Garret Gillespie

I’ve been reading The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz and they struck me with a new attitude about stress. Instead of reiterating the common convention of suggesting ways to remove stress from our lives, the authors make the point that true growth comes through balancing stress and recovery. This point hit me pretty strongly.

How often do you hear yourself or someone close to you express how stressed out they are? It seems like we’re constantly trying to figure out ways to remove the stress from our lives. Life just keeps moving faster and faster and the competition to survive just gets tougher. Even in medicine, it seems as though the diagnosis for everything from the common cold to a heart attack is too much stress in your life. The drive to escape the stresses in our lives compels far too many to find their escape through harmful means. Amidst all the excitement and the seeking of escape from the stresses of daily life, have you ever taken the time to consider the benefits you can reap from those stresses?

Physical development, strength training and weight loss all depend on one’s ability to push the physical body beyond the status quo to a point outside the current comfort zone. In order to increase the load bearing capacity of a muscle, that muscle must be strained beyond what it can comfortably handle. This stress actually damages the muscle. In self-defense and in preparation for possible future stresses, the muscle repairs the microscopic tears that occurred and adds additional muscle fibers. This is the process of muscular development. Pretty common knowledge amongst the body building community.

Have you ever considered how we go about developing ourselves emotionally, intellectually and spiritually?

The same way.

Seriously.

At the same time our society is in the midst of the biggest physical health boom in the history of mankind, we are simultaneously creating a boom in the business of escaping stress. But what if we could find a way to make that stress work for our good. This is the point made in The Power of Full Engagement. Through developing healthy habits and positive rituals in our lives we can harness the growth opportunities hidden within the stress we create in our own lives.

And let’s be honest, very little of the stress in our lives comes solely from outside influences. In most cases the stress we deal with is a direct result of the choices we make.

Just like constant strain on a muscle will eventually tear it beyond repair, constant stress in other aspects of our lives can cause damage that requires significant time and care to repair. The key in physical development is to stress a muscle to its limit, hold it there for an appropriate time and then let it recover. The same is true in our intellectual, emotional and spiritual lives. In order to achieve growth and increase in any area of life, we must push ourselves to a limit, hold at that limit for an appropriate time and then provide time for recovery. How far you need to push yourself in any area, and how long you need to hold that limit depends on where you are and where you want to go.

Constantly seeking escape from all of the stress in your life is a recipe for disappointment and atrophy. Too much unrelenting stress is a recipe for frustration, discouragement and burnout. But developing a program of balancing periods of stress and recovery in the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual aspects of our lives provides opportunity for growth beyond our imaginations.

Check out The Power of Full Engagement and manage the stress in your life instead of trying to escape it.

The mountain of complications to our existence continues to build ever higher. One-by-one I am compelled to address the obstacles in our way. My business tanked and I am left with the debts and debris from its implosion. Thankfully, we saw the writing on the wall at soon enough to start looking for a change in income before things completely caved in. And words cannot express my gratitude for the opportunity I found and for those at my current employer who have chosen to take a chance on me.

Interestingly enough, it’s my new employment that has revealed a parallel between my work and my life. Last November I became the IT Specialist for Wilcox Associates, a software development company. This is my first experience in working closely with the software development process, and I’ve been introduced to a wide range of development methodologies. I hadn’t previously considered how difficult and circuitous the process of software development is. I’ve gained a greater appreciation for those that work behind the scenes to create the programs and applications that put modern computers to work for us. As I come on the scene, the software package my company develops has been going through revisions and version updates for more than a decade. On the surface this may cause one to assume the package should be nearing perfection. The problem is that as quickly as the developers correct bugs in the code that have been revealed on existing hardware, the hardware changes, introducing a whole new set of programming errors that need to be addressed. Some bugs in the programming code are considered minor. These may be small anomalies in the user interface that don’t appear the way the programmers intended, but the package still performs the function for which it was designed. Other errors are more significant, and are called “stop releases.” These are the errors that prevent the software from functioning or cause system crashes. They are called “stop releases” because they literally stop the latest software revision from being released and, as would be expected, are top priorities for the programming team to address. One particularly frustrating aspect of the debugging process for my development team is the ongoing challenge of fixing errors in the program code in one place without breaking the code elsewhere.

As I’ve participated in these debugging discussions I’ve begun to see a parallel between this software development cycle and life. Like computer software applications, we are programmed from birth to perform certain functions. Some of our programming is well written and gives us the ability to perform the functions of life highly effectively and efficiently. Regrettably, other programming we receive may not be written well and can hinder our ability to achieve the success we desire. Our earliest programming is written by our parents, and we, as parents, write the first lines of code our children will use to function in their lives. As parents, we do the best we know how to develop emotional software in our children that will prepare them to live healthy and productively in the world in which they live. Sadly, our efforts are inherently flawed, because we can only program our children based upon the world we experienced. We have no idea what their world will be like. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven Mitch Albom stated this fact all too pointedly with his words, “All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” My parents did the best they could with the programming written in their lives, and I’ve done the best I can to program my girls with the code that was written into my life. Some of the code my parents wrote into my life has served me well; Dad did a great job writing mechanical skills into me. I have complete confidence in my abilities mechanically. With that confidence, I’ve spent my life confronting mechanical or technical challenges knowing I can figure them out; my success in those challenges further reinforces my programming that I am skilled mechanically. And the cycle continues.

