KURT FROST psychotherapy

Category: Therapeutically Thinking

  • Can You Listen to Another’s Heart?

    Can You Listen to Another’s Heart?

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it working with fears and how they show up in the many parts that make us up (one of my favourite concepts in all of psychology). Fear and the other self-limitations hold us back in far too many ways, on a day-to-day basis. As I keep trying to further hone ways to understand and help others, as well as myself, on this path, more pieces like the following are sure to come out. Let me know what you think.

    We may not know everything about others in our lives, but that’s actually a rabbit hole you must watch out for. We may think that we need to understand or experience or connect with as much of that other as we can and then we will be happy, then we will be able to relax because we think we will know them and feel they are finally connected to us. This path, however, besides sounding endlessly tiring, is ultimately counterproductive to the goals to which it strives.

    I very much understand the impulse to want to know everything. I have an endless curiosity for the world and the people within it. When I meet someone whom I resonate with, it only, therefore, seems natural to want to dig down into the atomic elements to see all the potential awesomeness within. (Bear in mind, this may also be because I’ve taken one too many physics classes in my life. An Engineering Physics education has its apparent limitations.)

    The desire for understanding can also have a dark side. Our fears and anxieties, who’s flames can be fanned by our ruminating mind, will also seek for complete understanding, or as much of that as they can get. The reason for this is that fear is not OK on its own. If it can’t relax into comfort or safety, it is happy to take understanding. Because, by understanding something more fully, our fear believes that it can either, as quickly as possible, get to the good stuff and relax or find out about the bad stuff and employ ways to protect itself or escape.

    We also have to consider that there is another human involved in this affair. They are not to be observed or inspected. If they’ve chosen to want to connect with you, it’s a symbiotic contract. It’s a slow, unfolding of you and them and sharing what you find. Learning from what you don’t understand and if done well and with full awareness, you have an opportunity to learn about yourself in the process.

    To cave to the impulse for more, all and now ruins that fun and is disrespectful to the other. They may have opened up a door for you to walk in, but most likely won’t want you rearranging all their furniture.

    This is entirely overly poetic and metaphorical and I’m sorry, as it is bound to only get worse. (What poetry metaphor can give us, despite its inexact nature and sometimes dramatically increased puke-worthiness is a more effective window into direct experience that straight prose or, God forbid, academic verbiage can never do.) Even though we might not be able to assuage our fears to know everything about another and see who they can be in their entirety, we can know something far more simple and often far more obvious. We can know their heart. (I know, again, I’m sorry.)

    There are many ways to think about one’s heart, but I’m definitely not talking about the ones you can hook up diagnostic equipment to. A heart can be thought of as the emotional core that connects right down to the essence of our being. Because emotions are inherently non-rational, they are excellent, if not naïve indicators of what we feel deeply and what matters.

    Someone may not be in touch with their heart and these emotions and any gleanings from their core may stay covered and hidden away. That’s a reality that all of us have to one extent or another, but we are also very imperfect. We are partly imperfect in that we have many flaws or at least things we are working on that might not be where we would like them.

    But we are also “imperfect” in that we can’t be fully in control of ourselves and be “messed up” consistently all of the time. As much as one might hide their heart and deeper self, for all the best and worst reasons, glimmers of that core are bound to surface, here and there and most definitely in the most unexpected moments. All one has to do is pay attention.

    If you are brave enough to choose the path of listening for and to someone’s heart, you will find that even your fears may relax. For even if you can’t know everything about another and even though this is definitely a practice of vulnerability, you’ve actually been given a gift. By giving up the search for the all, you have settled on the One. All of the many things you can know may give you specifics that may prove fascinating or terrifying. But, even though knowing the heart may lack some of the detailed parts of you may desire in this moment, it has the concentrated truth of who that person is. Knowing the heart is knowing who they are.

