How You Do One Thing Is How You Do Everything

Recently, however, I’ve been having conversations with clients, with friends and with myself where it finally started to click for me.

It’s about patterns. It’s about habits. It’s about unconsciously going through life not looking at either of those things.

What’s your pattern for responding to someone who’s confronting you? Does the red mist fall? Do you get triggered into a defensive response? Do you retreat into your shell, assuming they’re right?

Geneen Roth talks about it with food. Our relationship with food is a mirror for our relationship with life. Do you deprive yourself of food (life) and then binge on it when no one is looking? Do you stand in front of the refrigerator forever, unable to make a decision? Or do you grab something without thinking and later wish you would have thought it through more?

How does that show up elsewhere in your life? Are you poleaxed by making decisions about where to go on holiday…whether or not to leave your job, or your relationship?

The way I’ve “done food” in the past has been a huge reflection on how I’ve done life

• Deprived myself of carbs/fat/sugar while at the same time depriving myself of loving relationships with people that cared about me
• I’ve listlessly wandered around supermarkets and kitchens alike many, many times unable to decide what to have. I’ve also done the same thing relationships that were past their sell-by date and jobs that I lost sleep over

Here are how these kinds of patterns show up in what we talk about a lot round here – relationships. Something I do with my clients is to ask them to list their past relationships and assess what was positive and negative about them.

Always, my clients start with what’s wrong with them. Soon enough, we start to uncover the patterns that continue to show up in each relationship, like:

• The girl who always has to be noticed. She must speak up in every group, has to have the last say in the meeting. She just can’t understand why her boyfriend has become really quiet and withdrawn throughout their relationship. Come to think of it, every boyfriend has done that. She thinks her pattern is that she picks guys who are talkative at first and then become withdrawn.

• The girl who needs to be needed. She has so much drama in her life because everyone needs her to be doing something important in their lives yesterday. She can’t understand why she always finds herself in relationships with guys who bring some kind of drama too. She thinks her pattern is that she’s like fly paper for crazy.

• The girl who’s lonely. She’s got fractured groups of friends, no one really close to rely on and a couple of people in her circle who are activetly destructive. She also has a pattern of getting involved with unavailable men. She thinks her pattern is the challenge of the unavailable guy.

What patterns are you starting to notice as you read this? Is how you do food how you money? Is how you do money how you do relationships? Is how you do dating how you do friendship?

What can you do about your patterns? First, you notice them. You can’t chance anything you’re not aware of.

Then observe what happens (Warning: this is going to be uncomfortable. Patterns are habits, but they probably also serve to distract you from some kind of pain. The discomfort that comes up when we don’t fall into our patterns is what you get to learn from. Sit with it until it begins to dissipate. It won’t take as long as you think.)

Beware of the tendency to dive too much into where your patterns come from or why they’re there. It doesn’t really matter. It’s like the connect-the-dots puzzle. It doesn’t matter which dot you start with, the game is in connecting them all and discovering the picture you’re left with.

Rather than ask where it came from or whose fault it is, ask yourself some different questions. You might try “How does this serve me today?”, “How does this hold me back today?”, “What pattern would I rather have?”, “What’s one way I can begin to play with this pattern?”.

And finally – tell me what patterns you notice! I’d love to hear what you discover!

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