Reflexivity — The Missing Part of the Success Puzzle?
Reflexivity (noun; /rɪ.fleksˈɪv.ə.ti)
The fact of someone being able to examine his or her own feelings, reactions and motives (= reasons for acting) and how these influence what he or she does or thinks in a situation
Cambridge dictionary
A guilty pleasure in our family is to watch ‘Total Wipeout’ on YouTube. This gameshow pits competitors on a water-based obstacle course and those who complete each round in the fastest time proceed to the next. After 3 or 4 obstacle courses a final three enter the ultimate course for glory. The programme is slapstick and light-hearted, and we usually get caught up in the competition and love backing our favourite characters.
One phenomenon that we often see is that a particular obstacle will thwart all of the contestants repeatedly, and it seems at first impossible. Many minutes will pass with no contestant achieving even a modicum of success, and they start to tire. Then suddenly, one person miraculously makes it across, and once that happens, the floodgates open and contestant after contestant completes the section in quick succession.
Why?
It is the 6th May 1954, crowds have gathered on a damp and blustery day to watch a 25 year old medical student run a mile along the Iffley Road running track in Oxford. As Norris McWhirter announces: “The time was 3…” noting the athlete’s finishing time, the crowds’ excited cheers drown out the end of his sentence. This was the extraordinary accomplishment of Roger Bannister’s sub 4 minute mile. Although Bannister had only been able to train minimally around his clinical rotations at St Mary’s Hospital, he was the first to achieve this astounding physical feat. But, whilst Roger Bannister was the first to do it, he held the record for a mere 46 days. Records of one mile running times had been kept since 1850 when the first precise running tracks were built. It took 100 years for this physical accomplishment to be achieved. Yet why then had something previously unimaginable been so rapidly beaten?
Because more than breaking a physical record, he shattered a mental obstacle.
“It became a symbol of attempting a challenge in the physical world of something hitherto thought impossible.
I’d like to see it as a metaphor not only for sport, but for life and seeking challenges.”
-Roger Bannister in the approach to the 50th anniversary of his achievement.
Most of us have ideas of what we would like to do in life, how we would like life to be and some kind of vision for the future that we are aiming to get to. This approach to life is almost universal. It has, however what we call in medicine a ‘narrow therapeutic window’. If we were talking about a drug this would mean that at dose A it is ineffective, at the higher dose B it is toxic, but the difference between A and B (the dose at which it is therapeutic) is very small.
In life, what this means is that the best way to envision our future is pretty much moment to moment. This sounds crazy, but I will explain why.
Have you ever sat eating your breakfast and thought ‘Today I have got to do A, and oh my God, B is overdue, and if I don’t do C today there’s going to be trouble….’ and so on. In other words, creating a heap of all that needs doing into one big pile appears overwhelming. Instead you decide to have another coffee and stretch the day with one thing or another and put off jobs A, B and C to another day when they are joined by jobs D, E and F and suddenly you feel like a constant failure. We all encounter this sometimes, and it is obvious with a list of jobs, and eventually some fall by the wayside and we realise they weren’t that important, and others you scrape in on time (or slightly overdue!), and its all ok in the end.
But what if you do this with the bigger picture? What if you never feel like you’re getting anywhere in life and you have no real bigger purpose? Every time you create space and time to achieve something more, you are paralysed by indecision and overwhelmed by where to start. So you feel like you never get anywhere?
If you project too far into the future you can become overwhelmed, and stop before you even start.
At the other end of the spectrum, never stepping back to reflect can also limit you from exploring your creative potential.
This is where Reflexivity comes in.
