Feed The Right Wolf
EPISODE 057: FEED THE RIGHT WOLF
In the old Cherokee story about the two wolves battling within each of us, the one that prevails is the one we feed. But is it that simple? Does one wolf have a distinct advantage that demands we be even more proactive in feeding the other, how do we do that, and exactly when did this become a podcast about wildlife because I thought this was meant to be about my creative life, wasn't it? Let's talk about it
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
There's an old story, or perhaps a story rumoured to be old, in which a Cherokee elder tells his grandson that within us all are two wolves at battle with each other. In some versions of the story one wolf is good, the other evil. In other versions one is light and the other dark–it's a little more symbolic, I guess. In both the grandson asks which wolf will prevail, to which the grandfather replies, "the one you feed."
There's a sagacious quality to parables like this that I find irresistible. I love the way the lesson is left hanging in the air, as if it's our job to pluck from that wisdom the applications that best fit us and our lives. I like the simplicity of this story, though on its own it makes for a pretty short podcast. And as always with soundbites of wisdom there remain questions, not the least of which is how do we feed, or–alternately–starve, the wolves within? And of course, what does this have to do with you and your creativity? I'm David duChemin and this is episode 057 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
Long before it gets to the fingertips with which we write or paint or use the camera, or to whatever parts of your body are your means of making, creativity is an inner game. It comes from a mental landscape. What and who we are internally is made external in the making. The compassionate writer will write with compassion. The arrogant poet will write largely about himself. The hesitant artist will create hesitantly, or those hesitations will prevent or delay the art from being made in the first place, because to the degree we believe we can't, we won't. What we believe matters a great deal, not only about the world around us which inevitably becomes the subject and the ideas explored with our art, but how we create in the first place. And in some cases, whether we create at all.d
I think most of us go through our lives with some kind of inner chatter, like we're constantly talking to ourselves, though usually, hopefully, self-aware enough not to do it out loud and scare the guy beside us on the bus. That chatter seems to stick to a script that has been written over the years by our own experiences, and by the other voices in our lives, particularly the experiences and voices we most vividly remember, and those are more likely to be the negative experiences. We live, science tells us with a cognitive flaw called negativity bias, and it means, basically, that humans are more wired for the bad than for the good.
We remember the criticism more than the praise. We recall the pain more vividly than the pleasure. Our failures register for longer than we can recall our successes. When making decisions we give more weight to negative past experiences than to positive ones, assuming we even remember those positive experiences to begin with. Simply put, it has been to our evolutionary advantage to remember the negative, I assume because what is positive–being in a room full of puppies, for example–is less likely to leave us dead or horribly traumatized than, say, being in a room full of venomous spiders, which is arguably a more negative experience and to be avoided in the future. The pleasure of the puppies just can't compete for space in our memories with the terror of the spiders.
This negativity bias is active in less dramatic ways. The embarrassing moment when we said the wrong thing during that one public speaking engagement is more likely to be long remembered over the applause received in countless others, assuming we even get back in front of the mic ever again. The critical voice that judged your writing or your photography harshly is a story you're more likely to re-tell yourself than the many times someone gave you praise. The times we failed stand out in our minds more vividly than the times we pulled it off. Negative experiences are registered by our brains as more intense than positive ones.
In other words, of the two wolves inside us, the dark one has a head start, has a stronger appetite, and needs us to feed it less in order to be stronger than the light one. I love the wolf metaphor, but it's not quite right. As it applies to what we believe about ourselves, and the script we're constantly writing about who we are and what we're capable of, the good wolf is at a distinct disadvantage. The wolves are not the same. See, the light wolf needs us to feed it, but the dark wolf feeds itself and seems to find more calories in what it consumes. Frankly, the dark wolf doesn't need us at all. He's a survivor, honed by 300,000 years of evolution. He's interested in surviving, not thriving, in staying alive, not making art. He is risk averse, aware of every danger, and he'll sooner tear your arm off than allow himself to be harmed or to do something he believes will harm us, and that includes being embarrassed or shamed by failed first efforts, risks that didn't pan out, new ideas that are still only half-baked, dreams that are not immediately achieved and almost anything that reveals perceived vulnerabilities in us, which is a frightening prospect because those are the things upon which our creative lives depend.
For the good wolf to become stronger than the bad wolf, we need to feed it disproportionately more than the bad wolf on its own will scavenge. We need to actively cut off the food source of the bad wolf–let him starve for all I care–and put the good wolf on a calorie-rich diet of positivity. But by positivity, I do not mean self-delusion. Back in the early 1990's Saturday Night Live had a regular segment called Daily Affirmations with Stuart Smalley. Played by Al Franken, who would eventually in his post-SNL life become Senator Al Franken, the main character hosts a satirical self-help television show in which he, not infrequently, looks into the mirror and says things like "I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!" though it was frequently obvious he didn't really believe these platitudes himself. This is what I think of when I hear the words self-talk, and it's not what I'm suggesting when I talk about positivity.
I'm suggesting a more creative way of thinking about, and of re-telling the story upon which our internal scripts are based. If the human brain is so naturally pre-disposed toward the negative, which in turn re-enforces our aversion to risk and the kind of stepping out into the unknown that is required to make anything new - new ideas, new dreams, new art, new ways of living and being - then until evolution updates our firmware - we're going to have to re-wire that brain ourselves. Luckily for us, the brain is proving itself to be remarkably adept at changing and being changed, forming new neural pathways and adapting to new ways of thinking. You can change the way you think, and if you can do that you can change the way you live and create.
One way you can do this is by understanding or accepting the profound implications of negativity bias. That script you keep referring to, the one that your inner voices keeps reminding you about? It's wrong. It's not a flawless memory of the past so much as heavily redacted list of emotionally charged negative experiences with a few rare positives thrown in that don't remotely displace the negatives.