Some of our code could have been written better. As we grow and develop into adulthood and confront the inevitable challenges adulthood brings, we begin to uncover “bugs” in our intellectual and emotional programming. The challenges of relationships, careers, and finding whatever it is we define as success can reveal the flaws in the early programming we received in our youth from our parents and guardians.

Now, before we go off on a rant about how our early caregivers failed us, it’s important to clarify and express our respect for the effort they made in trying to get our programming written well. Usually, they did all they could to correct errors in their own code before they wrote the same errors into ours. But the sad truth is that none of us will get our programming code completely error free in our lifetime. You might be able to get close in three or four lifetimes, but I don’t recommend spending a lot of energy hoping for more time. Like the software I see my colleagues constantly revising, we are constantly revising our emotional code throughout our lives. Some of the errors are easily visible and confront us daily. Amongst those are some that can be easily corrected through small, conscious changes in our emotional syntax. Others are more difficult to rewrite, requiring significant, sometimes painful changes to our subconscious, or the changing of habits and addictions. These can even require professional help depending on their severity and how deeply they are ingrained into our lives and personalities.

Our code continues to be written and revised by siblings, extended family members, caregivers, teachers, neighbors and friends. We make our own programming revisions based on the experiences we pass through with all of these individuals. Like the changes software programmers are constantly compelled to make to their code to adapt to changing hardware configurations and advances in technology, we are compelled to adapt our own internal software to our changing environs. Our early programming, while well intended, can only be written from the perspective of another’s experiences. The world continues to change at an ever increasing pace. The programming appropriate for one generation must be adapted for use by a following generation. At best, the programming we received from parents, grandparents and guardians needs only minor adjustments to be effective during our lifetime. At worst, our early programming may be wholly ineffective and we may find ourselves struggling to survive the changes taking place in our world while feverishly working to avoid a complete system crash. The challenge to make significant revisions to our personal software is further complicated because, like computer software code, we often find that a correction to facilitate overcoming one obstacle “breaks” the code elsewhere in our life. In response to the pain of a lost love, we may close off our emotions as a means of avoiding similar pain in the future, only to discover later in life that we’ve rendered ourselves emotionally inaccessible to those who could give us the love we desire.

In my case, it certainly isn’t love I lack. I’m surrounded by family and friends who have, and continue to, provide me a wealth of love and support during difficult times. Motivated in part by that love and support, I’m in the process of making major revisions to my emotional programming. While my parents made every effort to give me the tools they felt would help me find success, the world I live in bears little resemblance to the world they lived and learned in. In addition, by the time I came into their lives their code had been so altered by fear and struggle, that the programming I received provided much to protect me from the heartache and disappointments they had experienced, and little to prepare me for the risks and challenges I would need to confront and conquer if I were going to achieve the level of worldly success I know they desired but had never attained.

I now choose to rewrite my programming. I know I have talents that I’ve kept hidden out of fear. Like the design process for computer software, I am revising emotional programming by taking the time to review the personality traits that have gotten me where I am in life. Taking a clue from Steven Covey, I am choosing to accept that continuing to conduct myself according to the way my code is written will ineluctably render the same results I’ve gotten. If I want to change the output of my life, I need to change the way my code is written. The revisions are different for each one of us. For me, the challenge involves slowly removing lines of code that stimulate the fear that has stifled my progress, stunted my intellectual growth, and kept me safely hidden from the world. Some of my revisions are being drawn from extensive research into the success stories of others that have overcome vastly greater obstacles than I’ve confronted. Amongst my sources are The Secret of Success is Not a Secret: Stories of Famous People Who Persevered by Darcy Andries and Extraordinary Comebacks by John A. Sarkett. I’ve read these cover-to-cover many times over, always with the mantra repeating in my mind that if they could do it, so can I. I’ve immersed myself in the strength and determination displayed by the real people whose stories are compiled in these volumes. Their stories span centuries, cultures and physical, emotional and intellectual circumstances. Few of these great success stories involve a generous benefactor or the luck of being in the right place at the right time. Nearly all describe people just like you and me determined to achieve a dream regardless of the sacrifices, challenges and obstacles they had to pass through.

I finally realize that I, like you, have God given talents that need to be shared — or lost. I refuse to keep hiding from the world in fear while my talents atrophy. I’m determined to keep revising my programming, and so can you. If they can do it, so can I. If I can do it, so can you.

The world is dark right now economically and politically, but that means the dawn is approaching. Change your programming; rewrite your code, and embark on a life that produces the results you want and deserve, not the ones you’ve always gotten. Be ready to hit the ground running when the day breaks.

“A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals.” –Larry Bird