I sat on an old couch in a garden-level office not far from where I practiced as a therapist. My supervisor sat across from me, gray hair, gray beard, glasses, everything you’d picture in grizzled therapy veteran.
I’d just told him that I was going to enter a doctoral program focusing on religion and psychology. He’d congratulated me before growing silent, one of those “far too long” pregnant pauses.
I shifted uncomfortably; he smiled. Then he said something I’ve never forgotten…
“The world is full of smart ABDs (all but dissertation). Getting your doctorate has nothing to do with how smart you are, and everything to do with your ability to finish.”
With those words the conversation was over. We moved back into talking through clients and my impending Social Work licensure exam. Not another word was said about my journey back to school until we said goodbye and good luck a few sessions later.
We often think of stories in the context of experiences or carefully woven tales of our exploits. Sometimes a story is two sentences long.
You might be smart enough to get in, but are you tenacious enough to finish?
Twenty years later, and this story still feels fresh. I can picture the office in my mind, and the way my supervisor looked. He was mischievous in all the right ways, and I appreciated his guidance. That story, along with some words from a mentor, propelled me through the program in a little under 5 years.
I’m surprised, as I look at my practice today, how much that story still seeps into the therapeutic space. I use different words, but the meaning is the same. I talk about experiments and repetition, about reflection and adjustment.
I appreciate people who try, get knocked down, get up, and try again. I cheerlead from the sidelines and get dirty with the postmortems. I want to see the people I work with create the processes that help them settle into their lives with meaning and purpose.
A big part of that work is the cocreation of stories that challenge long held truths. The point of story building experiments is to provide a contrast to long held narratives and “truths” we hold about ourselves.
We don’t experiment for experiment’s sake. We do it because it gives us alternatives that we have to reckon with. We cannot hold on to a singular version of a story when we have data and evidence that confounds our long-held beliefs.
I was thinking this week that I’d be remiss if I didn’t do the same things for my own stories.
You’re smart enough to start, can you finish?
It’s an interesting statement in the context of therapy. Most of us who go see therapists are smart enough to know something isn’t working. We’re astute enough to listen and wonder if there’s something better.
We’re smart enough to start. However, we often find the road ahead to be challenging. Change is inevitable, but reflective intentional change is difficult. It requires a fortitude that many of us, myself included, don’t want have. We’ll make excuses, we’ll lean on past stories, we’ll do just about anything to keep significant change at bay.
We’ll jump to justifying stagnation by extolling the virtues of living into our convictions, even when those convictions cause harm to ourselves or others. We consider it a badge of honor to be an unyielding force in a dynamic world.
We bring all that old baggage into therapy with the hope that we can scratch the itch of necessary change without actually having to change anything. It’s in these moments where the story I hold cracks. It’s where that tenacity for completing a task becomes a liability rather than a virtue.
We’re smart enough to know change is needed, but too tenacious to let go of the old stuff that holds us back. We will death grip the old narrative, no matter how detrimental it is to our lives, because we aren’t smart enough to let new data inform our identities.
Instead, I’m wondering if we need to change how we understand the word smart. The smart move is to loosen our grip, it’s to understand and embrace the contextuality of our lives and relationships. It’s to be astute, responsive, and curious. All too often smart is associated with a static ability or intellectual quotient.
Smart in the context of too much tenacity wonders what I’m holding on to or needing from a story. It interrogates beliefs and values constantly in light of new information and experiences. Smart adapts while maintaining a critical eye on what’s happening around us. Smart might open a door, but tenacity and curiosity makes us want to enter.
Just as we’re making smart a more complex quality, tenacity deserves the same treatment. Often we look at tenacity as an aspirational quality, and in many cases it can be. At the same time, too much tenacity breeds arrogance and inflexibility. Instead of adapting, we brute force our way through the world.
Square peg, round hole? Where’s my hammer?
Instead of looking for the square hole or wondering why and how we wound up with mismatched parts, tenacity beats a solution into submission, and then blames others or ourselves when our attempts fail.
The story from beginning to end is never as easy as opening the door, walking through, and then leaving when finished.
In between the start and finish are successive series of failures that are rife with the kinds of feedback we need to keep going. All too often we see any failure we experience as indicative of the entire experience. We internalize an experimental failure as an identity marker and give up.
Smart interrogates the failure and finds the feedback needed to adapt and amend the next iteration. Tenacity gives us the will to try again.
My simple story is so much more complex and rich when we dive into what it means and where its limits live. It allows compassion and curiosity to seep into the cracks and expose the story’s limits and liabilities.
Even the exercise of writing this post and deconstructing this statement in real time challenges some long held assumptions and gives me insight into my hopes for clients and myself. It allows me to access my empathic gifts rather than the rule following side of myself that wants to be rigid and judgmental.
So, as you examine the stories that govern your steps through life, how are you being both smart and tenacious in a way that helps you adapt and grow? And, if you aren’t, what are you going to do about it?