How Do We Know What to Do? (Description versus Prescription...)

How Do I…?

The how-to questions are everywhere and it’s seems normal that they will provide the answers we seem to be looking for:

How do I get fitter / lose weight / deal with this difficult member of staff / child / partner / feel more confident / learn how to make a presentation / know what to do with this important decision / develop a practice to improve x, y, z…

It’s endless.

We ask ourselves, our friends, our colleagues, and, of course, as a coach, I get asked these questions all the time.

Is that really the best place to start, though, and what are we getting when we get someone else’s answer to their particular challenge or objective? What’s the key piece that moves us from question to action?

If you’re anything like me then you can hear the same story or the same advice or the same information many times over until one day it sparks something in you—is it the information or did something else happen?

Creating Habits or ‘Practices’

It seems to me that there’s a world of difference between looking back at what we, or someone else did, and taking that forward as a prescription for what we should do in similar circumstances.

A description is not the same as a prescription. And creating a ‘habit’ or a practice, is nothing at all to do with decisions and discipline.

My Summer Routine

Over the summer it felt like I wanted to do a little exercise, something easy while I was away and away from my routine at home. I didn’t want it to be ‘exercise’, and I didn’t want it to take up much time. I took this into a group I’m in and one person said,

What’s the smallest amount you can do? Something that might only take five minutes or less? What would that be?

I had an answer immediately.

It was there, right in front of me and I knew I was willing to give it a go for the two weeks we were on holiday. Now, that doesn’t mean I would have found myself doing it two weeks later, but it felt like the answer I was looking for in that moment.

As it turns out, two and a half months later, I’m still doing this exercise practice most days. It’s become a ‘habit’; and it didn’t require a decision, or discipline, or willpower. The spark for me was that I ‘saw’ the answer and I was prepared to give it a go without expectation.

And the words that look important to me in what I just wrote aren’t about the content of the process or even the very helpful question I was asked. They’re,

as it turns out…

As it turns out… I took a request to someone.

As it turns out… I heard the question they asked.

As it turns out… I’m still doing that practice months later…

We Can’t Predict the Future

We can’t possibly know, in any moment, whether something will become a habit, or it won’t, and forcing a ‘decision’ seems to me to be a flawed way to try to anticipate, or create, that future.

We can only know in a single moment whether something feels right, and we can only see an imagined future where that practice has become a habit. We don’t actually know what will happen and living into the illusion that we do can even become an opportunity to beat ourselves up for not sticking to our decisions or for lacking ‘willpower’ or failing to create whatever we imagined in that moment that is now past.

Sure, I could make up a story that this worked because it was easy, because it was short, or because I’m noticing the benefit—and all those things sound true, and maybe they’re based on some self-knowledge about what I thought might work for me, but it’s still a post-hoc rationalisation rather than an explanation. I can weave a story about why I’ve stuck to this habit where other habits have fallen by the wayside but what I actually did was put into practice what felt obvious to do rather than develop a practice in order to get somewhere (fitter, stronger, whatever…).

Something occurred to me to do, and it doesn’t occur to me to change it, or to stop doing it (yet).

Letting go of my imaginary stories makes life (and decisions) much simpler!

Look to the Source of Ideas

Too often we try to systematise what we do, look for causality, for explanation, and use that to guide future actions.

And that can help sometimes.

I’ve found that some clients like to do x, y, z…

Here are some great ideas I read about…

This worked for me in the past, Does it sound like something you want to have a go with?

Sometimes it’s helpful to get ideas, and to notice what else people are doing—that can give us things to try or open up a whole new chain of ideas.

And sometimes we need information—if I want to develop my glutes because I think it will stabilise my back, then some exercises will likely work better than others—there’s a knowledge piece in there. But information doesn’t create action; when the idea or the insight lands, it always come from (seemingly) nowhere.

Correlations Versus Causality

It’s way too easy to look back at something that happened and to see connections where there may only be randomness. We only see systems in hindsight.

I’m sure I’ve had other ideas for daily exercises that have fallen by the wayside after days or weeks—therefore I can’t possibly turn what I did into a prescription of what you should do—that’s not how change happens.

Change comes from an insight, something fresh in the moment, a new idea, a way to implement an existing idea, or even noticing anew the thing we’ve heard a dozen times before. I had the inspiration to implement a small daily exercise, someone asked me a question, and, boom, the idea was right there.

Be Curious

It feels very different to ask and look with curiosity than it does to simply implement the idea that worked for someone else (or worked for us in the past).

I’m coordinating a network of coaches inside an organisation at the moment and it looks as if there are patterns to where these relationships seem to be more successful and where they are less so. I’ve noticed that the ones that are creating the greatest transformations are when the coach and client meet very frequently—usually weekly.

Am I seeing a description, or a prescription?

I suspect the frequency is most likely a result of, rather than a cause of, of the depth of the transformation.

So I ask myself what else is at play here? I’ve noticed that some clients seem to immerse themselves in the unknown and are open to whatever occurs. Could it be that those clients have fallen into more frequent meetings because that’s what looked obvious to them and / or their coach?

Who knows, right? And it could well be a combination of both, and more things I can’t even see—human relationships happen in a single moment of time and space.

I can only describe what I can see, and then I can get curious about what else might be happening (the receptivity of the client, the structure, the frequency, the questions, the quality of listening…) and suggest experiments for future coaching relationships. I can’t prescribe a ‘one size fits all’, and what would be the fun in that anyway? Forcing my ideas on creative human beings?

To me there’s a feeling of lightness when I play with things as experiments, that isn’t there when I become attached and create expectations around what should happen—a sure fire way to set myself up for disappointment.

Please, This Isn’t a Prescription!

A friend of mine asked me how it’s possible to live from a more lighthearted place; does it require trust in our capacity for agility and responsiveness in the future?

Yes and no,

I answered her.

To me it’s something deeper than trust; I’m not conscious of ‘trusting’, I only see it when I look and mostly I’m acting like this is the obvious way to be, like there is nowhere to get to, only to experience life and all it throws at us. Like my choice might be more about what seems fun rather than what seems ‘important’, like everything we do is part of an infinite, rather than a finite game.

When There’s Nowhere to Get To…

I have no interest in ‘growth’ in the way it’s typically understood—that I have to get somewhere in order to be ‘better’. That I need to add to my life, my knowledge, my practices in order to grow. If there is nowhere to get to then the only thing to do is to enjoy the game (and sometimes get caught up in being a bad loser—yes, me too!)

Which doesn’t mean doing nothing as we can sometimes assume—it’s quite the opposite.

If I’m not placing any weight on something working out a certain way then why wouldn’t I experiment with a new exercise practice? Nothing to lose, right?

What feels obvious may (will!) change. Which means I can drop any judgement the future me might have about forgetting or changing that practice.

At the end of the day my life, just like yours, is a series of tumbles and trips. I fall over, I get hurt, I feel pain, and the best I can do is laugh at myself, get back up and try again. I can look back and smile or I can look back, tut tut, and prescribe myself a better future.

I way prefer the former—I don’t need to judge myself for being human.

With love,

Cathy