#160 Break Free from Who You Think You Should Be

// After the three previous three episodes about change, I wanted to take some time to think through together what the psychology behind behavioral change means for you individually and how you can process paradigm shifts and helps others process them as well.

In this episode, I share the difference between assimilation and accommodation, the first time I experienced change in a way that rocked me to my core, the song I wrote about the feelings I had during that experience, how to understand what your paradigm is, the power of being able to honestly answer if you could be wrong about the situations requiring you to make paradigm shifts, the sense of feeling lost after going through a paradigm shift and what you need to remind yourself of during that time, the importance of not blocking out the pain that comes with paradigm shifts, and more.

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Transcript

Hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  So, episodes 157, 158, and 159; we all were kind of talking about the same topic that we’re going to kind of close up with today.  It’s just you and me today.  I don’t have any other guests. Rosanne is not with me.  I just want to take some time to really think through together what assimilation and accommodation, what the psychology behind behavioral change really means for you individually.

Last week, we were talking with Rosanne about how people really need time to process what they’re learning.  If you’re going through a situation that gives you the opportunity to grow, that’s great.  But if you don’t take the time to really process it, it makes it really difficult for it to become an integral part of who you are now, to synthesize it into who you are, or to make a complete paradigm shift.

So, the thing that had me asking Espen to be on the podcast again a couple of episodes ago – so that would have been 158… what had me asking him to do that was our conversation about assimilation and accommodation – how people learn and really change.  Because assimilation is where you just take things in and you kind of filter them through who you already are, the way that you look at things now.  You’re not changing how you look at things.  You’re just filtering it through that way that you already do it.

Accommodation, on the other hand, is where everything kind of falls apart, and it’s possible that it feels like you don’t even know who you are anymore because you’ve made such a huge shift or something is rocking inside of you.  But it’s really important that we figure out how to go through this process.  Maybe you’ve been through it many times before.  Maybe you’ve been through it a couple of times before.  Maybe you feel like you really haven’t been through a situation that has really rocked you to the core and caused you to think about life differently.  Regardless, it’s possible that something I share today might help you to process these kinds of experiences in a way that will help you to then also help other people go through a big shift, a big paradigm shift – possibly a shift that you want them to make based on your expertise or your experience.

So, I’m going to start by sharing with you a little story about myself in a time… probably the first time that really this happened for me, that I felt rocked to the core.  And then we’ll talk about you.  I’ll give you a chance to think about yourself.  And then… this is kind of weird.  I hope that you are feeling very generous today.  But I actually wrote a song that explained this feeling, that kind of described this feeling that I had when I went through this experience that I’m about to share with you.  And so, at the very end, I’m going to do something totally off the wall and different, and I’m going to sing that song for you.  So, let’s get started.

All right, when we’re talking about paradigm shifts, we have to start by thinking about, “What is my paradigm?  How do I see the world?  How do I see myself and how I interact in the world?  What’s my role here?  How do I define myself?  Who am I?  And how do I want to have an impact on other people?”  I don’t think that I could probably describe this specifically when I was a kid.  But now looking back, I can say pretty definitively that I saw myself as someone who fit really well into a box.  I would call that box the “Ideal Andrea Box”.  And I wanted it to be the “ideal Andrea” because I did not want people to see the not-ideal Andrea.  I wanted to be perceived as being strong so tears and feeling vulnerable were not okay for me.  So, strong and good – I wanted people to think that I was a good person.  I wanted God to think that I was a good person.  I wanted to be a good person.  And so I wanted to be strong, I wanted to be good, and I wanted to be competent.  But really, I wanted to be right.

I wanted to know that whatever I said or thought was correct.  And I wanted other people to think that I was right about things as well.  So, you know, I wasn’t afraid of having a heated conversation to prove that I was right as long as it stayed within the box of also being good and strong.  So, good, strong, competent, “ideal Andrea”.  I wanted to be these things.

There was a situation in my life where I was this young adult.  I was a woman who was at seminary, and I wanted so desperately to find a husband.  Now, that is not something I want to talk about a whole lot on my Voice of Influence podcast where we’re focused on you, but the truth is, that that’s what I wanted.  I so desperately wanted to find companionship with somebody who respected me for being good, strong, and competent.

