When we feel that we want to leave a situation, for example, a job or a relationship, the impetus to just get out quickly often overrides the thought process required to understand why we want to leave. We struggle to sit with the thoughts that arise as we are dealing with a negative environment. Often we are looking for someone to blame for how we feel (e.g. a boss, a partner), and we avoid the self-reflection exercise required to assess why the environment or person is no longer a fit, and what we would need to feel fulfilled. Part of this assessment is also considering whether we or the situation could change without us actually leaving, or whether it truly requires a complete change of scenery.
In the workplace example, we don’t necessarily need to quit our jobs if we aren’t fulfilled. We may be able to refine our role or take on a project that provides what we are missing. But this would require us knowing what we are missing.
The same happens in relationships–when something just feels “off” and we suppress the feeling to the point where we experience the relationship version of “burnout,” all we want to do is walk out the door as fast as we can. But in most cases we don’t have any GPS coordinates plugged in to direct us where we want to go next. A destination of “anywhere but here” is often a red flag. It means we are running away from something versus running towards something that we have identified as meeting our needs.
I don’t know recall where I heard this phrase, I think it may have been from stoic scholar and author Ryan Holiday, but it stuck with me–”you can’t fix an internal problem with external solutions.” The “internal problem” in the workplace example could be a toxic company culture, or an internal state of mind that we are unwilling to address. To address internal problems, many companies ask employees to fill out surveys on the culture, revealing what is and isn’t working to make the work environment positive, pleasant and productive. When the company leaders receive negative feedback they often don’t know what to do with it. They may take it personally, which puts them on the drama triangle as a persecutor. They may think, “these ungrateful employees don’t even acknowledge all of the things we are doing for them.” When and if they do try to address the employee feedback, they miss the mark by doing things like assigning the employees to fix the problem for them. They create working groups of individuals who aren’t in any position to make decisions that would actually address the problems. Alternatively, they may bring in external consulting groups to help create change, which could work if the consultants were actually speaking with the people who are most affected, but often they are only meeting with the leaders who have blind spots and are potentially still sitting on the persecutor corner wondering why their employees aren’t just grateful to have jobs. This is of course a broad generalization, but it happens. The missing piece here is the communication of needs, and the honest discourse required to determine if a situation is still a good fit. That communication gap can exist both between parties involved (e.g. employee/boss) or within ourselves as we avoid the inner work required to identify what it is we want/need to run toward.
In the relationship example, when one person has decided they are no longer happy and want to leave the relationship, the other person may also take it personally and persecute their partner by saying things like “after all I’ve done for you, how could you possibly leave me?” In actuality, the things that person has “done for” their partner was not what the partner actually needed or wanted. And possibly, the other partner didn’t even know what they needed or wanted and never communicated that gap. In some of these situations, before a partner is even ready to leave, they may throw a Hail Mary external solution such as suggesting a move to a new city, or spending time traveling away from their partner, or the real moonshot, deciding to have a child to “save” the relationship. It bears repeating: ”you can’t fix an internal problem with external solutions.”
The protagonist in the bestselling novel Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, is an excellent example of someone who is running away from something versus running towards something, and she exemplifies trying to use an external solution to fix an internal problem. For these reasons I abhored, and couldn’t even finish, that book.
For those unfamiliar with the story, which is a true story based on the author’s life, the protagonist is devastated by the dissolution of her relationship and decides that the solution for her is to travel to Italy, Indonesia and India to find herself again. First of all, the fact that a man, or lack thereof could send a woman into such a spiral of self-doubt was heartbreaking to me, and I didn’t like the message that it sent to readers about their worth being tied to a relationship. But I digress… My real frustration came from the message that was missing. The author embarks on an international journey which must have cost a fortune and which necessitated time off from work, responsibilities etc. Based on the story, this seemed to provide an awakening for the author, but I felt she never revealed that this experience and self-realization could have been accomplished without ever having left her home in New York. The inner work does not require any fancy location or complete rejection of our day-to-day responsibilities. Many people have read this book and lamented that they do not have the means or freedom to travel the way the author did, and unfortunately the take-away message for many was that this was the only way to solve a big, emotional problem. Readers found themselves thinking they lacked the one external solution that could heal them, “if only I could run off to Italy and Bali I would come back with all my problems solved, just like in ‘Eat, Pray, Love!’” We can not outrun or out-travel any of our stuff. And the solution is within us, not outside of us.
When I first wrote about my disdain for this book about five years ago, I wondered if I was the only one who felt this way. So I googled “eat, pray, love criticism” and found an article by Jennifer Egan in the New York Times that articulated my feelings, and supports the theme of this blog post, perfectly:
“Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What’s missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life…”
We rarely talk about the “messy middle,” or “the hallway” that I’ve written and spoken about previously (they say when one door closes, another one opens…but that hallway is an effing bitch!) But these transition areas are where the real work gets done, and where we clarify what it is that we want to run towards.
In Eat Pray Love the author is clearly running away from something and she’s not sure what she’s looking for. This is “seeking” behavior. Seekers are almost never satisfied because they are constantly on the move, trying to find the one thing that will bring them peace. But they haven’t spent the hard time in the messy middle or walking down the scary hallway to understand why the last thing wasn’t “the thing,” and they haven’t spent time meditating on what they believe the next “thing” needs to look like to bring fulfillment and joy into their lives.
In creating the exit ramp from my last job and working with a coach, we walked that hallway together. I re-connected with my values and answered questions about what my ideal work situation would look like, from the size of the company, to my role on the team, to what kind of manager I would want and want kind of manager I would want to be. You can see how this would be a valuable exercise to do with any life choices such as where you want to live, or what kind of partner you want to have. This type of reflection exercise helps us at least have a direction to move towards when we are leaving a situation. And let’s face it, sometimes we need to leave situations, and we may even have to RUN FROM a situation. There will be times when we don’t have the freedom or space to think about what’s next because where we are is truly dangerous or harmful and requires quick action that aims only to bring us to safety for the interim. But if we don’t pause before that next move we may find ourselves constantly on the run without any sense of knowing what we actually want to RUN TOWARD.
It may seem daunting to think about how to know what you want to run toward. There’s always an unknown involved. We may think we know what we want, but we can never be 100% certain that what we have envisioned will actually bring us the feeling we desire. Identifying what we want to run toward doesn’t necessarily mean that will be our final destination. It may be a temporary stop that provides us with additional information about what we want. The goal is to constantly move towards a place of increasing satisfaction and joy. It requires that we continually reassess where we are and try to avoid running from situations before we have identified what’s working and what isn’t, whether we need to run at all, or whether we can just adjust our current environment to support our needs.