💡 Quote I'm pondering

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves” - Elvin Semrad (quoted in Van Der Kolk’s ‘The Body Keeps The Score’)

I had a session earlier today with a new client and was reminded of this quote. I’m reading The Body Keeps The Score at the moment and it has been a heavy but powerful read (definite recommend). I was reminded of this quote in my session because the client was struggling to pick between two actions:

One action was something they thought “sounded like the sensible option” because that is how everybody else does it, but they hated the idea of doing things that way. The other option was something they were excited to do, and that would achieve 95% the same results in the same amount of time without the icky part they hated from the first option. They didn’t know what to do and felt deeply torn.

The core of the issue was them struggling to give themselves permission to take a “suboptimal” or “non-rational” action in monetary terms in order to be happy and able to sleep at night. After all, what is the acceptable price for happiness?

They believed they had to do things a certain way because that is how other people do it. They were really torn, suffering, as they knew they didn’t want to do it but had pressure from the feeling of “that is how people do things”.

The thing is, nobody would have cared if my client did things the way they wanted. My client would be happier, the business would run smoother, and everything would be better if they did things the way they wanted. The weeks they wasted mulling over this decision would have been better spent working on the business, and that 5% difference would have been more than accounted for had they just done the thing they wanted and carried on moving forward.

The suffering was brought about by the lie the client was telling themselves that people would think less of them or that they had to do things the way other people had done in the past. It caused real suffering in terms of a delay, but deep emotional suffering for those weeks also.

When we “named” the lie together, we brought it out into the open, my client remarked how everything became clearer. They knew exactly what to do next. Life became easy again.

Often, we can’t tell when we are lying to ourselves. We all do it. Our own lies are often our greatest sources of suffering. Having someone you can trust, who has experience of your path, will help you spot the lies we tell ourselves and to move forward without the suffering. The suffering has never been necessary.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-september-24

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