So, when I had the opportunity to get to know some people, one of the people I was getting to know, I kind of thought maybe he liked me.  And so, I went ahead and went with that.  I was kind of excited about the idea that, “Maybe this guy likes me.”  But you know what he said to me?  He said something along the lines of, “You know, Andrea, I’ve had this situation before where I have a friend that’s a girl and then she thinks that, ‘I like him.’  And so, I wanted to let you know that that’s not the case with us and just want to clear that up right away.”  And so I was like, “Okay, fine, I can handle that.”  So, I went on my merry way.  And I thought, “Well, I can be that.  That’s fine.  I’m good, strong, and competent.  I can be the strong girl that doesn’t care.”  And I went along and continued to be a friend.

But he continued to share lots of his struggles with me.  That’s always sort of been a tendency for people.  My life has been sort of a magnet for…I really care about people.  People tend to be vulnerable with me, share their emotions, share their struggles with me, and he would do this.  And a while later, I started to wonder, “Is it possible that he likes me?”  Well, the “Ideal Andrea Box”, and his past experience of having girls be confused about whether or not they liked him or he liked them, and my own desire to find somebody who would be a good companion to me… all these sort of collided in one moment.

And he realized that I kind of had a crush on him and that I thought maybe he liked me.  And when he realized this, he looked at me, and he said, “Is this a problem for us?”  And I just totally broke down.  I thought, “What in the world?  No way!”  And all I wanted to do in that moment was to go hide, dig myself a six-foot hole, fall down in it, and then bury myself there and never come up again.  Because it felt like good, strong, and competent Andrea was now bad because I had bad judgment by, you know, he had said that this wasn’t the case and then I came back and thought, “Well, maybe that is the case.”

So, anyway, somehow I’m bad.  I’m not strong anymore.  I’m obviously vulnerable because I’m feeling something that somebody else isn’t feeling.  And then I’m not right either.  I’m incompetent because I’m wrong about the situation.  So, the “Ideal Andrea Box” just fell into shambles; totally like a storm came through, ripped everything about me apart and left it all laying there.  And it felt like a death of some kind.  Some people talk about it as “feeling broken”.

And in that moment, I was being prepared.  I was being set up in a sort of way that I would be able to make a complete paradigm shift on my own identity.  I didn’t know that at the time.  That’s not how I was looking at it.  I was talking to a friend of mine, a mentor of mine and I kind of told her about the situation.  And she said, “Andrea, of course you had feelings for him.  You’re a human being.”  And I realized in that moment and I actually said this to her – through a bunch of tears, by the way – “I don’t want to be a human being.  I’m not a human being.  I don’t want to be that vulnerable.  I don’t want to be that wrong.  I don’t want to feel that vulnerable, that somebody could hurt me that bad.  I want to be able to take care of myself.  I want to be able to manage how other people feel about me, what they think about me.”  And in this moment, I couldn’t manage it because I was wrong about the situation.  So, everything came crumbling down.

I’m kind of curious.  Have you been through a situation where you felt like the ideal you, whoever that might be… it may not be good, strong, and competent like me.  I’m guessing that as an expert at your field, you probably want to be right about things like I did…  So, maybe competence or feeling respected, feeling strong.  Maybe those things do resonate with you.  But that ideal perspective of who you are, your identity, has that ever been just destroyed?  Has it ever come crashing down around you?  Or is it possible that maybe somebody has kind of knocked you off your foundations, and you feel rattled.  But you don’t want it to get to the point where it’s all in shambles around you.  And so, you sort of just fortify your walls of idealism about who you are.  So, you’re like, “No, I’m going to make sure that I’m right about this.”  “No, I’m gonna make sure that I’m strong.”  “No, I’m gonna make sure that I’m being good,” whatever it might be for you.