We don’t always realise it, but much of what defeats us is not a lack of time, resources, opportunity or support, but in fact our own self talk. Of course life’s circumstances do come into play, but these are often less disabling than the subtle and automatic thoughts that stop us from achieving what we really want in life. In fact that process is so frequent, subtle and automatic that most of us aren’t even aware that we do this to ourselves, but consider the following:
Have you ever met someone who has achieved something you think you would like to do? For example they are an amateur artist and have displayed their art in a local gallery, or you go to someone’s house and find out they have built a treehouse in the garden for their kids after looking up how to online. They DO things. Suddenly you feel like it is achievable and you are inspired to put those subtle goals that you have shifted to the background back to the foreground. Like Roger Bannister’s peers and the contestants in Total Wipeout, a goal becomes something visibly achievable to someone comparable to you. You mind has stopped telling you quietly in the background that this is NOT achievable.
So we understand that there is an unconscious level of thought in the background that we are often unaware of that dissuades us from achieving what we want, most usually because it thinks that it is too big an undertaking, or that we lack the skills, time or resources. We have these thoughts so automatically that we are often not even aware of them, but the outcome is that we don’t achieve our full potential.
What do we do about it?
1) Bring the self-defeating thought into the forefront of your mind.
Imagine you have a spider phobia. You see a spider. It elicits the feeling of fear. You run away. You can no longer see the spider. You feel better. This polarised feeling — fear in the presence of the spider, contrasting with relief and calm at the absence of the spider, cements the negative thought; you start to believe that the spider is the cause of your fear rather than your thoughts about the spider. It happens so rapidly that you can’t separate the spider from the thought about the spider.
One of the tenets of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is to become aware of your negative automatic thoughts. If you have a spider phobia for example you might use CBT to examine the thought and and get to the root of it. The thought may be ‘I am afraid of spiders because they move quickly and they could lay eggs in my ears if I don’t run away’. Once you lay out the thought in full sight you can start to challenge it. For example by saying ‘in reality this has never happened to me or anyone I know’, ‘My ears would be an inhospitable place for a spider to lay their eggs’. This may seem like a weak weapon in the face of all of the emotion, but it is actually quite powerful. And it works for a lot more than just phobias.
If we apply this to achieving what we want in life we don’t have to wait for that inspiring person to come along and challenge our view of what it achievable. We just have to bring our own automatic thought about our limitations to the foreground. This may be ‘I have so much housework to do that I don’t have time to focus on my bigger goals’. If we dissect this we could change it to ‘I don’t actually spend every waking hour doing housework, so I could find 30 minutes per day to contemplate my larger goals which is more than I spend now and will add up over weeks and months.’
2) Remember, every journey starts with a single step.
Start small. It’s much better than not starting at all.
Behaviour change is not necessarily about aiming high, but aiming to be consistent.
In fact, by setting ourselves a very small task we start to carve out the time, space and place for bigger steps.
This means that many of the barriers we face in making any positive action become a part of our habitual activity is overcome by simply creating a small routine that can become expanded.
3) Learn to love the process and forget about the outcome.
In all we do there will be a period when we do not see much in the way of results. But if we focus on enjoying the process then however long it takes becomes immaterial.
Cultivating the habit of telling yourself that each positive action is an opportunity will work on a subconscious level to reap results. So for example, substituting ‘I get to (eg. go for a run)’ versus ‘I have to (eg. eat more veg)’ reduces barriers to change.
And bear in mind, that in the background change will be happening.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as
much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first
blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last
blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
- Jacob A Riis
4) Increase present moment awareness.
We are usually at least one thought away from the actual moment that we exist in.
What I mean by that is we are usually thinking — about the future (eg planning, hoping, worrying), or about the past (regret, nostalgia). It is another habit which is so commonplace we don’t even notice it. And if we do, we don’t even realise how poorly it serves us.
Practicing present moment awareness allows us to open up and bask in this moment. It helps us to stop worrying and know we can (and do) deal with whatever we are facing, and do it more effectively.
There are numerous ways to improve present moment awareness, including meditation, writing a daily gratitude journal, most creative pursuits like painting or playing music, or being out in nature.
5) Be kind to yourself.
You probably would never discourage a friend the way you quietly undermine yourself. Once you know you are doing this, be your own best friend. Bask in your positive attitude even if it brings no immediate reward — at least the punishing self criticism has been quietened- and that is no small achievement in improving your quality of life.
