Tackling my aversions

Unpopular wisdom

This is Jamie’s Room, a once a day musing about my career, purpose and what I learn from failing at a bunch of things.

I’ve let this blog sit for a while.

I’ve had more work on my plate and decided I’m probably going to drop something so it might as well be the most public thing I am engaged in.

I left this for two weeks - so much for carrying on the habit.

Then I read this - Aversion Factoring - and I realized I’m making smaller steps into avoidance rather than smaller steps into exposure.

Simply put - Aversion are the items on our to-do list and the things that we try to purposefully ignore. This is often to our own detriment but for some bizarre reason what we are averse to will magically disappear or we will forget about them. Our exposure is when we step into these challenges and actually attempt to wrestle them.

Acknowledging what we are averse to is a different type of self-meta analysis that can be quite challenging to try. I really think the hardest part about focusing on improvement is to genuinely acknowledge the things that are wrong. It requires humility and I am not as humble as I’d like to be. Once we acknowledge the issue we can generally begin to engage it. We can’t ignore or expose ourselves to what we don’t see.

My wife and I have recently gotten married and we moved into a new place together. We have a surprising amount of stuff, far more than two 24 year old’s should have. We’ve overfilled one of the rooms with the excess stuff and it takes us a really long time - battling our schedules, our social lives and our desire - to start tackling all the different boxes. The room is out of the way and we rarely go into (makes me wonder why we need all the stuff). Yesterday, in acknowledgement of Aversion Factoring I wanted to approach this room once again, its like a big scary dragon sometimes. So we did, we tackled it for 30 minutes and got through some of the stuff. The room looks neater and strangely the house feels more calm because of it.

This is all to say that I’m continually find things that suck and continually avoiding them - hoping that they don’t suck if I ignore them. I always find they continue to suck and get worse over time. I think the key takeaway is to think over the things that I am averse to - not to find out why I’m averse to them, although that would be helpful - but rather to try and tackle them and remove the obstacles and possibilities of aversion.

I think this is actually a decent means of approaching problems - becoming aware and then actively choosing to engage with the issue.

So I’m back to blogging - I’ll do this once or twice a week as my schedule is busier.

I’ll do a few other things too and hopefully have less problems on the way.

Jamie