So, you sort of fortify those walls, and instead of allowing yourself to feel broken, to have this paradigm-shifting kind of experience of the death of who you thought you were or who you wanted to be, instead of experiencing that, you resist it.  I understand why you would want to resist it because it is very, very painful.  And not only that, it makes you feel like everything that you knew and who you thought you were may not be right.  You may not have been that the whole time.  Or the way that you’ve looked at life, all of a sudden, you’re seeing it through different lens, and it feels incredibly unsettling.

You know, one of the questions that has come up with a couple of psychologists I’ve interviewed recently is the real question of humility.  “Could I be wrong about this?  Is it possible that I’m not right?”  It’s an incredibly important question for us to be open to asking.  And in that moment with my friend, my mentor, the real question that I had to ask myself was, “Am I human?  Am I willing to accept that I do have vulnerabilities, that I’m not right all the time?  And that maybe my motives aren’t even right all the time?”  I had to ask that question, “Is who I say that I am really who I am?”

Another thing that Espen told us about accommodation – this idea of learning in huge paradigm shifts – is that for a while after an experience that puts somebody in a position where they’re ready for that kind of change, you really feel like you don’t know anything for a while.  You kind of look around, and you’re like, “Wait a second.  I thought this, I thought that.  Where am I?  Where am I going?  Who am I?”  And for a while, it feels like you’re backtracking or that you’ve been reset back to zero.  It’s like you’re playing Mario Brothers, and you get almost to the end of the level, and then it sets you all the way back to the beginning or something.  I don’t even know if that’s really how that works; just an image that popped into my mind just now.  But that’s what it feels like.  It feels like you’ve lost it all.

I want to remind you, in case you’ve forgotten, that you haven’t lost at all.  That when you do go through an experience that is knocking on those walls and is saying, “Hey, hey, hey!  Pay attention!  Maybe you’re not right about this,” that it’s not the end of the world and it’s not actual death to open yourself to the possibility of letting those walls be crumbled and fall to the ground.  Because after that happened to me, it took me probably a couple of weeks of hiding in my room, not wanting to see a single soul…  I didn’t want to see a single person.  I felt so much shame, and I felt so unsettled about who I am that I couldn’t handle it.

But after that happened, it made me open to see things spiritually in a way that I had never seen them before.  And whereas before, I had sort of felt like I really wasn’t human.  I felt like I was sort of on one side of a pane of glass with God.  It was like God and me on this side, looking in on the world.  And I wanted to connect with people.  People were really sweet and vulnerable with me.  And like I said before, they would share things with me, but I didn’t feel that connected to people because I felt like I was better than them, that I had it more figured out than they did.  And so, the amount of influence that I could have on a person was very, very limited because I couldn’t truly empathize with them.  I wasn’t allowing myself to feel that weak and vulnerable to be able to truly empathize with somebody else who I thought might be wrong with about something.

So, this whole idea of having an ideal self or having an ideal sense of who you are, that that might not be the case.  For me, that made me open up to understanding what the Bible teaches about God’s love.  I’m not going to go into great detail about this.  I go into great detail about my experience in my book, Unfrozen.  But it was this opportunity for me to feel loved by God in a way that I had never felt it before because I wasn’t protecting myself.  I finally felt raw and real in a way that I’d never felt before.  So, I could therefore experience God’s love in a way that I’d never felt before.

My point is not necessarily that you should experience what I experienced.  My point is that it’s very possible that you might be wrong about something.  Maybe you’re not right about everything all the time.  Maybe you’re not as strong as you want to be all the time.  Maybe you’re using self-protection to keep others out so that they can’t mess around with your sense of who you are as a person.  It is good when pain comes knocking on that ideal sense of who you are, and it starts to set cracks in it.  It might be time to let the thing fall down because it might put you in a position where you can learn something about yourself, where you can grow in a way that you’ve never grown before, simply because you’ve opened yourself to this opportunity.  And I tell you what, it’s usually pain that gets us there.

So, when you’re experiencing pain, please grieve it and ask an open-ended question.  “What might I need to learn from this?”  “What could I learned from this?”  “In what way might I be invited out of who I am and into something new?”  It might end up taking you to a place where you feel more confident of who you are and more confident of working with the people who care about what you have to say.  It might make it so that your voice matters more.