of that truth. We must shove it down whenever it threatens to arise. But since the whole point is to keep that truth out of our conscious awareness, we’re not usually aware of the repression itself, and so our own behaviour becomes inexplicable to us. We find ourselves repeating the same patterns over and over, and we can’t fathom why.

We can continue such an approach for a lifetime. Some people live their whole lives in denial of some truth about the world or themselves. I’d even say that most people live that way. But there’s another force at work.

Jung also believed that the psyche has an innate orientation towards integration and wholeness. In contrast to the ego, it wants to recognize the truth. It wants to integrate and accept the shadow. Thus we see where the inner tension emerges: the ego seeks to protect us, the psyche seeks to heal us. Between the two, we end up stuck.

Depression, in some cases, a consequence of that inner tension. It’s a sort of stalemate between our ego and the world. The universe throws our ego against the wall and says, “Look, there’s no way out. You either face this, or you’re stuck here. Got it?” Reality traps the ego. These are the moments when it seems life has us by the throat. This was my experience of depression. There was only one way forward…

embracing suffering

The belief that I was so desperately clinging to was that I could just decide who I wanted to be. From my childhood to my 20s, the foundation of my identity was a faith in my ability to “figure out” who I needed to be, in order to access what I wanted (namely love, safety, and belonging). Life was a problem to solve, and gods be damned, I was going to solve it.

How very egoic! The premise of this identity was that I was in control, I was empowered, I could just make things happen… I could avoid suffering. In retrospect, it was easy to see how neurosis was just a step away.

It’s important to acknowledge that this belief didn’t come from nowhere. The ego isn’t “bad”; it’s just doing its best to keep you safe. This belief system, at one point, gave me hope at a time when there wasn’t much hope to be had. It gave me something to strive for. It gave me direction.

That orientation was invaluable when I was younger, but eventually, it broke down. Depression became a self-reinforcing system: I felt miserable because I wasn’t who I wanted to be, but being miserable was also not who I wanted to be, so I became even more miserable… and so on.

The truth that my ego was so desperate to avoid was that suffering was inescapable and necessary. And not just grand, glorious, heroic suffering, but mundane suffering, the suffering of the everyday, the suffering of just being human.

There’s more I could say here about why that was so unpalatable to me (see: a deeply rooted need to be special) but the core point here is that there was an ugly truth that I felt I needed to avoid, and to embrace it meant suffering, but I could not move beyond my depression until I did so.

emerging on the other side

Life is not a series of epiphanies. My depression did not end one morning with me finally proclaiming, “Ah yes, I must simply submit to suffering!” Integration is slow, painful, and frustrating. But it does happen… if we are willing to allow it.

That truth that I was avoiding, that life is not a problem to solve, that suffering is part of the human condition, that suffering is often the source of growth and beauty… well, my ego still doesn’t like it, but I feel a sense of peace about it. Misery is no longer a sign that I’m doing something wrong; rather, it’s an invitation for me to pause and ask what my psyche is pointing me towards.

This is not meant to be an explanation of all forms of depression. As always, seek help when you feel you need it, probably before you feel you need it. This is an account of my experience, and what I wish I had known at the time. I probably wouldn’t have accepted it, back then, but it might have sped up my progress.

My cat will likely never accept that the vacuum cleaner means her no harm, but maybe she will. I hope she does, because in that moment she’ll finally be able to relax, and see that she’s free to move wherever she likes. There is a way forward, and it doesn’t mean the absence of suffering, but a different relationship to that suffering. But it takes time.

With love,

Scott

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I’m having more and more conversations with people who have an “or else” relationship with their own success.

Why do you need to be successful? I ask them.

Well I don’t need to be, they usually say. I just want to be great.

Okay, I say. And what happens if you’re not great?

Oh. Then I’ll hate myself.

Ah.

It’s a painful thing for them. It’s like a bad love affair. At times it’s exhilarating, this pursuit of greatness. It feels beautiful, worthy, right. But it sucks the life out of them.

It’s Jung’s idea of a provisional life. Life is lived in anticipation of future greatness. One day, it’ll all be worth it. But they’re not there yet. And so they can’t relax.

We might say, for the provisional person, that success is a prerequisite to fully living a life. Greatness is the permission slip to actually enjoy living.

But such a person would probably disagree with that. “I enjoy pursuing greatness!” they protest. “After all, what else is there?” It’s the same with the lover caught in a bad affair: “but I can’t imagine my life without him!” Yes, and therein lies the problem.

If the pursuit of future greatness is your main source of meaning in your life… well, first of all, you can’t let it go. You can’t stop. You can’t slip up, not really. You must pursue, always pursue, always strive, improve, reach, dream…

You must always be earning. Earning what? Your future life, your real life. For such a person, the present isn’t real: it’s a staging ground for their potential.

It’s an inversion of reality. In truth, the present is all that’s real; the future is an abstraction. The provisional person reverses this.

In doing so, they sacrifice their present self: they repress their imperfections, doubts, yearnings. They cut off anything that threatens their future. Thus they are often at war with themselves, with the accompanying vicious self criticism.

Will they win this war? Probably not. Reality tends to win out, on a long enough time scale. That doesn’t mean that a beautiful future is impossible. But when it arrives, it will be in the shape of a beautiful present. At that point, the skill will be in appreciating and enjoying the present. And that is exactly the skill that the provisional person forgets to learn…

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With love & appreciation,

Scott

🍊 1:1 coaching with me

After posting for a while on Twitter, I’ve noticed something interesting.

I have just under 8000 followers, at the moment. I’ve written around 7000 tweets. That means, on average, each tweet has attracted around one follower.

As I looked around to other small-to-medium accounts, that number seemed to hold roughly true. Most people have as many tweets as followers, and often, slightly more tweets than followers. Large accounts seem to break free of this ratio (especially celebrities & public figures) but under ~50,000 followers, it seems you need to tweet thousands of times to gain thousands of followers.

My initial reaction to this ratio was, “I wish I had known this sooner.” If I knew that in order to get 10,000 followers, I would need 10,000 tweets, I probably would’ve started tweeting more sooner. I post a lot now, out of sheer habit, but when I started tweeting, I was a lot more careful, trying to post something high quality each time.

But creativity is, and always have been, a numbers game. Consider the following:

A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during the first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw pots nonstop in every session. And although it was counterintuitive to his students, you can guess how his experiment came out: at the end of the course, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent the most time actually practicing their craft.

— Creative Confidence, Tom & David Kelley

You can’t catch my hustle

You can’t fathom my love, dude

Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers

That’s A Different World like Cree Summer’s

I deserve to do these numbers

— Spaceship, Kanye West

The lesson here: quantity, quantity, quantity.

When you’re making five beats a day, you can’t think about quality. When you’re trying to produce 50lbs of pottery, you can’t think about quality. You have to totally surrender to process.

Any quality that emerges will come as a surprise. Greatness cannot be planned. It is an emergent property of consistent output.

I’m considering jumping into National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. It’s the same principle: write a 50,000 word novel in a month, for the pure purpose of making something. It almost certainly won’t be good; that’s not the point. The point is to sidestep the inner critic, to overwhelm the inner critic to the point that it simply surrenders.

The ultimate creative question, then, is not “how do I produce something beautiful?” but rather “how do I produce as much as possible?” Then we trust that the beauty will emerge. We accept that it’s not up to us. Our job is to show up and create.

If you want 20,000 followers, you’ll likely need to write 20,000 tweets. So might as well write the first one today.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

🍊 1:1 coaching with me

But for a long time, I didn’t really believe that.

I felt I needed to do something really “important” with my life. I needed to produce some great work, or have the most amazing relationships, or achieve some heroic feat.

I believed that I needed to do something important in order to be worthy of existence. If I was worthy of existence, in turn, that meant that I would be loved. Love was something I had to earn.

But love is a felt experience. It encompasses mind & body. The experiences of receiving love & giving love, being loved vs loving, are very similar. Many people say they are seeking to be loved, but what they actually want to do is love. The good news is that is always available. There is always something to love, if you’re skilled enough.

