On Acceptance and Tolerance

When she gives a talk, a coach and author, Martha Beck, sometimes asks people in the audience whether they are sitting comfortably. When everyone politely nods, she asks again, ‘Are you really sure you are comfortable?’ People still nod, now perhaps a bit irritated. Then she continues, ‘If you were at home alone right now, how many of you would be sitting in the position you’re in at this moment?’ Almost no one raises their hand.

We know how to tolerate things, how to dismiss slight discomforts, how to ignore bodily and mental annoyances. Many of us become so good at this skill, that we tolerate things we shouldn’t tolerate, like a soul-drenching career or toxic relationships.

The famous Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer implores God to grant us serenity to accept the things that we cannot change, courage to change the things that we can, and wisdom to know what can be changed and what cannot.

I want to reflect on the difference between serene and wise acceptance of the things we cannot change and tolerance of the things that we indeed can change. I would argue that this imprecise line dividing tolerance and acceptance can make a huge difference in one’s life.

In my bistro, I had a door that looked like a bookshelf. If you consider it a door and push it, it opens. If you consider it a bookshelf, you don’t push it. Why would you?

Niebuhr’s acceptance is about ceasing to push bookshelves that are only bookshelves. The problem is we rarely deal with how things are, instead, we often deal with how things occur to us.

Tolerance hinges on how the world occurs to us and how we interpret that: the rules and beliefs about what the world is, how it operates, and about who we are and what’s possible for us. All that influences what makes sense to do and what is not worth trying. Many things will occur to us as bookshelves, and many of them are only bookshelves, and so we don’t push them. And some of them are also doors, but we wouldn’t check.

Tolerance is not pushing doors because they occur like bookshelves. This kind of tolerance happens and is reinforced because we confuse what occurs for what is (relevant here is Alfred Korzybski’s concept of consciousness of abstracting, I blogged about here)

When we distinguish what occurs from what is, we take, by default, every bookshelf for bookshelf only. And then we can discover one that is also a door. Distinguishing occurring and is-ness enables a different attitude in what we consider to be true about the world.

To further distinguish the kind of tolerance I want to emphasize, let’s consider what might be happening with Martha Beck’s seminar participants. When she asks the first question, most people may consider it a perfunctory pleasantry, as if it’s not a real question to consider but a nice thing to say. Most people won’t really hear it as a question to answer. When it’s asked for the second time and the third time, that’s when most of the people start paying attention to it as a real question. At this stage tolerance can unconsciously kick in in two forms: one is people thinking ‘Yes, it’s not comfortable but I’m ok to sit like that for the next hour, so why would I mention it’ and second is a form of ‘I don’t see sense in answering questions like this because there is no way to sit differently here so I won’t really bother about becoming aware of how comfortably am I sitting’ One way is about dismissing possibility another about dismissing awareness.

In coaching, people become aware of the process of occurring–how they perceive their reality and how they attribute meaning. Realizing the changeability of what was considered a hard fact about the world often leads to a big relief because now there is hope, now there is light at the end of the tunnel. Gently pushing a bookshelf and learning that it gives in, by itself, could be a transformative experience.

People who go to therapy or coaching, explicitly or implicitly, don’t want to tolerate a thing anymore. If it’s a therapy, perhaps they are fed up with unbearable fear, anger, grief, trauma, loneliness, or lack of aliveness. If it’s coaching, perhaps they are fed up with being stuck in their career, unproductive relationships with colleagues, overworking, or not feeling fulfilled.

When people don’t bring the things they are tolerating to coaching, psychotherapy, or some other work, those continue to be like bookshelves that we don’t test on being a secret door. As a result, many avenues in our lives remain closed off.

In a research commissioned by the International Coaching Federation in 2009, what struck me was that the vast majority of coaching clients, 97%, had tried something else before turning to a coach; the most common option was talking to a colleague. My very loose interpretation of this statistic is that people need to be really, really uncomfortable before they reach out to a coach. Before that, they will mull things over in their heads, talk to anyone willing to listen, try courses or books (which typically don’t help address the phenomenon of occurrence). By the logic of survivorship bias, it’s reasonable to assume a significant group of people will try all those things, but then won’t reach out to a coach.

People tolerate their problems and pains because those occur to them as unchangeable givens they have to accept. I’m often reminded of that through two kinds of experiences.
First comes from the stories I hear from people about their past problems, where, I’m fairly certain, coaching could have helped. They are stories about struggling to improve a relationship with a manager, being burned out in one’s first leadership role, not being able to clarify expectations with stakeholders in a new role, or not being able to address low performance. People do their best, but their best is often about tolerating and enduring what they perceive as unchangeable. Tolerating deals with a symptom so people don’t address the root cause. After some time, these people quit the job, move to a different career, or they fire a low performer; it’s just too much. They tolerate and don’t address the thing that could be changed.

