Truth Bomb Tuesday: Time to update your mental models
Most of us end up scared of what we really want.
It’s such a funny thing. It sounds so ridiculous.
But it’s not that we scared of the things we want themselves. (Who’s afraid of a new car?) Rather, we’re afraid of the part of ourselves that really wants something.
We become afraid of desire itself.
Again. It’s a crazy situation to find ourselves in. How did we get here?
The way I see it, we, as humans, our motivated by either our desire body or our commanding mind.
(There’s probably specific psychological terms for these but I don’t know what they are. But then Freud probably never crunched a feaso on two-into-four subdivision, so whatever.)
Anyway, when we’re hungry, we want to eat. That’s the desire body. And when we want to study to transition into a new career, that’s the commanding mind.
The whole journey of early childhood is bringing executive functioning on-line. It’s about empowering and learning to listen to the commanding mind – the voice that tells you not to hit Timmy for taking your truck.
The whole journey is about learning to not listen to the desire body, and give attention to the commanding mind instead.
And often, if we do just listen to the desire body – we take cookies from the cookie jar, we give Timmy a wallop, we write our name with crayons over the nice new wall – we get into trouble.
We realise that if we follow the lead of our desire body, we often get into trouble.
AND we realise that not following the desire body is actually hard. Those impulses can be strong – much stronger than our freshly budding executive function.
And so we become afraid of desire itself. We’re afraid of what it might make us do. We’re afraid that it will lead us into trouble. We’re afraid that we won’t be able to resist it.
And we carry this fear (some of us) for the rest of our lives. We feel safe when we’re listening to our commanding voice. We feel scared and unsettled when we’re listening to our desires.
(Sometimes we forget how to listen to our desires altogether.)
But if we’re not listening to our desires – if we’re not allowing desire to exist – then we stop having fun.
Life is productive, but not fun.
And the tragedy in it is that our fear is simply based on an outdated relationship between desire and decision.
We imagine the battle we’re living out is still the battle a four-year feels between a four-year old’s impulses and a four year old’s executive function.
But that’s not what we’re dealing with. It’s a battle between a 40 year old’s impulses and a 40 year old’s executive function.
Executive function continues growing and getting stronger the older we get.
So a four year old’s executive function is sometimes hopelessly outgunned. But the balance of the battle has completely flipped by the time we’re 40.
But we don’t update our mental model. We still think our desire is a terrible demon that is going to run away with us the first chance it gets.
It’s not. You are so much stronger than that now.
And with that strength, you can allow you desire room to breathe. You can let it be. It can’t control you. It won’t control you.
You are allowed to be desire-driven. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
You are allowed to have fun.
DB.