This Framework Lets You Avoid This Personal Development Trap

How to be universally forward moving

If you’re on a personal development journey, you’ll find it easy to spot other people’s limiting beliefs. When you raise your income, heighten your concentration, or become a stronger swimmer, it’s natural to notice other people’s inconsistencies or limitations. The paradigms that motivate your friends’ thinking become firm to the touch.

Recognizing their blind spots, you’ll want to share your discoveries with people you care about. At times, you might even feel a moral obligation to do so. You might think: if this tiny tweak elevated your life, what could it do for your confused uncle? After all, if your newfound worldview gives you an astonishing amount of satisfaction, why wouldn’t you share it with those you love? Aren’t you doing them a disservice?

Recognize This Subtle Yet Corrosive Mindset

“Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.” -Robert Green

Most of us know what it’s like to share an exciting discovery with an indifferent family member. We’re not always successful. Too often, a sister, grandparent, or uncle is lukewarm to your revelation at best or angry and contemptuous about it at worst.

Disagreements around exciting paradigm shifts take their toll on relationships. Yet needing other people to go on a growth journey with you never works. In fact, it’s a great way to derail your growth all together. No matter how useful a given insight, it might never penetrate an old friend like it did for you. Your sudden yet massive perspective shift might inspire a yawn in that person, nothing more. Do you have a duty to convince him otherwise?

Caught in the immensity of your own paradigm shift, you might think so. It’s easy to forget that transformations usually occur after personal trial and error, not as the result of another person’s advice. Often it’s best to optimize your own life and simply be an open-minded yet reserved supporter of those around you.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield describes a sly and invasive force called resistance. He sees it as the source of struggle in life. Migraine headaches. Martial strife, tooth aches and autoimmune diseases. Resistance causes them all.

In this view, human beings are by nature creative. People can’t help but hit the planet in a state of joyful expansion, overflowing with something to share. Being is generous at its root — it doesn’t have to exist, yet it does. The existence of the universe requires hyper-specific atmospheric conditions. Why does anything exist if it’s so fragile and demanding of precision?

In spite of the bizarre significance of life, people lose touch with their creativity. This is easy to do. After all, authorities trained us to see ease as more distant than it is. Indoctrination into mainstream media, direct-to-consumer advertising, and life in mid-2000s suburbia solidified this error in thinking. For most people, it’s a stretch to realize just how accessible abundance truly is.

In this estrangement, resistance to express arises. We find it hard to practice a hobby everyday. The practice feels robotic, forced, and concentration comes slow. We run out of ideas.

Resistance also arrives in subtler forms. You feel you need a special certificate to begin writing, gardening or painting. Or resistance might also manifest in social judgment. Fear that your family’s disempowering thinking will infiltrate you. When you’re too caught on the implications of your positive life choices, you become susceptible to trying to arrange the pieces just right rather than doing the things that really ensure positive momentum.

This is what’s happening when you fight with people. Or even when you take the milder approach of trying to persuade someone. Your urge to distance yourself from those who disagree as a form of resistance. It’s a way of avoiding the work you need to do to stay on your upward spiral.

Rather than writing a blog post about the nutrient density of meat, the resistant writer spends an afternoon convincing a friend with a text-messaging campaign around the inflammatory qualities of wheat-based alternatives. They’re caught in resistance, distracted from the activities that actually help them progress in their desired direction. Thinking that they have a duty to convince rather than lead by example, their strategies prove corrosive not only to their friendship but to their creative growth.

To expand your self-concept, continuously grow, AND maintain friendships, consider this. When you learn to see differences in perspectives as a curious observer of human nature, rather than a fixer of other people’s faulty paradigms, life gets easier.

You recognize conflict as a form of resistance. Nothing more. Trying to change someone’s mind doesn’t help you or that person. It does nothing but break your flow and obscure your creativity. After all, it’s neurophysiologically expensive to navigate a disagreement. It encourages one or both parties to enter a sympathetic state. With sympathetic activation, the body is on the defense. It doesn’t have the bandwidth to support creativity or innovation. In this way, when you worry about other people’s flawed thinking, you make it harder to persist in the better approach you’re trying to defend.

