by Bill Cottringer 

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

     We are all living our own unique story in life, but with varying degrees of success or failure, happiness or unhappiness, distress or peace, and mindful focus or mindless wandering. We also have one common flaw in developing our storyline. This common flaw is our tendency to over-embrace alluring priority reversals or spending too much time and effort focusing on low priorities that are inverted before tackling much higher and more valuable ones. This short-term focus usually hampers our perennial pursuit of longer term self-development gains and eventually, the end game prize of self-actualization.

     In this scenario, we are living the Pareto Principle of spending 80% of our time and efforts getting only 20% of our results. Reversing this priority inversion process can give us more results and time than we know what to do with. And this is a good problem we need rather than the many bad ones we don’t want. After all is said and done, the flexibility in changing a major perspective about life and people will always change what you see as true and useful, all for the better. Many early psychologists maintained that you can’t change a reality you may not like or want, without first seeing it as it really is.

Who We Are

     The main priority inversion we fall trap to is dreaming about who we want to be and what role to play in our story—as hero, villain, victim or bystander—before we learn how to become who we already are. This simply means that if we are born as an orange tree, we cannot become a pretty blue flower or a tall oak tree. But we can use our free will smartly to become the best orange tree in the orchard. We start out thinking we can act to get rid of a problem but later realize we must first learn how to manage our reactions to the situations into which life moves us.

     This is not meant to dampen anyone’s dream; however, taking on the challenge of simply being who we already are—an orange tree—and then becoming the best orange tree in the orchard, gives us quite enough purpose, meaning and satisfaction to live a good life worth living, leaving us with sufficient contentment that is satisfying enough. Another version of this inversion is, “You have to lose yourself to find yourself.” Maybe as adults we adopted a new version of the childhood game of hide and seek, making the seeking part challenging but not impossible.

Wants and Needs

     The second priority inversion is chasing after all the things we think we want, before taking the time to know and understand the few things we really need. We want to believe certain things, but we need to live by our few compelling convictions. We may think we want to be married when we really need to learn how to flourish alone. Or we may think we want a bigger house, make more money or drive a fancier car, but at the same time we may not want the stress those acquisitions cost us. Our heads see what we think we want, while our hearts know what we need.

          As it turns out, letting go of our wants and leaning towards our needs is a strength of success, not a weakness of failure. Dreaming who you think you can be is a want, while becoming who you already are, is a need. Ironically, admitting weakness is liberating and such vulnerability actually invites strength. This is profound simplicity behind Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity. Everything we think we know and own are all different types of security blankets that help us fee secure until we learn to see though them for what they are. Sometimes it is our beliefs that get over-defended, becoming impervious to change.

Conflicts and Resolvers

     The next significant priority inversion is making choices about how to resolve the three main conflicts in our life story that confront us (from the outside)—us vs. life, us vs. others and us vs. ourselves—before we understand the true nature of these conflicts (from the inside).   At the end of the day, opposites usually turn out to be just different sides to the same coin. The other obstacle is that the old “you” that created the conflict is not the same new “you” that wants to resolve it, because perceptions, perspectives, beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviors have all changed, even in a day’s time.  Such a disconnect is a formidable obstacle to problem solving.

     Of course, this inversion compounds the disruption further from mixing up wants and needs. So, it is smart to stop running away from conflicts and start embracing them despite the short-term pains for the benefit of the long-term gains they may be hiding which could help the self-development process. And here is something to think about. Human intelligence and thinking really make up the very first version of artificial intelligence. Our thinking is only a virtual approximation of the realities we are thinking about. And as it turns out, many seemingly vivid conflicts are merely imagined.

Purpose and Meaning

     A fourth priority inversion to put on our story re-writing agenda is the habit of looking for our purpose in this life abstractly, somewhere “out there,” instead of stopping to objectively see where our footprints are already headed. Sometimes, the purpose and meaning of our lives are so close to us that we can’t see them clearly. Victor Frankl discovered that meaning comes when you stop obsessing over yourself and serve something bigger. He called this self-transcendence. Translation: The more you chase things with your ego, the more those things escape you; whereas the more you pursue meaning, the more fulfilled you feel.

