UN-Hooked

So imagine you’re a fish swimming along, enjoying the sparkling fresh water. You’re with your buddies and you know exactly what direction you’re going. You see some food in the distance and swim towards it. All of a sudden, you’re HOOKED. You don’t know how this happened, but you have a hook implanted in your cheeks and it hurts. Sometimes, the hook isn’t in very deep and you can just wiggle yourself free. But sometimes, the hook is so deep and it yanks you out of the water, up onto the boat as you struggle and fight for a breath until you find yourself staring into the eyes of a hungry fisherman. If you’re lucky, the fisherman is kind, does “surgery” on you to unhook you and throws you back into the water so you can find your school and keep on swimming. Sometimes you’re not so lucky and you fight and gasp for air until you give up. Or maybe the line is cut and you live, but the wound heals around the hook, and you don’t even really notice how much you’ve compensated for its being there.

Depressing, right? But it’s what happens to us as humans all the time. We’re going along our own way when all of a sudden we find ourselves hooked by something, struggling to wiggle ourselves free. When the hook is shallow, let’s say it’s someone cutting you off in traffic or a sharp comment by a coworker, you can usually wiggle free without too much pain. You get annoyed but then a new song comes on the radio and you can let it go.

But sometimes the hook is huge, like believing you’re not good enough or will never succeed. The hook is dug so deep into your psyche that you can’t even see the little prongs that keep it in place. You’re struggling, gasping for air, and you don’t even know what the hook is, you just know you want it to stop hurting. It becomes part of you. You organize your whole being around it. You can probably see the outer part of the hook—maybe a tendency to settle for jobs that you don’t like because you’habit or addiction that you constantly beat yourself up over. But the little prongs that keep that hook in place are deeper thoughts, feelings and tendencies that can take a while to get loose.

It is my belief that our thoughts are the hooks. Not the circumstances, but the thoughts. It’s the painful stories we have about what happened, instead of what happened, that hook us. Then the work we need to do, and what this blog is dedicated to, is to get un-hooked from our painful and self-limiting thoughts. Some of this can be done through self-analysis and self-coaching. Some requires outside intervention, like coaching or therapy. Regardless, the process of un-hooking ourselves from our tired, old patterns and thoughts and becoming free to be our true, authentic selves is, in my opinion, what it’s all about.