So, next time your fourth cousin or uncle shares a limiting belief, smile and nod. Next time someone disagrees with you, smile and nod.

This isn’t a way of becoming repressed or complacent in someone’s downward spiral. It’s a form of respect for the paradigm shifts that got you where you are. You don’t want to trade being right for being in a state conducive to carrying out your larger mission.

Disagreements Become Portals, Not Red Tape

The truth does not require your belief. The truth is real! You can beat it on the ground, you can rip it apart, you can look inside it. Nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection. Nobody needs to tell you that, you know, you can’t look behind the stage. -Terence McKenna

As discussed in a recent episode of the Personality Hacker podcast, knowing the difference between narratives and tools is a useful way to avoid conflict.

The difference is roughly this. Tools give us insight about reality but don’t tell us how to navigate it. Conversely, a narrative explains how reality works, and it also comes with parameters that tell us what we should do about it. A good analogy is the difference between a map and a GPS. A map offers no direction — it just displays the territory. A GPS comes with navigational technology that offers specific directions about how we should approach and direct ourselves within a space.

When we strive to change other people’s minds, we take out our GPS and demand to go on a journey in a specific direction.

For more harmony, we might learn to clearly attend to the territory, also known as the perspective of another. We can commit to truly understanding a person, not leading them in a specific direction. It’s the difference between attentive, open-ended listening and formulating a response while someone’s talking.

When you see differences in perspectives as narratives rather than as tools, you’ll lack clarity. To feel valid, you’ll need agreement. Otherwise, you’ll believe there are either there are flaws in your paradigm or in other people’s.

Yet when you adopt a tool-based perspective, you don’t need others to approve of your journey. You don’t demand anything. You see your behaviors as useful tools, not the objective right way forward. As has been said by psychedelic explorer and writer Terence McKenna, the truth doesn’t require your belief. A tool-based framework helps you recognize that the rightness of a choice speaks for itself.

Here’s an example to hammer in the point: Take the paleo vs. vegetarian diet. When you ignore USDA guidelines, you win mental clarity and ease of being. And your friends enjoy the satisfaction of telling themselves they’re healthy vegetarians. Yet when your friends eat tofu-based ice cream and misinterpret blood sugar imbalance as unavoidable mid-to-late 20s-angst, it doesn’t tread on your improved cognition and easy digestion. Your choices speak for themselves. Your dietary changes are too busy drastically improving your concentration and will to live — they don’t have time to demand agreement from other people.

Seeing your paradigm shifts as tools, not narratives, opens you up. You get to enjoy the benefits of your worldview without needing to convince someone it’s there.

In this way, you’re free to talk about differences without becoming frustrated or combative. Frequent challenge makes your thinking even more multi-dimensional. You learn what works for yourself yet grow from your frequent entanglements with fresh perspectives.

Personal development is both fragile and powerful at once. It can swirl you with great force into thousands of positive feedback loops. Yet sometimes it will make you heavy handed, puzzling, or frustrating to other people.

Because deep change requires letting go of long-standing and habitual modes of being, your grasp on new paradigms might feel slippery around people who knew you before your transformation.

Not only are your paradigm shifts new to you, but the emotional states of others can’t help but impact you on a physiological level. It’s not easy to maintain a state when those around you reflect a different one.

Changing your life requires a delicate balance of irrationality, persistence, faith, and lightness of being. Smiling and nodding at people who disagree with you is the best method for staying in that state of eager creativity. Don’t let resistance hook you.

Rather than a form of repression, smiling and nodding and adopting a tool-based perspective lets you recognize that there are simply better uses of your attention than others. You don’t want to drop off your upward trajectory in hopes of taking someone with you.

Just step forward.