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Habits and Strategies

Jul 24
Love1

Curiosity Provides the Energy for Excellence

By Habits and Strategies

An essential ingredient for success at anything – beyond the most mundane of rote tasks – is curiosity.

Curiosity is about exploration and discovery; it creates energy, possibilities, and movement. It also allows us to create relationships, and to grow more deeply and delightfully connected with one another. It allows us to play – and excellence in work can be like play for adults.

In my work as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Life Coach, and Business Consultant, I would be utterly useless without curiosity as a central deliberate practice. I need to get to know, before I do anything else, who this other person is – or who these people are if it’s a couple or a work team. I need to be keenly interested in knowing and understanding them, their circumstances, and what their goals and challenges and strengths are. That’s all about curiosity.

You might think, “Well, that sounds like you start with empathy…” But empathy, in my experience, follows from curiosity. If we’re curious about the other person, that’s the portal through which our empathy and care for other people enters.

Think of your own work, your own family, your own friendships. With those with whom you enjoy a good relationship, I would bet that you also are curious about who they are as people. On the other hand, if there are people from whom you feel more distant or critical, you might find that bringing more curiosity about their internal worlds can bring fresh energy and interest – and perhaps greater compassion as well.

In our work, our success and prospects grow with curiosity. The antithesis of curiosity is a sense of or desire for certainty.

Curiosity is a quality that allows us to deliberately expand our awareness, to explore and search for possibilities.

In contrast, when we look for certainty, we’re looking to end the search, and bring the exploration to a close.

The need for certainty can reinforce the need for more certainty, as we narrow our possibilities. We become more defensive in the pursuit of being right; we’ll tend to replay events as we interpreted them, rather than wondering what we may have missed. We’ll tend to look for and hold on to stereotypes, avoiding too much empathy or self-reflection in favor of what we think we know.

Needing certainty locks us down into familiar dogma. It makes us rigid, saps our energy, and leads ultimately to bad decision making – since we will have closed off a whole world of information that doesn’t already fit our model of the world.

This is why in my profession – and in many other professions as well – spending more time practicing does not often lead to greater skill. Unless we continue to explore and learn and practice new skills deliberately. That all requires curiosity.

As Harry Truman said, “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.”

There’s nothing wrong with wanting certainty. There are times when curiosity is not called for. Pure, well-practiced, rote competence and focus can make the difference between life and death when we’re driving in a dangerous situation; it can make the difference between success or failure on an objective test, or putting together a precise piece of machinery.

So there are times where exploration and curiosity are not what we need. But when we’re habitually looking for certainty, eager to end the search, we’re severely limiting the possibilities for living a rich and fulfilling life.

We may also be limiting our health, including how long we live. When curiosity and mortality were studied over five years, in 2,000 older adults between the ages of 60 and 86, the single most important quality that determined whether any of them were still living at the end of the 5-year study was – you guessed it – curiosity. Their age, whether they smoked, or any other medical conditions such as cancer or cardiovascular disease… none of this affected their mortality as much as curiosity.

Growing our sense of curiosity is also something that we can do fairly easily – and it can be a lot of fun, once we get the hang of it. Of all the major personality traits, curiosity and openness are the most malleable; curiosity is something we can grow on purpose, and we can do this at any time of life.

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Jul 17
Love1

Taking Your Time at the Start

By Habits and Strategies

When we see someone who truly excels at what they do, one quality often jumps out: they make it look easy.

But what is it that gives us the impression of ease?

They seem to take their time. Even when you’re seeing an elite athlete making lightning quick moves, it seems to be moving more slowly than the actual elapsed time. They’re not panicked, they’re not forcing things; the moves look fluid.

When someone has reached a state of mastery, with all the deliberate practice that requires, they’ve accumulated a vast store of knowledge and experience in their working memory. So when they get to work, they don’t need to take time to look things up; or when it’s a physical skill like athletics or music, they don’t have to think about the movements themselves.

Because of this, they also don’t feel rushed to act. They have time to orient to the problem or the task, and before they take action, they will have scanned their working memory for the information they need – the facts, the experience, the causes and effects they know – and then when they do act, they do so magnificently.

In my college astronomy course, our professor brought in a guest speaker one day who had once shared an office with Albert Einstein. He told us how Einstein had been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during this time this (then very young) professor was working on a complex formula on the board in their office. He was stumped by one section of the formula, and had not made any headway on it for most of those two weeks.

When Einstein returned, he was curious about the formula, and he began asking what seemed, to this professor, to be some very simple – and kind of dumb – questions. This went on for about twenty minutes, during which time this professor was beginning to seriously question the great genius of Albert Einstein.

But then, all of a sudden, Einstein said, “Oh, well then…” and he promptly completed the formula, easily solving the problem that had flummoxed the professor for two weeks.

When approaching a problem, a true expert will approach it with curiosity, take their time, orient to the situation, and get to know the problem first, before they act.

Novices, on the other hand, will tend to jump in quickly, getting to work on the problem before they really understand what they’re dealing with.

Those who have spent a lot of time at their craft, but without the kind of deliberate practice we talked about in the last column, will also tend to move too quickly to action – because they assume they know it all already, and so they have suspended their curiosity in favor of their familiar toolkit.

How does this help us if we don’ t actually have expertise yet?

As novices, what we’re missing is the vast store of accumulated knowledge in our working memory. That takes a long time of deliberate practice to achieve. But we can do the next best thing: when faced with a problem, be patient, do some research, ask advice, find the information and the understanding that we need, before we act.

A true expert will quickly sort through their internal working memory before taking action, but they will still take their time with it, orienting completely, and with abundant curiosity to the problem before diving in – just like Albert Einstein did with that “unsolvable” problem.

When we’re not yet an expert, we need to take even more time and learn what we need to know first before acting. This will be slower and less reliable than would be the case for somebody with decades of experience of growth through deliberate practice. To get the best results given that reality, spend some extra time learning and orienting to the problem first.

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Jun 26
Love1

Excellence Takes More than Time

By Habits and Strategies

We can learn a lot about gaining our own expertise from seeing how the great masters gained theirs.

Back in the 19th century, Sir Francis Galton in his book “Hereditary Genius,” argued that performance of skills for mature adults improves rapidly at first, but then at some point “Maximal performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity.” What limits any significant improvement beyond that, in Galton’s view, was whatever nature endowed us with.

Other researchers – as far back as 1899 – added to this that it may take over 10 years to become an expert. The idea that this is a relatively orderly process, moving from novice to intermediate to expert, led to the belief that we can judge expertise through someone’s social reputation, education, accumulated knowledge, and length of experience.

There’s truth to this, of course, but it’s missing something important.

Because it turns out that people’s level of training and experience don’t always predict high performance. From psychologists to software designers, to wine experts, to decision makers and forecasters on investing, research has shown that the amount of time spent in the field is not a reliable measure of performance.

Something else is essential, which K. Anders Erickson and his co-editors map out in their tome, “Expertise and Expert Performance.”

What makes the difference between a Mozart or a Beethoven and somebody who can play quite well? What makes the difference between a Michael Jordan and a good overall basketball player?

There is a role for raw talent, of course. You have to be capable of accomplishing such feats as these incredible masters to begin with. There is a role for genius and natural ability. There is also the role played by parents and mentors from an early age, which is usually significant.

But there are plenty of people with loads of talent and ability who never, ever come near their potential. There are a lot of people with very high IQs who never really challenge their mental capacities.

Everybody knows that we have to practice something to get good at it. But there are plenty of people who spend years and years at their instrument or profession or sport, but who reach a level of basic competence and go no farther. The now famous 10,000-hour rule, or ten years of experience, doesn’t apply when we just go through the motions doing what we already know.

The one element that is most crucial for developing and maintaining an exceptional level of performance is deliberate, conscious, and concentrated practice.

Deliberate practice involves actively, purposely focusing on each precise skill of our endeavor, paying attention to the details, and consciously adjusting and modifying what we do so that we are bringing out the very best outcome that we possibly can.

This is hard work, and it can be emotionally challenging to consistently open ourselves to the kind of feedback and criticism that it sometimes takes to keep our skills growing.

With most everyday skills like typing, driving a car, or learning how to play a game like tennis well enough to have fun with it, there is an initial learning period, which involves intensive focus and attention to detail.

But the goal for most of these skills is not excellence, but the ability to perform them easily and nearly automatically. This usually takes no more than about 50 hours to get to the point where mistakes become rare, and the performance is relatively smooth and competent.

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Jun 19
Love1

Your Long-Term Goals Have to Matter to You

By Habits and Strategies

Where do we find the energy to achieve big, long-term goals?

How can we persevere over time and through adversity to create something that requires a commitment of several years?

Simple. It has to matter to you.

Not just a little bit. It has to matter enough that you’ll see it through.

When someone calls me for coaching, once we’ve established the goals that they want to accomplish, one of the first questions I ask is “Why is it important for you to reach these goals?”

If the reason is something like “My parents want me to…” or “My boss wants me to…” or “I’m supposed to…” I know we have some work to do before we get to the nuts and bolts.