    Life and people need to unfold and reveal themselves as they need to. Forcing things, like grasping for a delicate flower, is bound to cause damage and leave you with far less. Paradoxically, listening more, for less, but far more important parts of that other, will be much richer. And, don’t think that you are in this alone. We can all feel when we are heard and understood. Braving your fears and focusing on the quality that is in front of you very well may allow that other’s heart to open even more, revealing parts of them that you and even possibly they were not aware of.

    Your fears may not go quietly though. They are young and don’t understand the wisdom of the heart. They will push for more information so they can mercifully relax. Be patient with them. It is a mindfulness practice to become skilful with letting the fears and sensations arise, seeing them for what they are and then allowing them to settle a bit, for now. By remembering the truths you do have from the other’s heart, of all the goodness, has already been gifted to you. You have all you need.

    There are absolutely no guarantees in life and all this may ultimately not live up to what you thought was written on the label. Maybe you didn’t pay attention enough or didn’t know how to listen more deeply to the other? Maybe the other had ill intentions or was not capable of opening their heart? There isn’t a right or wrong here. There are just perspectives and practises. (Go back to engineering if you want fixed decimal points.) There are ways of doing things so difficultly and painfully that can be given up for ways to relax into an easier life that can be richer and more deeply enjoyed. Not just for yourself, but for you & the other, and all of the other others.

    Stop making things so hard. Listening to your own heart a bit more may give you a waypoint to look for in the sea of voices within that will impulsively will try to steer you off course. I won’t say any more of this better than Franz Kafka:

    You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

    Franz Kafka

    The other’s heart will thank you for it. Just keep being still and listen.

  • The Practice of un-Productivity

    Reading Time: 8 minutes

    Why I’ve called you here today

    I have many thoughts on many things, but the achievement of or abject failure to obtain a regular sense of personal mastery over my work and day-to-day life is one that keeps bubbling up to the surface. I have a few thoughts on this and also some suggestions on some ways past it.

    The short story is that I have developed some focusing sessions to help you get your work done and a group where you can learn to find some ways to get out of the traps that can hold you back and make you more stressed. Click the button below to get details on the programs, but I encourage you to read on to see my motivation and reasons for starting this to begin with.

    The landscape…

    Focus, attention, etc. seems in short supply for many of us these days. Maybe you have an ADHD diagnosis (I do!) and all of your good intentions, brilliant ideas and bulletproof plans get trampled on by the stampede of a new work week and all of its demands. Even if you don’t have ADHD, the fact that we live in what is becoming a very “ADD” society cannot be underestimated for how much it now affects us all.

    Attention spans are a fraction of what they used to be. Things that many in an earlier age would have been happy to engage with for hours at a time are only tolerated for seconds or minutes now. Speed and brevity are the new expectation and this is far too much of a self-fulfilling prophecy for our ability to tolerate things that need time to be savoured and carefully considered to be appreciated… much less feeling you can focus long enough to get through the tasks of your day.

    Though there are certainly many good things that come from speed and brevity (many that I desperately need to embody), many other things are also lost. This shift to what can be achieved and how fast it can be done has crept into all aspects of our lives and, I am sure I don’t have to tell you, is very much present in our work life. This pressure to do more, faster adds a lot of stress to our lives that often doesn’t need to be there.

    Attention issues and overwhelm are not even the whole story and ADHD, though more prevalent is not the only thing at play here. Anxiety, depression and other flavours and degrees of mood disorders are on the rise. They show up like a low-grade fever or emotional toothache, tainting your general functioning through your daily tasks. It can get a lot worse than that for some, but these same symptoms seem to be more common on a very general level in society.

    It is a cliche, but it often does seem like we live in a “sick society”. It’s a great society (trashing the world we live in is not the angle I am going for here), but systems within it seem to leave a lot of people worse off. Too many people are suffering more and more and in ways that are preventable.