You're not a negative person, but you do have a brain that leans powerfully in that direction. We all do. There's only so much room in there for the memories of your life to this point and it has discarded the ones it deems less important. Of all those victories, all the things you did well, at which you did not fail, and on which - if they were still there - you could look back and use them to feed the white wolf - they've been expunged in favour of what your brain considers more important, your brain's way of saying, "don't do that shit again!" And the dark wolf eats it up. Good for survival in a tooth and nail kind of way. Lousy for a life of creativity, experimentation, and risk.
What would happen if we were more proactive about helping our brains remember the victories? How useful would it be if there were an archive somewhere other than your brain to which you could go to feed the white wolf? I keep a journal for that. A place I can reframe the lessons I've learned, a place I can look for something more objective about my experiences. In those journals I am honest with myself, but also compassionate and patient, and I make an effort to write down the victories, the stories of ground I've gained and lessons I've learned. It's like a prosthetic brain, a storehouse to retain the positive things my real brain otherwise ditches in search of the more dramatic headlines. My brain, like the daily news, seems to believe that if it bleeds it leads. My journal helps me feed the right wolf.
I also keep a folder of emails, I call it my victory file, and I go there when the dark wolf starts circling. It's full of letters from others telling me I've made a difference, that I've contributed, added value, done something good and worthwhile. They slowly re-write the script in my head that tells me I am only the sum of the dumb shit I've done in pursuit of the good stuff. They re-introduce good memories and displace some of the bad.
The absurdity of Stuart Smalley's Daily Affirmations aside, how I think about and talk about myself and my efforts is important in keeping the right wolf fed. I don't use affirmations, not consciously, but I am very careful about how I frame my experiences because the moment I let my brain judge them and frame them as negative, it feeds the dark wolf. I remembers it better and more vividly because of that negativity, and it reinforces the limiting beliefs that restrict how freely and boldly I create or, often, whether I create and put my work into the world at all.
When I make mistakes, my ideas seem to run out of gas, or the risks I take don't pan out, all of which are daily occurrences, it's really easy to go back to the limiting language of earlier scripts: "I'm stupid. I'm a loser. This was a failure. Nothing I do ever works. What the hell was I even thinking?" All feeding the wrong wolf.
But I've learned to take a more patient approach, and to give myself the kind of compassion I hope I'd receive from, and give to, others in the same situation. I've learned to laugh things off a little more easily. To acknowledge the flip-side of otherwise negative experiences. To see not the sting of failure but the thrill and pride of having taken a risk. To see not stupidity but the presence of a beginner's mind that just learned something new. To see the incredible value of knowing now what doesn't work as I look for what does work.
The way we think about and talk about ourselves changes the wolf we feed. The script can always be flipped or re-written, and the polarity of the emotional charge reversed from negative to positive.
"I've never done this before" can become "I can't wait to see what happens!"
"I don't have what it takes" can become "I can work with what I've got."
"I'm not sure it's going to work" is just the obverse side of "Let's see if it does."
"This is too hard" is just "I love a good challenge" in disguise. Or it could be.
And, "Man, I sure screwed that up" can be turned into "well that didn't work, I'll try it a different way next time." Which has a way better chance of leading to "I can't believe that worked!" rather than the resignation that comes with "I can't do this."
This is nothing more than thinking more creatively about our experiences. It's looking for alternate, less limiting perspectives, finding words that are not only more positive but more open to possibilities, and looking at things with a little more compassion and humility. After all, who do we think we are that we alone should know things without first learning the lesson that would teach us those things, that we should get things right on the first try without experiencing the failures we need to teach us those lessons, or the fear we need to feel in order to flex the courage that will make our work more human and vulnerable? Why should we be any different from every other human that's faced uncertainty and tried to reach beyond their immediate grasp? We aren't. And that means we're not alone.
I think many of us call our first efforts 'failures' because we've wrongly defined success and think we're the only ones who don't get it right the first time. We think we're the only ones that are scared or feel like an imposter. We look around. We compare. We judge ourselves on the merits of evidence we ourselves tamper with, and in the absence of evidence we ourselves have signed out of the evidence locker and conveniently lost. And we keep feeding the wrong wolf under the table.
There is so much more to talk about. Many of the articles I read about self-talk, all from legitimate sources–from Harvard Business Review to Psychology Today–they all suggest we pay particular attention to our pronouns, and point to studies that show it can help to refer to ourselves by our first name rather than using the first person "we" or "I", as in: "David can do this, he's done it before. He's good at what he does and he's going to knock this one out of the ball-park." Weirdly, because I don't usually do that kind of thing, when I tried it over the last week, as an experiment, I was more willing to hear it and believe it than when I said similar things using first person pronouns. Don't think for a moment that I didn't feel a little silly, but when it comes to feeding the right wolf, I think you need to do whatever works for you, including the Jedi mind tricks. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
What we believe about ourselves, and what we believe we're capable of accomplishing, is too important to the doing of those things, and the meaning and joy we find in the efforts, to allow ourselves to be bound by old scripts and beliefs created by fearful and amnestic brains that are so focused on keeping us alive, that they prevent us from doing well, and deeply, the things that make life worth living.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm honoured to be a part of your creative life, however small a part that might be. I want to thank you for the reviews you've left and the for sharing this with the people in your life. And if you're not already receiving it, I'd love to send you On The Make, which is like an emailed version of this podcast, sent out on the one week in four that this podcast takes a break. Just go to StartUglyBook.com scroll to the bottom and tell me where to send it. Thanks again for being part of this. We'll talk soon. Until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0