Why Insecurity is an Anna Karenina Problem

I was lying in bed the other night thinking about the structure of insecurity.

Shocking, I know…It’s pretty much all I’ve thought about for nearly two decades.

But more specifically, I was thinking about the apparent difference between my experience of solving the insecurity problem and the experience of almost everyone I’ve ever coached, because the longer I have worked with people on this, the more puzzling that difference has become.

Even though people are generally insecure about being insecure, I have worked with hundreds of people who’ve been ready to tackle their fear head-on.

I have watched people make extraordinary changes.

I’ve watched people become more confident, more self-trusting, more alive and more willing to take risks. I’ve watched people change relationships, careers, businesses and entire ways of living.

But if I’m honest, I have never seen anyone reproduce quite what has happened in me.

That is not to say I’m better than anyone else, quite the opposite.

I mean, I know I am special, but my problems certainly are not.

I am convinced that what happened to me is replicable. It is the entire basis of my thesis – Insecurity is a solvable problem.

I know this to be true because I have completely eradicated my own insecurity.

There is no longer a single thing in my life organised around the need to prove or defend myself, nor one drop of fear driving me to cover, compensate or project some version of myself that I hope will be acceptable to other people.

I trust myself completely.

I am my own safety.

I know that I am delightful.

That’s not to say my life is static or complete. I still want things: I want more readers. I want a bigger business. I want money. I want my work to reach millions of people.

But none of those things are required to establish my worth.

I still feel pain: I can be disappointed, angry, frustrated and annoyed.

But none of those emotions fester, make me feel guilty or lead to anything I regret.

And perhaps most importantly, now that my system is no longer organised around fear, it has naturally reorganised itself around aliveness and play.

And I’ve never been able to quite explain why I seem to have gone further with this than anyone I’ve coached.

Until now.

The Anna Karenina Principle

Seemingly out of nowhere, I felt the need to google the opening line from the novel Anna Karenina.

This line had been floating around my mind all week. I don’t know why.

“All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I thought I’d better make sure I had the quote word perfect before I kept repeating it.

When I searched it, there were four surprises waiting for me:

a)     I had it correct.

b)    It was Leo Tolstoy who wrote Anna Karenina (I was sure it was Dostoevsky…Whoops)

c)     There is scientific principle based on this single line of prose that answered my long-held question in a remarkable way.

d)    I got to have another delightful experience of being life itself and life inside Jaemin. The giver and the receiver, the inside and the outside, the seeker and the provider.

The fact that this particular quote was in my mind at this particular moment in time, and that I then followed an instinct to google it, did not feel like some cosmic coincidence to me.

It felt like evidence. Evidence of a system organised around aliveness.

 I was participating freely in life itself. The great happening.

The revelation came not because I manufactured it. I was simply available for it.

As Rumi says “What you seek is also seeking you”

Have a look at the line again.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The idea behind the line is that happy families share certain essential conditions. But, there are many different ways a family can be unhappy, because the failure of any one of those essential conditions can disrupt the whole system.

This became known as the Anna Karenina principle.

In complex systems, success requires multiple essential conditions to be satisfied simultaneously. If even one of those conditions is missing, the system fails.

There is, in other words, only one way for everything to be working. But there are almost infinite ways for something not to work.

Wait a minute…Insecurity is an Anna Karenina problem.

That’s it!

Insecurity is a complex system organised around fear.

Freedom from insecurity isn’t one thing. It is what happens when the whole structure is gone.

A person can make enormous progress and still not be free.

They can understand their childhood accusation and still organise their life around disproving it.

They can understand self-permission and still wait for somebody else to give them permission.

They can become incredibly successful while still using success as evidence that they are worthy.

They can understand the methodology intellectually while continuing to protect the very insecurity they are trying to overcome.

Sure, they may have changed, sometimes dramatically, but if the insecurity system is still operating even in the smallest way, then one unresolved part will continue to organise the whole.

Progress is not resolution

You can change ninety percent of a system and experience a completely different life.

You can become more confident.

More successful.

More self-aware.

More trusting.

More capable.

You can have better relationships and more money and more freedom and still have insecurity operating somewhere underneath it all.

Because if the remaining ten percent is still organising something important, the system is still alive.

This is why I have seen so many people make extraordinary progress without ever quite reaching the freedom, aliveness and play that I experience.

Because progress and resolution are not the same thing.

I didn’t solve insecurity because I found one magical insight. I solved it because I was wholehearted in my pursuit of tracing every aspect of it through my life until it was gone.

I kept going.

Every time I found another place where I was still behaving as though I feared some perceived inadequacy being exposed, I examined the structure of that fear, broke it down to its smallest moving part, removed the error and replaced it with something more adult.

I didn’t stop when I understood the problem.

I didn’t stop when I became more confident.

I didn’t stop when my life started working better.

I kept going and going and going until there was nothing of the old system left.

And eventually, there was nothing left to prove and nothing left to defend; nothing left that had to happen for me to be okay.

The beautiful conclusion

This gives me a much more precise standard for the coaching work and in particular training Jbot to be your life coach.

The engineering problem isn't simply Can AI give people my insights?

It's: Can Jbot keep a person engaged with the process long enough, and honestly enough, to identify every remaining part of the structure that is still organising their life around the need to prove and defend?

Find it.

Make it visible.

Understand the language holding it together.

Dismantle it.

Then keep going.

Until there is nothing left.

Then:

Freedom.

The kind of freedom that automatically allows the system to reorganise itself naturally around aliveness and play.

Can it hold a person still until the necessary wholeheartedness emerges?

And that is the thing I now want to know whether my methodology, and ultimately Jbot, can reproduce in other people.

Not because I think people need another way to become better versions of themselves, but because I’ve experienced what becomes possible when there is finally nothing left in the way of being fully alive.