The Power of Realistic Best Efforts - Episode 14

Awareness That Heals, Episode 14.

So, friendly mind really is the voice that's just always trying to ask you to be inquiring, what is your realistic best efforts? Are you doing them?

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book, "Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges," to help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time, to find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

A very warm welcome to you today as we continue with our deepening understanding of Friendly Mind. And joining us today are two of my dearest friends, Dave and Shelley. We've been friends for ages. Dave is the co-president of the Global Bridge Foundation, and Shelley is a board member an exceptional therapist. And we're also going to include Mark, who's the engineer, but more than that, he's developed a core relationship to Friendly Mind and might make a significant contribution today with his depth life experience. So in the last episode, we just covered the realization that Friendly Mind isn't always able to be friendly when it's speaking to us. So it's a part of our best wisdom and our mind responding to difficult situations, difficult emotions. But when especially we're in a deep kind of suffering, we're totally exhausted, we're totally anxious, or angry, friendly mind might not be able to have that quality of friendliness. And that's what we went into in the last episode. But as we go into further exploration, it's very important to keep that mind, not to lay a trip on yourself that, gee, it's not friendly mind 'cause I'm not friendly. And it's still immensely beneficial if we can learn to devote ourselves to this kind of guidance without putting the standard of having to be friendly, uh, in our tone. So today we're going to really focus on the fourth key principle, which is making our realistic best efforts for self-care and beyond with our friendly mind. And the word realistic is crucial because we can become a perfectionist and thinking our best efforts are Superman or perfection. And if we do that, we're gonna be setting ourselves up for rejection. So it's important as we speak about realistic best efforts, Are you the kind of person that is a perfectionistic person? If so, then you're going to really need to remind yourself that realistically, something I know I can say is what I'm looking for. If on the other hand, you're the kind of person who might give yourself credit for having made best efforts, but actually you're a bit of a slacker and you are a little loose with yourself, then you might really need to say, am I really doing what I can, can do? So take a little look at that in the background. And as we've mentioned in the prior episodes, this is about you and about you looking inside yourself as to whether you're really understanding friendly mind, applying it to your life situations, applying it to your emotions. Now, one of the key elements of realistic best efforts is it makes it clear that friendly mind doesn't take you off the hook. It's not just saying, gee, you're a great guy, or yeah, you made your best efforts to work out. You need to really make your best efforts to work out. You really need to try what you can realistically do in any situation you're in or any difficult emotion you're having. So, for example, If you've just dumped a lot of anger on your partner and you're saying, well, I did my best to tell them what I feel, and you see hopefully that it was harmful. Realistic best efforts also means that you're not creating any harm for anybody that's unnecessary. Now, of course, there are situations in life where a person's going to be hurt. There's nothing we can do about it, but we're doing our best to make it be as gentle as we can be. And we're still staying with that premise of, am I really thinking about how can I be my best self within reason? So how much is that clear to you? And where do you see yourself on the spectrum of, gee, I'm a perfectionistic person, or I'm someone that talks about best efforts, but I'm not as devoted as I need to be. And so Friendly Mind can actually be both a catalyst to find the thoughts that are going to guide you But it can also be an inspiration or a motivation to see yourself and where you can make a more wholehearted effort.

Robert, first, I'd like to ask a question, and also thank you for, again, the opportunity to participate in these meaningful and important really life lessons. And I just want to say that I have, as I've talked about before, a relationship to a lot of different things, but health is one of the, the things that puts me into an anxious state when it occurs in myself especially myself or people very close to me. And the question really is, I find myself— and this is not a universal response— but often I find myself in overdrive. I will respond to something that needs attention in a real way by doing research beyond what is what most people would call healthy. And as I do that, I'm not really unfriendly to myself, but I'm occupied with really the doing that it takes to explore research, etc., which takes me, of course, away from the anxious feeling. But it's— I'm just wondering how you relate what I'm saying about that to Friendly Mind.

