Enough Is Enough?

"Enough is enough" is an expression known more for its "I am outta here" reference than anything else. But the truth is, it is a part of an important question that many people do not ask themselves...uh...enough. When is enough enough?

When I got my first professional job at the age of 23 I was given $16,000 a year. At the time, I told my mother that this meant I was finally being paid enough to never have to worry about money ever again. Yep, I actually said that. And I believed it. She chuckled and told me in the most gentle, but knowing tone, "Honey, it's never going to be enough".

"What an idiot," I thought.
Innocence is bliss.

Now that I have lost my innocence, I am left with the question, "What is enough?"

As a professional, I am poignantly asked by wives who have less than ideal marriages, "Am I stupid for staying with this man?" I am asked the same question by men, but not as often for a variety of reasons. And my statement to them is always the "golden question" in my mind: "Well, you have to ask yourself, 'what is enough?'" This is an important question, and interestingly, the answer changes through our life phases. In the our early phases we all expected to be millionaires, or marry one, and stay beautiful for the rest of our lives. We all expected to be celebrities in our communities and respected by all. We were all going to marry the most beautiful wife or husband---with a full head of hair and the perfect body, get the perfect job, gain much professional acclaim, and don't forget the perfect, loving, and beautiful children...and live happily ever after.

Not.

Then, hopefully, we all had to ask ourselves an important question: "What is enough?" For those of you younger than thirty-nine, relax, the crushing blow of that question is not relevant to you. I ask the troubled wives/husbands I see, "What if what you believed was your God-given right in the past is no longer necessary?" Things like: my right to a husband/wife with a perfect body, or my right to be or marry a millionaire, or the perfect job, or my right to perfect and never ending sex, or wonderfully behaved, hard working children, or maybe even my simple right to an affectionate, demonstrably loving partner. What if, grand as those wishes were in the past, I've truly found in my seemingly imperfect life---enough?

I think when we were young and had these images of what we wanted out of life, we had no reason not to expect them to come true. Why shouldn't they come true, that is what we wanted after all. It is only later that many of us find that many of those images we had of our future might not pan out at all or they just change over time. They change because of the unexpected events in our lives. They change because others didn't act like we expected, and they change because life deals us some unexpected cards. Sometimes the images changed because we actually attained and lived them and they were not as great as we thought they would be. Sometimes they change because we unexpectedly found something better, something we never even thought would be life changing in the first place, like children.

So what if, after a period of time (usually after thirty-five or so), we look around at what we have in our lives, our family, our partners/spouses, our children, our jobs and say "maybe this is enough." What if this seemingly imperfect life is all I need...it's not actually settling for too little...maybe somewhat less that I originally wanted or envisioned, but finding that what I do have right now is truly enough for who I have become in life.

There is a quote from the movie, "Still Bill". It tells the story of Bill Withers who took himself out of "the game" right as he became world famous for his songs like "Lean on Me" and "Ain't No Sunshine." He said, "It's okay to head out for Wonderful, but on your way to Wonderful you're going to have to pass through all right. And when you get to all right, take a look around and get used to it 'cause that may be as far as you are going to go."

Sometimes all right is enough.

What Is Heart Development?

My Last Blog entry has prompted several inquiries into what I meant by heart development as a method of developing courage and humility. I can sum up the last blog by saying I did not think the field of Psychology would be truly advanced by any new theories of neuroses. I may be wrong here due to a lack of vision or imagination, but I believe that the only genuinely important advancements would have be in the area of personal change and would need to involve methods of changing one's conscious behaviors. As in the field of medicine, diagnosis without cure is useless. It might be interesting to understand the workings of a particular neurosis or pathology, but without an applicable solution, it would still be useless. I suggested that heart development/awakening (achieving a "Braveheart") was the most straightforward way to prepare an individual to have the courage and humility to take on the difficult task of deep personal change so I want to explain the concept of heart development in a practical way.

Most of my Executive Coaching sessions are very problem focused: Here is my problem, how do I fix it? The next level of work is: "is this going to happen again if I do not change something about myself?" If the answer is "yes" then the next level of work appears. This is usually as far as work goes for people looking for Executive Coaching. Clients seeking Personal Coaching, looking at personal and relationship issues, are usually more open to exploring the deeper issues around one's life and the root causes of them. Heart development is the conscious work on building a strong foundation in oneself that allows courageous mastery of emotion in one's life. It is the mastery of emotion that determines the flexibility, presence, and quality of relationship we experience with everything/everyone in our life. The quality of the level of your emotional mastery determines the quality of your life. Emotional Mastery is attained through Heart development/awakening.

