Noticing the good, the bad and the ugly and how to deal with it.
Chers clients, collègues, associés, amis et famille,
Three things happened to me recently, all within the last few weeks.
1️⃣ I was facilitating a workshop at a conference I care deeply about. At the beginning, the participants agreed with each other on a few simple group guidelines. One of them was about airtime — making sure that in a room full of people with things to say, everyone (including the shy and the introverts) actually gets a turn to talk.
Most participants honored that agreement.
One did not.
Every time this person spoke, they spoke at length. Five minutes. Eight minutes. Long detours. Elaborate examples. The kind of talking that leaves everyone else watching the clock and internally composing the thing they would have said, if only there had been room for it.
I noticed myself getting increasingly irritated. And stressed. What is everyone thinking about my ability to manage the room?
2️⃣ I was on my way back from Paris, sitting in the airport, trying to work. The person seated near me in the airport lounge had their phone out, playing videos. No headphones. Full volume. Just one person broadcasting their entertainment to everyone within earshot with no apparent awareness — or interest — in the fact that there were other human beings around.
Irritated again. A LOT doesn’t even come close.
3️⃣ The third requires no travel at all. It is happening right now, as I write this, outside my office window. My neighbors have dogs. Lovely dogs, I am certain. They also bark. Enthusiastically. Lengthily. Sometimes for thirty minutes. Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes while I am trying to work. Sometimes while I am trying to enjoy a quiet morning on the deck.
Same feeling of irritation – yet again another flavor of it.
As I was sitting with all three of these, a thought arrived that I could not entirely dismiss:
I have spent years — years!!! — practicing mindfulness and meditation.
What if that's the problem?
What if, the more present and aware we become, the more present and aware we become of everyone else? What if mindfulness turns up the volume not only on beauty, on gratitude, on the extraordinary texture of an ordinary moment — but also on barking dogs, airport strangers, and workshop participants who seem congenitally unable to find the end of a sentence?
What if mindfulness has a cost nobody warned me about?
That question sent me somewhere interesting.
What Mindfulness Actually Is
Before we go further, let's be precise about what we're talking about — because mindfulness has become one of those words that gets used so often it starts to mean everything and nothing.
The definition I keep coming back to is Jon Kabat-Zinn's, and it remains the gold standard:
“Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment.”
My own version is slightly different, and perhaps more personal.
For me, mindfulness is the ability to live life and observe life at the same time.
One part of me is in the experience — angry, moved, frustrated, delighted. Another part of me is watching that experience unfold, noticing it, naming it. One part is speaking; another is registering the impact my words are having on myself and on the person across from me. One part is afraid; another observes that fear is present without being entirely consumed by it.
Mindfulness creates a small but crucial space between experience and awareness. Most of us spend much of our lives fused with our thoughts, emotions, and impulses — carried along by them without realizing we have any choice in the matter.
That gap, even a tiny one, changes everything. It is the difference between reacting and responding. Between being swept away and choosing to surf.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Viktor E. Frankl
The Science Is Pretty Clear
Mindfulness has been associated with reduced stress, lower anxiety, improved emotional regulation, better concentration, greater resilience, improved relationships, and increased overall well-being. Brain imaging studies suggest that regular meditation can alter activity in regions associated with attention, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.
None of this surprises me. After years of practice, I have experienced many of these benefits myself. I am calmer than I used to be. Less reactive. More aware of my own thoughts and emotions. More capable of noticing what is happening inside me before I automatically act on it.
Mindfulness has undoubtedly made my life better.
Which brings us to the problem.
The Part Nobody Puts on the Brochure
Mindfulness trains attention.
Attention is neutral. It notices what is there — all of what is there, without editorial preference for the pleasant over the uncomfortable.
The birdsong outside the window. Yes. The warmth of the first cup of coffee. Yes. The moment a stranger does something unexpectedly kind. Yes.
But also:
The colleague who speaks over everyone else in the meeting. The person who has a twenty-minute FaceTime conversation at full volume in a waiting room full of people. The neighbor whose dog has been barking since 7am. The workshop participant who agreed to the airtime guidelines and then proceeded to use all of it.
If mindfulness turns up the volume on life, it turns up the volume on all of life. Not just the parts we choose.
The more practiced I became at paying attention, the more I noticed. And the more I noticed, the more I found myself wondering: am I becoming hypersensitive? Is something wrong with me? Is this what years of meditation produces — a finely tuned instrument for detecting everything that irritates me?
I don't think that's it, actually. And the distinction matters.
Not Hypersensitivity. The Removal of Anesthesia.
Many of us spend years moving through life distracted, preoccupied, only partially present. We are scrolling, multitasking, half-listening, rushing from one thing to the next. In that state, a lot gets filtered out — including a lot of what is genuinely annoying, probably by design. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Mindfulness practice trains us out of that distraction. We come back. We notice. Life becomes more vivid — and that is mostly a gift. Colors seem brighter. Conversations feel richer. Mindfulness is like turning the volume up on life and hearing it more clearly and louder in every sense of the word.
Moments that would have slipped by unregistered suddenly land.
But irritation also lands.
What I don't think is happening is that mindfulness creates new sensitivity where none existed before. What I think is happening is that it removes the buffer that was there. The anesthesia wears off. The world was always this loud. We just weren't fully listening. Or taking it in.
Which brings us to the more interesting question.
Not: why is mindfulness doing this to me?
But: now that I notice — what do I do about it?
And yet — here is the paradox worth sitting with.
The same practice that sharpens our awareness of everything including what is irritating also builds, over time, the inner resources to meet that irritation with something other than a full-blown reaction. Regular meditation and mindfulness practice don't just turn up the volume on life — they also grow our capacity to tolerate what we hear. The research that documents reduced stress, lower anxiety, and improved emotional regulation is not describing a different benefit from awareness. It is describing the other side of the same coin. We notice more, yes. And we also, gradually, become steadier in the face of what we notice.
