If there’s one thing I wish for you at Christmas, it’s compassion. Yeah, I know you wanted to master Ruby on Rails or get that full-stack gaming developer position outside Portland, but hey, anybody can have that. This compassion thing is way, way cooler.
Not buying it? I get it. Concrete skills are marketable, way fun, and useful. Compassion is the soft stuff, the fluff. It doesn’t pay the bills and it doesn’t get you true creds.
Still, if there’s one thing I wish for you at Hanukkah, Kwanza, or Winter Solstice, it’s compassion. If there’s room for one more gift, I wish you generosity – generosity of spirit, of wallet, of time.
With those two skills, compassion and generosity, your life will never lack meaning or joy. I’m pretty sure you can’t say that about any coding language or new technology.
And yes, I do mean skills, because as any monk will tell you, both of these grow with practice.
I would love to help you experience the power of creating these in your life. You can sign up for free 25-minute session here… Free Session. No strings, no hard sell. At the end, I’ll ask you if you’re interested in signing up with me. You say yes or no. That’s it. No sweat.
Compassion is our innate ability to recognize suffering in others and the desire to help. Generosity is freely and frequently giving to others. To learn more about how compassion increases physical well being, check out this article.Basically, generosity gives us greater pleasure in life, compassion gives us less inflammation and longevity. Cool beans.
That urge to quell suffering isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not the soft stuff. No way. Compassion requires nerves of steel. That strength can yield big results at work.
In Fearless at Work, Micheal Carroll talks about viewing other people’s aggression as something separate from the individual. Rather than reacting to insults and threats, we can look through those behaviors and see the intent behind the behavior. Carroll isn’t advising this so that we can stay on the good side of a bully. He recommends taking the compassionate view so you can skillfully decide whether to “lend a hand, get out of the way, or end the confusion altogether.”
At work, this looks like keeping our cool when others are upset. It’s understanding and having sympathy for, the underlying situations and motivations that cause other people to lash out, to reply quickly and thoughtlessly, or to miscommunicate. Compassion is also holding people accountable, fairly, and thoughtfully, not allowing them to continue down a fruitless path. Compassion is the motivator for stepping back and shutting up when you have nothing to add. It’s the reason we step forward and speak up for the right things even when we’re scared. We do these difficult and sometimes frightening things because we see the suffering not doing so causes and we want to help.
That takes some serious mojo. Compassion is the only house big enough for that.
Compassion doesn’t just make us better work partners. It reduces our stress. Every minute we spend thinking about those around us, trying to lend a hand, is one less minute we focus on our own trials and tribulations. There is a world of suffering, an endless opportunity to help others and forget our own worries. Generosity of time shows us that we aren’t overwhelmed after all. Generosity of wallet proves that what we have is enough. Generosity of spirit gives others credit, support, and encouragement and in turn, we feel uplifted.
It’s almost impossible to help someone at your own expense. Every attempt just winds up back at your own feet, paying dividends that outstrip what you gave—everything you give boomerangs back.
In the biggest payback of all time, the more you practice compassion for others, the easier it is to have compassion for yourself. If you want more on that subject, click through and check out my blog – Mastering the Art of Self Compassion.
I hope you look back at this year and find achievements. I hope if you lost loved ones, your memories bring you more sweet nostalgia than tears. If you lost your job, or your business, I wish you a long list of strengths and skills, and the resilience to keep trying, to never give up. I wish you support and a hand up. I wish you friends, family, wildlife, and pets.
If your Work Life / Biological Life balance has been hit by a truck, read on.
I’ve got a deep-dark secret I’ve never shared on this blog. Basically, because I feel ridiculous to say it out loud… but hey, public embarrassment is what blogging is all about. Here goes. This blog is about the problem of not having time to eat lunch, and, er, other things.
Here it is, the whole blog, read to you…. with a brand new intro. Oh, yeah, and riffs.
I’m talking about the issue of mind-body disassociation. I initially noticed the problem when I was working with my very first private coach. I would talk to her every week and pretty-much try to impress us both with how difficult my work life had become. To show her the profoundly pressured existence I found myself in, I would get right to the most basic of bodily functions – using the restroom.