Somebody else wanting us to do something is rarely a strong enough motivation to make changes in our lives.

And reaching big goals usually requires making big changes.

Changing behavior, learning new skills, overcoming personal limitations – all take consciousness, time and willpower.

Habits are powerful forces; we can change them but not lightly.

Frankly, we have to have a darned good reason to change.

And we have to have an even better reason to maintain these new habits through adversity. Read More

May 30
Love1

What Happens When We Try To Change Somebody

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

One of the most common questions I get in my coaching practice goes something like this:

“My (husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, neighbor, etc.) has this behavior, or belief, or way of doing things… How can I get them to change it?”

Now, if it’s a very specific behavior, and changing it would make a big difference in your relationship, it’s always worth just simply asking, for example, “When you talk with your mouth full it really bothers me, could you please do your best to not talk while you’re chewing?”

But often what we want the other person to change is much bigger and more abstract than that.

Of course, we’ve all felt this at some time or other – “If only this person we care about would just stop being so negative, or change this one belief… then they’d be so much better off.” (It’s always something that seems so obvious and simple… to us.)

The big problem with this is that it’s hard enough to change a big habit or belief within ourselves, when we want to. Trying to get somebody else to change a habit or belief, that maybe they don’t want to change, is really a long-shot.

I’ve been working with people to – in part – help them change their beliefs and habits for over 40 years. It’s something I enjoy very much, and have a lot of success with. But it’s not easy. It takes time and energy – and often a good deal of courage – to face our troubling behaviors, and the fears that sometimes accompany them.

When we nag, lecture, cajole, or manipulate those we love to be more the way we think they should be, in that moment we’re not really in relationship with them. In that moment we’re not seeing them as a human being, with all the complexity and unique internal experience that we each live within. We’re seeing them as a thing to make different. In order for them to live up to our expectations of them.

I don’t mean to say that we don’t generally love or understand them, but when we go into that particular mode of “teaching,” and what we’re teaching is the lesson we think this person needs to learn… in that moment, we’re disconnected from that person.

When was the last time you changed somebody else’s behavior by nagging or lecturing them? Or better yet: When was the last time you changed your behavior from somebody else nagging or lecturing you?

We can frighten or intimidate someone to do certain actions, but that’s not helping them to become a better person; that’s just forcing them to act in certain ways… when we’re looking.

The truth is, we’re powerless to change and control people. We’re helpless to make somebody else be just the way we want them to be. We’re not machines to be programmed or fixed; we’re living, thinking, feeling human beings; each with our own hopes, aspirations, and visions for ourselves. And those hopes, aspirations, and visions are going to conflict – often – with other people’s hopes, aspirations, and visions. None of us are going to just toss all that aside because somebody else wants us to be different.

Each one of us is a world, and understanding and honoring that – and being curious about each other’s worlds – is essential for a successful relationship.

Here’s the good news, though: We do influence one another; and we influence one another in a big way.

But that influence isn’t linear, and it’s not something we can direct in such a way that we guarantee any particular outcome.

We have the most influence on the people with whom we have good relationships. That means less nagging and lecturing, and more listening, kindness, playfulness, and curiosity.

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May 22
Love1

Love and Playfulness

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

Working as a marriage and family therapist and coach, it’s heartbreaking when a couple seeks my help after they’ve become enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

A happy, committed relationship is a collaboration between two people creating a life together, sharing a common direction, common values, common dreams. A marriage is a team of two committed, devoted allies.

The heart of a relationship comes through small, daily encounters that create an atmosphere, through a reputation between two people for what they can expect together and through what Gottman calls “rituals of connection” – the things we do regularly that bring us closer.

In a marriage, this can mean that we regularly take time in the morning to find out what each other’s day will be and in the evening to see what each other’s day has been.

It can mean building regular habits of sexuality and physical intimacy, scheduling weekly date nights and predictable time away together, and nurturing shared interests and activities.

And one of the most overlooked qualities of happy, successful relationships is playfulness.

Play, laughter and humor are extremely powerful. We know that when we sleep, our dreams rejuvenate us, establish neural connections in our brains, and even wash away some of the toxins that build up over the course of a day.

Play is the waking equivalent of dreaming. It rejuvenates us, connects us with each other and helps to clear out some of the negative emotions that can become stuck or stagnant when we take things too seriously.

Play and humor – not sarcasm or biting, hurtful jokes, but benevolent play; playing with each other, as teammates and friends – is a creative process. A successful marriage doesn’t happen automatically by instinct; it takes consciousness, kindness and creativity.

