Don’t Poke The Tiger With a Stick. It Doesn’t Like It.

Do you ever get shut down?

It can be in small ways, or it can be in big ways:

• You are writing your blog, and you get tempted to look at incoming email, and something triggers you and you just can’t finish anymore.
• You decide to eat a little better, and for a meal or two or three, you do alright, and then you trigger your feelings of deprivation, and you binge for weeks.
• You KNOW you are supposed to do more networking (or exercising, or job interviews, or…), and you start making yourself do it, and then…everything shuts down. Not just the thing you were trying to do, but almost everything.

We’ve just poked the tiger too many times, and it’s gotten pissed off. My advice? Stop poking the tiger; it’s gotten grumpy.

What is the tiger?

The tiger is our inner balance system, the one which, for better or for worse, tries to keep things pretty much the same. This tiger is doing it’s very best to keep us well, safe and happy. Truly. And, most of the time, it’s the sweet cat we can rely on to keep us on the path we most prefer.

However, this balancing system has some beliefs that are profoundly out of date, beliefs about what is truly safe and useful to us. When we try to do something that contradicts or threatens one of these beliefs, the tiger gets grumpy. If we push it enough, it can react by shutting everything down in a attempt to maintain the safety it thinks we need.

Most of us, as adults, have a sense of what those areas of our life are. We’ve experienced how crazy our eating can get. Or we know the perfect circumstances to provoke our procrastination. The problem is that we feel like we need to change these patterns by pushing harder, and forcing a change.

Let me be clear: Force doesn’t work. It might work for a little while, but eventually, our inner balancing system will put things back on the track it thinks is best for us (even though, again, those beliefs are terribly out of date and not in alignment with what we know and want now). If this tiger thinks we are in total risk of our lives, it will shut us down to save us.

Now, there are ways to change these patterns so that the beliefs get updated and we can move forward in ways that feel good to us. That’s what I use NLP and Family Constellations for, and there are other modalities that do that, too. In the meantime, though, what do we do?

Well, don’t poke the tiger! Don’t rile up that inner balancing system so much it feels provoked to shut things down. This is so important, because, again, sometimes we feel like if we just applied a bit more force, we could get it to change.

So, if force doesn’t work, what keeps the tiger from getting upset and shutting everything down?

• First, remember, don’t force. If you’ve tried something and you can feel things collapsing, back off.
• When there is some area of your life that you can’t “fix” or really move forward on, be intentional about doing the things you can do. Momentum is very important; without it, we get discouraged. Do what you can do.
• Don’t try to overload your plate. Do a bit of this and that. Don’t try to change or address more than a few things at a time.
• Attend to your wellness (at least the kinds of wellness that are pretty much easy!). Pleasure, beauty, self-care–these are the kinds of things that make moving forward on the stickier parts of life easier.
• Support is critical, and find the kind that works for you. We really can’t build new patterns in our lives on our own. That’s very, very hard.
• And again, don’t force. Sorry to repeat it, but I see clients do this to themselves so often, especially people who are in business for themselves, alternative healing practitioners and coaches. If your work on the website it shutting everything down, focus on something, anything, else.

Another way to say all this: Be kind to yourself. Gentleness takes most of us further than an aggressive stance toward ourselves. Poking the tiger, in the end, is really us poking, unmercifully, at ourselves.

And although I have offered some advice for avoiding aggravating our inner tiger balancing system, this also applies to any good change work system, whether NLP or Family Constellations or anything else. Change work is never about simple force. It’s about finding the “third way,” the unexpected path that we couldn’t see.

All movement forward is about respecting the inner self that is so kindly trying to care for ourselves.

We need that tiger. Respect it. Don’t poke it.