What’s Really Holding You Back?
The Hidden Reason No One Talks About
When I lived in Australia, I owned a home situated on a lazy river that snaked through the palm groves and eventually poured out to the Pacific Ocean. Next door lived an elderly couple from the UK named Jim and Mary whom my children adopted as their grandparents. Our yards shared the same fence, the gate always open so we could walk back and forth to each other’s front porch. Most evenings we would sit on their veranda and share stories. Jim had served in the British Navy––an anchor aptly tattooed on his forearm––and the couple were avid travelers, so they had many tales of faraway exotic lands, as well as stories of their adventures of living on a barge and traveling the canal systems near London.
Jim and Mary had three very small white poodle-ish dogs who had traveled everywhere with them: Harley-Fatboy, Comfort, and Rose. Every day I came to their house, the tiny pack savagely hurtled towards the front door, a white swirl of furry fury, barking incessantly. And every day Mary would yell, “Shut up!!” but the dogs paid no notice. They just kept barking. In the end, I was always let in, and the dogs quieted down, and were their usual friendly selves.
And so it went like this day after day, week after week, month after month…for literally years: go to the door, white barking tornado, “Shut up!!”, barking continues. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat. It became part of the soundtrack of our neighborly lives, this comical repeated cacophony.
“If nothing changes, nothing changes,” author Courtney C. Stevens wrote. “If you keep doing what you're doing, you’ll keep getting what you're getting. You want change, make some.”
When I hear this adage, I always think of Mary and the little white dogs. How many times in our lives do we shout the proverbial “Shut up!!” expecting that something will change? How many times do we repeat the same behavior, avoid the same conversations, react in the same old way, and wonder why nothing has shifted?
At some point, like with Mary, we forget we are even wanting the metaphorical dogs to stop barking. Everything just becomes automatic. Once we get stuck in patterns of thinking and behavior, we forget that they are merely dysfunctional habits. We may even unwittingly or unconsciously develop a learned helplessness and just surrender ourselves to the status quo.
But just ‘making a change’ is not that simple. If it were, then Mary would have shut the dogs up long ago. What is simple, is what stands in the way, and what most people don’t recognize––avoidance.
“If that we do is walk away from what is most meaningful, if what we do is avoidance, we are walking away from our best lives,” says Dr. Luana Marques, Harvard-based psychotherapist, professor, and author of the recently released book Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power.
Most self-help books point to fear and anxiety as a reason why people don’t achieve their most
meaningful goals and aspirations. But Marques makes an important distinction––it is not fear and anxiety itself that is the problem, but our inability to bear the discomfort of anxiety. This leads us to be avoidant. “Anxiety is painful,” she writes, “but it is not what is holding us back from change. What is holding us back is avoidance.”
As someone who has an avoidant personality type (I avoid conflict, hard conversations, the truth, difficult people, feedback, the dentist…the list is endless), aiming my crosshairs on avoidance has been game-changing. So core is it to my self-awareness and self-growth that each day in my journal, I pose one key two-part question: What are you avoiding and, what do you need to approach?
I’m also highly sensitive and feel the buzz of anxiety radiate through my whole body most days. I learned long ago that the anxiety was never going to disappear. It’s how I’m wired. While this used to be my nemesis, I now think of my nervous system like that of a highly-strung thoroughbred acutely tuned to its environment. I live with anxiety in productive ways. I’ve even grown to befriend it. Anxiety sounds an early alarm to important things in my life, and the lives of those I care about. It keeps me honest and present. It points me to incongruencies to remedy. It propels and motivates me.
I was never fooled by the idea that my anxiety was in the way of my best life, because I have always made huge changes and taken risky leaps amid being anxious and scared. “We can’t get rid of anxiety,” says Dr. Marques, “but we can get rid of avoidance; we need to be fighting the right enemy to lead a bold life.”
An entire industry has emerged to help people end their anxiety. Yet I’m fairly certain we don’t want to be entirely anxiety-free. What would our lives be like without our body’s alarm system? Is it possible that an entire industry has been fighting the wrong enemy?