When there’s trouble, we need to find a way back to being allies. That can be a tall order sometimes. It takes a clear decision that regaining the friendship, the trust, and the allegiance with each other, is the most important thing – more important than being right, more important than teaching a lesson, more important than making our partner “better” or fixing them…

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May 15
Love1

Consciously Creating Relationships

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

As an example: Imagine you’re on a great basketball team, you have the ball, and you’re on a fast break down the court. You see your teammate up ahead with a great position, so you pass him the ball so that he can shoot. You could have taken the ball all the way down the court and maybe taken the shot yourself, but you passed it to your teammate instead.

Is that a compromise?

Not at all. As a team, we are working toward the same goal: we want to win the game. To win the game we have to play together as effectively as we possibly can. We have to know our teammates extremely well. We have to pay attention to where they are and what they’re doing. We have to be focused on the goal, and committed to playing together at the highest level possible.

This is not compromise; it is a conscious understanding of goals, priorities and strategy. There is nothing so disappointing in a sports team as a bunch of phenomenal players who each think that they are the star, and whose focus is primarily on their own personal glory.

To win as a team requires that everybody see himself as part of that team, and to think in terms of the team’s success and glory. The level of commitment to achieve this is total. It can’t be 99%. We can’t have part of ourselves thinking, “Gosh, maybe I don’t want to be doing this, maybe there could be another option…”

The difference between a 99% commitment and a 100% commitment is huge.

In a marriage, when we commit to curiosity about our partner’s internal world, to getting to know them extremely well, to wanting to keep learning what matters to them, what their dreams and hopes are, what their vision is for our marriage, we are getting to know our teammate. We will come to understand how they respond to different kinds of communication, how to ask for what we want in ways that they are likely to hear, the different moods and events and timings of activities that work and don’t work.

This is something that we both need to do as allies with the same vision for our marriage.

When the two of us spend time together clarifying and refining our vision for our life together, we’re setting the stage for success toward that vision. We are defining the shared direction toward which we both want to head, and we are consciously creating the kind of relationship we want to live together in.

This will be a different direction than we would be heading if we were single. Alone, we would of course have a different vision. But we also could not create the same kind of life as we can together. It might be a great life, but it would be a different kind of life.

Just imagine one superstar basketball player facing off against a full squad of players. He couldn’t do much, because that game is about the relationship between great players.

A marriage is about the relationship between two great people.

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May 08
Love1

Psychological Challenges are More Interesting than You Think

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

When we approach any problem, how we approach it begins with an idea, a belief, a story about what that problem is, and what needs to be done about it.

To considerable extent, we can choose the fundamental belief or premise from which we approach any problem… and how we frame a problem can be the very key to success or failure.

In the movie Apollo 13, when the spacecraft was in grave peril, and people at Mission Control were freaking out expecting disaster, Gene Krantz (played by Fred Harris) stopped them and said, “What do we got on the spacecraft that works?”

With that one powerful question, he reframed the situation from helpless disaster to solvable problem. Everyone immediately shifted from disaster mode to focusing on the strengths and resources available to bring the astronauts home safely – which they did. The story would probably have ended much differently – and tragically – had they stayed in disaster mode.

How we approach our psychological challenges also begins with an idea, a premise, a story.

Currently, the widely accepted premise is that psychological problems – depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions et al – are abnormal phenomena.

They don’t belong here. They were brought to us by some unfortunate circumstances – an unhappy childhood, a personal weakness, a society that’s sick. They’re polluting the system, like a harmful bacteria or virus, and we want all trace of them eliminated immediately.

But what if that premise is wrong?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, a marriage and family therapist, and a life coach for well over 40 years now. I started with that premise of problems as aberrations – the “disease model” of psychology. I don’t buy it anymore.

Let’s explore a different premise and see where it takes us.  The exploration starts with asking certain questions:

  • What if the underlying tendencies of these trouble are naturally occurring variations in human experience? What if they are not aberrations or pollutants, but challenges to overcome?  What if their severity can be intensified or minimized depending on our experiences, thoughts and actions?
  • What if depression is largely a natural response to feelings of helplessness, too much passive activity, or an unnatural lack of physical activity?
  • What if a certain percentage of us come into the world with a tendency toward depression, and part of our challenge is to master that tendency – just like any of us has to master other physical and intellectual strengths and weaknesses?

We might find that the most effective interventions for depression involve more exercise, identifying effective actions to take, and discovering, in a very personal way, what sort of thoughts and behavior help us move away from feelings of depression.

This is exactly what researchers have found. In fact, physical exercise is the most effective treatment for depression – 2 ½ times as effective as medication (currently the most popular treatment).

