Mitch: Days 4 & 5 - Spheres of Influence

Day 4: Simplify work tasks. Our work day is made up of an endless list of work tasks. If you simply try to knock off all the tasks on your to-do list, you'll never get everything done, and worse yet, you'll never get the important stuff done. Focus on the essential tasks and eliminate the rest.

Day 5: Simplify home tasks. In that vein, think about all the stuff you do at home. Sometimes our home task list is just as long as our work list. And we'll never get that done either. So focus on the most important, and try to find ways to eliminate the other tasks (automate, eliminate, delegate, or hire help)

In the past when I've looked for things to cut out of my routine, I've typically made a list. I usually spend several days tracking my activities as best I can, and as I find items that I can cut out from the list, I do so. But for me, I've found that such a direct method of streamlining my day tends to have about as much effect as cutting a head from the hydra. Every thing I eliminate seems to have two others popping up to take its place. Eventually I fall into persistence thinking and "accept" this is just how it is and develop unhealthy habits to adjust to it.

But this time around I intend to take a different approach; a principle based approach.

In the past few blog entries I've touched on a couple of key issues that I want to quickly review:

1. Ensure that the values you're focusing on are the values you've chosen for you. Focusing your attention and energy on situations that are at odds with your values will generate conflict within you, creating negativity that you'll end up turning onto yourself and others.
   
   
2. Make conscious decisions about what you commit yourself to, as you also take on the values associated with that commitment. Taking on commitments with values that are at odds with your own causes you to focus your attention and energy on situations that you may not have chosen for you, which places us again in a state of conflict.
   
   
3. Beware the reactive power of your emotional instincts. They bring a wide array of important issues to our attention, but often times can lead us toward making decisions that seem rational in the short-term, but can have devastating long-term consequences.

You'll notice that there's a central theme emerging around the idea that events, both internal and external, stimulate us to make decisions, which in-turn create harmony or conflict in our lives based on whether or not that decision is in-line with our values. Ideas 1 and 2 focused on values. Idea 3 focused on decisions. Today we'll cover Ideas 4 and 5 which focus around events.

Before we get too deep into the idea of events, I want to let you know ahead of time that this discussion is going to bleed over into Ideas 6 and 7. So today, we're just going to focus on one key aspect of events which is the concept of the Sphere of Influence. First I'll offer up an example from my life as an illustration for us to explore.

Back on Day 1 I mentioned how, when I was younger, a tremendous amount of my self-worth revolved around whether or not some particular girl was interested in me. We'll focus on one in particular whom I had fallen head over heels for, but who wasn't particularly interested in dating me.

I'd been working at my music store job in the mall, and there was a girl who worked down the way who I would see a few times a week on my way to or from the food court for lunch. I couldn't tell you why exactly, but I was smitten at first sight. It took weeks, possibly months, for me to work up the courage to finally go talk to her. But once I did, she was friendly enough and we ended up talking fairly regularly. I would bring her flowers, listen to her talk about her day, make her laugh and complement her. I felt like I was making a good impression. Yet every time I asked if I could take her out, she would decline. Finally, after nearly a year of this, I gave up, feeling absolutely terrible about myself.

I was entirely convinced that I was the problem, that I was doing something wrong, or that I could have done something different or better to make her want me. I wanted to believe that there was some strategy I could employ to make her see how worth it I was. But in the end I could only ever come to the conclusion that I must not be worth it, that there must just be something inherently wrong with me that made me deserve rejection. But my problem was my understanding of the events taking place and my role in them.

The way I saw it, the gestures I made could be described as either awesome or terrible, and depending on which it was, she would either accept or reject me. So every time she rejected me meant that the my actions that led up to that rejection were, on the whole, terrible. The fact that she never accepted me meant that, on the whole, as a person, I was terrible.

I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. It was comforting, in a strange way, to see that this perfectionist dilemma has been mentioned by a couple others posting as part of this blog, so I assume this way of thinking is probably fairly pervasive throughout our society. The question is, does it make sense to connect the events in that way?

Let's take a closer look and find out:

- Event 1: I give her roses on special occasions

- Event 2: I visit her at work and listen to her share her day

- Event 3: I cheer her up when she's down and make her laugh

- Event 4: I run into her somewhere and tell her she looks beautiful

- Event 5: I ask her out

- Event 6: I get rejected

In my mind all of these events are under my control. Events 1-5 must have gone so bad that Event 6 was inevitable, as if life was some kind of computer program where you enter in one set of inputs, "Buy flowers", and you can predictably get a specific output, "Affection". But that's under the assumption that I am the only user of a complex computer system where the rest of you are nothing but interactive software.

Now, as far as I know, I'm not living in the Matrix, so the other option is that all of us are individuals subject our own Sense > Emotion > Cognition way of evaluating the world. In that world, to this girl, my actions are not as black and white. I give her flowers, and it creates an emotional response driven by her genetics and her life experience that may generate an instinctually positive or negative response. Maybe she hates seeing flowers severed from the earth, or maybe she has a bad memory of getting flowers, and my unknowingly triggering those emotions may make her inclined to say "sorry, I'm not interested".

The point is that it may not matter how awesome I am to this girl. My actions may all truly be amazing gestures that would have absolutely smitten someone else. But for this girl, she's allowed to make the choice which appears right to her, and her choice was no. I don't get a say in that, nor should I.

If we look at the key difference between Events 1-5 and Event 6, I would describe the former as being controllable events. These are things that are within my sphere of influence. I give. I visit. I cheer. I run. I ask. These actions originate from my cognitive decisions. I control them. But Event 6 is different. I get. This is something that happens to me, that originates external to me. I cannot dictate the outcome to it, no matter how much energy I put into trying to do so. It is an uncontrollable event. So I cannot reliably derive value of my actions and my identify from her actions because there's a whole mechanism within each of us that doesn't rely solely on objective external stimuli for decision making.

To put it more simply, we feel something or we don't. Neither of us get to choose what we or the other person feels. The difference is that we get to choose our actions based on our feelings; we don't get to choose theirs.

To look at this more broadly, I've broken events down into their major categories as I see them:

Categories of Controllable Events:

- What we think

- What we choose

- What we say

- What we do

Categories of Uncontrollable Events:

- What we feel

- What other people feel

- What other people think

- What other people choose

- What other people say

- What other people do

- Naturally occurring events a.k.a. acts of God

If we know that events drive our decisions, and that decisions drive our commitments, and that our commitments either create harmony or discord with our values, then it's crucial to effectively manage the events from our time at work and our time at home in order to create that harmony.

But we also know that some events we can control, and other events we can't, which makes managing those events much more challenging. This is why for as much as we may be able to cut from our list of activities, everything seems to fall apart when other people get involved, such as our bosses, co-workers, spouses and children.

So as we walk further into exploring these ideas, we'll discover that we have tools to manage the controllable in the long term, and that even if we can't control the uncontrollable, we do have the ability to excerpt a significant influence on it.

Over the next two days we're going to focus on the controllable, and discuss how to alter the events within our controllable sphere of influence in two key ways:

First, we can make a change of quality, that is, making sure that the events that do occur are more in line with our values which we'll begin to explore more in Day/Idea 6 - Learn to Say No.

Second, as part of Day/Idea 7 - Limit Your Communications we'll look at reducing the quantity of events in a given day.

Thanks for reading!

- Mitch