The happy coincidence here is that loving well is the most important work you can do. The act of appreciation is a creative act, no matter what form it takes. If you orient towards love, you will create love, no matter what. It might not be on the most obvious scale, it might not have the most obvious impact, but it’s there.

Think of the love that a grandfather has for his granddaughter, which doesn’t manifest fully until years later, when she’s able to access a quiet confidence with herself, a knowing that someone loved her so deeply. Can you measure the impact of that kind of love? Maybe if you pay attention. But then an echo of that same love gets passed to her daughter, and her granddaughter, and so on. It unfolds over centuries. Is that not a great work?

Maybe that will be your highest achievement: an afternoon spent with your grandchildren. Or maybe your great work will be the love you pour into something you write, or something you paint. Or maybe your great work will be noticing a particular bird outside your window, taking a moment to observe it, and really seeing its beauty in a way that no one else in this world ever will. Is that not creating something? Is that not worthy?

Love creates love. There really is no way to know what your important work will be, but we can trust in that principle that if we are orienting towards love, we will create beauty. The easiest way to orient towards love is just to notice what’s around you and let it in. It’s not even an effortful act. It’s not a matter of doing. It’s just about letting the beauty in.

It’s actually impossible to avoid. As I’m writing the initial draft of this essay, I’m in my car staring out at the ocean and the sun is out and it’s glittering on the water and there’s a seagull bobbing on the surface. I could look at that sight forever. I could contemplate that forever. You could spend a hundred years staring at the way the light moves on the water and still not fully appreciate its beauty. The beauty is infinite.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, in the highest circle of heaven, the angels are circling around God eternally, in an act of constant contemplation. Their whole existence is appreciation. Their whole existence is love. I don’t think there is any other way to live.

So let yourself do that. Notice the ways you were already doing that. Notice the ways you are already in love with the world. Let that love be the creative energy that carries you forward.

It might be a heartbreaking love. It might be a love full of grief, rage, and disappointment. But that is love nonetheless. So let it in. Notice it. In the words of Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

🍊 1:1 coaching with me

Today is my 34th birthday, and while I’ll be celebrating with friends this coming weekend, I took this past Saturday to have a day to myself. My intention was to reflect, to dote on myself, and to celebrate the past year. I ended up spending most of that day in a deep sadness.

The theme of that sadness was a single thought that emerged with cutting clarity: I haven’t created anything that I’m truly proud of. The impact of this thought was immediate: an empty feeling in my gut, a twisting dread in my chest, and amidst all that, a welling surge of grief.

I was surprised by both the thought itself and the intensity of the related emotion. After all, this year was the year I ended my seven-year career in tech and went full-time on my own business. I own an apartment that I love. I’ve cultivated a number of good close friendships, new and old. I’ve written many essays and even a couple of books. And most importantly, I have a young cat who adores me. I love these things. I’m grateful for these things. I appreciate these things.

And yet, on Saturday, I felt only grief. My initial reaction was to want to “fix” that sadness; after all, it was my birthday, wasn’t I supposed to be happy? But as I’ve counselled many times before, I believe the most effective approach to intense emotion is not to dismiss it or try to argue with it, but to instead make space for it. So that’s what I did. I got curious about my grief.

My curiosity was rewarded. Some of the surface-level explanations that I thought I could offer for this grief, to explain it away, didn’t really seem to stick. Yes, there’s a part of me that expected to have a family by now. Yes, there’s a part of me that always wanted to write a novel at this point. Neither of those things have happened.

I thought those two pieces were part of the picture, but when I offered them as comfort to my grief (saying things like, “I understand that you really wanted a family”) that didn’t really seem to resonate. It didn’t really seem to move the grief. So I sat with it. I let it be there. I held space for it.

Eventually an explanation emerged, a deeper reason than all the above: Much of my life has been a performance.

I grew up in a family of well-meaning people who nonetheless had a hard time celebrating me for the way I am. I didn’t receive the affirmation that I deeply craved about who I am as a person. That’s no one’s fault, but it in turn led to this belief that I needed to perform a certain way in order to access love, belonging, and affirmation.

I’ve been aware of this performance tendency for many years and been painfully aware of it for the past couple of years. I’ve been working to release it. But a lifetime of performance tends to yield projects which are designed for applause. You end up with achievements that are designed to convince others of your worth.

The sad fact is that if someone doesn’t readily recognize my worth, there’s a good chance that they’re simply not willing to, no matter how much convincing I do. Or even if I do manage to convince them that I’m worthy, the validation that I earn feels hollow, because I know it’s conditional on me being a certain way. Either way, there isn’t room for my whole self.

Spread that over a lifetime, and I created the conditions for a life that seems accomplished on the surface, but not in a way that resonates deeply through every part of me. In understanding how deeply my need for performance contorted my life, I’m also recognizing the other path that I turned away from, the more genuine path, the path of following my bliss, the path of following what was meaningful for me. So of course there’s a grief there. There’s hope for the future, of course, and we’ll get to that, but there’s a grief to be worked through first.

From a young age, I wanted love. So I set out on a decades-long project to earn that love. Unfortunately, that didn’t yield the results I want. Putting that in context, it makes sense to be sad. It makes sense for that little boy who unconsciously engineered this project to be feeling grief and regret. My duty on Saturday was to hold that grief, and to fully feel it.

That’s what I did. I took myself out for a coffee, for a croissant, to multiple bookstores, and then for a long hike. I just let that sadness be there. I let myself grieve what I hadn’t created, as nebulous as that is. I let myself grieve who I could have been, if I felt empowered to follow what was most meaningful to me.

As a result of that intentional attention, the grief eventually passed. On my way back from my hike in the late afternoon, I felt a bubbling joy within me, an enthusiasm, a recognition that there was still abundant time left. I recognized that this project of turning away from performance and towards the genuine pursuit of bliss is exactly the thing that informs my work with others. There’s an alignment there, a symmetry. My reckoning with my grief and regret helps me resonate with those who are going through a similar struggle. That’s a blessing.

And also there’s a challenge here. If I’m not truly proud of all that I’ve created, what would I be proud to create? How can I step towards that? What is next on the horizon?

It is the paradox of the human condition that to look forward to that brighter future, I had to look backwards first. To release the grief, I had to go deep into it. I had to hold it. I had to let it be here. I had to give it permission to be here forever. To see myself clearly, I had to sink into the fog of despair.

I ended the day in a state of excited bliss. Okay, if I hadn’t yet created anything that I was truly proud of, what did I want to create? What would get me excited? If I fully leave behind the concept of performance, what does that empower me to do next?

The important thing here is that this excitement arose from genuine feeling. It wasn’t a “mindset shift”, or me forcing myself to think positively. It wasn’t me dismissing the grief or pretending it wasn’t there or trying to fix it. This outpouring of energy was a result of having met my grief at its deepest level. It came as a result of me looking my fear right in the face: Had I wasted my life? Only when I allowed myself to sincerely grapple with that question was I able to rise again to the heights of joy.

The result of this experience is over the past two days, I feel more excited about life than I have in a long time. I feel restored. I feel creative again.

I can’t help thinking what a loss it would have been if I had accepted the well-meaning advice of trying to be happy on my birthday weekend. If I had viewed my sadness as something to fix or escape, I wouldn’t have learned from it.

I’m 34 years old. I still have much to learn about this world and my relationship to it, but here is something I have learned, something I am truly proud to have learned: there is nothing within me that I need to be scared of. There is only one way I need to relate to myself, and that is with love and curiosity. As long as I can be patient, as long as I can hold space for what emerges within me, then there is no grief, anger, or fear that I need to run away from. I can simply be, and that is enough. There is no performance necessary.

Today is my birthday, and I am happy to be here, and I am excited to create what I’m going to create, and I’m happy to have you, dear reader, along for the journey.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

👑 1:1 coaching with me

P.S. Here are the books I bought on Saturday, and a picture from the top of the hike.

