We learn many tools in counseling. I have had clients learn a skill and then try
it once during the week and come back to let me know that this skill doesn’t
work for them. While I am glad to see
that they tried the skill and put in at least that much effort, I have come to
learn that there is a difference between training and trying something. I was reading a book called “I am More Than
Enough” By Dr. Robert Jones and Bryce Dunford.
In this book, they had a great analogy that helped me explain what I was
seeing when client’s I worked with did this.
I am going to paraphrase that analogy here.
Let us say that your gym is having a contest. In four weeks,
they will draw a couple of names for the people that are going to be able to
win $100,000. There are many names in the jar but you choose to add yours along
with the others. Now once your name is
drawn there will be a date set and if you can bench press 100 lbs. by that date,
you could be a winner.
Four weeks pass, and along with another person, your name is
drawn. The date for the big lift is set
for two weeks. Ecstatic (as any of us
would be) at a chance to win that kind of money, you find yourself obsessing
about it. You plan how to spend the money
and what you will be doing with it once you have won the money, and then at last
the day of the big even arrives.
The News is there to cover this event and you feel the
pressure to do well. Here is your moment. If you can lift the weight just twenty-four
inches away from your body you win. You feel that weight rest on you as two men
steadily place it there. Next to you is
the other person that got their name picked. The next ten seconds will tell
your future.
You begin to exert all your best physical and mental effort
to lift the weight. You can’t move it
off of your chest. It might as well have
been three hundred pounds for all that matters.
You simply can’t budge it. Next
to you, the person is slowly lifting the weight and you see that they are going
to win the money.
Two men come and finally lift the barbell off you and a T.V.
personality shoves a microphone in your face and asks how you felt. You responded that you are very disappointed,
and don’t know what happened. You tried
as hard as you could. You guess it just
wasn’t meant to be. Your partner in the
lift reports that he is grateful for the chance he had and is excited to see
that all of his training and hard work in the last six weeks has paid off.
The same principal applies to mental health skills.
If we don’t take the time to train our brains, so that we
can create the neuropathways that it needs, we won’t be able to implement a
skill when we need it. We can try once,
and not see results, or we can practice the tools we are learning and use
therapy to train, learn, and get better.
In the end, you are only going to get out what you put in. Are you going to TRAIN, or TRY?
By Kristy Goodson, LMSW