Good Life Project - Certainty Anchors: Finding Calm in a Stormy World

Episode Date: March 16, 2017

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re living in uncertain times. And, that can have a pretty life-stifling effect on us. It can impact everything from state-of-mind to our physical health and even our creative and mental abilities. Question is, if you can’t change the immediate circumstance at work or in life, is there something […]The post Certainty Anchors: Finding Calm in a Stormy World appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So one of the things that we've learned over the years is that a pretty sizable percentage of our listenership, our community, are what we call conscious business founders, people who are creating something, whether it's a social venture, nonprofit, or for profit, but with a real mission built around it, the desire to serve something or someone bigger. One of the other things that I've learned along the way, being an entrepreneur myself and also working with and supporting hundreds of others over a period of years,

is that it can be a profoundly lonely pursuit. It's the type of thing where even if you have a team and a substantial company, very often you need somebody else to turn to, people who are sort of parallel playing along the way with you. So we've created something for you. It's called The 108, and it's a conscious business collective of similar founders capped at no more than 108 people, where we're all in. It's a safe, protected space, a place where you can get true, confidential, uplifting advice, wisdom, input, and no longer travel this road alone.

So if that sounds interesting to you, check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash the 108. That's T-H-E and then the number 108. You can also just click the link in the show notes. And just a super quick heads up that we're down to about the final 25 spots. So if you've been thinking about this and listening for a while, probably a good idea not to wait a whole lot longer. On to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan with this week's Good Life Project riff. So I don't know if you've noticed, but we live in a bit of uncertain times. And that may be the understatement of the decade right now.

And a lot of people are struggling. And I've explored, I've researched, I've studied, I've written about uncertainty, constant shifts, living in the unknown for a lot of years because it fascinates me and has always fascinated me, especially in the context of large-scale creative ventures or careers or entrepreneurial ventures. What I learned is that there are a lot of things that help in those spaces that also help in life. In fact, I wrote a book called Uncertainty that came out in 2011. It's getting a fair bit of new attention these days, just because of what's happening around us. And I

was reflecting on that. And there was one thing that I wrote about, I call them certainty anchors that I thought it might make sense to kind of revisit and share with you. So I'm actually going to share this short excerpt from the book with you. So from the dawn of religion, nearly every faith has been built around not just scripture, not just community, but ritual. Hindus give offerings every morning. Buddhists chant and meditate. Christians receive communion and hold and count rosaries. Jews experience bat and bar mitzvahs, and many live by the rules of the kashrut. Muslims gather facing Mecca and pray during the day. Members of many faiths recite same prayers every day and share a weekly break, a Sabbath ritual, seasonal rites, or common rules about how to live and behave and treat others.

For many, especially those of deep faith, there is intense meaning and a sense of grounding connected to these faith-based rituals. But if you strip away the beliefs and leave only the underlying rituals, you may be surprised to discover that rituals alone still have immense power as tools to counter the anxieties of an uncertain life. They may not be as powerful as rituals anchored to faith, but a significant part of what's going on with rituals occurs in the realm beyond beliefs. Why? Because the simple physical act of engaging in ritual and routine serves as what I call a certainty anchor. So a certainty anchor is a practice or process that adds something known and reliable to your life when you may otherwise feel you're spinning off in a million different directions. And rituals and routines can function as certainty anchors

by offering a sense of connection with the divine or with a like-minded community. A lot of the power of rituals and routines comes from the simple fact that they are always there. They're grounding experiences to which you can always return, no matter what else is going on. Their consistency makes them effective tools to counter the anxiety that comes not only from living in uncertain times, but from embracing endeavors that ramp uncertainty even higher. For the creator whose very existence depends on the ability to spend vast amounts of time living and operating in the ethereal sea of uncertainty and anxiety that is creation. Rituals in every part of life serve as a source of a psychic bedrock. They provide just enough of a foundation to allow you to free up that part of your brain that needs permission to run unencumbered in the quest to create the greatest possible something from nothing. Joe Figg's fascinating look at the daily routine of artists in his book, Inside the Painter's Studio,

it reveals that many of them actually, they maintain a near-dog-it attachment to daily routine. For example, the artist Ross Blechner had for years kept to the same standardized day from the moment he opened his eyes to the moment he went to sleep seven days a week. In her classic book, The Creative Habit, legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp shares how she would awaken at 5.30 a.m. every day, take a taxi to the gym, work out with the same trainer, shower, Eat three hard-boiled egg whites and coffee. Make calls for one hour. Work in her studio for two hours. Rehearse with her company.

Return home for dinner. Read for a few hours. Then go to bed. Every day, the same routine. A dancer's life, she said, is all about repetition. So commenting on the role of certainty anchors in his life, Stephen Pressfield, whose book The War of Art, opens a window into the power of ritual in creative work. And he shared with me his belief that to be a writer is to live in total insecurity. You never know when your next job is coming.

You never know if the next thing you do is going to find a market. So let's say managing my money he offered. I'm the most conservative person in the world. I just give it to a friend who takes care of everything for me. The only place I take risks is in the work. And then that's where I feel like your job is to take risks. Broader lifestyle routines, they serve as a salve to calm a bit of the anxiety of creation and to drop an anchor to which we can tether our creative lines, knowing we can then float higher up into the clouds and stay there longer, trusting that we'll be able to find our way down. So I wrote that in the context of not just surviving, but creating tools that allow you to flourish in the context of the large-scale sustained uncertainty, the mystery

that comes from trying to create something big from nothing. And increasingly, I'm reflecting on the idea of certainty anchors, ritual and routine, in the context of how we find calm, how we touch stone in a world that seems increasingly fluid, increasingly groundless. And we may not have the ability to control the immediate circumstance that leads to it on any given day. Sometimes we may, sometimes we may not. Increasingly, we don't. What we do have is the ability to build structure, the ability to build behaviors, tools, and practices into the way that we navigate each day that allow us to change the way we experience those deeply fluid, mysterious, constantly changing circumstances. One of those tools is certainty anchors.

And one really powerful type of certainty anchor is ritual. So think about that in the context of your own life. Can you take anything that you do on a semi-regular basis and turn it into a routine and then repeat it so that it becomes ritual so that it moves from the sort of frontal conscious processing executive function part of your brain, which consumes energy and of that space to go into the place where you can handle sustained uncertainty with greater ease. So I'm going to think about as you figure out how you want to construct your days, your weeks, your months, your years, and your life. So I hope you found that interesting. And if you know anybody else who thinks maybe they need a little bit of ritual routine,

some certainty anchors in their lives, feel free to share this with them. And maybe share your rituals, share your routines, your certainty anchors with each other so that we can all find a little bit more stillness in a constantly flowing world. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's lives. Take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for.

Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then, of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much, as always, for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.