I didn’t have time for it.
I would find myself not drinking liquids for hours. My fingers would fly over the keyboard in a mad rush to finish one more thing, while my bladder tightened and my whole body was thrown into a tense and hurried race. God forbid someone came into my office to interrupt me. My head would jerk up, eyes wide and frantic. Suddenly aware I couldn’t wait one more moment, I’d start heading out the door as I talked to them, finally saying…
“I’ll be right back.”
This, I thought was a profound example of the extreme demands of my job and my need to keep producing every second. I also thought it was a bit wackadoodle and I didn’t want to confess it to anyone. Now, years later, I understand that I am not the only person to experience this. Just last year, I watched a woman who’d built a million-dollar business in a few years confess to the same thing. And she’s a doctor.
So let me ask you, are you disconnecting from your own biology? Do you –
Find yourself not willing to get up and get lunch, and when you do, you gobble it down at your desk?
Find yourself doing one more thing, one more thing long after you’ve realized you’re profoundly uncomfortable?
Start work early and find that it’s almost lunchtime and you haven’t had your first cup of tea?
Head into bed in the evening knowing you haven’t exercised or even been outside?
Work later than you want, feeling more and more pressured to work even later?
Miss dinner with your family, even as you rush to get finished?
Find yourself working late into the night, while lights go out, your family crawls into bed, and yet, when you finally walk into the bedroom, exhausted physically, your mind races on?
Dude. You are so not alone.
And Dude – understand this – you’re a carbon-based life form with some biological imperatives you will really enjoy following. And yeah, stick with me here. I know I just lost you on that biological imperative thing.
Long before I sat in the convention room in Texas and watched a woman with a two-comma business confess to my deep dark secret, I’d already resolved the issue for myself. It still felt great to realize that she’d been just as misguided as I had been.
Here’s how I broke free.
First, my coach and I really dug into some of the underlying beliefs I carried around.
This is something it’s much easier to do with a coach, so please, if you want help with this issue, definitely sign up for a free 25-minute session. You, basically, are the entire reason I’m a coach and I want to help.
As soon as she asked me what I would tell a teammate about this issue, the answer was way clearer than my annual objectives. I would say… “Go take care of yourself. Be late to the next meeting, leave this meeting early. Stop typing for Pete’s sake. “
Ask yourself, is there anyone in the world you care about that you would encourage to keep working when they were exhausted, hungry, ready to bust a gut or missing their children’s bedtime?
Please tell me the answer is no.
So step one is to find out why the heck you think it’s OK to do that to yourself. I’m not even going to make you turn this blog upside down to read the answer.
It’s not. You’re not different. You are a biological creature. If you dry up to a husk and pass out in your chair, you’re doing anyone any good. At some level you understand this because you’d shut your buddy’s laptop lid if he was doing this to himself.
Once I got through that thought process, I realized there was another problem. I’d decided it was OK to stop and use the restroom, to eat my lunch, to dance a jig at 6 pm if I wanted to… but I wasn’t doing it. Why?
I was so used to stuffing down signals, my body couldn’t reach me.
My body was literally phoning in and getting a busy signal.
Time to send in the construction crew to re-run the cable between my body and brain.
I literally had to train for this.
I made a plan and gave myself a mantra – Biology Rules.
Biology Rules – because it does. I’m not a brain on stick with some fingers and a thumb. I’m a human being. I’m a creature. I’m a mammal. If I don’t follow the biological rules that being a mammal encompasses, I’ll die.
I can’t swim underwater for hours and I can’t survive without physical exercise.
I can’t jump off a cliff and fly and I can’t go without water.
I can’t crawl across the ceiling and I can’t go without hitting the john.
PERIOD.
And neither can you.
We can’t do without sleep, without connection to other humans and we can’t think well for hours and hours. We just can’t.
To restring the connection between body and mind, I made a deep pledge to myself. Biology Rules. No excuses. The minute I noticed that I needed something BECAUSE of my biology – I just got up and did it.