Second comes from coaching people who receive coaching as support at work. It’s not uncommon for such clients to start talking about what really matters only after some time. I remember a client like this in my earlier coaching days. In our sessions, he was bringing up some transactional stuff. As we were having our last coaching session, he mentioned, in passing, a performance issue on his team he needed to address. I asked about it. He shared more and then we did some good work on that challenge. I won’t forget how he said with regret, “Damn, why didn’t I start talking about this stuff earlier?” Even after starting working with a coach, people can continue to tolerate stuff and stoically not bring it up. (Because of that, I ask people when we begin and then as we continue something to the effect of ‘If we stop here, what would you regret, that we didn’t archive?’)

Tolerance of what annoys us not only hinders us from achieving our goals. It often hides a possibility. Then we won’t even consider something a goal. If leadership roles occur as stressful and bound to require a lot of overtime work, one wouldn’t want it–quite understandably. If a meaningful and well-paid job doesn’t occur as a possibility, what’s the point of pursuing it? My personal example is that people are often surprised when I say that I have a restaurant business and don’t spend my days and nights over there. A lot of people have the belief that it’s an extremely time-consuming and stressful business. It occurs to these people that one must spend a lot of time there. Because I knew it doesn’t have to be that way, I knew that my goal was to create a restaurant business that would work the way I wanted it to work.

Tolerance walls off our desires, yearnings, and longings. We doubt whether what we desire is possible at all, and then we learn to tolerate living the life we feel is not fully ours. Life of tolerance often turns into a life of denial: what’s the use of admitting that we are not sitting comfortably if that’s the way we have to sit.

A slightly different variation is a supposedly temporary life of tolerance, a postponed life. We just need to tolerate what we don’t like for now: until the kids grow up, until we retire, until we exit, until we get a promotion, etc. And while we are waiting, we typically numb ourselves so that we don’t experience unnecessary psychological pain.

For me, the last December and January felt like a see-saw, mostly saw. They were difficult and stressful. Still, I was coping pretty well. For a while I felt as if I was deftly surfing a huge wave. I thought, finally, my meditation practice made stress less sticky. It went away almost as quickly as it came. Also, there was a new for me thrill of experiential learning from observing myself in the stressful moments.

And, of course, it changed. I started feeling worse, lonely and sad, more out of touch with myself. The wave has finally thrown me off. ‘I’m a failure,’ I thought to myself. My coaching practice is stuck and is going nowhere. I made some painful and easily preventable mistakes as a restaurant owner. I’m a lousy leader and have let people down. For a few days, I just felt shitty.

Then, I started noticing that something was different within this lousy state. It felt familiar but also slightly different. It felt shitty but also ok–I didn’t want or need this shitty state to go away. Yes, I am a failure and I can continue living as a failure. The thought that I remain a failure wasn’t as frightful as it could have been before.

Unorthodox Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa said ‘The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.’ Easing, even a bit, to that feeling of falling and not trying to cling or deny the falling made a huge difference. When I admitted and accepted that I’m not ok and that I’m not as good as I would like to be, when I started reflecting on it with an attitude of acceptance, when I stopped treating feeling shitty and being a failure as a problem, then things started to brighten up.

Admitting and naming the tolerance is the first step to go through the mindless fog of tolerance. Unclenching one’s fists and jaws while experiencing something uneasy that we learned to tolerate is another one.

Whereas Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer emphasizes accepting unchangeables, poet Wendell Berry exhorts us to do something different. ‘Ask the questions that have no answers’, he writes. It’s as if he is saying don’t stop pushing the bookshelves, even though you know most won’t give.

How would one go about that? One way is to face our tolerances squarely. Martha Beck, in her book The Way of Integrity, offers a practice of acknowledging honestly where we are not living fully. To do that, she invites people to say the following sentences out loud and notice how they land in us:
— My life isn’t perfect.
— I don’t like the way things are going.
— I don’t feel good.
— I’m sad.
— I’m angry.
— I’m scared.
— I’m not at peace.
— I can’t find my people.
— I’m not sure where to go.
— I don’t know what to do.
— I need help.

You don’t have to do anything about what comes up. The main goal is to honestly look through the dismissal of possibility or awareness induced by our tolerance. Maybe somewhere under a thick layer of dust, there is a forgotten and condemned childhood dream or a forgotten part of yourself. You can build a good and comfortable life without them. But is that really how we want to spend our one wild and precious lives?

Tolerances of today tend to become regrets of tomorrow. Do we want them to become regrets we will face on our deathbeds? If so, what do we need to stop tolerating on this very day?
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