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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Challenging The Assumptions That Keep You Stuck
Welcome back!
The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.
Paul Broca
Do you have a favorite story that gets to the essence of your life? Rabbi Arthur Green begins his book, Seek My Face, Speak My Name, with such a story. I refer to him not because of the story he tells, but because of what he writes about having such a story.
This tale by Rabbi Nahman has become my story. I have been retelling it for twenty years or more. Whenever I tell the tale, I ask those who are hearing it for the first item to share with me in the task of interpretation. Seldom do I tell it without coming away with some new meaning that I had never seen in the story before.
Arthur Green
I also have a story that has become my story. It is a true story, based on an experience with my son. I can tell you only a little about what I have learned from this story, and what I continue to learn from it. For me, this story is a hologram, a single story that contains the whole.
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
Eric Temple Bell
When my son was sixteen, he bought his first car, a well-used navy blue VW beetle. He bought it from the next door neighbor with money he had earned on his own. After he bought the car, he drove it into the garage and began to rebuild the engine. I don’t know everything he did beyond replacing wires and spark plugs and various other worn-out engine parts. After all of his work, he reached that that magical moment when he turned the key in the ignition, ready to start the engine in his first car. However, there was a problem. When he turned the key, nothing happened.
I have always been close to my son and so it was perfectly natural for him to stop into my study to tell me that he could not get the engine started. At that moment, I had one of my intuitive flashes and said, “It’s the distributor cap.”
Eric’s response to this statement was “The distributor cap?? The distributor cap??!! And since he clearly thought this was an utterly stupid idea, he gave me a mini-lecture on distributor caps. He explained that the distributor cap is connected to the spark plugs and that the wires from the spark plugs go through the holes on the top of the distributor cap to carry sparks to the pistons in the cylinder. I remember clearly that the lecture ended with these words. “It can’t be the distributor cap because the distributor cap doesn’t do anything. Nothing can go wrong with the distributor cap.”
At that point, the only fact he knew with absolutely certainly was that nothing can go wrong with a distributor cap. As for myself, I had no need to be right or wrong about the distributor cap as the source of his problem. The idea came from someplace other than the rational part of my mind. I went back to my writing and Eric went back to the garage.
We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.
Stephen R. Covey
Eric was on a school vacation and didn’t have a job at that point, so he spent all of his time in the garage working on his car. I remember that we had our first conversation on Monday. I could be wrong about the timing. As I remember, he worked all day on Monday and far into the night. He worked on Tuesday and far into the night. He worked on Wednesday and far into the night. It was all I could do to get him to stop for meals. I think it was on Thursday when he came back to my study, slumped down in my visitor chair, and said, “I give up.”
I had never seen him defeated before. Eric is one of the most persistent people I know. If he sets out to do something, he stays with it until he has accomplished what he set out to do. And for the first time in his life, he had reached the point of saying, “I give up.”
You must stick to your conviction, but be ready to abandon your assumptions.
Denis Waitley
At that point, I heard myself saying, “Eric, if you are stuck, it is because you are making an assumption that is keeping you stuck. I don’t know what is wrong, but the problem with your engine has something to do with the distributor cap.”
I didn’t get a lecture on distributor caps this time. Eric stood up, went back to the garage, and came back a few minutes later to announce that he had found the problem and started his engine.
He then explained what had happened. When he replaced the wires between the spark plugs and the pistons, the wires that go through the holes in the distributor cap, he had connected the wires out of phase. So instead of running wire A between spark plug A and piston A, and wire B between spark plug B and piston B, he had run the wire from spark plug A to piston B, and so on for the four spark plugs and pistons. This miswiring meant that the engine was out of phase and so each spark plug fired at the wrong phase for the piston. This is why nothing happened when he turned on the ignition.
I tell you this story because this story of my son and the distributor cap on his VW beetle has become the foundational story of my life and work. The longer I live with the story, the more I see in it.
The most immediate benefit from the story is the point of the words I heard myself say. “If you are stuck, it is because you are making an assumption that is keeping you stuck.” I call this “Kalinda’s First Law Of the Universe,” even though I can take no credit for it. I recognize the difference between insights that come to me and ideas that I dream up inside my own head. These words came to me as insight.
The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there’s gold in letting go of them.
John Seely Brown
In the years since these words popped into my consciousness, I have seen the truth of this “First Law” again and again. Underneath any experience of being stuck, there is an assumption. And until you identify and challenge the assumption, you will remain stuck.
How do you know when you have hit this assumption? One of the clues seems to be that your first response is the same as Eric’s first response. “It can’t be the distributor cap because the distributor cap doesn’t do anything.” In other words, the formula is, “It can’t be ________ because __________.” You immediately reject the idea and give a reason why it cannot be true.
I want to make clear that I am not telling you this story to impress you with my intuitive insight. Sometimes, being intuitive is a dubious gift, which I usually keep to myself. I have lost at least two friends because they were offended by what they heard. In each case, a friend came to me and asked for help with a health problem. And in each case, I had a sudden moment of insight, which my friend immediately rejected. Later events proved that my insight was accurate, but the cost of my insight was a friendship.
I am telling you this story because I have seen again and again that people stay stuck because we are making assumptions that keep us stuck. If you hear yourself saying the words, “It can’t be _______ because ________”, my experience teaches me that you have come very close to the assumption that keeps you stuck.
There is so much more that I have learned from this story that I can only hint at here. One lesson is that answers will come to your questions if you ask them. And the answers will come sooner rather than later. We live in a vastly interconnected spiritual universe. Answers will come in ways that your logical mind cannot anticipate and will often come from the most unlikely sources.
One of my own mysteries over the years has been why my insights are always both accurate and inaccurate, both enough and not enough, at the same time.
The fact is, Eric was right when he reacted to my statement about the distributor cap. It’s true that nothing can go wrong with a distributor cap because a distributor cap is just a rigid cap with holes in the top.
So, why didn’t I get the insight, “Eric, you wired your engine out of phase?” Why did my insight come to me with the words, “It’s the distributor cap?”
I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe it is not enough to receive information from someone else, no matter how accurate the information is. To break through the assumption that keeps you stuck, you have to challenge your unchallenged assumption. What you THINK is true is often the assumption that is keeping you stuck.
Eric had to go to the garage and actually look at the distributor cap, all the while knowing that nothing can go wrong with a distributor cap. But when he really looked at the distributor cap, he found that the problem with his engine did have something to do with the distributor cap.
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.
Alan Alda
Whatever your struggle in your life right now, I invite you to ask this question. “What am I assuming that is keeping me stuck?” And when the answer comes, as it will inevitably come, and you hear yourself saying, “It can’t be ________ because ______, you have probably found the assumption that is keeping you stuck. The path to freedom is to act as if the answer is true, especially if the answer comes from the most unlikely source. When you challenge what you think is true, you will very likely find the solution to the problem that is keeping you stuck.
This article was originally published September 6, 2005.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2005-09-06.htm
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© 2005 Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
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