What is Drift?
Drift is something I’ve been observing in myself since November 2019. Its a pattern. And since I identified it in myself I have noticed it in my clients, my players, my friends, and most humans I’ve come in contact with to some degree. You could say there is some selective attention or recency bias here, like when you buy a new car you suddenly start seeing that car everywhere on the road. But that doesn’t last 6 years and hundreds of people.
So what is Drift? Let’s start with the dictionary definitions. Here are a few:
“to move along a line of least resistance” “to become carried along subject to no guidance or control” “to move slowly, especially as a result of outside forces, with no control over direction”
And those map pretty damn well onto my current working definition for the pattern I’ve observed:
Drift (v) the slow, often unnoticed movement away from the person you know you are capable of being.
To be honest this still feels like a working definition for me. There is something about the end of it that I don’t think totally squares up for me yet. It reinforces the idea of an “ideal self”, an end state, and if you aren’t there then you are somehow broken. And that’s what the self-help industry thrives on. Drift isn’t the movement away from an ideal self, its more a movement away from a true self, a full aligned, connected, engaged, and alive self. Drift is the dampening of expression. It’s really a gradual disconnection from self, reinforced by small acts of avoidance. So maybe a better working definition for now is:
Drift (v) the slow, often unnoticed movement away from connection with yourself.
And this leaves me with a lot of questions i’ve been circling:
why do we Drift?
what does Drift look like? what are the patterns?
why does it matter? what is the cost of Drift?
what purpose does it serve?
what are the outcomes?
once we become aware we’re Drifting how do we stop?
and how do we prevent ourselves from Drifting again in the future?
But this isn’t just about connection. It’s about direction as well. Because the real world requires both. When we Drift we don’t just lose connection to ourself, we lose sight of the direction we want to go in life. We stop moving toward what really matters to us and settle for whatever life puts in front of us. An aligned life takes both connection and direction. Without true connection the direction will always be off. And without direction you’re just a person sitting on a bench staring at birds all day with a smile on your face.
You need both connection and direction to get out of Drift. And what I’ve learned is that here is not one sequence. Sometimes you have to act you way into connection by starting with direction. And other times you need to find connection before setting direction. But i’ll come back to this soon, along with the questions above.
Cheers,
Al