Give The Monkey A Job: The Harder You Fight Your Thoughts, The Louder They Get
Aug 27, 2026Written By Bart Berkey | Founder of Most People Don't
WHAT UNCERTAINTY FEELS LIKE
"Hold it," she said.
We'd all taken a long breath in, and she wanted us to keep it there.
Ten seconds passed...
Then twenty...
My chest started to argue with me while my mind went looking for the exit.
When is this going to end?
How much longer?
I don't like this!
"That is what uncertainty feels like," our meditation guide said.
Then she told us that in a moment she was going to ask us to breathe in again, and that this part, we can control.
Later that morning, we were at a coffee shop trying to put words to what we learned in that meditation room.
That is when we met a therapist sitting nearby.
We entered into a deep conversation, and he shared this concept.
THE MONKEY MIND
There is an old Buddhist teaching about what they call The Monkey Mind.
Your thoughts behave like a monkey in a tree, swinging from branch to branch to branch, never sitting still.
Most of what it grabs is noise, and a good deal of it is not kind to you.
What resonated the most from the therapist's perspective is that you cannot tell a monkey (or gorilla) to be quiet.
There's constant chatter running in the background.
Anyone who has ever tried to clear their mind already knows this.
You sit down, you close your eyes, you instruct the monkey to settle, and the monkey gets louder.
Then you decide you are bad at this meditation stuff and you quit.
So the monk did not say "silence the monkey."
Instead, he said "give the monkey a job."
You are not going to out-argue it, so you employ it instead.
Which raises the question, what job do you give it?
The meditation guide had already answered that in her own words an hour earlier, while my lungs were burning.
I just wasn't listening yet.
CLEAR YOUR MIND
She instructed us to hold your breath, and that is the entire assignment.
I noticed that when I focus on my breath, holding it, then taking another one - that I was not focusing on my thoughts.
But this didn't last long, I didn't realize how hard it really is to focus on my breath, because my thoughts are loud and determined to get my attention.
When the monkey starts swinging, you do not wrestle with it.
You hand it work, and the work is to watch the air come in and watch the air go out.
There is a reason it has to be that particular job.
Your heartbeat is not yours to run. You did not schedule the first one and you will not be consulted about the last one.
Your next promotion is not yours to run either, and neither is the diagnosis, the market, or the phone call coming on Tuesday.
Your breath is yours.
It is one part of your own body that will do exactly what you ask, right now, every single time.
It also only exists in the present tense, because you cannot breathe yesterday's air and you cannot breathe next March's.
The moment the monkey takes the job, it has to come back to where you actually are.
That is the trade. You stop trying to be certain and you start being present.
BE PRESENT
Being present is not a soft skill, and for some reason - it's hard.
Researchers at Harvard tracked 2,250 people through an iPhone app, pinging them at random moments to ask what they were doing and how they felt.
People's minds were somewhere other than the task in front of them, 46.9 percent of their waking hours, which is nearly half of a life spent somewhere you are not.
The harder research finding is what predicted their happiness.
What people were actually doing explained about 4.6 percent of it.
Whether their mind was wandering explained about 10.8 percent.
Where your attention sits, matters more than what sits on your calendar.
Which is exactly what the job is for.
Give the monkey your breath, and your attention lands in the present.
You stop spending energy on a future you cannot reach and a past you cannot redo.
Put it where it can actually do something. The worry does not disappear, but the grip loosens.
The difference between a mind that runs you, and a mind you can put to work.
Put it where it can actually do something. The worry does not disappear, but the grip loosens.
The difference between a mind that runs you, and a mind you can put to work.
THE NECESSARY LOSS
The therapist at the coffee shop also recommended a book called "Necessary Losses" by Judith Viorst.
Her idea is that certain losses are not accidents, they are the structure of a life.
A baby gives up the bottle, and that loss is what makes solid food possible. We give up being taken care of, and that loss is what makes us capable.
Every person we love, we will eventually be separated from, and that is not something going wrong.
That is the arrangement.
Most of our worry gets spent trying to negotiate our way out of the arrangement.
You cannot do it.
What you can do, is decide who you are going to be while it happens.
THE UNCERTAINTY YOU NEVER CARRIED
There was one more example from the meditation guide, and it's the one I have not been able to put down.
"Before you were born, you were not sitting in your mother's womb worrying about whether you were going to have two lungs."
"You were not lying awake over whether you would get ten fingers, or a working heart, or even a face."
The most uncertain and highest-stakes stretch of your entire existence, went by without a single minute of worry from you, and then you were born.
You had no capacity to control any of it.
You were born.
Regardless of the uncertainty of what your life was going to be.
A surprising amount of what we grind on now belongs in that same category.
Some of it is genuinely ours, like whether we prepare, whether we do good work, whether we are decent to the people standing in front of us.
The rest is weather.
We spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to control the weather, and then we call that energy...
Responsibility.
At the end of the exercise that morning, she finally told us to breathe in.
I remember the sound of it, an entire room inhaling at the same moment, and thinking how completely ordinary taking a breath is.
Nothing about the room had changed. Nothing about my week had changed.
The uncertainty I walked in with, will still be out there, waiting for me in the parking lot.
What changed is that now I know I can give the monkey a job anytime I feel uncertain, and so can you.
Give the monkey a job.
Three things to do this week:
- Assign the job before you walk in. Before the meeting, the hard call, or the front door of your own house, take one breath in for four counts and out for six. That is the monkey's assignment for the next ten seconds. Do it before you need it, not after you are already spiraling.
- Look back twelve months. Ask yourself what you were certain was going to ruin you a year ago this week. Most of it you will not be able to name anymore. The parts you can name, you survived. That is not optimism, that is your own track record, and your monkey has forgotten all about it.
- Take the step, not the staircase. Ask what you can actually control and do one thing about it today. You do not have to solve it, you just have to move, whether that is one call, one email, or one honest conversation. Uncertainty is not an excuse to stop moving, and it is not a demand that you fix everything by Friday.
Do your best. Prepare. Have a plan.
Then let the rest be uncertain, because you can always give a monkey a job and put your mind at ease.
Your monkey has been working the entire time you have been reading this, and it has been swinging.
What have you had it working on?
And what would change if you gave it something better to do?
Most People Don't. But YOU Do.
Bart
_______
If your team knows what to do, but isn’t consistently doing it, let’s fix that.
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