The goal of emotional work is self-understanding. The Delphic Oracle taught the commandment of “Know thyself”, valuing it enough to inscribe on the wall of her temple. Self-understanding transcends mere curiosity; to know yourself is to know how to act. The better you understand yourself & your patterns, the easier it will be to create what you want to create in the world, and to manifest your desires.

Yet many people ignore the most fertile source of self-understanding. Many people view their negative emotions as mere obstacles. Given the choice, they’d prefer to be happy all the time, to bask in constant joy. Fear, sadness, anger… all of these are “in the way” of the true purpose of life. They try to “solve” or “get rid of” these negative emotions as quickly as possible, so they can get back to the business of being happy.

But our emotions are not mere distractions. Our emotions tell us what matters to us, what we truly care about. Our emotions reveal our desires & preferences. Without them, we’d be lost. Emotions orient us in the world.

If we want to know ourselves at a deep level, then we want to learn as much as possible from our emotions. The lucky coincidence is that learning from our negative emotions also tends to help them transform. As we learn to relate to ourselves with curiosity, we tend to become happier. My goal with this article is to give you a specific approach for doing so: a way to communicate with your emotions, so that you can acknowledge their teachings, and thus allow them to move on.

emotions as signals

The most productive way to view your emotions is to see them as signals.

They are a signal that your body is trying to get you to take a particular action. The easiest example here is the fight/flight response (or, more thoroughly, fight/flight/fawn/freeze). Your nervous system has a stress response, which then induces a certain action: fight or run away.

Most animals do what their emotions tell them to do. Sometimes, I suspect my cat is actually holding back her anger (and the corresponding desire to swat me in the face) but for the most part, animals do what they feel like doing. Humans are unique in having a conscious mind, a layer between instinct & action, where we can choose how we interpret those emotional signals.

Giving that conscious awareness, we have the luxury of three possible relationships with our emotions:

1. helplessness

2. repression

3. transformation

Helplessness is the least empowered relationship; transformation is the most empowered. Let’s talk about each one.

a helplessness relationship with our emotions

Though helplessness has a negative connotation, this mode aligns with the default mode most animals experience. There is a lack of conscious interference: the instinct arises, and we follow it.

If we get an anger signal, then we freak out. If we get a fatigue signal, then we lie down. If we get a scared signal, then we run away or we freeze.

Our emotions are running the show. This mode tends to lead to all sorts of difficulty in our work and our relationships. We find ourselves lashing out at others, or only doing work we find pleasurable, or oscillating rapidly between joy and misery.

Of course, since we’re animals at our core, we all end up in this mode at some time or the other. But it’s the least empowered position to be in, and our life improves the more we can transcend it.

a repressive relationship with our emotions

A slightly more empowered relationship to our emotions is repression. This mode is where we ignore or push down anything unpleasant that emerges within us. We start to adopt this mode when our childhood selves are told we’re “too much” or that we need to “just behave”, without enough positive encouragement to balance it out.

Emotional repression can easily become a habit, to the point that we don’t even feel our emotions. Our body might experience a stress response, but we just stay numb. We stay passive. We stay quiet. We shove it away.

This approach leads to two outcomes:

1. Most of the time, we lead a flat, numb life. We fall into passivity, settling for whatever we get.

2. At the same time, since we’re pushing more & more emotions down, we’re building up pressure within us, which eventually erupts in a violent & uncontrollable way.

What’s significant about this mode is that we are interfering with the energy of our emotions. In the helpless mode, the energy of the emotion just carries us along, like the current of a river. In the repression mode, we’re trying to dam that river, which means it oscillates between a trickle and a flood.

The missing piece here is the skillful management of the energy of our emotions… which is where we’ll turn to next, in the transformative mode.

a transformative relationship with our emotions

Imagine that your partner forgets to do the dishes, and this makes you really upset. Rationally, you know it’s not that big of a deal, but there’s a bubbling rage in your throat that won’t go away.

In the helpless mode, you would storm into the living room and hurl expletives at them. In the repression mode, you would push the rage down until it later erupts at your sister-in-law’s wedding. But in the transformative mode, the process is different.

When you’re in the transformative frame, you take a moment to connect with the anger, and get curious about what its concern is. In doing so, you discover that you’re not upset about the dishes themselves, but about how this situation signals that your partner isn’t thinking about you: how you’ll have to now do the dishes after you’ve had a particularly stressful day. The anger comes from a place of “this person doesn’t actually care about me”, which is really the voice of fear.

You recognize that this fear is irrational (your partner does care about you), but you don’t dismiss it. You sit with the anger/fear for a moment, acknowledging what it’s trying to tell you. Then you go and speak with your partner about how you would like to feel more cared for in the relationship, and that them doing the dishes more often would be a good way for them to help you feel that way. You extend an invitation for them to help create the experience you would like to have, and (ideally) they accept that invitation. The anger vanishes, and you’re able to feel connected to your partner once more.

In this model, you are both receiving the signal of the emotion, and channeling its energy into something creative. The emotion ends up creating more love & connection with the people around you. Anger turns into love. That’s emotional alchemy.

That’s what we’re after. So how do we master this process?

how to develop a transformative relationship with your emotions

Emotional alchemy is based on a two step process: understanding what your emotions are seeking, and then taking action to move closer to that.

What I want to note here is that this process is highly individual. Your approach to communicating with your emotions is going to be unique to you. But it comes down to two questions:

1. What are my emotions trying to move me towards?

2. How can I take aligned action in that direction?

With the first question, it’s important that you get to the core of what your emotions are trying to tell you. On the surface, your anger might be saying “Go scream at your boss.” That’s not the core. That’s the surface level. If we take that and run with it, we have a helpless relationship with our emotions.

Why does your anger want you to scream at your boss? What experience is it trying to create? I’ll give you a hint: our nervous systems are constantly trying to move us towards greater safety. So we can rephrase the first question as, “how is this emotion trying to help me access safety?”

Perhaps the answer is that screaming at your boss might convince them to treat you better (in the eyes of your anger), and thus allow you to stay at this job long-term, which will give you access to better financial stability, which will help you relax about your future. The anger is really attempting to move you in the direction of relaxed safety.

Once we’ve identified the core of that desire, we can move to the second question, and think about aligned action. If what we’re seeking is a sense of stability, and the relaxation that comes from it, how else would we create that? Maybe in the short-term, that means sitting for a bit of grounded meditation. In the long-term, it might mean having a (calm) discussion with your boss, or seeking other job opportunities. We act on the intent of our emotions, rather than submitting to their demands.

the skill of emotional attunement

Your job here is to find an approach that works for you, to find a way of communicating with your own inner world. That's going to be different for everyone. This is a creative pursuit.

If you want guidance in this process, I encourage you to apply here for one-on-one coaching with me. I'm happy to help you build the skill.

I also will be working on building more resources to support this. Subscribe to my email list below if you want to stay up to date with that. You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

The main thing here: we want to cultivate a relationship with our inner world where we have as much access to information as possible. We want to know as much as possible about ourselves, so that we can better react to ourselves and to the world. A free & loving relationship with ourselves will allow us to take action that's aligned with who we really are. It will allow us to be much more effective, not just in attending to ourselves, but in creating all that we want to create in the world.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

🍊 1:1 coaching with me

The north star of my work, both in my coaching practice & my content, is to help people create what they want to create.

Creation is what we’re here to do, whether that’s creating a business, a family, an art project, or an inner sense of peace.

But creation is work, without exception. It is the hard work of taking our vision and making it into something tangible. Some parts of that work are joyful, and it is possible to amplify that joy so it becomes a bigger & bigger part of our process… but there are always those bits that we don’t really want to do: the difficult, scary, uncertain parts.

What seems to distinguish pleasant and unpleasant work is a matter of orientation. Pleasant work can take many forms, but it seems to have a rough shape: we know what we’re trying to achieve, we’re relatively confident in our ability to achieve it, and we get small bits of satisfaction along the way.

Unpleasant work, on the other hand, tends to be nebulous and messy. We don’t really know the goal, and we’re either a little or a lot doubtful that we can get there. It’s like slogging through the mud in a rainstorm. Or maybe we do know what to do, but it’s just plain tedious, with no real satisfaction along the way.

