One thing that’s been bothering me over the past 9-ish months as I went through the productivity literature is the fear based marketing that seems to be so common. In this marketing strategy the sole goal seems to be to make you feel bad about who you are now so that you’ll buy this $500 folder of pdfs that took almost no time to make. Essentially, it’s your fault if you’re not getting a move on and working yourself to exhaustion and bleeding from your eyeballs to change yourself.
This strikes me as so strange. Not only because it goes against my beliefs about growth (most of my coaching/teaching is about telling people they are enough as they are) but it goes against how productivity actually works. The people who consistently get stuff done have a system. As James Clear, author of the excellent Atomic Habits, said “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
If you look at a well oiled system as the core of getting things out into the world, then this conversation about someone being at fault for not reaching their dreams seems extra harmful. People who don’t know how important systems are, and who aren’t necessarily aware of the systems they are a part of, just feel bad about themselves. And without the cohesive vision, flail around and end up getting stuck.
Now the real problem is that the fear based marketing works. If it didn’t work, this would be easy. I probably wouldn’t even write a blog post, we’d just all go on with our much happier lives, without any shame at every molecule of fat or worry about if we have enough twitter followers to make a difference.
Unfortunately there’s something true about how people view change that these marketing strategies tap into. So my question became, is it possible to acknowledge that true thing, whatever it is, while still leaving space for self-compassion? Can you love who you are in the moment, while still having the motivation to change?
I pondered this for quite a while, and couldn’t quite come to a satisfying answer. Most of my journey of change started from a lack of self-compassion. I felt I wasn’t {smart,fit,interesting,focused,loveable} enough so I starting trying to change that. Over time, and with what felt like an unnecessary amount of emotional turmoil, I got to the point where I could really engage with personal growth from a place of loving myself. But the point of my question was to find something different than my journey, one that at least minimized the emotional turmoil, and I couldn’t quite figure it out.
Then I read Tiny Beautiful Things, a beautiful collection of Dear Sugar columns written by Cheryl Strayed. Dear Sugar was an internet advice column on therumpus.net which has now become a podcast. Over the course of the columns in the book, Sugar (Strayed) encourages people again and again to reach for what excites them or what they want, even if it scares them.
I realized the act of reaching for a better you doesn’t need to degrade the current you. That better you will share your same flaws, just in a different proportion or supported by a better system.
This realization helped me reframe the process of growth as being motivated by a push or a pull. Either you’re being pushed from a version of you or pulled towards one. Reaching for something you want is being pulled towards that version of you that has it. The fear marketing is about pushing you away from who you are right now.
If you push against who you are right now, it’s very hard to still love who you are right now. But if you push against the person you will become if you don’t change, a less happy version of you discontented by not having done what you knew you needed to do, it’s much easier to have compassion for you, where you are.
What about you? Take some time to ask yourself if you’re using a push to motivate you. If you are, is it making you feel bad because you’re pushing on who you are right now? I’d find other images to push against. Change is slow and you’re going to be this you for a while longer.
