The Gordian Knot of Personal Development

One Size Fits All
Often I read an article or a book that offers the solution to a problem: a diet for everyone, an exercise regimen for everyone, a money making method for everyone, a therapy for everyone.

And so on.

There’s no question that as human beings, we have a great, fundamentally similar biology, psychological nature, and common experiences.

On the other hand, our psychology is very complex, and it allows for dramatic variations in the meaning of our experience, as well as our goals, interests and focus.

The “one size fits all” attitude is convenient for authors and marketing, but it doesn’t always match reality.

Some methods of therapy suggest a painstaking search for the source of every psychological difficulty or undesired behavior in each individual.

This results in an extraordinarily customized, and unmanageably complex solution to the “challenge” of [TAG-Tec]personal development[/TAG-Tec].

Each of us has an intricately interwoven nest of experiences, traumas, fears, and thoughts that give rise to our behaviors.

When we want to change some aspect of our behavior, we may be challenging that tangled nest. It reminds me of an impossibly complex knot, which seems to have no beginning and no end.

If the only solution is to unravel the knot, what hope can we have to be able to change and grow?

The Gordian Knot
The term “Gordian Knot” appears in a legend that tells of a knot tied by an ancient Asian king. It was foretold that the one who would untie the knot would rule all of Asia.

Alexander the Great knew the prophecy and wanted to untie the knot. When he faced the knot, he saw that the rope had no ends. There was no way to untie it according to its own rules.
What did he do?
He went outside the rules of the system, and cut through the knot with his sword.

In current usage, a Gordian Knot refers to an all but unsolvable problem, that is solved with a quick, simple solution.

Our minds may be unimaginably complex, but I don’t believe that we need methods equally complex to fuel our personal growth.

What I think we’re up against are Gordian Knots: complex and tangled problems that can be solved with simple (or at least much simpler) solutions. Our knots try to convince us to play by their rules.

We don’t have to.

The Solution Must Be as Complex as the Problem
There. I said it. This is the assumption that we often accept, consciously or unconsciously.
But is it true?

Do we need to understand the details of every problem to fix it?
NO.

I’ve included some examples below to show, by analogy, that there are complex problems that can be solved by simple solutions. Our purpose here is not to provide exact solutions, just to point us in the right direction.

Example 1: Obsolete behavior
Let’s say I was confronted as a child by an event that seemed to be dangerous. In truth, there was no real danger. Since I didn’t understand the real significance of the event, my mind built a program that tries to protect me against similar events, even though there is no real danger.

Alternatively, there was some danger to me then, but it poses no danger to an adult with my skills.
In either case the core behavior may have been expanded, and built into a complex combination of behavior, but the root of it all is obsolete or unnecessary behavior. If I could weaken the root of the behavior, the rest would collapse. I don’t need to understand all the detailed branches. I just need to get at the root.

Example 2: Computer Software
A particular program may be a tangled combination of logic, resulting from the efforts of many people over an extended period of time.

The mess often results because different programmers have different goals and approaches, and don’t fully understand the prior approach. In the early days of programming we would refer to a program with a confusing structure as “spaghetti code”.

(The image is of a pot of cooked spaghetti. The strands of spaghetti are all mixed up together in an impossibly complex structure!)

When confronted with an overly complex program, sometimes the only solution is to create a new program, and just abandon the old. We don’t have to understand all the little details of the mess. We prepare an alternative, and institute some simple behaviors to prevent the mess from recurring.

We don’t have to destroy the old program, or the memory that is the source of an unwanted behavior. We just have to take the power away from the program/memory, and substitute another program in its place that has power.

Example 3: Eat the Spaghetti
When we eat spaghetti, do we separate each cooked strand from the next one before we eat it?
No. We just eat it. We ignore the complexity because it’s not relevant to the task of eating.
The force of eating overpowers the spaghetti completely.

Similar there are complex clusters of behavior within us that can be dissolved by overwhelmingly powerful techniques, without us ever understanding the details of the complexity.

Your emotions and your will when properly focused can overcome almost any previous programming. This is particularly true when you are focused on your most heartfelt dreams, dreams that resonate strongly with your special talents, and with your potential greatness.

While there is no single, magical solution which will handle every challenge, the solutions are far simpler than we imagine them to be.