These definitions map to Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of flow, as being the proper balance of challenge & ability:

What seems to characterize pleasant work is an abundance of positive feedback. We know what we’re doing and we know we’re doing it well, so we feel satisfied with the process.

What seems to characterize unpleasant work is either the presence of negative feedback (we know we’re doing a bad job) or the absence of feedback.

Framed in these terms, if we want to make unpleasant work more pleasant, a clear question emerges: how can we experience more positive feedback along the way?

internal vs external feedback loops

An external feedback loop is something in your environment that tells you how you’re doing. Think of test-driven software development, or graded assignments, or boss fights in a video game, or a mentor peering over your shoulder and critiquing your work.

If there are lots of feedback loops, and the feedback is generally positive, we tend to enjoy our work. This is what makes video games so addictive (especially in times when we’re lacking other sources of achievement in our lives). External feedback loops can keep us going for a long time.

To make your work more fun, it might be as simple as asking, How can I build more feedback loops into this process?

But because my frame is somatics, my primary interest is in internal feedback loops. Internal feedback is how you feel, in the moment, towards the work. It’s the voice of your intuition, or your fear, or your joy. It’s whatever is happening within you, as you try to create what you want to create.

External feedback loops can trigger certain internal experiences, which is how they’re effective. But to create an internal feedback loop, we need to go deeper and ask, how can I give myself access to the experience I want to have? In the absence of external feedback, how can I create an experience of satisfaction & joy?

the practice no one wants to do

I’ve worked with dozens of clients over the past year in my coaching practice. Most were struggling with some form of stuckness, unable to create what they wanted to create in the way that they desired. Their inner critic was a constant presence, pointing out all the ways they were wrong or insufficient.

The inner critic is an example of a negative internal feedback loop. You start doing the intimidating task that you’ve been putting off for weeks, and the inner critic tells you exactly how you’re doing it wrong, how you’ll always fuck it up, and oh, by the way, you’re a piece of shit for not doing it sooner.

In the face of such an internal onslaught, it’s very hard to access feelings of satisfaction & joy in our work. What’s missing is a balancing force, in the form of a positive internal feedback loop.

A positive internal feedback loop is really just a fancy term for the real currency of the universe: appreciation. We might also call this celebration.

Where an inner critic tears us down, an inner appreciator builds us up. It points out the progress we’re making, the courage we’re displaying in the face of resistance, the seeds we’re planting which will someday bear fruit. Celebrating ourselves gives us the energy needed to keep going.

And yet… no one wants to do it.

resistance to celebration

Using celebration as a tool makes perfect sense at a physiological level. When we look at all the good that we’re doing, we realize we’re more empowered than we think. In other words, we have more options than the inner critic would like us to believe. “I’m good at this, therefore I’ll likely be good at other things.”

The presence of options relaxes our nervous system. When we’re in fight/flight/freeze, it’s because we perceive only one option available. A flight response means our subconscious thinks the only thing we can do is run away. Dysregulation is a lack of options; regulation is an abundance of options.

But many of my clients, especially my male clients, have resisted the idea of celebrating themselves. It feels cheesy, unnatural. It feels childish. It even feels weak, as if they should be able to get this done without needing any cheap validation.

For many of us, it feels so much easier to listen to the inner critic than the inner cheerleader. We’d often prefer to look at all our flaws, rather than taking an honest look at our strengths.

the discipline of celebration

The simple explanation for this resistance to appreciation is that we’ve been taught that a self-effacing approach is more noble & acceptable. Many of us have grown up in environments where we got plenty of material for our inner critic, but very little evidence for our inner appreciator.

But this pursuit is, in my mind, the proper role for discipline. Rather than using discipline to force ourselves to do unpleasant work with no validation, we can use discipline to build the right conditions for that work, by committing to celebrating ourselves.

Rather than hope that we will magically learn the ability to work joylessly for hours, we can start to build that joy into our process. We can keep coming back to the practice of noticing how we’re showing up and explicitly naming the positive qualities we’re displaying.

We can choose to celebrate every little milestone. Tweet for 2 likes? Celebrate. First Substack subscriber? Celebrate. Wrote a few hundred lines of code that ended up being a waste but gave you a better understanding of the problem? Celebrate.

Celebration is just about noticing & naming, over & over. Yet it takes commitment. It requires admitting that we’re human, and to be human is to seek joy & satisfaction. It requires taking responsibility for giving ourselves access to that joy & satisfaction. It involves indulging the childish, silly, weak parts of ourselves, so that we have the energy needed to do the work we want to do.

Are you ready to commit to the practice of celebrating yourself?

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in building a creative process based in joy & satisfaction, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

Welcome to another edition of my weekly newsletter. The theme this week is heroism, weakness, and our relationship to our fear.

One thing that’s come up repeatedly with my male clients is a part of them that despises weakness. I know this part very well, because I also have it within me. This weakness-despising part says, “Hey, if you were more powerful, you could make your life a lot better: you could eliminate all the suffering & uncertainty you feel. But instead, you’re weak.”

Note the hidden irony here: this weakness-despising part is trying desperately to escape all suffering. It is actually trying to run away from suffering, rather than accepting it. So it remains perpetually disempowered.

Much of Western masculine-heroic culture is stuck in a similar bind. Heroism is the desire to make life better for everyone, but that becomes twisted when it comes from a fear of limitation. Our relationship with nature has been poisoned by this perspective. True heroism, the type we need to recover, would work with nature as it is, seeking harmony over conquest.

Fear-based “heroism” seeks to eliminate all limitations. Love-based heroism embraces and expands limitations.

I read Siddhartha for the first time this year, and bemoaned the fact that I didn’t read it in my early twenties: it might’ve had even more of an impact. This passage stuck with me, in the context of my own coaching work. My desire for all my clients is for them to learn to trust in their own wisdom, which begs the question: where does that wisdom come from?

The simple truth is that you get wisdom from having the courage to look at how things really are. So many of us are afraid to see things clearly, since we fear what it might say about ourselves. Perhaps the truth is that we really are broken, or twisted, or cruel… and it’s better to wonder than risk a clear affirmative.

Whatever truth you’re hiding from, no one can teach it to you. You must look at it yourself. You must find the courage to do so. The role of the guide/coach/teacher, then, is to bring you to the cliff and say, “perhaps you could look.” But actually peeking out over the cliff, into the abyss… that’s up to you. That is the heroic act.

And here too, in a passage from one of my favourite living authors, is true heroism. Fear is not something to escape, but something to befriend. How beautiful this framing is, how true. We are disempowered when we try to escape fear; we are empowered when we turn to face it.

Fear is a friend. Fear is an ally. Fear is a teacher. Fear is the gateway to wisdom: if you didn’t have the voice within you screaming “Don’t look in the abyss!!” then nothing would be gained by looking. Fear is necessary.

The question for you, then, is: what kind of relationship do you want to have with your fear?

Do you want to squirm and try to scurry away from it? Or do you want to welcome it in, offer it tea, and help it transform into something else? Do you want to wage a war you cannot win, or do you want to enter into a collaboration?

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in transforming your relationship to your fear, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

I recently received a question from a follower which I think will resonate with a lot of people:

For the past few years, I've been struggling with grinding/discipline based productivity. I get productive for a few days, stick to habits, stop scrolling, etc and then eventually, I just get a really strong "ugh" feeling of aversion to sticking with the habit, or continuing to stay off youtube. Like I just REALLY don't feel like sticking to it. In the past, I've tried noticing how it feels, but that urge still stays and eventually I have a really unproductive couple of days where I stay up late, feel terrible (like revenge procrastination?).

I'm interested in "do whatever you want & notice how it feels", but when I follow that, I end up staying up late and scrolling a lot. It feels good at first, and then eventually it feels bad. I can sort of feel in my body that it feels bad to scroll, but I still keep doing it, maybe out of inertia? Similarly, doing productive things, like studying, running, or writing sometimes feel pretty good in my body, but especially if I try too hard to like doing something, I get that "ugh, I don't wanna" feeling.