“But my anxiety makes me avoid it,” said a client to me recently. “If I got rid of my anxiety, then I would avoid it less.” There is some logic to that thinking. But here’s the deal. When we feel anxiety and hence avoid something, that avoidance reinforces our anxiety. Let’s say, for example, that you are required to give a presentation at work. You start to feel anxious about it, so you procrastinate (avoid) doing the project. As the presentation date draws closer, you become increasingly anxious, only to procrastinate more. You start freaking out about your anxiety and pinpoint the cause of the anxiety to the presentation. But it isn’t the anxiety that is the real problem here, nor the presentation, it is your inability to tolerate the discomfort of the anxiety, and the subsequent behavior––procrastination––that is the issue. By not dealing with your avoidance, you haven’t solved anything, you still feel anxious about the presentation and about presentations in general. This sets up a negative feedback loop that only exacerbates the problem. Eventually, you decline giving any future presentations, undermining your chance for promotions and other opportunities.
Instead, you must stretch your internal emotional space to have a greater capacity to endure the discomfort of the anxiety and stretch yourself into doing the presentation despite how uncomfortable, or even painful, it makes you feel. The anxiety will not go away, but you do have the power to approach the challenge, feel the discomfort, and do it anyway.
So what is avoidance exactly? According to Marques, avoidance is anything you do or don’t do in response to a perceived threat that is designed to bring our anxiety or discomfort down fast but it keeps us stuck long term. She cites the three R’s of avoidance: Retreat (move away, shut down, procrastinate), React (send a reactive email, yell at the dog, grab that glass of wine), and Remain (staying in a situation that doesn’t work). All of these “R’s” are designed to alleviate your discomfort.
The opposite of avoidance is approaching, Marques encourages. I love the ease and gentleness of this invitation. Instead of an aggressive damn-the-torpedoes or fight-for-your-life attitude towards our resistance and fear, this idea of approaching is much more compassionate, soft, unthreatening, and hence far more likely to set you up for success.
Marques encourages us to turn and face, deal with, and approach the things that scare us. She challenges us to flex our “inner feeling-capacity muscles” in as many small ways as possible. For example, if you feel compelled to bolt out of a room, she says, challenge yourself to stay there just one minute longer. Then challenge yourself to stay just two minutes longer.” This strategy de-couples the anxiety-avoidance cycle and actually reduces anxiety while supporting us to live more fully and authentically.
Once you start really spotting it, you’ll see that avoidance happens all over the place. We avoid simple stuff like replying to an email, replying to a text, having a conversation, opening a bill. We don’t deal with the cluttered closet; we put off getting a blood test.
What are you avoiding? Guess what? Those things that you are avoiding, and those behaviors designed to help you avoid, are all that stand between you and the dreams you want to actualize. So here is a powerfully helpful exercise to do:
On a piece of paper create three lists (you could make three columns or three different sections).
First, (list number one) write out all the things you want for your perfect life. Write down everything you dream about, yearn for, and want to create. Be generous with yourself, and really let your imagination and heart run.
List number two is for all the ways you avoid the discomfort associated with making the changes necessary to create the dream. These are things that you do, don’t do, or stay stuck in, that stand between you and your goals. For example, you want to travel, but you avoid the hassle of getting your passport renewed. Or you want to get fit but avoid enlisting a trainer because you hate how you look in your workout shorts. Or you want to have that critical conversation with your partner, but you just keep complaining about them to your friend.
The final list is all the commitments you will make to approach those things you have been avoiding. It’s important that this list attends to each avoidance you noted in list number two. It’s also important that your ‘approaches’ are small baby steps. For example, if you are avoiding renewing your passport, do not write “renew my passport.” That is too big of a step, and chances are you will sabotage yourself. Cut it into smaller bite-sized pieces, like “take passport photos.”
Life is uncomfortable. Life will always be uncomfortable, scary, and risky. Nothing will ever change that. Ralph Waldo Emerson knew this when he contemplated our key to actual personal growth, “People wish to be settled, only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” It's liberating to learn that we can stretch into being more comfortably uncomfortable and lean into things that create big, unique, beautiful lives. We were made for this kind of robustness. We are wired to be both sensitive and bold. The future is yours; what is your next move?