    It’s not, however, about the absence or presence of mental health issues. The point of mentioning them is to say that there are very understandable and insidious reasons why so many of us struggle to stay on top of so many things in our lives. No matter what you may or may not have as a baseline of challenge in your life already, feeling the stress of being scattered and overwhelmed is only going to pile onto it more.

    So, now some good news. Regardless of the presence of a diagnosis or not, the skills needed to manage issues around attention, memory, focus, etc. are pretty much the same for all of us. We will each experience our own dysfunctional version of how we may struggle and may feel it to a greater or lesser degree than others do, but the general impact on us and how we can address it is pretty universal. (Yay!)

    As overwhelming as life can feel, with all of the increasing demands and expectations (many put on us by ourselves), things can get better. We may not be able to change the world to our liking, but we can carve out our own little space within it and then learn to connect with the rest of it in saner ways.

    Productivity Dysphoria

    But people have already considered all this already, right?

    There are lots of experts to help you par down and streamline your life on your way to ultimate efficiency, happiness and wealth, right?

    You really don’t want to get me started.

    The quick and very unsatisfying answer is yes and no.

    So many good things have come from the productivity space, but the thing that many do not seem to talk about is that a lot of the productivity world seems equally caught up in the very same pathologies that are part of the root problem they are claiming to remedy. It is often about fast, simple, doing more, being your best, etc. (I can feel my heart rate increase just writing that.) I think we need to think differently and consider possibly getting off this train altogether.

    Asking the Wrong Questions

    Part of the issue is in the very questions that are being asked. Most parts of the productivity world and the tools that it spawns look at the what and the how.

    What you should be doing or not doing.

    What the best solution is that will solve your problems.

    How you need to make these changes.

    How this new way will be better.

    These are good points, but they can feel very prescriptive. It puts the power in the hands of those feeding us this info. It relies on us trusting that this very successful and extremely productive person (often who is rich and beautiful too!) knows what is best for us and if we just listen to them, we will maybe even end up like them. (Very seductive, I know. And not entirely wrong.)

    But, they aren’t you. Yes, you are a smart person and can decide for yourself what might work better for you. However, as well-meaning and even helpful as many tips, tools and systems may be, they all tend to look pretty slick. There will always be people who sing their praises and swear how using this or that has changed their lives. How do you really tell what is the best solution for you when they all claim to be the only one you need? You are the one struggling with this and look to them as experts. But, what makes you an expert on the experts?

    Then there are the embarrassing riches of productivity solution possibilities. Psychologist, Barry Schwartz, introduced the concept of the Paradox of Choice which basically states that the more choices we tend to have the harder it is to choose and the more anxiety it causes us. With so many options, all claiming equal, life-changing benefits and all being updated and expanded seemingly constantly, the solutions start to spiral out of control.

    And, the more important point, you are not even part of the equation anymore. The what that needs to be considered is what you really need.

    Different Questions

    What and how need to be asked at some point, but from a more therapeutic perspective, it might make more sense to look at why and where.

    No one tool or technique will work for everyone and even focusing on tools and techniques at all is often missing the point.

    Why are you doing a particular thing and where do you actually need the help?

    Is the solution really to be more productive?

    Maybe you are working on the wrong thing (like Stephen Covey’s ladder being up against the wrong wall) or maybe you already are working too hard?

    Maybe it’s not working because you are trying to fix something that can’t be?

    Maybe you can’t motivate yourself to do something because, if you are truly being honest, you don’t really give a crap about it? (Oh, the many ways we delude ourselves.)

    Why would you want to repeatedly keep trying to push that round peg into the square hole? No new tool or trick can save you from things that are not working because they are unworkable, at least possibly in their current form.

    It is looking into questions like these that I want to explore more. Maybe it is not so much about solving the problems you are struggling with and more about how to make your life fit you and be a little saner?