Turns out, the world didn’t end when I would check into a meeting and say – I’ll be right back.
Nothing fell apart when I started eating my lunch outside.
My boss did not call me into his office because he’d noticed I’d been getting eight hours. I mean what was he going to say, I think you need to be on line until eleven pm? Of course not. He had no clue how late I was working; he was having his own problems disconnecting.
OK let’s get back to you.
You are a biological creature. You have some rules to follow. If you ignore them, your experience right now is miserable and you cut your life short.
To remedy this, admit that you’re human.
Agree you deserve the same basic advantages as any assembly line worker – the right to regular breaks and a right to stop working at the end of the day.
Plan on a mantra and a rule. – Biology Rules: My body’s needs that trumps all other demands. Or try this: Use it or Lose it: I’m not willing to bust a gut, shrivel and dry up or have a lack of sleep induced psychosis for my employer, who doesn’t even want any of that either.
Notice your body’s demands. Are you angry? Is it because you feel rushed? Do you feel rushed because your body needs something? What is it?
Then give your body what it wants.
I promise you, when you do this, you will see a productivity increase. I’ve seen this for myself and client after client. It’s the cruelest joke ever. We think we have to double down on work to get through everything. It’s not true. We have to double down on bringing our A-game. To bring our A-game, we have to honor our biological mandate.
Feelings are a better predictor of actions than thoughts. Too bad they’re so messy.
It was 6:40 in the morning, and the woman on zoom was wearing leopard print glasses. I reminded myself for the third time that I absolutely did not want to talk about the thing that was bothering me. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to have a conversation about it and I certainly didn’t want coaching on it an hour before I was due to start work. I’d booked the session specifically to get an idea of how another coach might handle a client with no issue. Plus, I just didn’t want to discuss it.
The whole blog, read to you by me. You’re welcome.
“Hi!” She said. “What can I help with?”
“I don’t have an issue,” I said. “Don’t you have a question of the day or something?”
She smiled at me. “Sure. Tell me, what were the three main feelings you felt this week?”
I sensed a trap. I wasn’t going to lie. “Stress, excitement about a project I’m starting and, um, frustration.”
Inside of twenty minutes she had me talking about the issue I’d sworn to avoid. Here’s the thing – by the time we were done – and I’d gone through a fistful of tissues – my actions from the last week made a lot more sense.
The coach had me name the cause of my stress and then dug into that situation until I was openly saying all the things that I thought but wasn’t admitting to. She gave me permission to feel the feelings, sit with them, and really feel them. I was astounded at how deep and strong the feelings were.I hadn ‘t been feeling the fear, the sorrow, or the abject disappointment. I’d bundled it all up as “stress”, wrapped it in a blanket of TV, work and books. I dumped it my psyche’s laundry room, where, I hoped, I’d wash it out of my system without ever opening the bundle up to see what was in it.
This was a personal issue but we do the same thing at work. Our issues might be just as upsetting or more subtle, but if we’re not willing to dig in, get messy and really look at what we’re feeling, our actions at work can be just as mystifying as my sudden need to watch every episode of House.
At work, we aren’t binge-watching TVor sitting at our desk with a great thriller novel and a bowl of chips, but we do the same thing – we drown out our feelings by going through emails, not settling in and working, taking care of small things or snapping at coworkers.
If the underlying motivation for all this activity is unwelcome feelings or a desire to not look under the hood and find out what’s fueling our emotional engine, the results are the same – our actions seem oddly disconnected from our intent.
Why Bother?
Look, I did not want to unroll my personal emoticons for the lovely EU coach with the leopard print glasses. I sure as heck prefer logic to emotion at work too. There’s one problem with avoiding emotions –
Emotions Drive our Actions.
Figuring out what we’re feeling and then allowing ourselves to feel them can yield powerful benefits.
Actions stop being mysterious.
Let’s take an example from myself at work – for some reason, I seem to be incapable of delivering on time any report on the team’s activities. Once you dig into the feelings you have when you’re confronted with the task, you might just have an eye-opening insight. Any time I have to report out exactly what our team did for the past quarter, I’m gripped with a certainty that we did nothing. Not because we’re slackers but because I have terrible recall for things that are complete. When I understood that I had a deep feeling of being a fraud, it was easier to understand why I kept putting off doing the darn power point.
