If what you're doing isn't working, try the opposite

You could also go home and have a nice hot bath. (Image by Mircea Ploscar)

I have an ongoing text conversation with my cousin in which we seek to solve the problems of the universe…or at the very least, our own.

Recently, we observed how out of balance we can get if we follow advice meant for someone with a dramatically different temperament. “I don’t think everything is healed by action,” I said. “Rest is important. But probably if you’re a person who is constantly resting, you need more action.”

A few days later, an opinion piece turned up in the New York Times that validated our point of view. The author consulted an actual expert, even. Surprise: sitting on the couch isn’t going to fix your life.

Of course, sometimes sitting on the couch can fix your life. It depends what you need. After blogging consistently for more than two years, I have learned that every assertion I can make can be countered by an opposite, also correct assertion. Which one you should believe or follow depends upon whether what you're doing right now is working.

This dynamic is a challenge in the classroom, where a casual statement from a teacher (“Be sure to go over your work to make sure you don’t have any misspelled words or punctuation errors,”) is ignored by the people who need it and sends those who don’t need it into a spiral of anxiety and obsessive triple-checking. Many of us dig deeper into the tendencies we already have instead of seeking alternatives. This makes it harder to let go of stories and practices that aren’t helping us, because we’ve come to rely on them to make sense of the world. Clinging to them is making life harder, but it’s the only life we know.

One of the things I seek to do in my work is shine a light on these dualities — complex vs. simple, certain vs. uncertain, ease vs. challenge, and so on — and show that there is another possibility that we might not have considered. I see so many people exhausted and frustrated by ideas that we have come to take for granted about the nature of hard work, our purpose in life, or the meaning of success, and unconscious rules we’ve picked up from our families, teachers, and various media. I want to show that these are not immutable truths — they are beliefs. If we don’t like the one we’re saddled with, we can choose a different one.

Changing beliefs is really hard, though. So we can at least begin to change the stories we have around those beliefs. But the best shortcut is to change our actions. We don’t have to do what we’ve always done. We can imagine what we might do if we had a different set of beliefs. We can try this new set of actions and see how it goes.

It’s helpful to recognize that not every piece of advice is meant for us. When I’m leading a conversation a couple dozen people, I might invite those who are eager to share to make space for those who usually hang back. Meanwhile, those who usually wait for others to share first are encouraged to step up to the mic. It’s a way of ensuring that everyone’s ideas are heard — and provides an opportunity for growth and self-reflection as people challenge themselves to take a more balanced approach to group discussion.

That said, there’s no right or wrong way to be. Being a perfectly balanced individual is not the goal, and neither is doing a complete 180 from the way you’ve been your whole life. But if there’s a nagging sense of unfulfillment in a particular area of your life, you might ask yourself if there’s another way to look at it. You might question a deeply held belief and whether it’s actually working for you. What if you were to act as if you believed something else? What if you were to try a contrary approach?

If what you’re doing isn’t working, try the opposite. Or just something different. But this is, in itself, just another way of approaching life. If doing the opposite doesn’t work for you, you can feel free to reject that, too.