I also think focusing attention on my body when I don't want to makes me think of meditation as a chore. I like "do nothing" "meditation", and also just increasing self-acceptance and love, so I'd like to do more of that whenever I feel like it. Also considering "doing anything I want except scrolling".

Do you have any advice?

So, there's two things present here. There's inertia in what we might call bad habits, doing something that feels good at first but eventually feels bad. In the moment, we’re aware of that bad feeling creeping on, but we continue to engage in the activity. There’s awareness of the felt experience, awareness that the felt experience is negative, yet continuing to act in that direction.

On the other side, there’s resistance to positive habits. Knowing that things will eventually make us feel good and yet there's this block to starting that process, to start studying, to start running, to start writing. And paradoxically, the more that this person tries hard, the more resistance they feel. This is really well articulated and it hits on something that comes up a lot with my clients, which is:

“Okay, if I follow my intuition, if I follow what feels good, follow what feels good for me, I won't do anything. I'll just laze around. I'll just watch Netflix all day. I'll just play video games all day. If I do what I intuitively want to do, then I'll fall into bad habits.”

On the surface, this conclusion seems true. We seem to be drawn towards activities that take less energy, even if our soul yearns to engage in more energetic pursuits. So how can we reduce the pull of the bad and increase our desire for the good?

bad habits & aversion

Let's start with the bad habits. The first thing we want to ask is, why are you continuing to scroll, even when it starts to feel negative? Why are you continuing to do something that feels bad? There must be a reason there.

This is going to depend on the individual, but that reason is often avoidance: avoidance of a particular feeling or sensation. What gets really tricky is sometimes it's avoidance of shame. If I'm scrolling on TikTok and it's starting to feel bad, and I know it's feeling bad, and I'm also starting to feel this creeping shame… as long as I stay on TikTok, there's a distraction from that shame. Even if I’m aware of that feeling, I don’t have to fully feel it.

As soon as I get off TikTok, then I'm left with that feeling of, “oh, I wish I didn't do that.” So I'm actually motivated to spend more time on TikTok because I don't want to encounter that shame, and I know it's coming. If that's the case, then the answer is pretty clear. If we remove the shame around that, then when I get sick of TikTok, there's no reason to stay on it. There’s no reason to not just stop there.

But, of course, it might not be about shame. Maybe it's about something else. Maybe there's a fear of getting overwhelmed. Maybe there's a fear of being bored. And I'm using TikTok, or whatever the bad habit is, to escape that feeling.

We need to apply this curiosity of: if I am continuing to do something bad that feels bad, what is the thing that I am avoiding? Why is this “bad feeling” my preference? What other feeling am I trying to avoid?

Once we get clear on that, then we can come up with a strategy for decreasing the intensity of what we’re trying to avoid, which will make the escapism less necessary.

For example, if I’m avoiding shame, then the answer might be to totally de-shame the activity, to encourage myself to spend as long as I want on TikTok. If I’m avoiding anxiety, then we can investigate where that anxiety is coming from, and work on that. The idea here is to always go a level deeper, past the “I’m doing a thing that is bad” and into the territory of “I am trying to escape something worse.”

procrastination & good habits

Now we go to the other side of things: the good habits. I know logically that running is good for me. I will feel good if I go for a run. But there is resistance to that. So where does that resistance come from?

Again, this is going to depend on the individual, but I'm going to go into an analysis here based on what I see happening in this answer, which is that “ugh, I don't wanna” feeling that he named.

That feeling is about resistance to confinement. Nassim Taleb has this great line that “procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.” The “I don’t wanna” feeling is a part of us saying, “fuck you, I don't want to keep doing what you've been telling me to do.”

That's the anger of asserting unmet desires. The question to ask here is, “what are the desires that aren't being met?” Why does part of my soul feel confined, feel entrapped by the idea of going for a run?

Maybe the answer is there is that I actually don't like running that much. Maybe I would rather be doing some other form of exercise. Or maybe I've been pushing myself really hard this week, I haven't been giving myself space to relax.

Part of me is sick of that. Part of me is objecting to working so hard without rest. That comes from a benevolent place. It’s a part of me saying, “hey, I feel like we are being pushed too hard, which is going to have negative consequences… Therefore, I'm going to rebel against doing another thing.”

Through curiosity, we can bring that internal conflict from the subconscious to the conscious. Once that's in our conscious mind, once we recognize what's happening within us, then we can come up with a strategy, through dialogue.

Maybe I can say, hey, let's go for a run today and we'll take tomorrow off. Maybe that's enough. Or maybe it's, okay, hey, let's go for a walk, and if we feel like running, then we’ll start running. Or, let's run for as long as it feels good and then walk back.

Now we're engaging in dialogue with ourselves. Now we're recognizing our desires. Now we're making space. There's no entrapment. There's no forcing. There's just dialogue. There's just engagement. There's just curious, loving attention.

the dictator & the caretaker

Our best path forward is to understand ourselves at a deep level, acknowledge all our desires, and work to find a compromise through dialogue between the competing parts of us. Yet some people want to avoid that dialogue. They want to have perfect control over themselves. They want to be the dictator of their own behavior.

I know that place well. I lived there for most of my 20’s. Sometimes it works, sometimes it produces results. But over the long-term, it seems to produce more internal tension, conflict, subconscious rebellion, and self-sabotage. A dictatorial regime is never stable; it requires ever more fear & rigidity to stay in control.

Nor is the path to just surrender to our every whim. We still want to use our discernment, to think carefully about our choices, to nudge ourselves in a positive direction. But that is the energy of the caretaker, not the dictator. We want to lead ourselves through trust, curiosity, and understanding.

I wrote a tweet recently about how in any moment, you’re either building trust with yourself or you’re fighting yourself. The latter is the path of the dictator. The former is the way of the caretaker. The choice is yours.

For me, being a thriving human means being in constant dialogue with yourself, being in constant conversation, making compromises along the way. That’s how you build consistency. That's how you build joy. That's how you build alignment through that conversation.

And it all starts with curiosity.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in choosing more productive habits, DM me on Twitter or Instagram, or click here. 🏹

You can also submit your own question here.

I’m continuing to tinker with the format of this newsletter, as I search for a structure that feels both energizing for me and valuable to you. Of course, part of me rejects that whole process, and thinks I should have magically figured it out by now, or just commit to what was working, or stop posting until I have something perfect…

We can recognize this as the Inner Critic part, who would prefer that I never do anything to risk criticism, ever, for the rest of my life. As I’ve spoken about before, my task is to welcome that Inner Critic into the process. My task is to let him know that I hear him, that he’s welcome here, but also we’re going to keep taking this iterative approach, thank you very much.

I like to think of the Inner Critic as a little kid version of me, who’s sitting beside me, watching me work. “Don’t do that!” he yells. I tell him I hear him, I’ve got it, he can trust me. And then he gets to watch as I continue to risk & receive criticism and judgement… and everything is fine. The world keeps turning; my heart keeps beating. Through direct experience, he learns that fumbling around in public is safe. That’s the important thing, even more so than writing a good newsletter.

But also, here’s the newsletter: a collection of words that resonated with me this week, and a few thoughts to go along with them.

the repudiation of the bud

In your subconscious mind, you have a certain identify, the concept of Who You Are. Inevitably, there’s some attachment to that identity, because it’s been trying to keep you safe… and it’s been successful, based on the fact that you’re still alive. So your subconscious is going to be unwilling to let that identity go. There’s going to be some clinging, some resistance to change.

Your next identity is the fulfillment of your current identity, but also its repudiation. The best way to accelerate that transition is through appreciation (the good old currency of the universe). The more you celebrate both your current identity and what’s emerging within you, the safer your body will feel. The more joy you cultivate around your shape-shifting, the more relaxation you’ll bring into your subconscious.

When we celebrate change, we amplify it. When we try to force change to happen, we stultify it. Celebrate both who you are and who you’re becoming.

the liberation of limitations

I love this framing of commitment. It’s easy to get scared of commitment because what if we choose the wrong option? What if we commit to the wrong thing? What if there’s something better?

