Change your instincts
One of the funniest lines in the mockumentary Waiting for Guffman is when the character Sheila says of her husband and acting partner, “He’s teaching me to change my insincts . . . or at least ignore them.”
But actually, there can be a lot of power in changing, or at least ignoring, our instincts. Because instincts—fixed patterns of innate impulses—are where our unconscious beliefs show up and shape our lives, often in harmful ways.
Approaching change from the direction of thoughts and the emotions they cause is certainly profitable, but sometimes moving from an unconscious value to a conscious one takes more than a new thought. Or rather, we need some data in order to actually believe that new thought. The kind of valuable data that is lived experience.
Let’s return to my dishes example from the previous post, where I talked about receiving a message from myself that one of my conscious values was starting the day in a peaceful space. I had a new thought about cleaning up every night—it was worth doing not just for its own sake but because it meant something deeper to me as a parent.
That great, but it didn’t mean that I started doing the dishes every night.
Because sometimes—many times—other feelings were stronger than this parenting-related desire. Feelings like burn out, overwhelm, sadness, or boredom. And when left to following my instincts, I (like most humans) will choose to react to negative feelings much sooner than I will act on positive ones.
So I started ignoring that instinct by making a commitment to doing the dishes every night no matter how I was feeling.
How did this suddenly become possible?
It wasn’t willpower. It was faith.
Faith that in the long term, consistent action toward this value would bring me deep satisfaction and faith that in the short term that I could handle any emotion.
It was accepting that I could feel burn out, overwhelm, sadness, and boredom and not to do anything about it. It wasn’t until I stopped automatically reacting to those feelings in an effort to get rid of them that I realized I could simply accept them without judgment and feel them all the way through while I did whatever the hell I wanted.
Arms shaking after the gym? Yep. Do the dishes. Worried about finishing work hours and getting up in time for early-morning choir the next day? Yep. Do the dishes. All PMS weepy about Life in General? Yep. Do the dishes. Burned out from every minute of the day being scheduled? Yep. Do the dishes. Bored from a monotonous task at work and driving kids around? Yep. Do the dishes.
When I stood at my sink and chose my conscious value again and again while feeling all of these things, something miraculous happened.
I became a lot less scared of emotions because I stopped letting them make me do things.
Leaving from an orderly kitchen each morning now is heavenly, but more important is the power I have gained. I went from thinking I could only show up as the kind off mom I wanted to be if I was in the right mood to knowing that I get to be that mom as often as I choose to be, regardless of external circumstances or my internal landscape.
Which doesn’t, to be clear, mean that I choose it every time the choice arises. (And I don’t beat myself up when I don’t because I’m choosing to not live in that perfectionist trap.)
Committing to conscious values doesn’t guarantee perfection but it does guarantee choice.
Real choice, the kind you believe you always have the power to make and follow through on.
Since changing your instincts starts with ignoring them for a while, at first they’ll still be there, nagging at you, making you feel that the action you are committing to is plain old wrong. Change often feels wrong in the moment but once the long-term benefits start to add up, that data gets hard to ignore.
And then you start to notice that Oh heyyyy! The dishes actually only take 20 minutes at their worst. And that crappy feeling I have sometimes when I start them rarely lasts longer than four plates. And I can count on myself to give my kids a gift every morning that I care about.
The next thing that happens is you realize you can commit to anything you damn well please.
You’re the boss. You’re the decider. You get to create whatever you choose.