Build Self Compassion
When you understand the feelings, you’re having it’s easier to be compassionate with yourself. Once I realized how I actually felt about score cards, I felt compassion for myself. I mean, I’d feel bad for anyone who worked hard and still felt like they were somehow not cutting it.
Release Judgments
I had a lot of judgments about myself not doing the scorecard report on time. I was lazy, lacked discipline, a procrastinator, a disorganized manager. Once I realized I was just a person who only remembers how to solve problems and what the current list of problems is and I quite literally believed that I wouldn’t find any accomplishments recorded, all that negative self talk fell away. Of course we did stuff. Of course, we earned our pay.
Change your thinking and get different results.
Armed with my insight, I decided to change the way we do the reports. Why not invite the team and have them tell me what they did? Why not have them each bring the data for their area and let’s put them on the PowerPoint together. Now, we meet once a quarter and celebrate all we’ve done as a team. Members get to see what other people did and we all get to feel like we’re part of a group that adds a lot of value.
What do other people think of you? Better ask yourself what the question costs you before you ask it.
I love to wonder what other people think about me. I mean, kinda. Right? In STEM we don’t all walk around emoting and asking if people like us. We’re the problem-solvers, the endurance kings, the queens of creating something out of nothing. We don’t care what other people think about us. Right?
Have me read you the blog and give you the riffs. My pleasure.
I had one of those eye-opening experiences the other day. I wanted to make sure our team understood my expectations for how we work with our summer intern. I look forward all year to our summer college student joining our team. It’s a chance to make a positive difference for sure, but more than that, it’s our chance to show up as the leaders and teammates that we want to be. A time to bring our very best to the table. A chance to cheer on another human being reaching far, far out over thin air, trying to grab at the branchwe’ve carefully placed there. A chance to witness a real triumph and real accomplishment.
I believe every word of that.I take enormous pride in our ability to find challenging, meaningful projects that get these college students a chance to achieve more than they thought they could. It’s my pure joy if they blow their minds while working for us and leave there feeling ten feet tall.
This year, I’m turning all that over to someone else on our team to lead. As I wrote out the instructions for how to achieve this, imagine my surprise as I realized that I have that same opportunity every day for every member of my team and I’m not bringing it. I mean, yeah, I do OK but I don’t bring it like that. Not with every fiber of my imagination, not with those big expectations, not tossing them out into the river without telling them I’ve got their lifelines looped around my fist and I’m ready to haul them out with everything I’ve got.
I almost couldn’t hit send on the email. What would this person think of me when he saw what I expected of myself and him, and realized that I was dropping the ball daily?
We don’t care what other people think of us.
Oh, big fat hell-yes we do.
Our brains are designed to make sure we hang in tight with the tribe. Tribe is survival. As children, our entire job in life is to watch other people’s body language and try to figure out how to get more cheerios and a clean diaper. That’s before we even know how to say pass the pampers.
Once we’ve got language on our side, it’s worse yet. There’s standing in the family. We grow up applying all the labels that come with social dynamics – the good one, the wild child, the troublemaker, the silly one, the funny one, the smart one, the bad one. Lovely labels stuck all over us like little price tags that rub off as we carry an armful of cans to the pantry.
All of this is 100% normal. Here’s where our education system and culture leave us in the lurch – nobody ever tells us – Here you go kid, how you feel is on you now.
Next thing you know, you’re thirty-five, walking out of a meeting, unable to stop the flood of worry over what the person across from you thought about your progress on your project.
Again, 100% normal and 100% useless.
Here’s the rule – you don’t belong in anyone’s head but your own.
What she thinks about you, your project and the way you waxed your car is on her. It tells you absolutely zero about your ride, your performance, or you as a person. It tells you everything about her.
Get it? I could have held back on my proclamation for interns, toned it down, set less dramatic expectations, aligned it better with what I’m actually doing on the regular, made it less obvious that I’m not all that. If I did, that would tell you something about me wouldn’t it?