But the opportunity here is to realize that commitment allows us to release that wondering. When we commit, we set the intention to release that questioning. That’s not aways an overnight process, but it’s a beautiful intention, because it frees up our energy for other pursuits.

My X account only started gaining traction in the beginning of last year, and since then, I’ve noticed something interesting. The most intense hate that I’ve received has come from small accounts, usually under 100 followers. Bigger accounts will disagree with me sometimes, but almost always in a respectful way. (And actually, the exceptions to that “almost always respectful” came from big anonymous accounts, where there wasn’t a real name/photo attached.)

Writing a few tweets isn’t too remarkable, in of itself, but you see a similar pattern in other fields. Wannabe writers will post brutal reviews of popular fiction… but published authors tend to praise each other’s work. Why? They know how hard it is to make something, anything. Just to complete a novel is an enormous feat.

Until we say yes to our life’s adventure, we won’t fully understand the difficulty and joy of the journey. Our ego will want to quell our internal sense of FOMO, and as a result we’ll want to keep others “in their place.” Our once-ferocious creative energy will be channeled towards festering resentment.

So to become the most vibrant & creative version of ourselves, we need to ask this question, over and over: where am I refusing the call?

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in accepting the call of your life’s adventure, DM me on Twitter or Instagram, or click here. 🏹

Learn more about 1:1 coaching

In Buddhist thought, Mara represents everything that keeps the mind enslaved—fear, doubt, avoidance, anxiety, craving. After the Buddha attained enlightenment, Mara appeared, seeking to corrupt him.. As the Buddha sat beneath a bodhi tree, Mara summoned dramatic visions meant to instill fear & desire in his victim, including monsters, beautiful women, and the promise of transcendence.

Buddha’s response was simple: “I see you, Mara. Come, sit. Let us have tea.”

Unable to provoke the Buddha, Mara eventually departed.

Two millennia later, this idea of “inviting Mara to tea” shows up in modern inner work practices like Internal Family Systems. In IFS, we can visualize fear as a frozen part of you, old programming that’s no longer relevant. By relating to it with kindness and warmth—by inviting it to tea—we are able to transform it.

This approach is often the most effective path. Trying to reject or even destroy our fear usually backfires. When I’m feeling afraid, and I try to just think my way out of it (“I shouldn’t be afraid—I shouldn’t be afraid—I shouldn’t be afraid”), I usually end up introducing more fear and tension into my body. I become anxious about my anxiety.

But when we allow our fear to be here—when we notice it without judgement—then we introduce relaxation into our body. The fear is still present & unpleasant, but we’re not fighting against it. We can relax around it.

Instantly, our body feels safer. It’s a bit of a paradox, but our body starts to feel safe about the fear. We realize it’s okay to be afraid, which means there’s less to be afraid of, and… next thing you know, the core fear starts to dissipate.

Emotions are just signals. They want to be heard, acknowledged, and appreciated. They want to be invited to tea. Once that’s done—once they have the recognition, warmth, and love that they seek—then they’re able to settle down. Usually, they turn into something else, like joy, excitement, and calm.

The next time your fear is being particularly stubborn, ask yourself—what if I stopped trying so hard to fight it? What if I sat down with it, spent some time in its company? How might it feel after a warm cup of tea?

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in transforming your relationship to your fear, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

"But you must be ready for it. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: ‘As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.’"

— Joseph Campbell

The Greek god Dionysus is often depicted riding a leopard just as you and I might ride a horse, the leopard leering with wide eyes and gaping teeth. For Campbell, Dionysus is associated with wild & dangerous divine energy. He represents that same vibrant nature within ourselves, the manic rush that sometimes seizes us on the dance floor or in the midst of a creative project.

But Dionysus’ leopard is not tamed. She has not been made docile. This is not a relationship of “discipline”, of taking that wild energy and turning it into something “productive.” Rather, it is a relationship of cooperation and surrender. At any moment, the rider might be ripped to shreds. But that energy is what makes the relationship sacred.

In my own life, I’ve often tried to have it both ways. I wanted that ferocious aliveness, that generative zest for life, and I also wanted precise control. For me, this looked like:

• having an exciting idea for a novel and immediately trying to turn it into a balanced five-act structure, with a schedule for completing it

• enjoying the process of writing an essay and thus deciding to commit to writing one every few days

• finding a new workout routine that’s fun and trying to “optimize” it for maximum “impact”

In each case, I was trying to turn a leopard into a horse. I wanted to take that initial excitement—ephemeral, visceral, vibrant—and turn it into something controlled, tame, and fully within my grasp. I wanted certainty and direction, but in doing so I lost the spark of aliveness.

Iain McGilchrist, speaking of the Greek playwright Aeschylus:

Aeschylus was, then, a Dionysian; not just in the technical sense, but in the Nietzschean sense. His intuitive and imaginative art, ambiguous as himself, 'the ambiguous god of wine and death, came to him via divine inspiration, announced to him in his sleep, and was inextricably bound to the world of religion and its mysteries. As Sophocles said of him, 'Aeschylus does what is right without knowing it'.

How does it feel to imagine “doing what is right without knowing it”? Part of you likely finds that relaxing, but another part is probably protesting: “but how would I know?” How can I be certain of the outcome if I haven’t properly analyzed the path ahead? How can I live in ambiguity, when certainty is safety?

Well, the point is that it isn’t safe. It won’t feel totally safe, because the moment it does, you’re no longer riding the leopard. The tension is the point. What you give up in certainty, you gain in aliveness.

Riding the leopard doesn’t mean throwing all sense away in wild abandon. Rather, it means shifting our priorities. Rather than leading with our analytical minds, and trying to map out the path ahead, we lead with our intuition. We follow what makes us feel energized, enlarged, expansive, and we let our rational minds make small adjustments along the way. We trust. We surrender.

Today, how can you follow what feels most alive for you? How can you give that vibrance a little space, take the leopard out for a few laps, surrender just a bit more to that Dionysian energy? What does it feel like? What does it give you?

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like support in following what feels most alive for you, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

If I could sum up in one sentence my philosophy about the energetics of creative work, it would be this: “meet yourself with love and curiosity rather than fear and forcing.” It’s about creating the inner ecosystem that supports your best work, by allowing all that’s within you to reach its fullest, most beautiful expression.

But that’s easier said than done, so this week I explored specific strategies for doing so.

courage is not a switch you flip

If you could just decide to be more courageous, why haven’t you done so already? If you could just decide to have more agency, why didn’t you do so five years ago?

I don’t ask these questions from a place of shame, but rather as a prompt to look deeper. If courage & agency are not “decisions”, then where do they come from?

My answer, which I explored in the below essay, is that they’re a product of a loving relationship with uncertainty:

fear is an opportunity for curiosity

On a similar note, there’s lots of talk out there about “pushing past fear” and just forcing yourself to do the hard thing. Sometimes that works, but often it leads to stop-and-start movement; it’s like we’re pressing the gas and the brake at the same time.

A more effective & sustainable approach, in my experience, is to get curious about where the fear is coming from, and seeing if you can identify the root belief. If you can bring that into conscious awareness and hold it with compassion, things tend to shift.

More on that here:

scottdomes

A post shared by @scottdomes

you can just make a podcast?

I love audio content and have been wanting to make more of it, but it always felt like there were all these steps involved. Surely I had to get a nice microphone, and prepare a bunch of notes, and do a few rehearsals…

Nope. This week I sat down and recorded my first podcast on the Voice Memos app on my phone, and uploaded it straight to Patreon. All those extra “steps” were just my fear & doubt masquerading as necessity.

The podcast itself is about how we can identify those limiting beliefs (e.g. “I’m not ready”) and bring them into the creative process:

emotions are signals

This was my most popular tweet of the week. What you resist persists; where you allow expression, you get relaxation.

That’s all for this week. If you have a question for me, feel free to reply directly to this email; always love to hear from you.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’re an ambitious creative who’s looking for a more energizing relationship with your work, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

My definition of agency is being able to do the things you want to do. That’s it. There are some steps along the way—like figuring out what you actually want—but the core of agency is going from vision to action.

