What is Your Current Experience?
The first step is to work out what your current experience is when you do not take the action you want to take.
So tell me more about what it was like for you when you did not take the action you wanted to.
How did you feel when you did not do what you wanted to do?
Many clients will struggle with being able to articulate their experience of life they sensed in that moment. They will usually answer:
“I felt shitty.”
“It felt like a loser.”
“I felt angry.”
“I felt sad.”
“I felt scared.”
These are great starting points, but they are not experiences, they are emotional expressions.
Emotions are categories we use to make sense of more generalized senses of life shaped by how you related to yourself, others, and the world in real-time.
So to find your current experience, you want to go a bit deeper than just saying “it felt like shit.”
Moreover, because I have asked you to think about a situation where you wanted to take action but did not, it is safe to assume that the reason why you did not take the action you wanted to was because of fear.
But fear of what?
Remember the second Principle of Life?
“The reason why we do what we do is because we want an experience.”
Sometimes that means that we want to avoid experiencing certain negative sensations that we imagine will come from taking certain actions.
Some common descriptors of experiential terms I use to help clients identify the experience they are wanting to avoid are:
powerless
disconnected
insignificant
empty
isolated
worthless
uncertain
blocked
bored
If you are still struggling to find the core experience you are wanting to avoid, try asking yourself 3 questions in this order:
1. What were you afraid of happening?
2. How would you feel if that happened?
3. Why?
Keep asking “why” until you can no longer answer without repeating yourself. Here is an example: What Are You Really Afraid Of?
Once you have a sense of the experience you are wanting to avoid by not taking action, I want you to fill in the blanks of the following statement:
The reason why I did not do what I wanted to do was because I wanted to avoid feeling (Insert experience term here).
If you are still struggling to identify the current experience you wanted to avoid, no worries. Here is a cool little thing about the script.
Your desired experience and your current experience are like two sides of the same coin, a real yin and yang.
If you know one, then you know the other.
So even if you have not yet found your current experience, let’s move on to find your desired experience.