Why do you do the things you do? That’s the million dollar question isn’t it? What makes you have that response? Why do you feel that way? What makes you think those thoughts? Do your actions begin with the thoughts or do your actions begin with your feelings?
Thoughts or Feelings?
Sometimes we like to try to answer these question by focusing strictly on our thoughts. You procrastinated once again doing that thing you’ve been wanting to do for weeks and you might hear some advice that you just need to focus on thinking about how great it will feel to have that task done. In other words, if you focus on the right thoughts then the right feelings of motivation and action will follow. Well, I agree with that whole heartedly. So why do we do the things we do? It must be because of the thoughts we think, right?
But what about when a friend, parent, or spouse does something hurtful to us and we’re feeling upset or angry. We want to resolve the conflict and be able to forgive and move forward and since our thoughts must be the solution then we just have to focus on thinking the right way about the situation. “Oh, they did that to me because they are struggling right now themselves so I’m just going to be gracious to them and focus on thinking about how hard of a situation they are in and that’ll help me to love them and move on.” Well that doesn’t seem right or feel like it’ll work. That completely stuffs down what we are feeling and we all know those feelings are gonna come up eventually.
Well then, it’s more important that we really focus on what we are feeling. It’s not right to stuff down our emotions by thinking our way out of them. The answer to why we do what we do is because of what we are feeling. When we can figure out what we are feeling and allow ourselves to feel those feelings then we’ll be able to move forward, right?
But what about when we have a big important assignment due in a couple weeks at work and we’re feeling super anxious about it? Well we just need to really focus on what we’re feeling and allow ourselves to feel and process that anxiety and then we’ll feel better and have motivation to press on in confidence! Well I can tell you right now, that isn’t gonna work. There’s a reason we are feeling anxious and I bet you it’s rooted in some sort of thought that just isn’t true. And until we take some time to really think about what is true about the situation then we are probably going to continue to feel anxious about work, which is probably going to make us avoid work as much as possible, which is only going to make the situation worse.
So focusing on our feelings isn’t the answer. We need to focus on our thoughts that are leading us to feel anxious. Final answer: our thoughts are the reasons we do what we do! But wait! What about the example of being hurt by our friend? Or what about when we our 10th job application gets denied again? Are we just suppose to think away and ignore our discouragement and disappointment and white knuckle press on thinking we’ll land a job eventually? Uhhhh… I guess not? I guess we should focus on our feelings too?
I don’t think we’ll ever really be able to answer the question of why we do the things we do. I believe strongly that life is more often grey then black and white and that instead of swinging the pendulum one way towards focusing on thoughts or swinging it the other way towards focusing on feelings that we really need to do is hold both in tension with one another.
A New Framework
I want to propose a new framework for thinking about our thoughts and feelings. Instead of focusing on one or the other, I propose we think about them in terms of a great dance, one in which we are the choreographer.
In this great dance, you have your two partners, your thoughts and your feelings. They are constantly spinning around and around. Sometimes your thoughts will lead the dance spinning and twirling your feelings around and sometimes your feelings will lead your thoughts around the dance floor.
With this idea of a dance in mind, lets go back and look at our first example of procrastination and watch how the dance is played out. Let’s use the task of budgeting, something I often procrastinate. When the end of the month is arriving I begin to think about how I want to review this past months budget and plan for next months and in that moment my thoughts begin to lead the dance. I start thinking, I wonder if we overspent this month? Or I remember we had an unexpected big expense that probably blew up our budget. And as I start thinking these thoughts, dwelling on them, and repeating them over and over in my head, they begin to direct my feelings around the dance floor. I begin to feel anxious thinking about sitting down to work on the budget. This leads me to procrastinate, which only makes the weight of budgeting feel like a larger cloud of doom hanging over my head. I get into a scarcity mindset feeling like I probably don’t have any money to spend so I forgo eating out, or buying that book to read, or whatever else because I’m worried thinking I don’t have enough money. My bad thoughts about budgeting and money are fully in control and leading my feelings and subsequently my actions around and around the dance floor.
But what about when your feelings begin to lead the dance? When I was looking for my first software development job I needed to find something quickly because I was getting married soon. Thankfully, I landed a job literally a week before getting married, but unfortunately it was an hour away from home. I survived driving two hours each day for a couple of years, but eventually I needed to find a new job. It took me almost a full year of job hunting, countless interviews, and countless rejections until I landed the right job. And if you’ve ever gone through the job hunting process, which I’m sure you have, then you know how terrible, exhausting, discouraging, and grueling the process can be.