Well, it's a great question because I think it's going to bring in a certain set of people who are not particularly critical of themselves, but what they do is they overcompensate by doing more and more and more so that they can not be critical of themselves or not be anxious. And so knowing you as well as I do, you know, setting up doctor's appointments, giving it hours of thought, you know, having conversations with doctors, that at some point you would say to yourself, okay, what is my friendly mind gonna say to me about this? So your friendly mind is going to be saying something to you like, hey Dave, you might be overcompensating here. And I know you're doing it out of the best intentions of your heart, but maybe in the guiding sort of way, it would say to you, maybe you've done it, maybe you're anticipating too much out in the future for too long, and you're preparing for something that is only a 2% chance of happening. What do you think, Dave? And then you have a dialogue back and forth with friendly mind, and friendly mind intervenes while you're seeing yourself take those extra actions, or maybe even before you're taking the actions. And it's there as a guidepost to stop you from, let's say, in a really let's say beneficial way for others, it would intervene and say, God, you have some great intentions, but you might be slightly neurotic here. You might, you might, you might be, you might be anticipating a 1% chance and spending a lot of your life anticipating 1% chances, and that's going to keep you engaged at such a level that it'll cover some of the anxiety, but you'll have way more hours where you're anxious. So what do you think, Dave?

And I'll tell you what I think. I, I think that's exactly right. I think, I think it is a, a way for me to not feel the discomfort, which for me is very uncomfortable actually, of anxiety. And if I were to feel anxious and I were to put it in perspective, then I would be— if I were to not occupy myself with the research and the other efforts, and the anxiety could be alongside of the realistic things, which is so important, that are really going on in front of me, then as I have had to me, to happen to me, then I think it becomes a different question. It becomes a question of why the hell do I feel so, you know, anxious? And it is self-critical, and it is a different equation. And I, in my life, have been fairly successful in avoiding, or let's say compensating compensating by research, which, by the way, doesn't really work. It only works temporarily because as soon as I stop, and it can't be 24/7, of course it rushes back in. There's no getting around it.

Yeah. And I think it's also very important when you say, why in the hell am I so anxious? You know, that's where Friendly Mind comes in and says, listen, Stakes are high. We're in bodies. We get sick. Our friends get sick. We love them. It's probably the, the, the best, uh, neurotic element one could ever have in the world because it's all helping people, but it's not helping you. And you're the priority here along with them. It's not that they're not the priority, but so are you. And so, Dave, I see that you're anxious. It's understandable that you're anxious, friendly mind would say. And how do we balance caring for ourselves while we're anxious and doing the great research you're doing without overdoing it?

So there is another fine line I want to ask you about right there. Because it feels— the word self-compassion, the word self-caring, but especially self-compassion, which is how I relate to the best of that caring for myself, feels like it's halfway into friendly mind as friendly thoughts. And also it has a certain emotional element to it that is different. That it feels like a bridge in some ways. Can you speak to that?

It can be friendly mind, especially if it's in a relatively not terribly serious emotional state, because then we can have the freedom to feel the self-compassion. But if we're severely anxious, severely depressed, or we're looking at somebody that's terminally ill, and you're really, really nervous about it, then to be self-compassionate with friendly mind is exactly what we did in the last step, which is we can't always feel friendly mind. So the self-compassion is something we'll deal with down the line, is included when we're not in a very serious emotional state. And we're calling that wisdom mind, which allows self-compassion and all the qualities to go along with the mind. So friendly mind, the way we're using it, is really an emphasis dominantly when we're really in it deep and we need a best friend that can't feel and be beneficial on the state of feeling, but where we can learn to be deeply trusting that this inner knowing of friendly mind is a guide. And even though it's often seen as a booby prize because it's only friendly mind, and I frequently say something like friendly mind/wisdom, it's something that we need to lobotomize ourselves with and recognize that Friendly Mind is almost a miracle. If you can find a voice to guide you when you're feeling lousy, you're feeling anxious, you're feeling depressed, you're feeling angry, you're feeling exhausted, and you say, you know, I know you're angry, but now's not the right time to act it out. I know you're exhausted. The question is, do you have enough energy to send this email, or are you better off to rest? So friendly mind is a neutral place when you're in it down deep. So it's a very important question and particularly highlights the third level where we can't always be friendly.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