    Getting off the hamster wheel

    After all of that, it should not be a surprise to hear that I am tired. Tired of trying, again and again, to be better, only to feel like I am coming up short time after time, never catching up and feeling the discouragement (and worse) slowly growing in my gut. Especially in a business environment, the go-to is often to look to the productivity gurus for our salvation. They are legion and I love them all so much! The David Allen’s, Stephen Covey’s, Tim Ferris’s, plus all of the apps, the planners, checklists, calendars, protocols, etc, etc, etc. What they offer is truly amazing and their insights have helped so many people.

    What’s the problem, then, you ask?

    Like, I’ve already said, it’s too much. Too many options. Too many seemingly contradictory golden nuggets of advice. Each on their own is most often very bang on and extremely helpful and valid. But, to a stressed-out, demoralized, and lost soul like me (and this is just on a Tuesday) the cure can feel more overwhelming than the disease. And, I am getting more and more dubious that any of them really know what I need for myself.

    If this sounds overly dramatic to you we really should talk, because maybe you have some breakthrough thing you can teach me and others. But, I promise you that I often have and do feel this way. I imagine, however, if you have found this page and have read this far you may feel this pain yourself and want to find out what brand of productivity porn I am hucking. Maybe you are curious how I might have cracked the nut on this and will solve all your problems?

    un-Satisfying Global Solutions

    The sad truth is, I have nothing necessarily incredibly new or profound to offer here. (Great salesmanship, eh?) Anything I say, do or offer probably has been said before, offered elsewhere and has been available to you for a long time.

    This is exactly my point though. I can’t ever hope to give you the solution. Nothing here can solve all of your problems. What makes sense to me won’t work for everyone.

    That’s the true beauty of it, though. For the people who find this helpful, it can maybe help them get their feet under them again. Then, with some traction, there might be more they can learn and start doing here and elsewhere.

    So, this may bring in another of those question words: when. The when is now. (Sorry, so cheesy, but it is true.) I believe it is about finding what works for you now and helping you to find ways to implement it in small, doable ways that can help you step forward, out of the mud and into a new dawn of enlightened living! (Or, in a less sickeningly, grandiose and over-the-top way, at least not feeling stressed out and like you are losing at life anymore.) It is one step at a time. If you can find something here that can help now, let’s stop debating this and see what can be done.

    Practicing un-Productivity

    Much like mediation, yoga, competitive cheese rolling and even all your bad habits, you need to practice regularly to gain competence. (That cheese just doesn’t roll itself!) Solution-Focused Therapy has a concept that gets tossed around a lot: the snowball effect. The idea is that to learn and become proficient at anything you need to start small. Pick something that you have possibly had success with in the past or at least feel confident that you can start doing today and over the next week or so. As you get small wins from successfully doing whatever it is you are doing, your confidence will build and so will the habit of doing it. Each time you do it and especially with every success you have, it is like the little snowball that was your initial challenge to experiment with is rolling faster and faster down the hill, not only picking up speed, but getting larger and more solid as it goes.

    I am suggesting that we need to start small, but start something and apply it regularly. You can add more later, if it feels like it is going well, but you mostly need to unshackle yourself from all these productivity shoulds and start just showing up each day to get stuff done.

    Again, this is not the solution and it is a tool of sorts itself (which partly, only partly contradicts my points above). But we always need something to focus on. I am just suggesting we focus on less and do it more. You can feel free to glitz it up as much as you want later.

    Much like that snowball of work-life effectiveness, I have a few first steps I want to try with you. They may change and grow over time, but I am confident this is a solid and time-tested way to start. Check it out and let me know what you think.

  • A Little Bit of Structure Helps the Day Run Smoothly

    A Little Bit of Structure Helps the Day Run Smoothly

    Reading Time: 5 minutes

    If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will get you there.

    paraphrased from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

    In our last Men in Captivity call, the idea of the importance of having a schedule or structure to our day came up. Though individual experiences are different, many of us are finding that the routines of our pre-lockdown life have gone out the window and it can be easy to allow ourselves to free-float through our days. This attitude is not bad if you’re taking some vacation time and want to just “do nothing” for a while, but this hedonistic reprieve wears thin quickly, giving rise to boredom and unhelpful habits taking root.

