The Awkwardness Principle

I keep coming back to a line in the excellent book Already Free by the psychotherapist Bruce Tift: “The practices that carry the greatest ­potential for transformative change are usually counterinstinctual.”

I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way — more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self-sabotage — then the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel especially good.

They’re more likely to feel scary, or at least awkward, like wearing an ill-fitting shirt or writing with your nondominant hand. While learning to be patient, you should expect to feel restless. As you embark on a long-postponed creative project, you should expect to feel unready.

One way or another, change will likely feel somewhat crappy.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, you’re attempting in some way to be different than you are. (That’s true, by the way, even if your goal is to become more accepting of how things are.) Your entire personality, up to this moment, has been one long exercise in getting good at being who you are now.

So of course you feel ungainly when you try to do otherwise. If it feels disagreeable to learn to meditate, or time-block your day, or learn to finish what you start, that’s often a good ­indication that you’re on the right track.

The explanation for all this, from the viewpoint of old-school psychoanalysis, runs as follows: Due to the normal incompetence of almost all parents, most of us grow up with the deep-seated belief that there are certain feelings we can’t allow ourselves to feel.

Maybe you were raised with the message that you shouldn’t depend too much on others, or that you shouldn’t stand out from the crowd, or that you should stand out from the crowd. Or that you should always have a clear plan for the future, or guard against being taken advantage of. (Among my hang-ups, I’ve learned, is the belief that I need to put massive amounts of effort into work and life to justify my existence. So I do, then end up resenting it and going on strike.)

For a small child, falling in with these family patterns feels like a matter of survival. By the time you’re an adult, you’re deeply convinced that easing up on them — by allow­ing yourself to depend on others, or stand out, or operate without a clear plan — would be to invite disaster. No wonder the prospect seems utterly terrifying.

The Change You Want May Not Be the Change You Need

The flipside of this is that if some new habit or practice strikes you as hugely exciting, there’s a good chance it’s the opposite of what you need. It’s likely helping you to shore up your defenses rather than challenge them.

For instance, I’ve learned to be skeptical about how thrilled I get by any new system for scheduling my workday so as to achieve untold heights of productivity. That heady feeling isn’t a good thing. It’s a warning sign!

By contrast, the productivity technique I’m finding most genuinely useful at present — aiming for lower, but consistent, volumes of daily output rather than working in binges — has felt uncomfortable, because refraining from cramming as much in as I possibly can makes me feel anxious.

(An aside: I’m talking here about acting against your instincts, but I don’t think instincts are the same as intuitions. If you get the sense that, say, walking down a particular alley at night might be hazardous, or that someone you’re dating is bad news, what you’re experiencing is an intuition, a subconscious alert system that developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It’s probably worth heeding.)

And, of course, the big revela­tion is that pushing through your resistance and experiencing the emotions you’ve been avoiding virtually never feels utterly terrifying at all. It usually feels just mildly uncomfortable. You realize that you’d been putting off a project you really care about, or failing to commit fully to a relationship, or holding back from speaking your mind, all to avoid a feeling that you imagined might kill you. Then the reality turns out to be roughly equivalent to sitting on a badly designed chair, or forgetting your umbrella in a rainstorm, or eating an overripe banana.

In other words: a little yucky, perhaps. But totally fine, really. Nothing you can’t handle.