So Robert, I have a situation where it's not perfectionism, it's more like just enoughism. And so my situation in which I tend to harbor a fair amount of guilt that is not a chirping bird, as one of my professors used to call it, the ruminating mind. It's not so much that, it's just a feeling of I should be doing more. The reason it's that way is because my family were bicoastal and even through the pandemic, our level of communication didn't change that much. We make some phone calls, a few emails. But many families are doing joint Zoom calls from all over the country or world even, and every Saturday and things like that. And in my family, nothing has changed. And so I feel as though I reach to my family members more than they reach to me. And they never complain and they never ask for more, but I feel that we should be more connected. And so then I feel guilt, but I'm stuck in this place of I do more than they do, nobody's asking for anything, but it still doesn't feel like there's enough cohesion in the family unit. For me. So, so then I— and it feels more like a little bit of a collapse, like a sadness, like I don't, you know, I should be doing more. It's not their thing, but I know that they appreciate it. And I mean, I, I do sometimes just do what I think I need to do, but there's still a feeling of guilt.

Yeah, well, having the advantage of knowing your family and your family system, I think the reason why you might feel some guilt is because you're by far the most natural leader in the area of talking about things. You're a therapist. Nobody else in your family is a therapist. They're largely non-communicators, and they would likely look to you to be the leader. And so the beauty of your question is it really reveals another aspect of friendly mind, which is that many times it leads us to a very ponderous question. And I mean many times. So the question in this situation, friendly mind would ask a question and it would say, given the fact that you are the one that's most skilled in this area, and also, again, knowing you very well, given the fact that you also love your solitude and you're also a very full and busy therapist and person, do you believe your best self would lead some of those Zooms, or are you right on target where you are? Is this guilt rational? Is this guilt irrational? And then that would lead you into a ponderous question. And you might say, you know what, once every few months I do want to suggest a family Zoom. Or maybe you'd say, you know what, I'm doing so much more than they are, that's enough. But the idea of friendly mind being a question when we don't know is a critical aspect of friendly mind. And I would say it would come up For most people, maybe half the time. So that simple question for you, you know, can you stay in the question and tolerate asking that question without a preconception of a knee-jerk reaction that's going to just come in and say, no, I do it, and I do it enough, or I don't do it enough. But more getting to a place of resolve where you feel like that question is reaching your best self and you say, you know what, I don't want to do it for a long time, but I wouldn't mind doing a 15-minute Zoom and initiate that. That would allow us to feel a little bit closer. It wouldn't feel burdensome, wouldn't cut into my life. Now, I don't mean to give you answers, but I'm kind of hinting at the kind of process that might go on with friendly mind. Then again, friendly mind, another aspect of it that's subtle, often has a series of dialogues. You might hear that and you go, yeah, sometimes I feel like it, sometimes I don't. Or, you know, or maybe it hits the bullseye. But maybe you could reflect back what you think the question would be for yourself and whether you think you have an answer.

Let me share one more level that makes it difficult, and that is that I feel as though I ask that question when I need to, and I appreciate the refinement of it, but I do, and I act on it But part of it is I know energetically that my family members love hearing from me. And so it feels as though if I'm not reaching out, even though I am the one who needs to reach out largely, if I'm not reaching out, that I'm withholding— I don't want to say withholding love, but I'm withholding some level of enjoyment or joy that they would get from from me connecting more with them, even though they're not asking and I connect more with them than they do with me. So it, there's, you know, there's, it's an energetic thing. It really is.

