22 Comments

Love this piece and your writing style, nice one!

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i sense theres even a trap here of people pursuing the familiar bad over and over again - I think this explains why people stay in jobs they hate too

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Great piece

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I can really relate to the anecdote about coffee in the morning! I know it doesn’t serve me in the long run, but it just feels right…

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Mar 14Liked by Michael Ashcroft

I like this perspective you've shared Michael.

"While I’ve talked about this at an individual scale, I suspect it holds true at higher levels of organisation."

This sentence reminds me of the tale of the quarterly report that's prepared for board meetings. If you ask around, no-one knows why the report is prepared. It simply is prepared every quarter.

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Mar 14·edited Mar 14Liked by Michael Ashcroft

Hmm very interesting, and counter to the often used "fully your gut" advice that is often used in somatic circles. I'd imagine the ideal route is to find a balance between the two.

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Mar 14Liked by Michael Ashcroft

I always think of this in terms of weightlifting

If you go wider on your grip on bench press, it will feel weird. You might lift about the same or a little less. Keep doing it to train the new pattern, though, and you'll be able to lift much more over the next several months. Good/neutral weird.

Go too wide, and you will be able to lift a lot less. You've gone over the optimum. Bad weird

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This piece deeply resonated! Thanks for writing and sharing it. I've always thought about doing new/hard things in the traditional term of facing a "fear," but diving a click deeper and into the body, this feeling of "unfamiliarity = bad" often feels like the root of the more nebulous "fear." Super helpful!

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