I share that quick story because I remember at one point I thought I had found the perfect job. It was a remote position, which sounded amazing, it was doing mobile app development, which also sounded amazing, I had spent a weekend working on and passing a coding project as part of the interview, I’d studied a week preparing for the in-person interview/coding test, done well in that, and made it to the more HR related interview, which I also thought went well. Everything was looking promising and I thought my months of job hunting was coming to a close only to receive that dreaded email that they were thankful for my time but had decided to pursue other candidates. I was devastated and my feelings begin to really lead the dance. I felt exhausted from the studying, working, and waiting to see if I made it to the next round of interviews. This was the second time I’d gone far in the interview rounds at a company and thought I’d secured a new job and so it began to feel hopeless like I’d never find a job. I started feeling like I simply wasn’t a good software developer, that my skills weren’t good enough to land a new job. And all these feelings begin spinning my thoughts around and around and I begin to think I’d be stuck forever and ever driving two hours to work. I began thinking I wasn’t a good software developer, that I should just give up searching for a new job, that I felt too exhausted to have the energy to start looking for another job and that I simply just didn’t feel like doing anything. My feelings can be a powerful leader on the dance floor.
Both our thoughts and our feelings can be powerful leaders on the dance floor that’ll spin us around wherever they want us to go, but! I strongly believe we are not powerless or victims to the whims of our thoughts or feelings. I believe that God has made us with this wonderful third member to this Great Dance: the mind.
The Power of the Mind
The mind, or our conscious thoughts or awareness, is a third member to the dance that represents our ability to step away from our thoughts or feelings and begin to direct the dance in the way we want and believe it should play out. It is the thing that when we are having spinning thoughts, or feeling deep emotions of anxiety, fear, or depression, is able to pause, step back from these thoughts and feelings, and begin processing and assessing the why.
The mind is the real you, the one that isn’t powerless or a victim in what is going on in your life and has the ability to extended kindness and compassion to yourself, and decide what you are going to choose to believe is true.
So how does this “mind as the choreographer” play out in the Great Dance? It starts with stepping back from the situation, gathering the facts, and asking the question “why?” Let’s go back to my anxiety around looking at a budget. When I step back and gather the facts, I find that I put off budgeting because I’m afraid of what the outcome might be. Now, I can ask the question why? Well, I’m afraid we might have overspent. Great, let’s keep asking why. Why would that be a bad thing to have overspent? Well, it might mean we’ll run out of money and not have enough to live. Okay, that feels a little scary to think about, but now let’s explore if any of this is true or look at the worst case scenario. What if we didn’t have any money what would happen? Well, we both have loving parents that would be more then willing to take us in and help us get on our feet. Great! So, that would be humbling and maybe embarrassing, but we’d still be alive and living. But what about the thought of overspending? Is that even true for me? Well, no. Some months we have overspent and others we have greatly underspent. And have we ever not had enough, in other words, has there always been enough for how we live? Well, yeah. Great!
So as I go through this reflective process, and ask myself why, and explore what I’m really afraid of, more often then not, I’ll land on some feeling that is rooted in a thought that simply isn’t true. This is the beautiful thing of the mind that it allows us to assess and determine fact from fiction. And once we do the hard work, because it is hard work to do what I did above, then we can come to this beautiful almost magical moment where we get to be intentional to choose what we want to believe is true about the situation.
If I do this for myself and budgeting I can begin to believe that God has always provided financially for me, and that I actually believe he will always provide for me. And furthermore, I can begin to believe that budgeting could actually be a fun activity. I can choose to believe that we have control over our finances, that I can choose to decide how we will spend our money, and that budgeting can be a tool I use to begin to enable us to have the money available to live the life we want to live. And the most beautiful thing about this? Is that when I begin to think about how I really want to look at or think what is true of budgeting is that my feelings of excitement follow. Instead of dread and procrastination, I start to almost look forward to budgeting. And then I have the motivation to do it, and it feels good to do it and feels like I’m being intentional and feels like I’m directing my own life instead of just being a victim to what I’m feeling or thinking. My mind chooses the choreography of the dance and it’s a beautiful thing.
Now what about when we find our feelings directing the dance? It’s the same process. We step back from the situation, we gather the facts, and we ask “why?” So in my situation of not getting the job offer from earlier, I can step back and assess the situation by asking the question, “what am I currently feeling at this moment?” Now here is a key difference between dealing with our thoughts leading the dance and our feelings leading the dance. When our thoughts are in control, we can be a little more logical or firm with ourselves. We can almost give ourselves the freedom to debate our own thoughts by jumping to asking why over and over again. However, when dealing with our feelings being in control, we need to be kind and gentle to ourselves.
