Bridges, Tunnels and Doors
In this episode I want to do something a little different and invite you to think about how three visuals - bridges, tunnels, and doors - are great vehicles for thinking about how to navigate challenging moments you encounter in your day, and at the same time be a way to open yourself up to receiving opportunities that are all around you that are ripe for the taking.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
For the past few months I’ve had a couple of metaphors on my mind that I think have the potential to be a great vehicles for thinking about some pretty powerful mindset concepts - and the three metaphors are bridges, tunnels and doors.
So in this episode I want to do something a little different and invite you to think about how these three visuals might be a way for you to process challenging moments you encounter in your day, and at the same time I think they’re a way to open yourself up to receiving opportunities that are all around you and that are ripe for the taking.
Here we go.
Main:
I want to do something a little different today. Over the last few months there are three concepts I’ve been thinking about and that I’ve been trying to really internalize myself, and in trying to think about the best way to describe them I keep coming back to three visuals: a bridge, a tunnel, and a door.
And in a way they’re all sort of related to one another, and so the more I thought about it the more it made sense to use the power of the visuals to just describe them all together, so here goes.
And the first one is the idea of a bridge. So if you just take a minute to take a quick survey of the types of thoughts you’re thinking throughout a typical day, I bet you’ll find that a good portion of a typical day is spent being stuck inside of wishing that we could sort of bypass many of the things that are happening moment to moment.
So in other words when we encounter something new or challenging, or that causes us some discomfort, or that maybe it isn’t our favortie thing to do, or we’d rather be somewhere else then where we are right now, our mind immediately wants to categorize that moment as an impediment or as something that’s standing in the way of us experiencing peace or a sense of ease or simplicity or enjoyment.
How often do you wake up and view your workday as an impediment to you doing something after work. Or how often are you thinking throughout the week that your workweek is an impediment to what you’re going to experience this weekend. Or maybe you’re going through something difficult right now and you can envision your future self not having to deal with this thing, and you wish you could just bypass all this middle stuff in order to have those things right now.
And so what we end up doing is falling into the trap of viewing many of our day to day experiences as impediments. And usually our default reaction when we encounter an impediment is to become resentful of the fact that this thing is standing in the way of us experiencing that future feeling of ease or simplicity or enjoyment. And when our mind is trained on the future like this, it becomes a slog to move through each day because happiness or contentment or enjoyment feels just outside of our reach.
When we’re in that mindset of looking to a future version of reality, that’s when we get pulled out of the moment and stuck inside of wishing and lamenting or feeling disappointed about the present state of things.
And so this is where the idea of a bridge comes in, and here’s the question:
Are you open to the possibility of viewing all of your experiences - even the ones that may initially feel like an impediment - as a perfectly designed bridge that is helping you get from one place to another?
When you find yourself inside of doing something that’s challenging or difficult or that you want to completely bypass, can you view it as a perfectly designed bridge that is taking you somewhere, something that’s a natural and necessary part of the process, instead of an impediment or something that you have to endure?
Now this is not a request that you try to find ways to be happy in each and every moment. I’m not suggesting that you try to find ways to be happy all the time.
First of all it’s not natural to be happy all the time, that’s not a natural part of the human experience. And it’s not only ok to be sad and low energy and upset, it’s essential for us to sit inside of and process that range of emotions - the high and the low.
Instead, what I’m inviting you to do is to see whether you can gently and gradually come to a place where you first conceptually understand - and then hopefully over time come to a place where you can internally accept - that each part of your day to day experience has some sort of meaning and is meaningful.
Now again it doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it or that you will understand right away why it’s meaningful, but as a starting point you become open to the possibility that it innately does have some type of meaning.
So have you ever had something happen to you that in the moment caused you some sort of suffering - an experience that you didn’t like, something that in the moment you were wishing you didn’t have to deal with - but with the passing of time and the ability to reflect, you later came to a place where you understood how that experience shaped you and you came to understand how it involved meaning, even though at the time all you wished you could do is not have to experience that thing. Those are the kinds of realizations we’re talking about.
And the reason this is important is because if you can wrap your mind around the fact that there is meaning and something of value in each and every moment, that’s one of the first steps in being able to gently bring your attention back to what you're doing right now - because you’re no longer avoiding it.
You start to see experiences as bridges that are perfectly designed to get you where you’re going, even if you want to kick and scream while you’re crossing them. And it’s ok to want to kick and scream - it’s possible for you to hold space for it being an experience that you dislike, and at the same time understand that it involves a sense of meaning that is taking you somewhere.
And so the more we can slow down and notice when we’re being avoidant, and instead view all our experiences as bridges, the more we begin to enjoy and appreciate the entire process. And instead of resenting that we have to go through it, we can start to celebrate it, even in small ways at first, as being the perfectly positioned bridge that it is.
Second, let’s talk about tunnels.