Most people think that taking bold action is about forcing yourself to do the thing. They think it’s about saying, hey, I want this, so I’m going to do it, and if any fear or resistance comes up along the way, I’m going to push past it. There’s a whole identity wrapped up in that: I am someone who pushes myself.

In this model, agency is a product of clarity + courage + decisiveness. And those last two are, according to the model, just things you can decide to have. You can just decide to be more courageous; you can decide to be more decisive. The thesis here is: if you want more agency, decide to have more agency.

However, if you look at your own history, this thesis doesn’t really seem to hold up. If you could just decide to be more courageous, why haven’t you done it already? If you could just decide to have more clarity about what you want, why haven’t you made that decision?

If we look at the evidence, it seems like “more agency” isn’t really something we can just will into existence.

We could maybe take the long-term view and say, if I am consistently courageous over time, then I will develop more and more agency. If I take baby steps here and there, I will move towards a more clear, decisive, and courageous version of myself. I think that’s true. But based on my own experience, I suspect there’s a way to accelerate your progress.

getting used to bold action

In the above model of “baby steps towards more agency”, what’s happening is the gradual habituation of your body to a scary experience. Taking action is frightening, and our nervous system’s reaction to that is to flee or hide. But by taking small doses of slightly uncomfy action, our system gets used to it, and we develop a tolerance to doing scary things.

I don’t think we can fully skip that habituation process. But I do think we can speed it up. The reason we can do that is because we can make fear itself a safe experience.

Sounds paradoxical, and in a way, it is, but it’s also very possible. But first, we need to understand the fear that’s keeping us from agency.

what’s stopping us

I would hypothesize that in the vast majority of cases, the thing that keeps us from agency, the thing that we are actually afraid of is: uncertainty.

Uncertainty means not knowing what’s going to happen as a result of our actions. That is, at a visceral level, terrifying. Your nervous system evolved with one primary goal: keep you alive, at all costs. Keeping you alive depends on being able to predict what’s going to happen. Certainty = predictability = safety.

(This is why people stay in miserable jobs and relationships and living situations: because predictable misery feels safer that unpredictable joy. This is a core aspect of the human condition. I spoke about this here.)

Not knowing the outcome of our actions is terrifying because what if it's the wrong thing? What if we make the wrong choice? If we make the wrong choice, what will the consequences be?

Even worse, if we make the wrong choice, what does that say about us? If I'm someone who makes the wrong choice, how am I ever going to make the right choice? If that’s my identity, I can't predict that things are ever going to get better.

So we’re terrified of both what might happen and what it might say about us. This is the dual threat of uncertainty.

let’s just wait & see

As a result of this fear of uncertainty, we wait. We try to wait until we have “enough” information to be certain of the result. If we’re certain of the result, then we know things are going to be okay, and we know we’re going to be the type of person who makes the right decisions. Both are deeply relaxing.

Our fear of uncertainty thus causes us to wait until we solve our fear of uncertainty. That’s the funny little loop.

Of course, the loop never completes. You never “cure” uncertainty. Yes, more information can be useful in swaying the probability, but absolute certainty is a myth. If you think you’re certain of what’s going to happen, you’re lying to yourself.

So how do we get out of the loop? We come back to the body. We realize that uncertainty is a felt experience.

the felt experience of uncertainty

The thing we're afraid of is a feeling in our body, the feeling of “I am a person who makes the wrong choices” or the feeling in our body of “I don’t know what’s goign to happen”. We are scared of a feeling.

And I’m not saying that like, oh yeah, it’s a feeling, you can push past it. “Oh it’s a feeling, it doesn’t matter.” No. It does matter. We can’t just push past it. But we can change our body’s reaction to that feeling.

Your body can get used to almost any feeling. There are limits to this, of course, but there is a lot more space than people think. I remember I once had a very long tattoo appointment, hours and hours. And in that appointment, I tried on this frame of mind that “any sensation can pleasurable”. I sat there, as the artist went to work on my arm, repeating to myself “any sensation can be pleasurable, any sensation can be pleasurable”.

Did it work? Yes, actually, for a long time. I was actually able to enjoy the sensation of being jabbed by the needle. Eventually my body wasn’t able to handle that anymore and it just became painful. But for a surprising amount of time, there was space to create a different experience. An objectively painful experience became subjectively enjoyable. So can we do that with uncertainty?

changing our relationship to uncertainty

To change our relationship with uncertainty, we need to get comfortable with it. What that looks like is really sitting in the fear. “Okay, let's say I have no idea what I'm doing. Let's say I have no evidence that things are going to be okay. What would that feel like for me?” And just really sit with that.

At first it's going to feel terrifying. Maybe it feels overwhelming. Maybe it's hard to access. You might try to squirm or flinch away from it.

But eventually you realize that it's okay. Even if we end up in that worst possible place where we have no faith, where everything's gone wrong, where we have no faith in our ability to make it right… it’s okay. There's a part of us that is still able to feel love, that is still able to feel connection to other things. We still feel connected to the world. We still have breath in our body.

Even in the worst possible outcome, the total loss of certainty and safety, we’re still able to feel a bit of love.

That sounds small, but it isn’t. That’s the most reassuring thing in the world for your body. Your body just wants to know that you’ll be okay. By giving it the experience of the total worst case scenario, and showing (not telling) your body that even then we’ll be okay, you assuage its deepest fear.

(For a step-by-step guide to sitting with your feelings, check out this post.)

Do that over and over again, and watch what happens to your agency.

It's not a perspective shift. I'm not saying “just ignore the terror”. It's more like, “you can be in the terror and also feel okay”. You can hold both of those things at once.

Once we can hold both of those things at once, then there's no reason not to act. We know that the experience we're afraid of isn't that scary, and our body recognizes that we’ll be safe even in the worst possible outcome. We have integrated a new capacity to act.

Your agency is constrained by your fear of uncertainty, but you can change your relationship to uncertainty by allowing your fear to come to the surface. The more you make friends with your fear, as an embodied experience, the greater your capacity to take bold action.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’re an ambitious creative who’s looking to boldly step into uncertainty & bring your vision to life, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

I’m starting to write more than ever and I thought I’d try sending out a weekly summary of the best of my work, rather than hitting your inbox with every single essay. As always, I appreciate you being a subscriber: your time & attention is not something I take lightly, and I’m so glad that you’re here.

reflections

1:

My definition of agency is very simple: being able to consistently do the things you want to do. But many of us hold off on doing those things, because we’re waiting until we can be certain of the outcome. Uncertainty keeps us stuck. Here’s what we can do about it:

The best way to feel safe in uncertainty is to change your relationship to it.

2:

For a long time, I had a serious block about posting video content on Instagram. Something about people from high school perceiving me. But this week, I finally did it, and talked a little about working with your inner critic:

scottdomes

A post shared by @scottdomes

3:

I also wrote an essay on how honest self-expression is necessary in order to experience true belonging, and described the main thing that gets in the way:

That’s all until next week. Let me know what you think about this format by replying to this email. Feel free to reply with any thought that pops into your head, as well. Would love to hear from you.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’re an ambitious creative who’s looking for a more energizing relationship with your work, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

There’s something revealing about the responses to “cringe” content. I’m thinking of the videos where someone is making really “bad” music, but doing it completely unironically and with a straight face. The comments in response always have this air of indignation to them. It’s not simply “this is bad, I don’t like it”, it’s more along the lines of “this is bad, how dare you do this?”

The implication seems to be that the cringe person has violated some rule, and as a result, they deserve to be mocked. There’s a moral equation there: “yes, this is what happens to people like you. This is what you get for putting yourself out there without sufficient self-awareness.”

The “violation” in question seems to be that lack of self-awareness. Something isn’t “cringe” if it’s consciously bad; it becomes cringe if the creator doesn’t seem aware that it’s bad. Contempt is the reward of the oblivious and naive.

