Cool Story. But What Exactly Are Boxes And Ladders, Cath?

Forgive me if explaining my box and ladder metaphor feels like I’m explaining a joke…

Metaphors have great value in that they allow us to make our own meaning, and they often provide visuals that carry much more meaning and convey it much more quickly than what we can squeeze into a more left-brained, tangible explanation of an idea. Feel free to keep whatever interpretation and rich connections you had made of my box and ladder story as Kyle did. What follows is my unpacking of what boxes and ladders mean to me and what boxes and ladders actually look like in our lives, so that you can find your hard corners and stiffnesses that are keeping you stuck.

Lots of little boxes

Boxes are labels, categories, social rules and restrictions, and one-dimensional perspectives that limit us and create stiffnesses and figurative prisons that make us move through life more rigidly or even get stuck because we’re so rigid and unable to bend with the changes and challenges that come our way. Boxes are also when we make choices to be in restrictive relationships or work roles where we have to deny a big part of who we really are.

Lots of long ladders

Climbing ladders is the pursuit of linear progress with a tunnel vision, focusing mostly on the things that we can measure and not noticing all the things that are hard to measure, and putting happiness and being who we want to be off until we’ve achieved whatever rung on the ladder we’ve come to believe represents success.

Ultimately, ladders and boxes are about pursuing stability, predictability and certainty and trying to avoid variety, change and uncertainty. We seek safety instead of happiness, in the belief that one day we’ll have accrued enough safety to be happy.

How boxes and ladders show up in our lives

The ways that boxes and ladders show up in our lives are in all the ways we avoid variety, change and uncertainty and try to feel safe and in control:

• We make up a big book of rules about the way things are and how you “should” and “shouldn’t” live, so that we can feel like the world is a safer, more predictable place. But reality is diverse and it rarely conforms to our rules and over-simplified mental models of the way things are.
• We try to feel more in control of change and our uncertain futures by creating comprehensive goals and plans that we stick to religiously. In a high-change world these rigid goals and plans often quickly become irrelevant and ineffective.
• We set goals and obsessively measure as much as we can in life and work. We focus all our attention and energy on improving our statistics and we stop noticing or valuing the stuff we can’t easily measure or count.
• We make up stories to explain life and death and all the other things we don’t fully understand, so that we can feel like the world is a more certain, predictable place.
• We try to squeeze ourselves into one-dimensional job and identity labels that we think will make us successful and popular, and give up the richness and multi-dimensionality of who we really are in the process.
• We avoid ideas and experiences that we don’t yet have boxes or labels for, so we get stuck and don’t innovate, and then we feel disheartened that our idea “didn’t work.”
• We use language to label things, people and experiences so that we can reduce the ambiguity and feel more in control of the situation. This is the root of stereotyping, prejudice and war.
• We preach our view of the world, encourage conformity and try to get other people to live according to our big book of rules, in the hope that we can make the world a more orderly, predictable place. This creates conflict and stress in our relationships and we hurt each other.
• We spend time re-imagining the past in our minds, in an attempt to feel more in control of the things that we felt were out of our control in our past. And we spend time projecting ourselves out into the future, in an attempt to anticipate what might happen and prepare ourselves to better control the future. And all this leaves little time for being present and experiencing and enjoying the life that’s right there with us.
• We stay in jobs, relationships and daily habits that are painful or inauthentic because it’s more familiar than the jobs, relationships and daily habits we long to create. Better then devil you know than the one you don’t, right?
• We build a fort and collect excessive stuff in an attempt to insure ourselves against potential future changes, insecurity or loss. We invest all our energies in trying to collect material, tangible resources that we’ll always be vulnerable to lose, and forget to invest in developing the non-material, intangible resources available to us – our internal resourcefulness.

How do boxes and ladders show up in your life and stop you from being agile?

Boxes and ladders are all the stiff bits. Like an agile dancer that moves and changes easily, to create something beautiful, Agile Living is about having a mind and lifestyle that’s flexible and strong and moves and changes easily to create something beautiful. In Agile Living we’re constantly finding the stiff parts where we’re not dancing well with life, the parts where we’re rigid or constricted or weak, and stretching, strengthening and limbering them up again, and returning to our naturally agile, resourceful, multi-dimensional state, where we loosen up, relax and begin to move easily through and with life, and of course enjoy the dance along the way.

What form do your boxes and ladders take in your life?

Coaching News

* After a few months of heavy traveling, we’re now getting settled in Calgary, and I have more time, so I’m opening up 4 new coaching slots from 1 April. LATEST UPDATE 27 Apr 2010: 3 Coaching slots are taken, so there’s now only 1 left.
* Having done a bit of research into what other coaches are currently charging, I’ll be increasing my coaching fees by about 25% on 1 May to better reflect my experience. I’ve logged over 1200 paid coaching hours and 4 years of full-time Social Work experience prior to that and I’d hate for people to think I’m a newly qualified coach because I’ve been charging what the newbies charge!
* You can find out more about my different coaching packages over here.