    Living between your best & worst

    Without some boundaries for your time and activities, you are relying on the comfort seeking and “old habits” part of you to direct your day. If you think of yourself as a collection of behaviours or selves – with you as your best self leading the way towards your ideals and your worst self coming at life from your base emotions and impulses – you mindlessly floating through your day, doing what comes naturally, is going to most likely be unconsciously pulling ideas from much lower down the food chain of your best-worst self.

    Then, as you persist in these less helpful habits, it will tend to affect your mood. You might feel bored or be annoyed that you did not get done what you had hoped. This then triggers more unconscious behaviours (dig into more junky, comfort foods and watch another season of something on Netflix) and the cycle continues.

    Don’t get the idea that if you are not operating as your best self that things will go to hell. Similarly, if you have really “let yourself go” and feel you are off track, it doesn’t mean that you are beyond redemption. It is a spectrum. Just as your best self is an ideal you can look to and move towards and your worst self is a move towards Darth Vader impulses, how you show up at any given moment will be somewhere between the two extremes. The point is to not focus on what “perfect you” could be doing or on how bad things could possibly get, but to mindfully inquire where you’re at now and see what one step better would look like.

    Finding your way out…

    While the solution to this problem doesn’t need to be scheduling every moment of your day, at least some boundaries around how and when to use your time will go a long way to making you feel more accomplished. It will also ensure you are looking after what is important to you.

    I came away from the group call with a few key points that I have been trying to put into practice this week. Maybe you will find them helpful too:

    1. Be easy on yourself. You might be feeling only at 60% of what you used to feel like before the pandemic. Recognize this and understand that this might be where you need to be right now. If you want to up your game, ask yourself what 65% might feel like and make some small steps today to do it.
    2. Plan ahead what you want to do. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Loosely plan out your day with a few key things you want to get done. This can be done on a calendar or even as a simple pen and paper to-do list.
    3. Complete tasks, not projects. A single project can have many tasks, but we often start a project with the goal of finishing it now. Instead, break the project down into manageable task chunks and pick one of those tasks to work on. If you finish it, pat yourself on the back and decide if you want to take on another one or leave that project for another day.
    4. Know what is doable. Don’t schedule yourself like a robot. Be realistic about how long each task should take, considering the time you have, your energy levels and motivation that day. Again, if you are not feeling like you are operating at 100% that day, then decide what a reasonable goal is for you to accomplish. You will benefit far more by completing a smaller task fully than struggling to complete something that feels too big or you are quickly losing motivation for.
    5. Plan transitions. Don’t butt all of your tasks up against each other. If 45 minutes seems like a reasonable time to work on a task, then give yourself 15 minutes to take a break or organize things before doing something new.
    All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
    1. Plan in breaks and fun. This may sound like a suggestion from a productivity madman, but the point here is not to forget to add some fun into your day. Get some work done and then go for a walk, read a book, talk to friends, consciously choose to watch that Netflix show. Don’t be puritanical about your work. All work and no play really does make Jack a dull boy. (If you don’t know this movie reference, then you need to take a break and watch The Shining. If you have been repeatedly writing that phase for the past three hours on your manual typewriter, then you really should stop working for a while and possibly seek professional help.)
    2. Mindfully choose what you do. It’s often mindlessly “choosing” to do unhelpful things that gets you off track. Find ways to “wake up” and mindfully choose your next steps. One handy tool is to set a timer to go off several times per day (even every hour) that will remind you to check in and see if you need to redirect yourself.
    3. Forgive yourself when you get off track. Merely acknowledge the slip and make your next choice one you consciously want. Repeat as needed.
    4. Have filler tasks ready. You may find you have a few extra minutes to work on something, but don’t want to take on another project. Make a list of “filler tasks” of tiny jobs that need to be done that will only take 2 to 5 minutes. Pick one of these off of the list, get it done and then cross it off. Very satisfying…..and now no one will complain that the garbage wasn’t taken out!
    5. Plan shutdown. Once you have completed the tasks that you’ve set out for yourself, wind down your day and put things away for tomorrow. Spend your evening doing non-work tasks and resist the urge to check in on things or do “just one more thing”. It will be there tomorrow. Practicing not working is important for your healthy boundaries. You will find you have more motivation to get back to your work next time if you have been diligently practising not working.
    6. Appreciate yourself. No matter how small the gains you have made today, pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Little steps are still steps and you will feel far more like doing this again if you focus on what you did well rather than missteps.

