Have you ever had a friend who had a terrible day–they lost their job, their car was broken into, their dog peed on the new carpet–but they didn’t tell the story the way you might expect?
Instead of talking about their terrible day, they talk about the exciting opportunity to take a new direction in life since they lost their job; mention how lucky they feel that no one got hurt in the theft (and say prayers for the thieves); and remind themselves how much they love their zany rescue dog.
This can be understood as a simple “look on the bright side” kind of attitude, but it is actually much deeper than this:
The meanings we make about anything–everything–determine what our life FEELS like. (This is true for everyone, but if you are in business, you can click here to read more about an upcoming opportunity that is all about having a more success in business based on what business means to us.)
Meanings are awesome. They are what make life juicy. Meanings make it so that eating oatmeal reminds us happily of our childhood; they can incline us to assume our co-worker meant well when they interrupted us; we can take deep pleasure in a flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk that hundreds of people a day pass by without noticing it.
Meanings are also tricky. They can make us smell oatmeal at a nearby table and plunge us into miserable memories of childhood; they can incline us to assume that the inelegant comment of a co-worker means they hate us; we can look at a flower struggling to grow in an ugly crack in the pavement and feel despair at the state of the planet.
We need both positive and negative meanings. It’s very useful to have some flexibility in having both kinds. (We wouldn’t want a bridge engineer to always assume that everything is going to turn out okay, for instance. There’s a place for the skeptical, critical meaning-making!)
The problem is when meanings get stabilized into patterns that sometimes undermine our capacity to have a happy life full of possibility. Except in the most extreme instances (like the “Debbie Downers” on our work teams), these kinds of meanings are often hard to notice. We don’t even know we have them and that they are wreaking havoc in our lives.
For instance, for alternative practitioners and coaches building their practices, the meanings they have about business can be subtly undermining of their success. Meanings like:
- Marketing is creepy. It’s only about trying to get someone to buy something.
- Business is heartless. You have to sell your soul to be successful doing it.
- To do well in business requires you to join in the most awful structures of consumerist culture. It makes you a collaborator.
- Only people without ethics make a lot of money.
These are intense meanings which will shape anyone’s capacity to be successful (which means, probably not!). It’s true–there are lots of ways to be in business that aren’t so nice, but what if instead of the above meanings, we had these:
- Marketing is about creating relationships and offering value.
- Business can be heart-full. Indeed, our society is in desperate need of people in business who are more deeply connected to their souls.
- We have choices about how we join in our local economic culture; doing well in business doesn’t require us to join systems we don’t believe in.
- It’s arguable that it’s easier to be “nice” when we know we can pay the rent! And there are ethical people with money who find it a way to do more creative acts of service in the community than they were able to do beforehand.
If any of these were true–that is, were deeply experienced as true–what might that mean for you and your business?
For those of you not in business, what kinds of meanings might be making your dreams more difficult to achieve?
How do we get new meanings? It’s not always easy, because our unconscious sense of survival often depends on our old meanings. But there are a few ways of acquiring new meanings.
- A crisis shakes us loose and makes it obvious we’ve been wrong about some stuff, or that new meanings are more proper to who we are.
- We enter a new “culture”–a church, a healing community, a subculture, an entirely different country–and slowly acquire the new meanings of this community as we deepen our belonging to it. (This is why people newly in recovery find they need to find new friends; their old friends stabilize the old meanings, and it’s very hard to overcome the meanings of the culture we live in.)
- We do deep change work that helps us make new meanings feel safe deep in our unconscious so that we just take the new meanings for granted.
- Finally, sometimes, if for most of our life we’ve been exposed to the old meanings and never heard the alternative ones, one mention of the new way to think about it does the trick: “I never knew you could think about it that way! That’s SO much better! Thank goodness I’ve finally run into this!” It’s as if we kind of suspected it all along, but without external confirmation, we couldn’t really buy it.
Each way is a good way. Some we have a bit of control over; others are the gift of time and circumstance. But they are always out there, waiting for us to embrace a different, more proper sense of meanings.
There’s an argument that this, indeed, is what the whole world is waiting for–as Charles Eisenstein says, a new story, one that allows for a deep integration of diversity, disavows violence, and respects the limits of our planet.
What’s your experience of new meanings? Please post your questions and comments on my blog here.
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