Step #6: Push through your fear – and take action. Repeatedly.
If you’re discovering that learned helplessness is hindering you in your life and relationships, taking action is the most crucial step. It is also the most liberating.
The first few times you purposefully attempt to do something it might feel fearful or risky. Changes and consequences will likely come from our actions! But you’ll find that you get used to taking action, and that the consequences usually aren’t nearly as hard as we built them up to be in our minds. Doing this over and over again is how resilience is built!
To see how this works, let’s keep going with variations of the toxic boss example.
As one scenario, you might realize that while his/her behavior is not your responsibility, your best option is to get out from under that influence. (See? It might be terrifying, but it’s also freeing!) So suppose you switch your mindset to what you can do. You start saving money, update your résumé, and begin a job search. You give yourself goals to hit, like “I will call ten different people who I can network with this month.” It may be inconvenient, stressful, and even uncomfortable, but you are not helpless.
Or suppose that your boss is not truly toxic but just irresponsible in a way that makes things challenging. You could make a decision to keep your job but place boundaries up. Perhaps you have a conversation with your boss about ways in which you view their behavior as problematic and the line you need to hold as a result. For example, “On our site visit last week, I know you thought I was unreasonable for not wanting to go to the strip club. But because those are my values, I need you to know that I will never do that. And if you pressure me again, I will have to decline any more business trips.”
Or perhaps instead, you realize that you have trained your boss to know that he or she can reach you at all hours. So you say, “I know you have gotten used to reaching me at any time, but being available to you has come to mean not being available to my family. So unless there’s an actual crisis – like we are truly about to lose a client – I am not going to answer text messages after I arrive home.”
Again, not helpless.
These steps take practice, especially if you’ve endured years of messages that helped you learn the wrong things. Remember the example of Pooh’s Corner and Eeyore at the opening of Part 1? While we might have loved the stories when we were growing up, none of us sat around and aspired to be like Eeyore! None of us dreamed of throwing our hands up and quitting – even when a better way was right in front of us.
In the end, though, that slide is part of the human condition! We do essentially “learn” that response as we don’t fight it, and as it becomes a habit. But the really promising, hopeful thing about our responses is that we can always learn new ones.
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