I meant to write this newsletter last month to keep on my bi-monthly schedule. But you know how it is, life is busy, my office is a disaster and before I knew it, it was May and I was a month behind schedule. Then the unthinkable happened. My computer died. Not your ordinary euphemistic, run-of-the-mill kind of died that a techy fixes in a few minutes, but a full fledged complete hardware failure. My 97% full hard drive crashed and there went everything! My business life felt like it flat-lined and panic set in. “$%^&*!, Oh great, now what?!” The only saving grace in the entire incident is I had thankfully backed up my computer the night before. The fact that the backup ended up failing as well is another story all together, but the whole experience provided me a great metaphor for what many of my clients are experiencing at the moment – overloaded emotional hard drives (EHD).
Think of our EHD as that place where we store and manage all of our emotions and feelings and beliefs about ourselves. With every experience we load a new file or sometimes a whole new program of thought and emotion onto this drive. Like a computer, those files and programs get messy and need to be cleaned up. If old programs aren’t occasionally reevaluated and, when appropriate, deleted to make room for new files and programs, a whole array of performance and incompatibility issues can arise. For instance, old beliefs we hold about someone can clash with new experiences we have with them and we may get confused, not knowing how to respond to their new and different behavior. If we were able to purge old and useless beliefs we could process our new experiences more cleanly and we would have a place to store and use our new beliefs.
When our emotional hard drive is too full we can experience stress and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Life can seem messy, and in fact might actually be messy in our kitchen, garage, office and cupboards. We get a sense that if we could just organize our physical world, life would fall back into place and we could regain control of our emotional world. Unfortunately, for many people, the physical mess in their life is a symptom, not a cause of their stress. The cause is generally something deeper within them – something, or many somethings, stored on this emotional hard drive.
In computer talk you “tune-up” a machine to find free space, delete unused programs or unwanted viruses and put things back in order. To “tune-up” your EHD, take time to create an inventory of everything that is loaded on your drive. Look at your feelings and beliefs about yourself and the world around you and take the time to delve deeper. For instance, one client of mine was convinced they were being a bad parent. Every time there came an opportunity for evaluating her parenting skills, those files on her hard drive opened up and she judged every one of her actions through the filter of a bad parent. There was no room for considering the literally 1000’s of times she is a great Mom. Her hard drive was full and since there was no room to load a new thought program she was getting more and more overwhelmed by the day.
In computers an infinite loop is a program the runs over and over again continuously. For this client, her opinion of her parenting skills was stuck in an infinite loop, filling up her hard drive with evidence against her. When that happens in a computer you press “escape.” When it happened to humans we too need to escape. Quite literally, get out of the situation as soon as you can and breathe some clean air, then ask yourself, what about your current belief do you think is absolutely true? By absolutely true I mean irrefutable true, for example the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. When you find that there are even glimmers of refutable elements, such as “OK, maybe I’m not a horrible parent 100% of the time,” jump on them! These glimmers are the doorways to challenge your previous programming. In this challenging, ask yourself what else might be true. In the case of this client I asked, is it possible that you are a great Mom? We began to explore alternative perspectives that she wants to be true and searched for the evidence to support these perspectives. The turn around, while not instantaneous, was profound.
The objective is to make room for new possibilities because the secret is that life is like the stock market: past performance is no indicator of future gains. However, your current thought programs and beliefs are based on past performance, and unchallenged you will continue to get the same results, not because those perceptions are necessarily accurate, but for lack of any other way to perceive your daily experiences. Seeing things fresh, from a new perspective, from a different angle is how you determine future gains. The question is; do you have the emotional room to explore these options and store them if they have merit?
Here is the deeper challenge. When you delete a file from a computer it isn’t really gone until that space on the hard drive is literally overwritten. Until then, the file can always be brought back – restored if you will – and that’s what many of us do with our thought programs. We examine our beliefs and then delete them, but leave them in the recycle bin just in case we need to go back to a familiar place. Therefore, to make a true change you have to actually empty the recycle bin and eventually rewrite the open space left by an old belief, with a new belief.
One of the best ways to determine which files are best to delete and rewrite is to ask yourself what kind of person you want to be. In the case of my client, what kind of mother does she want to be? Then ask, are your current files/programs/beliefs allowing you to be that kind of person? If not, then how are they leading you astray? Look for the alternative belief that would allow you to step into being that kind of person you want to be. For my client, how would the mother she wants to be respond to the circumstances in her life such as her son losing his temper or treating his baby sister poorly? How would the mother she wants to be talk to the kids?
How would the person you want to be live your life to the fullest? How would that person wake up in the morning, and how would they assess their day as they climb into bed in the evening? Would that person you want to be care more about blaming others for their shortcomings, or being grateful for all the truly wonderful things that happened – even the ones that seem so mundane such as being grateful for returning home safely without an accident? They are simple questions that most people rarely, if ever, take the time to ask themselves. What makes them seem so big is not the size of the question, but its size relative to amount of space we have in our lives to actually fit the question into our brains and emotional hard drives. After all, whether you view 10 lbs of potatoes as a lot, depends largely on whether you have a 5 lb bag to carry them in or a 50 lb bag to carry them in.
So how full is your Emotional Hard Drive? Perhaps it’s time for a Spring cleaning. I sure wish I had done it to my computer hard drive a couple weeks ago!