     Useful clues about purpose and meaning can come from trusted others or mindful introspection as to what you enjoy doing most and what others have confirmed you are good at doing. And sometimes it is what you have most difficulty doing, but which desperately needs to be done by somebody. We all have either chosen or were assigned a unique purpose in life and finding it and living it is more rewarding than all the gold in Fort Knox. If we are lucky enough to discover our purpose early on, we can enjoy living it longer, but whenever the discovery comes the sense of fulfillment is priceless.

Change Strategies

     The next priority inversion is making all our efforts to change situations we don’t like, from the outside, before trying to fit in, understand the situation and learn what does or doesn’t need to change for quality, long term improvement, from the inside. Cooperation, compromise, and collaboration have replaced competition in work and play today, and this takes teamwork, creative change management strategies loaded with inside, intimate working knowledge. Fitting in first and working from the inside give us high priority change targets, with the right implementation methods.

     This is also an essential trust-building process where the needed changes coming from the team are accepted, rather than rejected when they come from an outsider. If we must compete then let us compete within ourselves while cooperating with others. In this spirit, cooperation, collaboration and compromise are strengths to build on rather than focusing on trying to fix competitive weaknesses. Teamwork is where “checking your ego at the door” because fashionable. Here again, the instrumental inversion is giving-up ego concerns that always end up with empty hands in exchange for the resilience of humilit

Information and Wisdom

     The sixth reversal is something that touches all these others and acts as a priority reversal of priority reversals. We spend too much time seeking information and knowledge about how people and life work, before studying the commonsense principles that lead to the more valuable wisdom, which we need to be genuinely happy and successful.

Admittedly, the information overload that the Information Age has piled up is a very tempting distraction of nonsense, hiding the much more valuable common sense. But as Mark Twain said, “Common sense is simply the knack of seeing something as it is and doing something the way it should be done.”

     Although information and knowledge help us to understand life better, living it with any degree of success, meaning and satisfaction requires acquiring and using commonsense and wisdom smartly. At some point in our journey, we begin to realize that all we know may not be so and is pale in consideration of what we need to know. These are the principles that hold steady over time and different situations, much like these priority inversions being psychological power points, where a small well-times and placed effort to reverse a priority can result in a huge gain.

Talking and Listening

     Finally comes the pervasive bad habit of wanting to tell our story, before we have finished it or taken some time to listen to others about their stories. In fact, talking less with our one mouth and listening more with both ears is one of the single most important skills of highly successful people. When we listen with both ears to understand rather than using our one mouth just to respond, we usually learn how to respond better and improve our story re-writing and telling.

     Like Yogi Berra probably said, “You can learn a lot by listening, just like seeing a lot by observing.” Furthermore, talking is often about self-promotion, which usually backfires, when listening is exercising humility, which is usually elevating. Talking is a form of taking, while listening is more giving, as another inversion variation.

     Consider reversing one or two of these seven inverted priorities and see how they can build upon each other to improve the quality of your story and the resulting satisfaction from that! All it takes is the inclination to lean away from a fearful, untrusting pessimistic perspective about people and life and instead, leaning more towards a hopeful, trusting optimistic viewpoint. And if this isn’t appealing, start exploring your own inverted priorities that may need reversing.

The way we tell our life story is the way we begin to live our life. ~Maureen Murdock. 

Note: I borrowed the concept in this article from the Episcopal Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts in his “Theory of Opposites.” And I am certain he expanded upon the Bible’s many inversions such as “You have to lose yourself, before finding yourself.” The above is not a sure-cure prescription but just a brief introduction to what is called paradoxical intention in personal development growth. We all are victims to some of our own ho-made inversions, which we can consider reversing. Take our egos as a good launching point. Our egos want immediate short-term gains, while reality rewards long-term alignment. When we defend our egos, we become more fragile, but when we release them, we become resilient. And when we seek control, we end up with anxiety, but when we surrender wisely, we feel peace.