How We Screw Up Is Predictable

Source: Daniëlle Eibrink Jansen / Pixabay

As I near the end of my fourth decade of working with people, I can safely say there are two truisms I can count on: (1) people screw up in predictable ways, and (2) people get better in ways that always surprise me.

Why is this so? How could I explain the source behind these truths?

Let’s start with how and why people screw up. Most of us are locked into behavior patterns that we first started to develop in childhood. Much as our mother tongue is rooted in our earliest level of verbal development, our coping strategies are also deeply engrained and perfected over decades of repeating them thousands and thousands of times. I will frequently tell my clients: “You’re better at your job [staying stuck in your dysfunctional patterns] than I am at mine [trying to help you interrupt them], because you have many more years experience at your job than I do at mine.”

So you will see a man who is 100% aware he needs to work less and pay better attention to his partner or children continue to take on more tasks at work and be less available to his family. Or a woman who knows she is attracted to unavailable men get involved with yet one more married man or a 50-something man who has never sustained a relationship for more than one year. Each one is acting out a script from their past, replaying the same dynamic over and over again, seemingly powerless to stop the pattern even though they say they want to.

To change the pattern, to disrupt the cycle, is actually a very scary thing, especially when it’s a lifelong one. Who am I if I am no longer admired at my work for how much I can handle, if I tell my boss “No, I can’t do that”? What happens to my identity when a man I’m in love with says he loves me too, and maybe we should get married? We say we want to make these changes, but when the opportunity presents itself we pull back from habit and from fear. It feels safer to stay with the tried and true, and so we continue our old patterns, comfortable in the familiar discomfort of our habits.

Don’t ask me how to break these habits, because that is one of the mysteries I haven’t cracked. Sure there are lots of ideas, thousands of self-help books that purport to give you a sure-fire way to do so. I don’t believe there is any single solution for all or even most people. Overall, I’ve come to believe it is usually a combination of sustained effort, experimentation and grace.

And what happens when that happens? What can we expect when we are able to transcend our past and become our present self? When we are able to step into the person we were born to become?

The first thing I would say is that even when we’re stuck in our old habits, we are always on the road to recovery of our true selves. The work and the repetition are part of this road, so no matter how long (or how many lifetimes) it takes, we are still on our path.

The second thing is that when we let go of our programming and step directly into our true selves, what emerges is always unique, magnificent, surprising and beautiful. Like a work of art rather than a commercially successful but predictable film or novel, our true self is always a breath of fresh air to ourselves and the people in our orbit. I marvel at seeing clients I’ve worked with step into their authentic nature in ways I could never possibly predict but which always make complete sense once it happens. Could we predict a butterfly would be the end stage of a caterpillar? And yet, its destiny was always to emerge in this way, even when it crawled along a leafy plant. Perhaps the best way to summarize this marvelous transformation, whether of butterflies or of us, comes from this saying I heard many years ago: “You only really change when you become yourself.”