IDEALISM IS A POOR STRATEGY FOR LIBERTY

We want to live in freedom. We want this country that was founded on individual liberty to once again become a country that champions individual liberty. America was founded on an this ideal; an ideal that holds tremendous meaning for most everybody reading this column.

But while an ideal is great for offering direction, there are dangers to holding too tightly or dwelling too deeply upon the image of what you would like to see fulfilled.

It’s good to know what you want, to understand your principles, and to do what you can to further those principles on a larger scale. But to expect the total fulfillment of an ideal, to believe that your ideal must be complete in order to be happy or delighted, is to invite continual disappointment.  And it can also undermine your effectiveness to actually further your ideal.

Researchers have found that when you are aiming for a personal goal, the practice of visualizing the end product can actually have a negative effect on your ability to achieve it. That’s because by visualizing your goal as achieved before you have actually achieved it, on some level you will tend to feel that you have already achieved it.

On an emotional level that goal is experienced as no longer something to strive for, but rather as something that you’ve already done.

Your feelings can then tell you it’s time to move on to the next thing, while in reality you still have much work to do – but now without some of the emotional drive with which to do it. You’re left with the discrepancy between your goal and your actual situation, but without that emotional juice you can wonder why you’re not actually getting things done.

This finding runs counter to decades of self-help advice.

If you want to be effective in achieving your goals, don’t visualize what it will be like when you have already achieved them. Instead, visualize the steps you need to take to reach your goals; spend your time planning and executing your strategy for getting there. Anticipate the predictable challenges you will face along the way, and visualize how you will overcome them.

It’s important to know where you’re heading, which is the purpose of an ideal – to give you a point on the land toward which to steer your ship; a compass heading toward which to aim.

But the strategy for getting there is much more complex and interesting a journey than a simple straight line toward the end point. Visualizing how to navigate the actual achievement is what leads you closer to that point, and can bring you to your goals with a sense of mastery from the journey.

Just as visualizing the end product of a personal goal can undermine your motivation and effectiveness in achieving that personal goal, visualizing the fulfillment of an ideal can undermine your motivation and effectiveness in working toward that ideal.

If you are holding in your mind an image of what a totally free society would look like; if you are measuring the political system in which you live, and comparing everything about it to that ideal, you will succeed in being eternally disappointed, dissatisfied, and even bitter.

The truth is, even with all of the really bad political news in America these days, life for most of us is still incomprehensibly better than it was just 50 years ago.

While we have less political freedom in general than we did a half century ago (more than 800 new laws coming into effect here in California this year alone), the economic and technological advances have been nearly miraculous – and those advances in themselves contribute to greater personal freedom in ways that we can miss when we focus purely on the political.

A personal example: I am able to write this article on my computer, edit it (without having to retype whole pieces of paper on a manual typewriter), and send it off this morning to wherever in the world Jack may be right now, to be posted and sent to the entire TTP list within minutes. I am able to work with clients literally around the world via phone, e-mail, and Skype without leaving my home office.

For me, the personal freedom this allows is huge. Granted, if I didn’t have the option to work as a Life Coach; if I were limited to working as a Marriage and Family Therapist, I would be restricted to working only with people in California (because that’s where I hold my license – I would need to get a separate license for every state to be able to work as a psychotherapist with people in that state), and I would have to spend most of my time in person, which would mean commuting to an office.

But for me, coaching provides the framework for the kind of innovative business that makes my work fun and exciting – and my clients benefit as well, since they can work with me from literally anywhere on earth where there are telephones or internet service, and my fees can be less expensive.

Such innovation affects many of us across a wide range of professions. Fracking is opening up huge reserves of oil and natural gas that were unavailable just a few years ago. Not on federal lands, of course. Where the government is involved, restrictions of freedom are suffocating innovation.

But there are still areas where the government is limited in its reach, and the market – and more specifically the innovative people who make up that market – is remarkably resilient and ruthless in finding openings for opportunity and innovation.

Other businesses are suffering, of course. The political situation is not good on many fronts. In a sense I had to close one business (psychotherapy) and open another (life coaching) because my government issued license restricted my ability to innovate.

But if your focus is entirely on an ideal of political liberty, then you will not see the opportunities to advance your own personal freedom, and you will be less likely to find specific, tangible, and effective means for supporting a freer society politically as well.

Let me put this another way: by looking for how you can increase your own personal freedom on a practical level, you are by that very act likely to be working toward a freer society as well. Government is only the clunky, steam powered version of societal change. It mostly follows trends that we set culturally. Government generally does not lead, it follows; and it tries to hold still certain dynamic moments of cultural intensity.

The more you and I passively long for an ideal time when government was smaller and less intrusive, the less effective we are in actually creating the kind of personal and cultural freedom that can lead us as a culture to reject the intrusion of government power into our lives.

Hold your ideals of limited government and individual liberty. I do, passionately.

But don’t spend much time dreaming of what it would be like if all your dreams were to come true. Instead, spend your time thinking about how to increase your own personal freedom, prosperity, relationships, and flourishing, and take the concrete actions that will bring that about.

Engage as you can to limit government power, but don’t ruminate on the loss of or the distance from your ideal.

You are living part of that ideal right now. Embrace those qualities; envision your own real blessings of liberty, and do what you can to actually expand your personal freedom, and to effectively influence our culture of freedom to flourish.

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LAST CALL! Enter the New Year with the tools to develop new habits for a fantastic year; join me for an exciting new Mastering Happiness Teleclass; beginning next week!

Don’t make New Year’s resolutions!  Let’s start 2013 off with practical, effective tools for setting fresh and inspiring goals that will take us toward a more meaningful and satisfying life – not imaginary, wishful thinking, but real, down to earth skills for mastering your own habits, and your own happiness.

In this class, you will not only learn principles of living a happier life, you will learn how to set and fulfill your goals, how to practice what you do to achieve excellence, and how to effectively use your willpower and mindsets to create a more effective life.

Cost is $400. The class will be interactive, with homework and handouts to supplement the learning and takeaways. E-mail me at [email protected]  to sign up. There is a sign up page at my website, drjoelwade.com.

The teleclass will be taped and available for the class if there is an absence.

Class is limited to fifteen participants. The 90-minute teleclass will be held on four (nearly) consecutive weeks:

JANUARY WENESDAY EVENING CLASSES

• Wednesday, Jan. 9th at 5 pm PST (8 pm EST)
• Wednesday, Jan. 16th at 5 pm PST
• Wednesday, Jan. 30th at 5 pm PST
• Wednesday, Feb. 6^th at 5 pm PST