    So much more can be said on this, but this isn’t meant to be a lesson in productivity. The point is to become aware of what you are up to during your days of the lockdown and to mindfully make choices that you will be proud of yourself for making at the end of the day.

    I strongly encourage you to not get excited about this and try to “change everything”. Start from where you’re at and make small steps to shift that. Doing 10% more tomorrow will feel far better than doing nothing. You will also feel more encouraged to do that much or more again the next day, rather than pushing to be 50% more productive and only getting half of that done. This may seem like you are still getting more work done (25% is a lot more than 10%), but we are not concerned here with work output and you are not a machine. Considering your mood and motivation is vital to keep the ball rolling here. So, be mindful of where you’re at now, where you want to go, and then choose a next step that will make your “best self” proud.

    Try out some of these suggestions and see what you notice. Reach out and let me know how it goes. I’m interested in hearing about your successes or if you have any questions.

  • Being superficially considerate

    Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe may try to do what we think is best for someone else, but not realize that this might actually be imposing our assumptions onto them. Derek Sivers put it succinctly as:

    Being superficially considerate can be inconsiderate.

    Doing the opposite can actually be more considerate, which Derek has coined “meta-considerate”.

    So, instead of putting someone else up on a pedestal (where they can only look down on you), try being more authentically you and let them come to you.

    Whether it is love, business, or pretty much anything in life, offering your truest self is the most powerful way to make connection and the best recipe for success. You will still fail here and there, but at least you are doing it on your terms, not trying to pander to what you imagine others will want.

  • Moods & Meaning

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    We all find ourselves in dark places at times in our lives. It can be a more formal depression, but many losses – of those we love, ideas we had to let go of, people who we were, etc. – can leave us adrift and questioning fundamental parts of our lives.

    In trying to find a way out we or those trying to guide us will often look for the root of the problem to fix or extract it. This can be helpful and sometimes teaches us important things about ourselves. However, it often is nebulous as to whether we have found this root. How do we know where the bottom is? Do we really need to know where the bottom is?

    When lost in the dark it is often meaning that we are lacking. The meaning, the hope, we thought we could count on is now gone and we have no waypoint to look towards. So, instead of digging to fix or extract the perceived problem searching for new meaning in our life can light the way to a new self.

    A beautiful story that I love is one of the African Violet Queen, told by one of my favourite therapists Bill O’Hanlon. It is a true story of a woman who lived in 1950’s Chicago and who was helped by Bill’s mentor, the great psychotherapist, Milton Erickson. Below is the video, which tells the whole story, but the main point of it is summed up in the one statement that Dr Erickson said to Bill many years ago as to why he chose to help her the way he did:

    I thought it would be easier to grow the African violet parts of her life than to weed out the depression.

    Rather than trying to fix the loss or cure the pathology it is often finding new things to live for and get excited about that saves us. Meaning is one of the most important things for humans to flourish. To lose it sets us adrift and to find it anew can change our whole life.

    What provides you with deep meaning in your life? If you can’t answer this you might want to start looking. If it is already not inside of you, see where you can give in the world. Helping, serving, bettering the world around us and those whom we share it with may be the way back to yourself.