Well, subtle energetics counts. You know, I mean, subtle energetics many times is much more important than what's said. So I would, deeply take into consideration. I feel the subtle energetics. We're not just responsible for what's being said, we're also responsible for what we perceive as being the energy that's coming toward us, and how do we respond in the best way possible. So again, maybe considering that, what would your question be?

Are you being as loving as possible when you're in contact with your family?

And the answer is?

The answer is I'd give myself a 90, 90%. Maybe a little less with my mom sometimes. Okay.

And then the next question is, do you consider that to be your realistic best effort? That is an 88 or 90?

No.

Okay.

I should be 100. That's the point.

Okay. And is the should, the perfectionist, or is it your best self?

Right. So there we are between the perfectionism and the just enough-ism.

Exactly. So then the question shifts as the dialogue continues with friendly mind. Is it— which one is it? Is it really a big deal for me to add that extra 10% where I have to get milk from a bone? Or Is it something, you know, it's not that big a deal, I just need to drop in a little bit and really focus in my heart, review the whole history of my family, and see that I can love more naturally and more easily, or not?

No, I love that you're saying that, and the answer is yes, and it's a great question. It has changed my perception in this moment. Great.

Yeah, thank you.

I'd like to say, Shelley, that you provoked a couple of things in me. One of them was when at the beginning of what you were saying, in the first part of what you were saying, the comparative feeling, what some families are doing versus others. And I certainly noticed that, and obviously throughout my life Comparing myself in so many ways. It's kind of just the nature of things, I believe, certainly for me, but for everybody I see. Am I generous enough? Or do I have enough money? Do I feel secure? Should I be more generous with my money, which is something currently going on, etc.? And it's It's an endless refinement, really, of— and really, as I evolve and as I decide what's important to me and what's not. And I feel in particular, which leads to the second thing that you provoked in me, which is my issue of setting limits, my issue of always being the initiator. And the request made with an expression of, this is what I would need, this is what I would— this is what would feel good to me. It would feel great if you would reach out to me, be interested in me. And that doesn't mean I'm going to get what I want, but the expression of it is really healing for me and really something that's been hard for me to do in my life, at least. And so that doesn't mean that if they don't respond because of whatever their issues are, that it will not lead to me continuing to be the initiator in that way. But it will affect the dynamic. But at least I will have put it out there. And those two things came up for me as you were speaking, and I thank you for that.

Dave, my questions to you, which again evokes the same thing, which is that oftentimes friendly mind is going to lead us to the critical questions. What would be your critical question regarding family? And what would be your critical question, you know, regarding initiation? And, you know, how would you frame that? And if you have an answer, show us a little dialogue.

So I would say that There's two stages to this in my life. Most of my life I lived without awareness and therefore without a suffering around any of this because I was being reinforced. People loved that I would reach out. That would be satisfying. I was, as we go back to the four levels of awareness, I was unaware of my unawareness, unaware of my needs, in other words. Unaware that I had them, unaware that they were going unexpressed, identified. I was finally able to see, able to recognize, able to, with time, which took some courage on my part because it was uncomfortable, wasn't my comfort zone, to ask. And So I needed encouragement from my friendly mind. I needed my friendly mind at those times to say, this is okay, this is not burdening them. I don't really feel even— I don't see that your feeling that you're going to burden them is something that you should live your life by. I think you should examine that more closely. That was a big one, right? Right there, I would say. And the boundaries that come with that, meaning the give and the take, kind of came from that, came from, okay, I began to feel comfortable, began to feel— and I think from there, the boundary issues, which of course still to this day are always question marks, you know, where do I reach, where don't I reach, where am I overreaching? Because my tendency is to want to be involved in ways that probably are more than the other person wants. So at the same time, that filling of the space prevents them from responding to me, and that's part of the issue.