So what would this look like? The good news is that I will not be writing some book in the future entitled, "Seven Easy Steps to a Brave Heart," though that is what everyone does these days to get rich. This work is uniquely individual and everyone works at different levels with different areas of their life to begin doing this work. Developing/awakening one's heart is extremely personal and vulnerable and deserves more care and attention than some "easy steps" because it is NOT easy. That is why I said it takes a brave heart to develop a brave heart. So what would this work look like behaviorally? I have to admit, explaining this is much harder than you would think because we have such few models out there to show us what it looks like. At the feeling level, it would be the moment in one's life when the emotion running through you is not frightening at all and you feel a simultaneous sense of both absolute confidence and vulnerability. It is a feeling of both fullness and emptiness, a sense in that moment of both wonder and knowing. The closest most people get to this is when they feel a rush of adrenaline, but that is the power feeling without the simultaneous vulnerability. Again describing this often turns discussion to poetry, but that is why it is so elusive: the more practically you describe it the more mundane it appears and the more descriptively you describe it the more paradoxical it seems.

Here is a quick behavioral way to test where you are or are not in heart development and emotional mastery:

1) How often do you verbalize your heart-felt, genuine love to your wife/husband/partner? To your children? To your friends? How often are you physically affectionate with your loved ones and family?
2) How often do you express vulnerability to your loved ones such as expressions of Fear, Worry, Weakness? How often do you apologize when you are wrong? How often can you identify making a mistake before being told?
3) How often can you express your positive feelings to loved ones and friends or express your difficult feelings with people without blame or judgement?
4) How often can you show tears to people? Do you feel comfortable crying in front of your loved ones or family? How about strangers or in movie theatres?
5) How often are you honest with people in a caring way?
6) How often are you genuinely interested in what others are telling you about their lives?
7) How often are you genuinely joyous over other people's good fortune in their lives? How often do you give positive compliments to people or give positive acclaim about their achievements?
8) How often do you make it important to make others feel safe (socially or physically) in your presence?
9) How often are you able to give genuine forgiveness to those who have hurt you or your loved ones?

People who have greatly developed their hearts, those few Bravehearts out there, do all of these things regularly and often. It is not a complete list of course, but it is a easy guide to what heart development would look like in someone else's behavior. I chose these examples because they relate to everyone and they demand the most courage and humility to accomplish. As you can see, emotional mastery involves the use of one's personal emotions and the awareness of other's emotional needs to build and strengthen all relationships. Emotional mastery, then, is not, as is commonly thought, the use of the intellect to overcome emotion, it is the use of emotions themselves to empower oneself and others. That can only be accomplished by individual work on heart development.

Growth And Change: Any Advancements?

Someone recently asked me what the "next big thing" in the advancement of Psychotherapy or Personal Change will be. It was an interesting question because in all of the sciences the forward thinkers are constantly thinking of the "next big advancement" so they can invest in their foreseeable future. The first thing that immediately came to mind for the field of Psychology was the mapping of the brain. Once we can map the brain (in progress as we speak) in a way that whatever we think can be recorded on a screen, allowing us to literally "read" people's mind when we ask them questions, we will have a huge advancement in psychological knowledge because we will finally know what people truthfully think, do, and believe in their lives. But that would only allow us to know what "is" in people and would not advance people's ability to change their thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

If we are to truly advance the field of Psychology, it would seem that it would have to involve something that would help people change the things in their lives that cause them and others problems. Psychological theories about behavior are fine for academia, but they do not ultimately help a person change their dysfunctional behaviors and thinking. As I see it, the two main keys to making changes in one's life are Courage and Humility. Courage is needed to allow a new vision of one's self and life and make the psycho/behavioral changes necessary to attain it (change is one of the most fearful things imaginable---ask any manager who has had to implement a company change.) Humility is needed to first allow that something we are doing is wrong and needs change (many people fight for their lives to keep their way the RIGHT way) and then to allow someone to help facilitate the change (receiving from others is actually more difficult for most people than giving.) It would follow then from this reasoning that anything that would effortlessly boost Courage and Humility would be the next big advancement in the field of Psychotherapy.

Of course the converse corollary would also be true so that anything that could effortlessly decrease Fear and Pride would have a similar effect. Any advance that could boost one pair (Courage and Humility) and/or decrease another (Fear and Pride) and personal and collective change could be much, much easier. Got any ideas? Yea, neither do I.

So we are left with the conundrum of the ages, how do we boost Courage and Humility and lessen Fear and Pride? The obvious answer is heart development/awakening, building a genuine individual "Braveheart" for oneself. With a "Braveheart" all things are possible, but you have to deal with a paradox to accomplish it: You have to have a Braveheart to attempt the building of a Braveheart. The work is initially too vulnerable and frightening without one which is why strong-heartedness is so rarely seen these days. If only there were some advancement that could make the whole process easier.

But maybe that is the point. There is no advancement that is going to make personal change/growth easier because attaining a "Braveheart" is such a rare and powerful feat that only the strongest get the prize. And only through the vulnerable and humiliating efforts made to accomplish it can we attain it. Change is not meant to be easy, and bravery is not attained through weakness. That is what makes a "Braveheart" so rare and valuable.