Now just as easily as we can get trapped inside of trying to wish away moments of suffering or discomfort, we can also very easily get trapped inside of thinking that in order to achieve something big or meaningful that it’s automatically going to be difficult.
What we’re talking about here are those moments when we’ve approached a new situation or a new experience and automatically assumed that it’s going to be hard or challenging - even before we’ve started. This could be things like taking on a new role with our work, transitioning from one career to another, starting to study something new or beginning college or grad school - anything where we encounter this moment of uh oh - I’m not sure I know how to do this or how this is going to go.
We’ve all experienced this before where our mind automatically blocks us from beginning that thing in a place where we believe that something might actually be easy or simple.
And the reason our mind does that is because if we allow ourselves to start from a place of believing something might be easy, our mind views that as a threat to our safety because we haven’t come up with a plan for how we’re going to protect ourselves if in fact it turns out that this thing is harder than we thought.
If we don’t think something is challenging from the start, then our mind chalks that up as us being unprepared for what a challenging situation might bring and therefore we feel exposed - which our mind views as highly dangerous.
And so as a way to protect us, our mind will automatically tell us that most things we encounter are going to be challenging, and tough, and difficult, so that we’re mentally and emotionally prepared, in advance, for what the challenge may bring.
And the visual I like to use here is that our mind sets up most of the new things we encounter as sort of a mountain that we need to scale. And the mountains may vary in size, but nonetheless we still tend to automaticallly view new things as a mountain that we need to scale.
And this is where tunnels come in. What if you could allow yourself to be open to the possibility that something will be easier than you initially think?
Can you become open to the possibility that you may not need to struggle and suffer in order to receive what’s on the other side of the mountain?
In other words, what if you could just access a tunnel and go straight through instead? What if you could take a shortcut and just bypass the need to view every, single, thing as a challenge?
Now I think the idea of a tunnel or a shortcut can have a negative connotation because we usually equate a shortcut with slacking off, or cheating the system, or being lazy, or not deserving something unless we work for it - but really a shortcut is just an alternative route that gets you to the exact same place but just a bit faster - it’s an accelerated way of arriving at the same exact point.
So the idea of a tunnel is not to give yourself an excuse to slack off, instead it’s the idea of bypassing your mind’s automatic desire to hold you down and keep you protected from growth by telling you that you that in order to experience happiness or growth or success you must endure suffering, and that there always must be this series of challenges that come first.
How often do you find yourself saying “well I can’t do that because of this”, or “what if this happens,” or “well im not sure how this part is going to work.”
So what we’re trying to do here is gently rewire our belief that everything good in life must first be preceded by a struggle.
Yes it’s true that from challenging moments comes growth, but it’s also possible for us to sometimes experience growth and achievement without the suffering. It’s ok for an opportunity to fall into your lap. It’s ok for something to be easy. It’s ok for you to automatically be good at something, it’s not a trick, it’s not an illusion. It’s ok for you to learn something faster than others. It’s ok for you to not struggle. There’s no catch. It doesn’t mean you’re missing something, it just means that you were able to access a tunnel related to that particular experience.
When you start to believe in the idea of tunnels, what you’re also doing is allowing yourself to shrink the intensity of limiting beliefs that are telling you that every achievement has to be preceded by an arduous climb up a mountain, or that you don’t deserve something unless you’ve climbed the mountain first.
If we walk around all day not allowing ourselves to have access to these tunnels and successes because they seem too easy, then we’re not allowing for the kind of natural and sometimes rapid growth and expansion that is part of life, but that we often suppress because of our mind’s desire to keep us protected.
Another way of putting this is to describe it the way my coach and mentor Jhana Goldenflame taught me to think about this concept, and the way she described it to me was by using the phrase: What if this is easier than I think? In other words, what if we didn’t have to struggle or to position everything we encounter as being hard?
Now I just want to be clear, this is not a knock on the value of participating in and extracting value from challenging moments - we all know that moments of challenge offer opportunities to shape ourselves in a way that we’d never be able to replicate if we didn’t take on that challenge - that’s the beauty of the bridges we just described. So this is not a call to action to avoid challenges.
What I’m suggesting is that it’s possible for you to walk around each day in the mindset of being open to the possibility, as Jhana would say, that things can be easier than you think.
One of the things you may encounter as you start to practice your ability to look for tunnels is that some people around you my not believe in them. And so even as you begin to adjust to this new way of thinking, notice that people around you may tell you that something is going to be hard, or you’ll hear them describe something that you want to do or experience as hard - and so they’ll be this temptation to want to, again, automatically assume that that thing is going to be hard.
But, as you go off and begin to put this shift into practice, just remember that you can hold space for the possibility that something might be much simpler or easier than you initially thought, and at the same time you can be prepared to meet a challenging moment, if that’s what you ultimately encounter.
And then third and finally, are doors.
