Personal and Interpersonal Action

This is a distinction I make a lot with my coaching clients. 

1) Action is good. 

Having epiphanies, emotional breakthroughs, insights etc, all of that is great, and occasionally life changing. And the chances of it actually changing your life are vastly multiplied if you also take regular action to live into the insight. 

2) There are two kinds of action

Personal action is anything you do where it's possible to do and no one know that you did it. Examples: Meditating, working out, praying, journalling, reading, practicing an instrument.

People MIGHT know that you did it because they see you or whatever. But you could do it, have no one notice, and it would still be true that you did it.

Interpersonal action is anything you do that you can only do by affecting someone else. Examples: Talking to people, calling or writing to people, publishing something, playing a (non-solo) sport, playing in a band, performing on stage.

These kinds of action are not created equal.

Personal action is valuable because it's easy to get high volume of reps in, and the stakes are relatively low. You're freer to explore, experiment, and make mistakes.

Interpersonal action is valuable because you get large amounts of incredibly high quality feedback. The world tells you if what you're doing is working in very direct ways. You also get tested in relatively high stakes situations where the results actually matter. And lastly, individual results actually matter! The circumstances of your life can change noticeably from a single instance of interpersonal action.

For introvert and/or spiritual types, we're often drawn to personal action, at the expense of interpersonal action. This is great, lots of wonderful, subtle capacities are developed this way.

This is an invitation to not neglect the other side of the street. If there are ways that you would like the circumstances of your life to be different, and you've been meditating, praying, journalling, doing therapy about them*, ask yourself "What scary-exciting action could I take towards that change that would involve other people." And then go do it!

Let me know if you do! Also, I'm curious if anyone here feels more comfortable in the interpersonal action sphere and it feels challenging somehow to engage in personal action.

* Therapy is an interesting exception to the above distinction because I think it falls closer to the personal action side than interpersonal. I have some thoughts about why, headline: therapy is designed to not have the therapist become karmically involved in the lives of their clients.