*Image of ‘The Two Wolves’ is used with the permission of Freelance Illustrator Gimena Ferrari.You may have noticed that some days it is hard to make good choices. You would think by now that you would have figured out how to make it easier. But here is why it will always be a challenge.
The name of the game up until recently was 'survival'. Over millions of years, life evolved a nervous system that beautifully responds to the many threats an organism will face. It is often referred to as ‘fight or flight’. While we seldom need true fight or flight reactions to the ‘threats’ we face today, these old neural pathways remain alive and well within all of us.
Related to our threat response, we also have a very strong desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure seeking drove our ancestors to find food, stay warm and reproduce, while pain avoidance kept us safe and alive.
However, today these traits can unconsciously drive us to overindulge in behaviour that is pleasurable or to develop unhelpful strategies to cope with or avoid many of the ‘pains’ we face (our worries about the future, criticism or feedback from others, concern about being valuable enough, concern about having enough, and even the pain of boredom).
The good news is that we also possess this amazing ability to see beyond our fight or flight reactions and our innate drives; to see choices that involve wisdom, acceptance, kindness and cooperation.
These choices have also proven to be highly beneficial toward our survival and are part of us. We are a highly social species that continues to grow and leverage our ability to choose wisely when faced with challenges and threats today.
These contrasting strategies (fight or flight vs. wisdom, growth and kindness) are nicely captured in the parable of 'The Two Wolves'.
The Two Wolves Parable
The story is often told as follows:
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “There is this fight going on inside of me,” he says to the boy. “It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”
He continued, “The other wolf is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
I share this story often in my coaching and teaching because it so nicely captures several important concepts related to who we are and how our brain works.
First, whether we like it or not, we are the descendants of people who survived through fight or flight and a deeply wired drive to avoid pain and seek pleasure. It is part of us. But we are also the descendants of people who possessed wisdom, compassion and kindness, often providing greater joy and peace in our lives.
Both ‘wolves’ are deeply woven into our neural fabric, but the dark wolf is typically the hungriest and quickest to leap into action. Particularly when we are stressed or overwhelmed, which tends to have us running on Autopilot. In this state, we have little awareness or willpower left over to do anything but feed the dark wolf.
Second, the concept of neural plasticity, our brain’s inherent ability to learn, grow and change our ways, is beautifully captured by the old Cherokee’s reply “The one you feed.” Every time we repeat a behaviour, or even re-think our opinions and beliefs, we wire that behaviour or thinking pattern deeper into our nervous system. The wolf we feed gets stronger.
How This Affects Us Today
If you are anything like me or the clients I coach, you will at times struggle to feed the good wolf. You may be overly reactive to little things (often unmet expectations, dropped balls or things not going the way you planned).
If you feel overwhelmed by your workload or obligations or worry about your status, you may seek excessive levels of control, rather than trusting your team. Or the overwhelm may drive you to avoid the hard task that just needs to get done.
You may even choose to numb it all away at the end of the day through any one of the countless options we can lose ourselves in today.
These actions are typically coming from a place of Autopilot and are often not conscious choices, but rather unconscious reactions.
Tools to Help You Feed the ‘Good’ Wolf
1. Calm your nervous system. Overwhelm, or a sense of undeserved criticism, disrespect, lack of fairness, lack of control and uncertainty will all trigger the wolf of fear. They also tend to keep us in a state of Autopilot, where we aren’t even conscious of our reactivity.
When we intentionally pause to breathe in a smooth, rhythmic manner we are resetting our nervous system back to a calmer, wiser and more connected to others state. When we practice meditation and mindfulness, we actively shift our nervous system to a calmer and more aware state, allowing us more space to feed the good wolf.
2. Live with virtue. The Stoics didn’t have The Two Wolves parable, but I believe they would have liked it. Instead, they had The Choice of Hercules, where Hercules had to choose between two goddesses: Vice and Virtue.
Choosing virtue would have been their version of ‘feeding the good wolf’. What that means is for us to be at our best (Herculean or otherwise), we want to choose virtue (e.g. wisdom, self-mastery, courage, gratitude, respect and fairness) a lot and say “No!” to vice (reacting unconsciously, self-indulgence, cowardice, selfishness, etc.). The more we do this, the easier it gets to choose virtue again and again.
Conclusion
One of the hardest things for us to accept is that the wolf of fear, hate and innate desires will always be there within us. It is part of our DNA. But our ability to make wise and conscious choices frees us from being dominated by our darker side.
Take a moment to recognize the two wolves inside of you? How does your dark wolf show up? Which wolf are you feeding these days (take a look at your thoughts, feelings and behaviours to tell)? Are you aware of which wolf you are feeding? Then, from a place of awareness, use your ability to choose wisely and feed the ‘good’ wolf.
To learn more about how coaching and training can accelerate you and your team’s ability to use these tools to be more focused, resilient and collaborative, please connect with me at scott@mindfulwisdom.ca. Or take two minutes right now to complete this simple survey and see where your head is at. The higher the score, the more dominant your dark wolf is these days.