The practice, in other words, is both the cause of the problem and the cure for it. Which is either deeply inconvenient or deeply elegant, depending on the day.
Where Alfred Adler Walks In
This is where I want to bring in a perspective that I find far more useful than the standard mindfulness advice, which tends to land somewhere in the vicinity of "breathe and accept."
Alfred Adler — the Viennese psychiatrist who is sometimes called the grandfather of modern coaching, and whose work underlies almost everything I do — would have asked a very different question when confronted with any of my three examples.
Not: why is that person so irritating?
But: what meaning am I attaching to what they are doing?
Take the workshop participant.
The irritation I feel is not simply a response to the sound of their voice continuing past the agreed limit. It is a response to the story running underneath: they should know better. What part of agreeing to a contract did they miss? They should be more self-aware. They are disrespecting the group. They are taking what isn't theirs to take.
Perhaps all of that is true. And yet — reality proceeds without consulting us first. The person keeps talking. The dogs keep barking. The stranger keeps watching videos at full volume.
Adler was remarkably modern in his understanding that events do not determine our experience. Our interpretation does. Not because reality is subjective or because nothing is really happening — but because the suffering we feel is almost always a combination of the actual event and the meaning we wrap around it.
And here is the Adlerian observation that I find utterly difficult to deal with:
The more self-aware we become, the more obvious other people's lack of self-awareness becomes.
That realization contains a trap that is almost comically ironic.
We become aware. Wonderful. Now we are aware that other people are not. And we begin to judge them for it. The meditator becomes irritated by the non-meditator. The person working on their reactivity becomes frustrated by the reactive person. The practitioner of loving-kindness contemplates drastic and maybe even unspeakable measures over a barking dog.
Mindfulness was supposed to reduce judgment. And instead, it sometimes just gives us new and more refined material with which to judge.
I say this from personal experience. This is not theoretical.
Three Actual Responses (That Are Not "Just Accept It")
Adler was not a passive man and he did not produce passive psychology. Actually his psychology is called a “psychology of use”. He believed fiercely in human agency, in the courage to take action, in the dignity of showing up. His answer to any difficult situation was never simply endure it. It was closer to: figure out what is yours to do, and do that.
With that in mind, here are the three responses I have come to when I find myself in the awareness-without-peace problem.
1. Change the circumstances.
Move. Put headphones on. Close the window. Leave the lounge. Create distance. Choose a different seat. Sometimes the wisest and most self-respecting response is not heroic endurance but a simple, practical adjustment that removes the friction. This is not avoidance. It is resource management.
"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." ~Jon Kabat-Zinn
2. Change yourself
Breathe. Observe the irritation without feeding it. Notice the story you are adding to the bare facts of the situation and see if you can set it down. This is where mindfulness earns its keep — not in preventing the irritation, but in creating enough space to decide not to build a whole narrative around it. The barking exists. My running commentary on what the barking means about my neighbors' character and my inability to work and the general decline of consideration in the modern world — that is optional.
"Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor."
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
3. Address the relationship
Say something. Make a request. Have the conversation. This is the one people most often skip, in favor of either silent endurance or private fuming, and it is often the most useful and the most courageous option. The neighbor may genuinely not realize. The colleague may be completely unaware of their impact. The workshop participant — and this one I know from experience — is often operating from their own anxiety, their own need to be heard, their own particular version of feeling like they don't quite count if they don't fill the space.
Sometimes raising awareness is an act of generosity. Not aggression. Not superiority. Generosity.
The Question I Am Still Sitting With
Mindfulness taught me to notice.
Adler taught me that noticing is not enough, and that it is not even really the point.
The point is what I do once I have noticed. Can I accept what is genuinely not mine to change? Can I act where action is mine to take? Can I hold onto the awareness that the person irritating me is every bit as human, as imperfect, as driven by needs I cannot fully see, as I am?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable version of the question:
What exactly am I becoming aware of, when I become aware of “them”?
"The price of our vitality is the sum of all our vulnerabilities." ~David Whyte
Because sometimes the irritation is simple: the world is loud and inconsiderate and a little much. But sometimes — and this is the part that requires genuine honesty — the irritation is a signal about something closer to home. A need that isn't being met. A limit I haven't named. An expectation I am holding that no one else agreed to. Or a piece of courage I don’t quite think I have in me.
That is the next frontier of the practice, as far as I can tell.
Not awareness of the world.
Awareness of what I bring to it.
"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." ~Pema Chödrön
A Poem
The Guest House by Rumi feels like the right poem here. The premise — that every emotion that arrives, including the ones we would never have invited, is a guest worth receiving — is both maddening and true. You can find it easily; I'd encourage you to sit with it.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Copyright 1997 by Coleman Barks. Posted with permission. All rights reserved.
De The Illuminated Rumi.
The line that keeps coming back to me is this one:
"Each has been sent as a guide from beyond." -- Including, apparently, the barking dogs.
A Song
I keep coming back to The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel — which is partly about a world that never stops making noise, and partly about the strange loneliness of being the one who notices. There is something in it that speaks to exactly this paradox: the more attuned we become, the more isolated that attunement can feel.
And then, for the moment after — for the three practical choices, for the courage to act rather than just perceive — I'd suggest I Can See Clearly Now by Jimmy Cliff. Because that is, ultimately, what all of this is for. Not serenity for its own sake. Clarity in service of living better.
As always, I would love to hear what this brings up for you. Drop a comment on the blog, or simply reply to this email. You are not alone in this — the awareness, the irritation, the humbling recognition that the practice is never quite finished.
Chaleureusement,