We also know from Martin Seligman’s work that depression is often a symptom of helplessness, and that actively changing how we think and what we do can move us strongly out of depression.

Even something as simple as regularly thinking of three good things at the end of each day can move some people out of the depressed range.

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Mar 13
Love1

Fear, Famine, and Finances

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies

Money troubles can tap into the most primitive emotions, including intense fear, and even reactions of flight and panic. But there are ways of using these signals, so we don’t get lost in them.

Matt wakes up in the middle of the night, anxious and troubled. Breathing shallow and high in his chest, thoughts racing… The severity of his financial troubles has just hit him. His investments have dropped significantly, and his spending has been putting him deeply into debt surprisingly quickly.

At least it feels like it was quickly. The habits had been established some years earlier, but he hadn’t modified his spending in relation to the real income he could draw from. For many months the trouble had been building, but credit created a buffer that allowed him to avoid feeling it.

Then one morning, at 3 am, it hits him. He’s in trouble, big trouble. So big that he couldn’t see a way to solve the problem. Panicked and overwhelmed, he soothes himself with a positive fantasy of things turning out okay. This calms him enough to get back to sleep.

When he wakes up, he’s forgotten the urgency, and dives into his day. The soothing fantasy providing a reprieve from the anxiety. Until another week passes, and he wakes up again in a panic…

In this case, the panic is Matt’s friend; his own awareness trying to break through his defenses so he can face the real problems. And there are ways of solving these problems. But nothing happens until he’s willing to acknowledge the reality first.

Why is this panic around money so severe?

Remember that money is a medium of exchange, a means of storing and standardizing wealth. It holds in abstract form the concrete stuff of survival– food, clothing, shelter. But the mortal danger of losing those things were a regular part of life for our ancestors.

Our security today is in the form of our investments and savings; for our ancestors it was abundant game to follow, or a portion of seed for the next season’s planting. Those things were often unpredictable for them.

So when we feel the panic of money troubles, we’re also feeling the echoes of a more desperate past.

For our hunter gatherer forebears, the risk of starvation was a continual threat. But after the agricultural revolution there were still often crop failures and famines.

Pre-modern Europe endured famines every few decades. In France at the beginning of the 18th century the typical diet was as desperate as Rwanda’s in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.

Today it’s not uncommon when we’ve gone without lunch or breakfast to say lightly, “I’m starving!.” But what we’re experiencing is nothing like starving. Famine and the mass starvation that it brings is a horrible, nightmare scenario, that was commonplace for our ancestors up to a few centuries ago, and was still significant up to a few decades ago. It happens still in some parts of the world, but at a much lower rate than ever before.

When we feel afraid of going broke, or losing our home, the intensity makes sense, because it mirrors to some extent that primal and common fear of starvation.

But we can also feel that fear when we suffer a significant investment loss, or aren’t sure how we’re going to make all the payments this month, or we see our credit card debt inching up.

So what can we do about this?

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Mar 07
Love1

Why it’s Hard to See What’s True

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

A healthy relationship with the truth is essential for a happy, successful life.

But this is not a simple thing; the ability to see, acknowledge, and accept what’s true – about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships; our own strengths and weaknesses, and the challenges we face – is actually much harder than it may seem.

We have all known people in our lives who are smart, self-aware, and curious, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over in one particular area of their lives. You see it, other people see it, but they don’t seem to see it at all.

It’s even more difficult when other people are seeing things that we don’t see – and seeing that we don’t see them.

I remember as a young psychotherapist in my 20s (I’ve been doing this for a very long time!) discovering a new approach or technique that seemed to do wonders. All I could see was the success, and it was exciting.

What I wasn’t seeing was my own confirmation bias, that would minimize my assessment of where it didn’t work very well, and maximize where it did.

It took some time and experience to see that every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and every client I work with is unique – what’s helpful with one person may do nothing for another.

And this sort of confirmation bias is something I still have to stay continually vigilant about – because our biases never disappear.

We are made for learning and growth. Our success in life depends, to a significant extent, on increasing our awareness and understanding of the world. Yet we have a tremendous array of biases that color our interpretation of what we perceive, what we experience, and what we think we know.

These biases are not flaws in our system, they exist because they are functional. Like our habits, in most situations, most of the time, these biases work pretty well for us, and the automatic nature of them allows us to live without being continually overwhelmed with bringing consciousness and willpower into every tiny aspect of our lives.

We generally work very hard to confirm our existing beliefs, stories, and biases – because the familiar story that we live within gives us a sense of security and constancy. It’s comforting to feel that what we think we know is true, that what we believe is true, that our sense of the world is true.

…even when it’s not actually true.

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