What Kind of Brick Wall Do I Want to Be?

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Not long ago, one of my earliest coaching clients reached out for another coaching stint as she redirected her career. I was thrilled. It’s a gift to catch up with old clients and see how they’re doing. I care about these wonderful humans.

During one of our sessions, she mentioned that some of the things I said in our sessions years ago have stuck with her all this time and informed how she acts and thinks. I was stunned. It’s not often you encounter the difference you make. For some people, I suppose there are ways of measuring their influence and the effect of what they give to others. For most of us, especially in the case of smaller interactions with strangers, we’ll never know.

This can leave us wondering if we’re doing good, making a difference, or in dire cases, if our lives matter. The range of emotions can span from wondering to futility.

The other day I learned that the mother of one of my high school classmates had passed. I was floored. During some hard times as a teenager, she helped me by sharing her experience and knowledge, consequently softening the harsh view I held of myself. Thankfully, years later, I told her this.

You hum and buzz through life and then, wham, someone who’d made a difference from your past makes their exit. I’d internally reaffirmed my love and gratitude for this woman through the years, but finality magnified how much it mattered. This is the ever-cycling story among us.

We grow accustomed to our personal history and take it for granted. It becomes as much a simple fact of “what is” as the nails on our toes, the sun in the sky, or the breath we take every six seconds. (I timed myself.) This is an efficiency about us and serves a purpose, but it melts the chunks of our life’s meaning into a background creek that we barely notice is flowing.

But it flows, and because of this, what we do absolutely matters — for ourselves and others. It adds up.

Recently, I wrote about the project I’m finally getting around to this year — telling my loved ones how grateful I am for them. That story is about others’ influence on me. This story is about my influence on others. The former is easy for me to detect and contemplate. The latter is either impossible to know, or something I can easily doubt.

But why would I be any different from anyone else? We’re a social creature. We affect others whether we want to or not, whether we realize it, or whether we’ll ever learn that we did.

So, opportunity knocks.

I asked my client who’s cycled back for coaching what I’d said that she carried with her all these years. “I remember telling you I was grateful for something,” she said, “Then you asked me in what ways was I grateful? You invited me to flesh out that gratitude. After I did, I saw how much more gratitude there is when you spend the time to think about how something affects you. That was big.”

I had no recollection of this conversation, but I knew where it came from — a class I’d taken on neuroplasticity and memory. The more you savor or give life to an experience in your mind, the more your mind creates a permanent home for that experience, and the more that experience grows in importance. It’s a magical feature of our crazy incredible brains.

Taking that class was a positive thing. It taught me some cool, useful information. Sharing this information with others increases the likelihood it will have the same lasting effect on a broader scale. It’s a numbers thing.

We can’t know what will stick — be it helpful or harmful — but we can be sure something will stick sometime for someone. I think you can guess the follow-on logic here: what sticky stuff do we want to sprinkle out there?

This is a well-trafficked message — be helpful, not harmful. I know you know this.

You also might know that the brain makes space for repetitious acts, important things, and danger. We skew toward that which might hinder or harm us, or things we’ve done many times. This is how we keep safe and process more efficiently.

We keep in our pockets the instruction manual for what we do again and again. This way we don’t have to reprocess and make sense of this thing each time. It’s called memory. Like a computer, if we’ve done something enough times — and learned it — our brain will quickly opt to do it again instead of questioning the situation. We do this super-fast, below the radar, and this is how we act and think as quickly as we do. We’re on an efficient autopilot often and seamlessly move through our days without grappling over each minuscule decision.

When we first learn to tie our shoes, it takes a lot of processing each time. Decades later, we can tie them while hopping on one foot while scrambling to make the bus.

We become what we do. If we log enough running miles, we can run many miles with the same effort it takes to sit — almost. If we learn math well, we can calculate in a split-second mid-sentence. If we grow skill as a complainer, we can rant on any subject that comes before us without hesitation. If we look on the bright side, we become someone who is the bright side.

On the one hand, we’re a sieve filtering out what we want to keep or discard from our attention span, but we’re also a brick wall, built brick by brick. Those bricks are what we do, imagine, and have been exposed to. Brick walls run the gamut from a pile of crumbles to sturdy support structures. There are options for how to be.

But you must realize you have options first, and then you need to believe you have the agency to choose.

If I don’t realize that how I think and act affects myself and my community, I don’t see why I’d consider how I am in the world. If I have no relevance, why should I be paying attention? There are plenty of other things to notice — dangers and delights, both.

But if one day your client comes to you and tells you that a few small things you said in the past have made a home in her brain, you suddenly realize your words can matter. You understand that words are choices and become tiny bricks inside minds — yours and others.

You suddenly see your choices. You suddenly want to choose.

I want to choose and build with helpful bricks. I want to become a sturdy, beautiful wall. I want to make a difference.

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Have a nice week, my friends.