I love the idea of looking at actions we take each and every day as just a series of doors that we choose to walk through. And the idea here is that in order to access just about anything - opportunity, wisdom, knowledge, a change in circumstances, peace, change - that shift is always preceded by taking an initiating action, something that involves a forward motion of some kind or the output of energy in some fashion.
And everytime we take that initiating action, it’s like opening up and walking through a new door. And the reason I like the metaphor of a door here is that when we step through we gain access to a new view and a new set of information that we just could not have had access to or seen no matter how hard we tried, had we not taken that action.
New vantage points, new insights, new perspectives, or the physical acquisition of anything, they’re always preceded by some sort of shift, or some sort of readjustment or motion.
And so the idea that every action we take is the equivalent of opening up a new door that gives us new information and a new perspective, is an incredibly empowering concept. Because often what we do is we get caught in a circle of thinking about something behind a closed door - in other words, we sit on one side and instead of taking action, we get caught in trying to use our intellectual mind to think our way to the other side. We try to apply pure reason or logic to solve a problem or address an issue. Now there’s nothing wrong with engaging in thinking, but if we overthink without eventually taking an action, then we don’t give ourselves the benefit of the new information we can access on the other side of those actions, even small ones.
And at some point we reach a threshold with how far thinking alone can get us, and oftentimes thinking without action is what leads us to wheel spinning, and feeling anxious, and cycling through thoughts that are just that - they’re thoughts, they’re not facts. We get stuck inside of guessing what’s on the other side of that door, instead of actually walking through it.
I think it’s helpful again to think about this in the context of new experiences. One that always sticks out to me from my not so recent past is about seven years ago when I decided I wanted to get a motorcycle. Now at the time I didn’t know anything about motorcycles, I had never ridden one before, and I felt pretty intimidated by just the idea of figuring it all out. And I remember waffling for a few weeks about it, and wondering whether I could actually learn, and if I could learn what kind of bike would I get, I didn’t know how to fix it if it broke down, all of these thoughts that kept just circling around, and looking back I know now that I was just stuck on this side of a series of doors.
But I can clearly remember this moment where I just decided I was going to take one step and then go from there. So I opened up a new tab on my computer and typed in “Beginner motorcycle San Francisco.” And immediately up popped a beginner’s motorcycle safety course that was happening in two weeks. So I opened up a door and signed up for the course.
The course provider had a bunch of resources on their site for beginners, so I opened up a door and watched all of their videos. Then I started to search for bikes, and I found a dealership in the Mission District that had the kind of bike I wanted, which is called a Triumph Thruxton. Then I walked through another door and went down to visit them. Turns out the guy who helped me was awesome and he basically gave me a roadmap or how to get started.
I took the safety course and learned how to ride. Then I went and got my license at the DMV, and the same day I got my license I went back to my guy in the Mission and bought the bike. And I’ve been riding it for seven years now.
Now even describing this chain of events out loud seems so simple to me now, and something I wouldn’t think twice about if I wanted to learn something new like this today - but for some reason, at that moment in time, it was a hangup for me. And I think each of us has these sort of moments where we get stuck inside a thought circle - some of them we’re dealing with choices or situations that have a more gravity than learning how to ride a motorcycle - but in any case we’re stuck in a place where thinking about it more will do us no good, and simply taking an initiating action will open up space for us to grow.
And when you start to think this way, you realize that you don’t have to have it all solved in advance and before you get started. Again, that’s what our mind wants us to do - it wants us to solve for every potentiality before we get started, so that we mitigate our risk. But it turns out that you actually don’t need to have it all figured out up front, and in fact you can’t have it all figured out up front.
And even if you could, why would you want to do that? If you try to have it all solved, then you’re missing out on the beautiful, rich set of information that sits on the other side of you taking action.
So from that perspective, what we come to realize is that we don’t have to have it all figured out, and instead we can focus on how to become expert at having the presence of mind to make the conscious choice to walk through mini doors, each and every day, with intention and with purpose.
The last thing I’ll say on this is that I think it can be incredibly comforting to believe and to know that walking through doors always leads to new information. Because it means that we never have to be stuck with how we’re thinking about the present state of things, and we never have to be stuck with our present understanding of the way things are.
It might feel like we’re stuck, but it turns out that if we believe in the power of walking through doors, then that means we always have the ability to access new information that can shift our perspective, or free us from a troubling thought or situation, or help us solve our problem - simply by taking an initiating action or a series of actions.
What a beautiful thing that is. It means we never have to be forever trapped in our current position because, at the very least, we can always choose to move gently toward a more spacious understanding of something. And I know that that shift in perception comes faster with some things than it does with others. But the possibility of that shift is always there for us.
So. If you’re having a hard time thinking through something, remember that you can’t see a second door unless you walk through the first one. And try to catch yourself trying to solve everything with your intellectual brain alone, and instead try taking some action as a way to open up a door for yourself that will give you some new perspective.
Go have a great workday.