Control

As I was meditating this morning, I was thinking about control. My attention was focused on the sensation of my breath moving past my nostrils, when cars outside my window would zoom by and my focus would shift to the noise outside. I wondered if I should move to the back bedroom where there is less noise from the street. Moving to another room would have been an attempt to create the perfect conditions in which to meditate. Surely, there is no point to meditate where there are no distractions. Or is there? Isn't that the point of meditating? Meditation is the practice of constantly bringing attention back to one focal point. Other noises are not ignored, and feelings that arise during meditation are not repressed, but they are acknowledged and let go. If I had moved to a quieter room, I would have been ignoring and denying the noise, rather than practice refocusing despite the noise. I was trying to control my environment in a way that made it easier to do what I wanted, rather than work toward being able to do what I wanted despite setbacks. I'm currently reading a fascinating book entitled, Mindset, by Carole Dweck. She identifies two types of mindsets, fixed and growth. The fixed mindset believes that talent is something we are born with, and that you either have it or you don't. Setbacks feel like failures to the person with the fixed mindset because it is an indictment. Setbacks say, "you don't have the talent, so why are you even trying?". The growth mindset is a bit different. The growth mindset believes that any person can, through effort, learn to do anything. Setbacks to a person in the growth are simply learning opportunities. I remember being a kid, sitting at the kitchen table across from sister, arguing with her about whether or not a person, with enough determination, could move a glass of water with their mind. We both eventually realized that we simply didn't have the talent to do such a thing. We tried, but after failing, assumed it wasn't possible. Although it isn't exactly what I had in mind as a child, someone has learned to do it, and did so through incredible effort and from learning from setbacks. I see many new mediators fall into the fixed mindset, and one early sign of it is their need to control the mediation. A mediator in the fixed mindset gets frustrated over the role-plays in a training and says things like, "a real case would never be like this". They also have difficulty facilitating real mediation sessions and may say something like, "we couldn't get to agreement because these participants were not mediating in good faith". These mediators try to create the perfect environment in which they can feel their efforts will be successful. Typically, they will avoid or dismiss feedback, because if it negative, it means to them that they don't have talent as a mediator, and then why bother trying? Mediators in the growth mindset learn from every opportunity. They have a difficult mediation and they to try learn how their behavior impacted the session. They learn what they could have done differently. They seek as much feedback as possible because they can only learn from it. I hope to explore this topic further as my own thoughts continue to develop around it. For now, I'll practice meditating on the couch by the window with all the noise. I'll also make sure I create time for feedback after every mediation session. It's easy to make excuses to avoid it, but we can only learn if we accept we are not perfect. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine Books.