We ask ourselves what we are feeling without jumping to analyzing why we feel that way or deciding if what we are feeling is based on truth. This is sooo crucial that we give space to simply take stock of what we are feeling and acknowledge to ourselves what we are feeling. So in the case of my job rejection I was feeling incredibly disappointed, hopeless, discouraged, exhausted, and worn out. It really did feel like I was never going to find a job. And once we have figured out what emotions we are feeling it’s important to basically talk to ourselves and extend kindness to ourselves. I can acknowledge what I’m feeling by saying to myself, “Ryan, that’s so hard and disappointing. You had all these dreams of what this new job was going to look like and now they’re gone. That is so heartbreaking. And that makes so much sense that you’d feel hopeless about finding a new job after not finding one for months on end. And that makes so much sense that you’d feel exhausted because you just put so much hard work towards trying to land this new job. Of course looking for another job sounds terrible right now, or hopeless or like the last thing you want to do.” By talking to ourselves like this, it may feel a little weird, but it is giving ourselves space to feel the real legitimate feelings we are having and experiencing.
Now this is where things can get tricky with our feelings because it is important to give ourselves space to feel what we are feeling, but we also need to assess why we are feeling what we are feeling. This is tricky because it is important to not rush into the assess phase and basically try to squash down our feelings and view them as wrong right away, but it is also important to not remain in the “feeling of the feelings” phase too long either. So for example, with my job rejection, I was feeling exhausted and discouraged and it was okay to tell myself, “hey, this was a long couple weeks, I just need to feel sad and not even think about looking for new jobs and it’s okay to even feel a little hopeless for a day or so.”
But eventually, just like when our thoughts are leading the dance, we need to begin to ask the question of why we are feeling what we are feeling. And again, this is where it can get tricky because with our feelings they can sometimes come from true experiences the genuinely leave us feeling sad or disappointed or embarrassed or whatever, but sometimes they can come from a belief that isn’t true and needs to be loving questioned.
For example, with my job rejection, I felt exhausted and disappointed. And why did I feel that way? Because I was really excited and thought I’d done enough to land this job and had worked for weeks to try to land the job. So yes, it’s okay to feel exhausted and disappointed. Those feelings are coming from true experiences. But I was also feeling hopeless. And why was I feeling hopeless? Well this was the second time I’d come close to a landing a job and didn’t get it and it had been about half a year of job searching and it really felt like I’d never land a new job. So in this case, that makes sense I’d feel that way, and I can have compassion towards myself for how real that thought feels, but if I step back and question that thought some more, I find that it just simply isn’t true. There are thousands and thousands of jobs out there and I’m 100% confident I can find the perfect one for me. I can being to fall back on my core beliefs I’ve previously written down, one being that I know and trust that the Lord will provide me with the perfect job and in this case it wasn’t that job for whatever reason. I can further remind myself that yes it feels exhausting and hopeless now, but that if I take a break from job hunting for a couple days or a week, focus on doing things that refresh myself, that I’ll be able to get back on the horse and be able to find that perfect job.
So just like in our example when my thoughts were leading the dance, and I stepped back and begin to let my mind lead the dance, I am ultimately able to come to a place where I begin to dwell and thoughts I believe to be true about the situation. And when I begin to think about what is true, my emotions, and energy leads me to become almost excited to pursue whatever it is I’m struggling with. I begin to remind myself that I am a good software developer, that my job is to just take the next step of faith in the job hunting process and that the Lord will provide, and it frees me up from the pressure, and excites me to once again start looking for a new job.
You Are Not Powerless – You Have a Choice
So why do we do what we do? I think it depends. As we have seen, depending on the situation I think that our thoughts can lead the dance causing us to do what we do, but I also think our emotions can take over leading the dance and cause us to do what we do. And in both situations it can feel like we are powerless to the dance and find ourselves spun around and around to the whims of our thoughts or emotions. However, we’ve been given a amazing thing called the mind, a third partner in the Great Dance, one that we have control over to become the leader in the dance, directing our emotions and thoughts into a beautiful dance that we want to perform.
And ultimately, the most amazing and hopeful and empowering truth I believe, is that we have control over why we do what we do. We aren’t powerless, we aren’t victims to our lives, we have the ability to step back from our thoughts and feelings, to be kind to ourselves, to assess the situation, and to intentionally decided and believe what we want to be true about our lives, which will generate the feelings we want to feel from our life.
Take Action!
Where in your life do you need to become a choreographer? Where are your thoughts leading the dance and what would it look like to begin questioning them? Where are your feelings leading the dance and what would it look like to be compassionate to yourself yet graciously question where these feelings are coming from?
I would love to help you navigate through any of these questions! I provide one-on-one coaching and would love to listen and help you process through whatever is going on in your life.