How you feel or what you do

For animals, there’s no distinction between how they feel and what they do. (Image by Siegfried Poepperl)

Between tennis sets, my friend remarked upon the little boy of about six who was in the midst of a rigorous practice session with his father on the adjacent court.

“He’s really good!” she said. “But wow...his father is kind of harsh.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about the many years’ worth of parent-child dynamics I witnessed as an educator. “Sometimes that level of performance carries a cost.”

“Why do they do it?” asked my friend. “Do they want him to have a better future?”

It’s such an interesting question. What do we want for our children? What do we want for ourselves? Different cultures have different priorities and different stories about what is important in life. Some parents begin preparing for their children to get into a “good college” before they’re even born. Other families, like mine, insist that all colleges are the same and it doesn’t matter where you go.

In some families, achievement is the key to happiness. In others, it’s money. In others, happiness doesn’t even enter into the conversation. Some families cultivate their children’s moral and spiritual development; others leave this up to the children themselves to figure out. There are many ways to live. It’s easy to assume that everyone wants what’s “right” until you realize that the people on the other tennis court, sitting at the nearby restaurant booth, or living in the house next door want something totally different that they also believe to be “right.”

That leaves us with the opportunity — and responsibility — to figure out what our own values are so that we can decide whether they are, in fact, the ones we want. Otherwise, we may live our whole lives by values that were handed to us from our parents, our culture, the media, our school, or some other institution without realizing that they don’t suit us.

For my part, I believe that how you feel is far more important than what you do. Achievement is only relevant insofar as it makes you feel good; achievement for its own sake can be useful, but it is not the measure of the worth of a life.

This belief of mine is often squarely in opposition to the beliefs of the people I encounter as a school leader, employer, and coach. If these people have examined their own values and beliefs, they will conclude that we are not a good fit. But more often, they haven’t, so they don’t even realize that our beliefs are incompatible. They might even project onto me the beliefs they want me to have — or deny their own.

Sometimes, though, a person is attracted to the values and beliefs that I represent even when they don’t share them. They are open to questioning the way they’ve always done it. They’re ready to consider metrics other than money, achievement, power, and prestige in assessing the value of their contributions to the world. They might be willing to risk what others think in order to find more joy and satisfaction. What would happen if they were to make how they feel a higher priority than what they accomplish?

I have found that seeking to feel good does not lead to debauchery and laziness. We need meaning in our lives, and the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake does not deliver that. Ironically, seeking a more lasting, sustainable sense of well-being leads us right back to what we do. What are the activities that will bring us fulfillment and a sense of completeness? How might we challenge ourselves on our own terms? What do we want our legacy to be? We might end up doing the same things as we did before, but with an entirely different context and worldview.

I’m not here to tell anyone else how to live. I think what I’m doing is offering additional possibilities for how we might live and how we might tackle the things we are longing to accomplish. I believe that accomplishing those things doesn’t matter if you feel like crap when we get there. I believe that the fact that you haven’t done those things yet does not make you less worthy, and doing them won’t make you more worthy. I believe that you’re okay exactly as you are, and you’re allowed to want more.

If you believe that, too, we’re in alignment. If you don’t, that’s okay. I’m not trying to convince you. But if you kind of want to believe it, stay with me.

What about you? What’s more important to you: How you feel or what you do? What about for the children you love? What about for the child you once were?