“When our purpose becomes avoidance, our life becomes a void.”

~ Bill Crawford

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Avoidance

In today’s fast paced, high stress world, many people have decided that the way to happiness and success is to avoid any people, situations, and/or feelings that they have determined to be problematic. They speak of how they want to avoid making the wrong decisions, feeling bad, making mistakes etc. They want to feel less stressed, angry, depressed, overwhelmed, anxious, thinking that if they avoid the bad things, this will result in their feeling good and being happy. While, on the surface, this perspective is understandable, I’m going to suggest that it won’t work. Or, put another way, I’m going to suggest that focusing on avoidance as a strategy for success is often less than successful.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, we are focusing on what we don’t want versus what we do, and secondly, what is generally produced by avoiding anything is not a solution but a void. A void that is then filled with fear…fear that if we aren’t worried about life, we will be unprepared, fear that the feelings we have tried to avoid will return, fear that there is really something wrong with us, etc. This fear then produces the same feelings of anxiety, stress, depression, and bad decisions that we have been trying so hard to avoid in the first place, and the “Cycle of Stress/Frustration” is born and exacerbated.

This also applies to other aspects of our life that we try to deal with through avoidance. This can range from our trying to create successful relationships by avoiding certain types of people, avoiding going to the doctor when our body is giving us signals that something needs our attention, or avoiding examining those parts of ourselves and/or our past that we would rather forget and hope no one else discovers.

The problem here is that thinking this way first necessitates the need to identify what we want to avoid, and thus, has us creating stressful, mental images of what we don’t want. The latest brain research describes how this negative focus actually engages the lower 20% of our brain, limits us to either fight or flight, and impedes our ability to access our higher-order thinking. Plus, we are using fear as a creative energy, which often creates a frightened, or at the very least, an “avoidance-based” experience of life.

So, what can we do instead? We can shift our focus from what we don’t want to what we do, not just what we want to accomplish or have, but who we want to be… the qualities we want to bring to life. As we make this shift, we emphasize the value of engaging our clarity, confidence, and creativity, and the upper 80% of the brain where our problem-solving skills and interpersonal skills reside. Rather than trying to avoid anger, stress, anxiety, etc., we can focus instead on what we want to feel, such as more satisfaction, accomplishment, peace of mind, and self-esteem, and begin to imagine the choices and actions that would flow from these feelings. Rather than avoiding those aspects of life that we are afraid of, we can choose courage over fear, and begin to face them in a way we would teach to a child or someone we loved.

Next, we can begin looking for opportunities to practice these feelings and this new vision of life so that it becomes second nature, and the good news is, life will always give plenty of opportunities to practice.

You see, we are always practicing something. We will either practice avoiding stress or producing peace…avoiding anxiety or creating confidence… avoiding fear or invoking love. In other words, we are always either creating a life, or creating “a void.” Here’s to a life of awareness versus avoidance, and the joy, peace, and satisfaction that comes with living our life “on purpose.”

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill