Jumping the Gap

Navigating the space between old and new behaviors

I vividly remember the feeling of euphoria, followed days later by creeping terror when the elation gave way to panic. The racing thoughts followed. “I can’t go back, but how do I function now?” With the best of intentions, I’d leapt into the void, and suddenly didn’t recognize how to operate something once very familiar – namely Me.

Photo by Joe Gardner on Unsplash

Context is in order. From an early age, my identity was wrapped up in being a “hard-working mother f***er,” a derisive nickname bestowed on me during an internship that I wore with perverse pride. Working intensely for long hours and scoffing at breaks was a big part of how I defined myself. On the outside, I appeared focused, ambitious, and successful. The story inside couldn’t have been more different.

Validation was the drug I constantly craved to temporarily soothe my ever-present fear. Fear of rejection, fear of being poor, fear of not being in control of my own life, and fear of someone seeing behind the curtain and glimpsing this flawed, unworthy shell of a human. To be rejected meant ceasing to exist (that’s how it felt in the pit in my stomach), which fueled me to chase success and validation with survival-instinct intensity. The addiction cycle of chasing money and accolades became an ingrained pattern for me attempting to outrun fear. Spoiler alert, this dependence on sprinting full-speed, hurtled me toward my breaking point.

At the ripe old age of 26, I was driven to the hospital with acute chest pains, certain I was having a heart attack. The diagnosis? The physical toll of constant stress, lack of sleep, and unrelentingly pushing myself led to my first panic attack.

That hospital visit was my first wakeup call. It spurred me to sporadically attend therapy, where I’d schedule a session feeling in crisis and then tell the therapist during my session that everything was fine. To her credit, my therapist pointed out this obvious incongruity. Begrudgingly, I began recognizing my tell-tale signs of stress and I became fascinated with the analogy of the carrot and the stick. What became evident was that I was all stick, no carrot. My motivation relied on a steady stream of invisible punishment from harsh internal criticism, supplemented by caffeine and adrenaline from intentionally aggressive deadlines. I finally admitted I was stuck in an unsustainable pattern that was going to subtract years from my life.

It took several years of inching toward the answer and retreating to old patterns. Finally, in my mid-30s (did I mention I’m not always a fast learner), the realization clicked that my life, ambition, and accomplishments were driven almost entirely by deep fears and my methods of motivating myself were causing extensive harm to me. I committed to setting down the stick forever.

Cue the marching band. Euphoria ensued.

I felt free of my self-inflicted abuse and breathed a deep sigh of relief.

I wish the story ended with “and he lived happily ever after”, but as my clever foreshadowing alluded, it did not.

The problem with unhealthy behaviors is they often provide the results we desire. We’ve all heard about the 10,00 Hour Mastery Rule, which is admittedly arbitrary and over simplistic. But it’s true that working intensely for 80 hours, rather than 40 hours, allows mastery in half the usual calendar time. The accolades and validation I was addicted to were legitimately earned, just at a very high cost. Unhealthy behaviors are honed over time to deliver the outcomes we want. The stick of self-criticism delivered intense focus and plenty of accomplishments, but with the cumulative effects of continually breathing the emotional carcinogen of self-loathing. Achieving results supports the illusion that we’re outrunning the fear, if only we can maintain the pace.

After dropping the stick approach, my euphoria was short-lived. It quickly became apparent that I was so focused on abandoning the stick that I hadn’t noticed my lack of experience using carrots. I didn’t know how to live my life without a constant, debilitating drive for more. I found myself asking questions like “Which carrots might motivate me?” “What if reaching a particular carrot needs a year or longer?” When you’ve spent your life relying on the immediacy of needing to impress people and fearing failure, the sudden absence is starkly demotivating. This is what I referred to as my “void”. I couldn’t go back to my old ways, but I wasn’t sure how to proceed with healthy motivation. So I froze. I struggled for weeks in the darkness of the void.

Human nature prioritizes stopping emotional pain. When we become aware of a source of pain, our focus narrows to quickly ending maladaptive behaviors and muting trauma responses. In my haste to stop my self-inflicted pain, I failed to consider what I needed on the other side of the gap – a fulfilling future without the stick.

The spinning wheels began gaining traction when I was fortunate enough to meet an insightful coach. She helped me identify ways to move beyond my void in healthy, sustainable ways by getting clarity on my values and updating my outdated labels. Through a series of values identification exercises I gained an understanding of what is most important to me and by extension, what underlies my purpose in the world.

Hint: if you’re struggling to create a comprehensive list of your top values, think about what triggers an immediate response of anger and indignation as that’s often an important value being stepped on.

The slower, more incremental work was identifying expired or detrimental labels that I was holding onto as part of my identity. Another insightful leadership coach shared the term “jet lag” with me. He used it in the context of me retaining labels that I’d long outgrown, but hadn’t left behind. Sometimes the shortest phrases like jet lag are the most helpful reminders because you can call upon them in an instant.

While working with coaches helped me, it is not the only way to navigate the void.

When I reflect on my process, these steps are what allowed me to keep moving forward when all I felt was uncertainty. Applying them can help you carve your path to a future of your choosing.

1. Expect a void when you break a pattern of behavior. Accepting that a gap is normal eases some of the tension while you leave old behaviors behind and practice new behaviors.

2. Prepare to face the underlying cause. Changing surface behavior without digging deep is like painting walls in a house with a broken foundation. It will get darker before it gets lighter, but simply acknowledging this will help you persevere when things get bumpy.

3. Determine what really matters to you. This will ensure that what replaces the old behavior will be sustainable and something you can trust in when practicing your new way is inevitably difficult. An instructive practice is identifying and ranking your top 5 values. This list of values by Brené Brown is a helpful starting point to remind you of values you may not have considered.

4. Observe your experiences as you practice your new habit. What are you experiencing and feeling? What is working and not working? Rinse and repeat. Building new patterns is very much like going to the gym. The first several times sucks and there’s plenty of discomfort. However, with a commitment to continue practicing you’ll reach a point where your default behaviors change. You’ll encounter a circumstance and recall how you used to react in that situation, but it will also feel like you’re watching a movie about a different person who looks like a younger version of you.

   
   

Ultimately, there’s no quick fix for setting down old patterns and adopting new ones, but knowing what to expect can lessen those feelings of discomfort and of potentially yearning for the old days of the devil you once knew.