Why is this important? Because it reveals the hidden script that many of us are following when it comes to self-expression.

what is self-awareness?

Again, the “rule” here is that if you are expressing yourself in a public way, you either need to be highly skilled or highly self-aware. To escape cringe, you need to own your own limitations.

But maybe you don’t care about your own limitations; maybe they don’t matter to you. Ah, now you’re in cringe territory. Even if they don’t matter to you, they matter to others, and that’s when it becomes embarrassing. You have to know you’re not good enough.

Self-awareness, in this sense, is the ability to predict how other people react. In this case, the commenters are saying “you failed to predict that people would find this bad, and failed to acknowledge that sufficiently, and thus it is cringe.”

If I post a video of me singing poorly, I might know I’m bad. But if I don’t demonstrate that awareness, I could be acting cringe. It’s not my perception that matters, but rather how I anticipate other people’s responses.

Again, let’s come back to the root belief: “you should be punished if you fail to predict how others will react to you.” Take a moment with that, see how that sits in your body. Does it feel true, to some extent? Does it feel right?

do you get to belong?

We can replace “punished” with “you should be criticized, you should be rejected, you should excluded.” All the same idea: your belonging to the group is contingent on your ability to predict other people’s responses.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. In any community, the ability to predict responses is super important. Someone who can’t do that properly risks offending or alienating other members. It makes sense that our subconscious would have an instinctive knee-jerk reaction to someone without self-awareness: they’re a threat to group cohesion.

But we live in the modern world, where there are infinite communities, and exclusion from one isn’t necessarily a threat (and can even be desirable). So what we actually want to do here is update our unconscious models, update the script that says appearing insufficiently self-aware is a threat.

finding your belonging

Honest self-expression is actually a great filter for finding your community, finding the people who naturally align with you. In a sense, we want to be cringe to the wrong communities, if it means being awesome to the right communities. But our psyches don’t like that very much.

What is tricky about that is surrendering any agenda. Honest self-expression has no agenda. It is self-fulfilling, self-justifying. You do it because there is something in you that wants to be expressed, and you want to see its most beautiful expression. That’s it. If the group likes it, great. If not, well, that wasn’t the point anyway.

honesty & resonance

Honest self-expression means we stop trying to manipulate other people’s perception of us. We just let them have their experience. And it’s important to acknowledge that this is a really really hard thing to do. Our nervous system does not like it. It wants control; it wants to control our access to belonging.

But real belonging, the kind that matters, doesn’t come from manipulation. It comes from resonance. It comes from how our energy naturally draws certain people towards us. The best way to encourage that is to show up as honestly and as boldly as we can.

Yes, we may still want to entertain and delight and please others. But ideally that comes from an honest desire, rather than a fearful attempt at controlling their perceptions. Ideally we create from a place of love, not a place of fear.

It’s not about purposefully being cringe (though that can help). It’s more about giving up the underlying agenda. Letting self-expression be for self-expression’s sake, and then seeing what happens. Do I like the way I expressed myself? Would I like it to be different? How can I make it even better?

And then allowing that process, over time, to lead to the accumulation of belonging: the kind we can trust, the kind that makes us truly feel at home, the kind we’ve always been seeking. We just had to stop trying to grasp it.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. I posted my first reel on Instagram (ahhh, cringe!) talking through my relationship to my own inner critic. Here it is:

scottdomes

A post shared by @scottdomes

P.P.S. if you’d like to explore your own relationship to bold self-expression, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊

What your body craves most is safety. Not just safety in the here and now, in the present, but permanent safety. It is what our biology is wired to seek: paradise on earth, freedom from any danger, a secure abundance.

What your nervous system craves most is predictability. Many a self-help commentator has declared war on “the comfort zone”, but there’s a reason we sink back into our old patterns at every opportunity. Even if those routine dynamics aren’t actually good for us, even if they’re actively hurting our physical and mental health, they’re alluring because our brain knows what’s going to happen. Predictability means we know how to respond, and knowing how to respond means we’ll know how to survive.

What we are seeking is certainty. We are always seeking it, consciously or not. Certainty means we know how to be safe. In a funny way, our minds even seem to prefer unsafe certainty over uncertainty; when you’re awaiting disaster, there’s always that sense of “I just want to know what’s going to happen, even if it’s bad.” Certainty is a form of psychic safety, and our minds seem to prefer it even to physical safety.

As a result, the desire for certainty contorts our lives. We stay in boring, stable jobs, even as they eat away at our souls. We stay in tumultuous, unsatisfying relationships. We shy away at starting that bold new creative project, even though we so desperately want to, because it means stepping into unfamiliar terrain. We choose certainty because it feels necessary to survive, and in doing so we fail to thrive.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In my own inner work and my work with clients, I’ve learned two things about certainty: a) certainty is an illusion, and b) uncertainty doesn’t have to be scary.

certainty is an illusion

I’m pretty sure we all recognize this at some level: you never know what’s going to happen. Even if you’ve weighed all the variables, done thorough analysis, consulted with experts, mapped out every possibility… well, the map is not the territory. Reality is complex enough to defy any predictive ability. Alas.

Which means: pretending to be certain is just a way to feel safe. It’s a means to an end. When your mind/body thinks it “knows” what’s going to happen, that’s just a way for it to relax. And relaxation is good! We love relaxation. But it’s useful to have some awareness about that. We can say: “I am choosing to feel certain in order to relax” and use that to access the feelings we want. We can engage with the illusion, while recognizing it is an illusion.

We can also recognize when we’re chasing certainty, we’re chasing a ghost. So we can give that up. When you are overthinking potential bad outcomes, take a moment to notice, “hey, I seem to be seeking certainty.” And then: “well, certainty is an illusion, so what feelings am I actually trying to access?” And then give yourself permission to feel those things. We don’t have to play the game. We can skip ahead to what we’re actually after: the feeling of relaxation in our body.

However, maybe you can’t accept that certainty is fake, or maybe you want to, but your subconscious is resistant to that idea. Totally normal, because by default, uncertainty seems terrifying. But it doesn’t have to be.

uncertainty doesn’t have to be scary

One of my clients is working to release old beliefs that keep her safe but stuck. She described what was on the other side of those beliefs as a sense of “freefall”, of plummeting into a dark abyss with nothing to catch her. This is what uncertainty feels like for most of us.

But uncertainty is actually the most creative space in the universe. Uncertainty is where anything can happen, where your experience isn’t limited by what your imagination can predict. Uncertainty is where the world can surprise you, where you can surprise yourself. Uncertainty is where transformation happens, and where real art emerges. Uncertainty is the seedbed of creation.

We should love uncertainty, because it’s the only place where we can be surprised by abundance.

While you can likely recognize that at an intellectual level, it probably doesn’t yet feel true; your subconscious is still craving predictability. That is because you’ve spent your whole life learning and reinforcing that predictable = safe. What we want to do is shift that process, and start to learn that uncertain = safe. The best way to do that is through experience.

The more experiences we have where uncertainty is not just exciting, but also rewarding, nourishing, abundant… the more our relationship to it will start to change. We’ll start to crave joyful uncertainty over depleting certainty. We’ll start to relinquish those heavy old beliefs that say, no, you need to be safe, you need to stay here. We’ll start to feel free and creative and collaborative with the universe itself. Rather than just seeking a safe place to sit, we’ll start to participate in the grand dance of creation.

This is a gradual process, of course. We need to start slow, by taking baby steps into uncertainty, playing at the edges of what feels comfortable. Ask yourself: today, how can you embrace a little more uncertainty into your life? That doesn’t mean changing up your routine (though it might), it might just mean recognizing the places where you already don’t know what’s going to happen. And then notice how that feels in your body, see if you can connect with a trace, a tiny seed of excitement, and let that get a little bit bigger.

Because while our body crave the safety of certainty, our souls already recognize the truth of things, and crave the freedom that comes from embracing that truth: that uncertainty is where you have always lived, and where you have always been safe.

With love & appreciation,

Scott

P.S. if you’d like to help exploring your own relationship to uncertainty, check out my 1:1 coaching. 🍊