Today’s topic may ruffle some feathers.

What if your striving for performance is actually an addiction?

The definition of addiction here is “a coping strategy and a protective mechanism that has been learned to get yourself away from pain”.

Hmm…

Could I be using my need for performance as a coping strategy to keep myself away from pain?

Yes, in this case we’re talking about emotional pain, of not being enough, of not being perfect, of being worthless and unloveable – unless I perform!

At some point the intelligence of your body may begin to give signs that perhaps it’s enough to use performance as an addiction – it’ll get you to slow down, lose motivation, sap your energy to the point of making you lose sleep so you don’t have any more energy to perform in the morning.

So that perhaps you stop running away from the pain that this previously unconscious pattern has been trying to keep you safe from.

So that you begin to face and look into the pain that has always been there, and all it wanted was your loving attention.

This is the work we do in our Peaceful Performance Experience membership calls.

Once you’ve resolved any remaining painful experiences, then performance becomes a way of an inspired creative expression rather than an innocent strategy of addiction.

Once a pattern is seen, it stops being a habit and simply becomes a choice.

And we’re all free to make our own choices, until a desire comes up to make a different choice.

– Dmitri “The Choice Maker” Sennikov