This post was inspired by more word play, which is in turn inspired by my dad’s lunch-bag vocabulary lessons (see prior post for background).
Dis: “apart,” “asunder,” “away,” “utterly,” or having a privative, negative, or reversing force
Traction: “the support, interest, etc., that is needed for something to succeed or make progress.”
“Action” is within “traction.”
Distraction is literally to take away action or traction. There will always be distractions, convenient and inconvenient, intentional or unintentional, to take us away from focusing on our purpose, our path, our journey, moving us away from action and back to stagnancy and complacency. Momentum is lost, focus is lost, overwhelm and chaos ensue. When I recognize that distraction is taking me away from my goals I enter a cycle of shame and self-loathing. “Why can’t I make progress/be more productive/stick to the diet/exercise/insert other goal, and why did I just waste an hour of my time on social media when I could have been working on my blog post?”
When I was creating my plan for a career shift I worked with a coach who helped guide me towards increasing the parts of my life that had been neglected due to the demands of my job at the time. She gave me “homework assignments” to help me design the life I desired. This included planning out my priorities, and the desired time allocations for each of those priorities, based on my values and what I felt was currently missing from my life. I was tasked with journaling on self-inquiry questions like “what am I no longer willing to compromise on?” and creating a vision board and personal narrative based on my strengths and motivating factors. All of these exercises would comprise the roadmap to my new destination where I would meet the new version of my life, designed by me. It was critically important work, yet I often found myself scrambling to pull together these assignments the night before my coaching sessions even though they could have been completed during the weeks between my sessions. I shared with my coach that I kept getting distracted whenever I sat down to do this inner work. She challenged me to notice when I was getting distracted, what was distracting me, and then to ask myself, “why am I letting this distract me?”
I knew that the answer was, “I am letting things distract me because I am afraid.” I was afraid to take action on new goals and afraid to pursue a new life because I was afraid I would fail.
Unlike the distractions that are truly out of our control, like a pipe bursting in the basement, the distractions we often encounter most are created by self-sabotage because we are afraid to do the work that we are meant to be doing. And we are afraid to do the work, because we are afraid we might fail.
To make things more challenging, we are very good at justifying the distractions we create to avoid action. After I finally resigned from my job, which was a huge step towards creating my new life, I had gifted myself time to dive in and start working on this new life. Instead of taking advantage of that wonderful gift of time, I convinced myself that what I really needed to focus on was getting my house renovated. That meant researching and hiring contractors, picking out paint colors, decluttering the basement and making myself available to manage all of the ongoing activities without setting boundaries to complete the work I was supposed to be doing for myself, the work that would allow me to create this new life I supposedly wanted so badly.
I would block time on my calendar to journal, or do yoga, or work on my CV and personal narrative, but then quickly abandon those plans when someone wanted to come by, during that very time that I had blocked for myself, and give me an estimate on building a new deck. Saying “yes” to others who asked for my precious time rather than protecting that time for myself sent a message to the universe that I really didn’t value my own priorities or take my inner work seriously, and that I was just fine settling for a life that wasn’t fulfilling my potential or my desires.
I recognized the pattern I was creating, and I had to work very hard to acknowledge that I was the one creating these distractions and that I was doing so because I had doubts and fears that I would not be able to achieve the things I had mapped out on my vision board. The next step was to determine what exactly I was afraid of. One of the beliefs I held about my own potential was that if I didn’t succeed immediately when embarking on a new path, then I would never succeed.
I saw an infographic online one day that really helped change my mind about this self-limiting notion. It showed 3 rows of 7 white circles with various levels of black shading inside of them. In the first row of circles the shading progressively increased in a linear fashion–10% shaded in the first circle, 20% in the second and so on until 100% of the circle was shaded black. In the second row of circles, the first, second and third circles all had 10% shaded in, and then the remaining circles only increased by about 5% each, with the final circle filled in only about 30%. In the last row of circles, the pattern was 10%, 90%, 50%, 10%, 5%, 5% and back up to 80%. The take-home message was that progress doesn’t always look linear. In fact, in some cases it may look like you’re moving backwards or not making any progress at all, but we must count the small steps, and not get fatalistic when we experience the backward steps. If we can accept the idea that progress doesn’t have to be linear we can keep moving towards our goals without throwing distraction speed bumps in our own path. This helped me diffuse the fear that limited my progress.
So how do we manage dis-traction?
First, we can ask ourselves why we are letting things distract us from what we say we really want in our lives. We may try to convince ourselves that these distractions are real issues that need our attention, but if we are honest with ourselves we will likely find that there is fear and insecurity underlying the distractions. When we are faced with fears we can use this three-step process: name it, face it, release it. Releasing the fear removes our need to use distraction as a shield against it.
Second, we must remind ourselves that when we remove distractions we enable it’s opposites: ACTION and TRACTION. With every decision we make to carve out time to work on our goals, we empower ourselves to take action that brings us closer to achieving those goals. When we say “no” to self-imposed distractions born from avoidant behavior, we create more traction, more grip on the road to move us forward.
And finally, we must remind ourselves that progress is not linear. Life is full of competing priorities. There will be times when true and necessary things distract us from our progress and require that we shift our attention for a while. In those moments that are truly out of our control we may slip backwards and lose traction on our goals. We must remember that these inconvenient distractions are temporary and ultimately we have the power to enable or distract from own progress. We can get ourselves back on track and take action. We can appreciate that progress can be made in small increments and let go of expectation to be constantly gaining.We can give ourselves the gift of faith and courage to pursue the life we want to create and leave behind the fear-based distraction technique that is holding us back.