The Importance of Being Specific
A young woman in her early twenties had recently begun working in a kindergarten and was about to start the last and busiest week of her school year…
A young woman in her early twenties had recently begun working in a kindergarten and was about to start the last and busiest week of her school year.
“All my life, I’ve complained,” she said. “It is part of who I’ve always considered myself to be. I knew the demands would be greater during this final week of school. And I knew from experience that my attitude would spoil it with a dark cloud of resentment. I would start the week just wanting it to be over. I decided to formulate the aim to resist listening to this resentment and complaining.”
A sound diagnosis is half the remedy. Our practitioner is wisely responding to something specific she has observed in herself. It is a pattern she knows well; she has seen it over and over again. Also, she is focusing her efforts on a specific area, namely her work with children. There will surely be other areas in her day that might trigger complaining—traffic, weather, family, etc.—but she is prudently recruiting all her resources for a single battle in this wider war. Too wide a focus is one way of defeating our infant will; another is by subjecting it to the prospect of working indefinitely on an aim. In light of this, our practitioner is restricting her aim to a week. It doesn’t matter that she has complained all her life and is certain to continue complaining beyond this week. She can always reset the aim for another week, but that need not concern her now. By restricting the scope of her aim to a specific time and place, our practitioner has downscaled an overwhelming challenge to something actionable and measurable.
“At first, resisting the habit of complaining was extremely difficult,” she continued. “Reasons to complain kept surfacing, reaffirming my habit. Moreover, on the very first day, my resolve was thrown off balance. I was put in charge of reading the children a story at the end of each day. We always end our days with music and stories, but I had not anticipated being put in charge of this. It triggered strong and conflicting reactions in me. On the one hand, there was my usual complaining at having been given additional responsibilities in an already full week. On the other hand, I was daydreaming about how I would outperform my colleagues in storytelling and win over the children. So now there were two culprits to watch out for: complaining and an eagerness to impress. I had to adjust my aim to accommodate this new development. Each time the impulse to complain arose, or when I began to fantasize about my coming success, I had to resist indulging in either one.”
“My aim was a lifesaver. As the week progressed, I could see the tendency to complain as separate from myself. Even when I did fall into it, I was eager to quickly get up, dust myself off, and recover my aim. It opened a whole new dimension to the week. My day now consisted of two layers, events happening outside and events happening within me. I verified how much more we can get from a job we previously discounted as too routine, a job we mistakenly considered to be the source of our own dullness. With each day that passed, I became excited to go to work, to test my newly-established skills, and to prove to myself that I could go through my obligations without complaining.”
We harbor strong resistance to bringing precision to our work. We hope to advance while remaining vague. But until we formulate what exactly keeps us back, we will only be able to apply generic solutions. No physician would attempt to treat their patients using a generic plan for everyone. Each case will have its own particular diagnosis and remedy. Similarly, we cannot expect to resolve our unique internal challenges with a one-size-fits-all approach. Therein lies the importance of the January labor.