Have you ever noticed this…You’ve been working on getting something you want for months. Maybe it’s to improve your marriage. So you’ve been careful about what you say, rehearsing in advance what to say and when to say it, and putting thought and effort into learning the best way to act or respond. Or it could be money or your career, where you’ve looked at all sorts of ways to increase your income or become more successful.
And the truth is that you’ve given it your all. But nothing much has changed. You’re still stuck and feeling more frustrated than ever.
Then one evening you say something to your husband or wife almost without thinking. It’s an offhand comment - but you get a surprisingly positive response. And suddenly you see more progress than you have from all your efforts over the last three weeks. Something shifts in your relationship and it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even something you would know how to do again.
Or an unexpected encounter with someone gives you a new opportunity to increase your income or move your career forward in a way you never thought of.
When something like this happens, most of us are surprised and maybe even a bit bemused. But instead of questioning why it happened, we put it down to a bit of “luck” or tell ourselves something like, “I knew my effort would pay off.” We accept that as the explanation, even though it doesn’t quite feel right.
Because we know deep down that what happened wasn’t really the result of our effort. In fact, all the things we had been deliberately trying to do had very little to do with it.
And of course if we don’t get the breakthrough or result we’re after, what do we say? There’s only one explanation: not enough effort yet. We need to try harder, be more disciplined about it, give it more time and fill in a gap in our knowledge that must be there.
So that’s what we do, even though there’s a quiet voice of doubt in our head that we don’t like to acknowledge - because to doubt what we’re doing suggests we might end up giving up.
When you look at the two situations, though - the effort that didn’t work and the lack of effort that did - you will see what is really different about each of them.
When you were trying hard, you were working towards a specific outcome. In a conversation with your spouse you could see where you wanted it to go. You knew what a good result looked like. Before you said a word to your husband or wife, you were measuring it against that result. You were thinking: “What should I say here that will help me get the result I want?” Which means you weren’t actually talking to your wife. You were talking to your idea about her, running a version of a conversation you’d already had in your head a dozen times.
But when something actually worked - when the right words or actions just came out, or when you responded to an unexpected opportunity - you weren’t really thinking, were you? There was no preconceived right or wrong that you had to adhere to. There was no picture of what would mean success. There was just the person in front of you and what they’d actually said, and you responded to that. You were speaking and acting without thinking - and somehow it worked.
Of course there are other times you’ve acted “without thinking” and got a bad result, like when you lashed out and said something hurtful. But were you really not thinking then? Or were you reacting to a thought in your head: “This shouldn’t be happening. Things shouldn’t be happening this way.”
That’s something quite different. Again, you weren’t simply responding to what was happening. You were reacting to what you thought should be happening instead.
This whole process - of getting better results when we stop reacting to what we think should be happening and responding instead to what actually is happening - isn’t ‘luck’ or ‘coincidence’ (words we often use when we don’t have another explanation). It’s a sign of how the brain is designed to work. Your brain was built to respond to what’s actually in front of you, and it’s extraordinarily good at it. Every other animal survives by continually responding to the information it receives from its environment. None of them lies awake rehearsing what it should do tomorrow.
When your brain is reading the actual situation, it is remarkably good at responding without being told how. What interferes and gets in the way isn’t the situation itself. It’s the description of the situation you’re creating in your head instead: your thoughts.
It wasn’t that you weren’t trying hard enough, or even that you were trying too much. The problem was that you were putting your effort into trying to deal with something that wasn’t there.
I learned this the hard way. I spent decades building wealth and then watched it go, all of it, down to being homeless. Everything I’d wanted was gone and none of what I’d planned for remained. But what I discovered through the experience was that the picture I had of what my life should look like had become more important than what was actually happening in my life. I had spent so much time trying to make reality match that picture that I had stopped paying attention to what reality itself was telling me.
And the gap between what I’d wanted and what actually worked turned out to be very wide.
You don’t have to believe any of this. You don’t have to adopt a new philosophy or decide that things happen for a reason. There’s nothing to accept. There’s only something to notice, and you can start noticing it today, in the situation you’re already stuck in.
Watch what happens the next time you catch yourself rehearsing how something should go or working towards something you think you need. Notice how much of your attention is on the person or the problem actually in front of you, and how much is on the version you’ve constructed inside your head. See whether you can tell the difference from the inside.
And when you find yourself thinking “life shouldn’t be this way, I want it to be different” - see if you can notice what’s actually happening. Notice how much of the anxiety and frustration comes not from what is actually happening, but from the difference between what is happening and what you think should be happening. Your brain is trying to deal with something it can’t deal with: an imaginary future. It’s very good at handling what’s in front of it. It can do nothing at all with what isn’t.
And when you see this, the right actions tend to take care of themselves.
Separating what is actually happening from what your thoughts are telling you about what is happening isn’t always easy. It’s something my Nextla tool is designed to help you do. You can try it here.