So one of the things, again, that is really helpful that you're exhibiting is the mind can cover, by going through this debate, the underlying anxiety or the underlying discomfort or the underlying guilt or whatever the feeling is. So as with all the steps we go through, they all start with being aware of our challenging emotions. So with you being aware of feeling the unmutuality of the initiation, or the imbalance and the discomfort with the imbalance, that will naturally lead you to that question of what would be balanced. And as you got that guidance I think it's fair for me to ask for a bit more initiation from my family members and have the courage. Dave, I want to encourage you. You have a pattern. We can see it together, right, Dave? Dave, I'm your friend of mine. Are you listening to me? Okay.

Yeah, you know, exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Okay. Is Mark here?

Yeah.

I just have a question. Um, you know, we're talking about guilt. Shelley brought that up and Dave brought up being the initiator and stuff like that. Isn't the function of Friendly Mind to help remove the anxiety around these things? I mean, isn't it simply giving a function of trust and forgiveness to each of us and finding that in the midst of our troubles? You know, like regarding health, for instance, I have a blood test coming up on Tuesday. I had lymphoma in 2006. I'm scared. You know, I'm scared to death. So what specifically do I, when I engage with my friendly mind, do I say? And for me, it's like, you don't have a lot of choices, buddy. This is what you need to do. You need to to make sure that you take care of whatever your problems are. And I said, well, geez, what if it makes me so I can't work? What if it makes me so— and I do all the what-if crap. When I contact and talk with my friendly mind, I take a deep breath and I realize my friendly mind helps me realize that this is going to be okay, that you have the strength to do this. 'You have the power to do this. It's the right thing to do instead of the fearful, afraid thing to do,' if I'm getting it here.

Yeah, I think that's about three-quarters right. So the function of friendly mind is rarely going to eliminate the emotional state. It's going to care for you while you're in that emotional state. It's going to say, 'Well, of course you're anxious. These are big stakes. You're human. It's universal. Be kind to yourself. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I know you can't probably feel me, but if you intuitively hear me, that might seep in in some way and lessen the anxiety. And it's perfectly natural that this is where you are, right? And can you see that it's natural to be anxious or nervous. And that doesn't mean very, very anxious. It also doesn't mean not very, very anxious, depending on how you're wired. But the facts, you know, you, you're going to want to review the facts and say, wow, 2006, that was a long time ago. Yeah, that means the odds are pretty good. It's 15 years that you've been— it hasn't reappeared. So a friendly mind will help look at the truth, look at the facts, And we'll say, gee, that would be very different than if you, you had a sign of it 6 months ago and then 3 months ago, and now you're going in to see whether it's still growing. And so I can—

there's logic involved.

Yeah, logic, looking at the truth. And then the other key point, which is the quarter, is that you're caring for the anxiety rather than to try to get rid of it. Good point.

Thank you.

Okay, so the last piece before we move on to the next episode is getting the joke, hopefully. Maybe a smile, maybe a laugh. One of my favorite things to ask myself, ask my clients, ask my friends, ask you guys, can you do better than your realistic best efforts? And I'll usually say something like, well, you can do just a little bit better than your best efforts, right? And then everybody pretty well will laugh, or at least smile. Somebody that's really serious and morose might not at all. But when you see that best efforts is just a holy ground, it's like a great basis for a religion. Because can you imagine God wanting more than your best efforts, given everything you know and everything you're facing? Can you imagine any sane moral standard that's asking you to do better than your best. So friendly mind really is the voice that's just always trying to ask you to be inquiring, what is your realistic best efforts? Are you doing them? And if you are, then can you move toward being content with yourself or at least quiet. It's not looking for an eraser to erase your emotions. It's looking for a salve or a bit of soothing as an effect, even though it might be delivered with complete neutrality when you're in very difficult times. So again, I thank all of you, 'cause I believe your questions all expose other elements of friendly mind. and look forward to diving in continued further as we move to the 5th principle of Friendly Mind. Thanks so much.

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