Four Tendencies & Resistance

& Movie Night Tonight!

Photo by Amber Kipp on Unsplash

Quick scheduling announcement: I’m away next week, so no Hope Lab on 8/4.

Last week in Hope Lab, we spent the evening exploring Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies - a framework organized around a single question: How do you tend to respond to inner and outer expectations?

If you weren’t there, we took the assessment together (you can still do it on Gretchen Rubin’s website), compared notes, and talked about what resonated, what didn’t, and what we noticed about ourselves.

The goal - at least according to the lesson plan I made before all of you showed up and became wonderfully opinionated - was to use the Four Tendencies as one possible lens for understanding resistance. As we’ve been talking about values and goals and identity, one of the things we’ve bumped up against consistently is resistance. I know what I want to do and what I value, but when it comes to changing things to get my life to line up with that? That’s a whole different thing.

As I said last week, one of the most important things we can do is pay attention to what we’re resisting. Resistance is almost always carrying information - sometimes incredibly important information.

The Four Tendencies gave us another way to ask why that resistance shows up. If I’m someone who tends to need external accountability (an Obliger, in Rubin’s framework), then maybe it isn’t a moral failing that I can’t seem to stick to goals I make entirely on my own. Maybe I need to stop trying to force myself to use a strategy that creates friction and instead build a little external accountability into the process.

In a way, the framework isn’t really even the point - reducing unnecessary friction and shame is the point.

We spent some time talking about whether personality frameworks are useful at all. Here’s where I’ve landed on this (and trust me, I have thought about this a LOT).

I have absolutely no interest in finding the framework that explains human beings. I think that’s wildly reductive and unhelpful and I also just generally don’t think it exists. I am interested in collecting frameworks that occasionally make me stop and say, “…wait that thing that I’ve never really been able to understand makes a little more sense now.” Ones that can help us move whatever giant shame boulder is standing in between us and the life we want.

You don’t have to marry a framework. You also don’t have to banish it into oblivion. You can date it for an evening. Borrow what you find interesting and leave the rest. The goal isn’t to become an Upholder or an Obliger or whatever. The goal is to understand yourself well enough that you can stop making life harder than it needs to be.

That’s really all we’ve been doing this summer. Every week we’ve picked up another lens - values, identity, resistance, expectations - because each one gives us another angle on the same question: How do I build a life that actually feels like mine?

Is that a Counting Crows lyric? I feel like yes?

Ok - one more thing. Tonight is Movie Night! We’ll be together at 5:00 PM Pacific to watch Voicemails for Isabelle, thank you Megan for the recommendation! Link below for all paying members of The Hope Circuit.

I’ll see you tonight!