You might think that I was being realistic in my expectations. You might think that I was a hypocrite or untruthful. You might think I was a coward. You might think I’m an irrational dreamer.
I sent the email. How do you like me now?
Here’s the deal. I can never know what you or anyone else actually thinks – even if you tell me.There are so many layers, filters and variations. In the end, the only thing that I can act on is what I think.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate people sharing their thoughts with me. Thoughts, critical ones especially, are worth their weight in gold.
Secret One: It’s darn uncomfortable to deliver critical feedback. If you get feedback you can bet the person felt you were worth thinking about for a couple of hours so they could figure out how to tell you something true and useful. Even if they do a poor job of handing it to you, it’s still the most valuable thing you can get at work other than your paycheck.
Secret Two: If you agree with the person who gives you feedback, even just a bit, and then thank them for it, you’ll get more of this magic serum. If you disagree and make them feel small or uncomfortable for sharing it? Right. It’s like killing the goose. You won’t get another omelet out of that bird.
Do you see that? Honest feedback about how we can improve is uranium. It’s the kind of information that can power a career. We should care about it. We should ask for it. We should embroider it on throw pillows and leave them on our recliners.
What we shouldn’t do is predicate how we feel about ourselves based on it.
Critical feedback is one thing. Speculative musing about what someone else thinks is where we tend to go next.
Our boss says “You need to be more organized.”
We think “He thinks I’m a chaotic mess and he’s going to fire me.” Which makes us feel anxious, and then we check our email and facebook, and maybe text a friend, all of which is – a bit chaotic and not what we’re being paid for. Ironic, yes?
Or we think “He’s the most disorganized person on the planet, who’s he to tell me that?” The answer to which is “He’s got no right to tell me.” And then we feel angry, and we discard the advice and keep doing what we’re doing and … that results in us not allowing him to tell us anything. Get it?
Better to remind ourselves that we have no business in his head, we don’t know what he thinks other than we might be better at our job if we were more organized. Truth be told, everyone is always better at their job as their organization skills increase. He doesn’t have to be good at being organized to be able to observe disorganization in us.
Ok, let’s tie this back to my story. Even if I’m not knocking it out of the park on the regular for every member of my team, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to do just that. So sending the email and braving disapproval is worth it. I meant what I said. We should make our summer intern’s ten weeks of work with us an opportunity for him or her to blow their mind.
What my team thinks of me for that, is up to them. What I decide to do with my insight is up to me.
How to use sensation to reframe quickly from drama – to blue skies
Here’s the deal – I bring a lot of drama. When I make a mistake, it’s horrible. When situations are critical, everything else can go fly a kite, I mean, it’s like, serious up in here. Worse yet, after it’s all done, the curtain closes, and the seats get folded up, I feel – less than and embarrassed, maybe more than a little regretful.
A little riff here on how to use this technique for smaller things… like not eating that cookie.
At work, no drama is good drama. It turns out, with my family, no drama is good drama. In fact, the only time anyone around me wants any drama at all is after the fact. We love to hear the story told with great effect. We don’t actually want to live it that way.
So how do you reframe tense situations to stop your reactivity and get back to chill? It turns out, there are little doorways into behavior we can tug on to quickly reframe.
Let’s do a quick recap – what you think about events and facts, situations, and people, causes you to have emotions. Every thought fires an emotional trigger. We humans take action in response to our feelings, not our thoughts. Those emotions are what drive actions and … say it with me…actions create our results. For the coup de gras, our results are usually a reflection of our thoughts.
If that paragraph sounds new, check out several of my earlier posts where I build out that premise further. The rest of you, keep up.
If you would like to have me take you through this process, or you’re just curious about life coaching, book a free session here. 25 minutes, on Zoom – no sweat.
When the proverbial crap hits the fan, our fight or flight kicks in. You have, like, no control over that. It’s like a freight train. Your heart speeds up, you get laser focus and you either freeze or start a-hollering or you bolt out of the building. Or, you sit in your cubicle with every muscle on high alert, desperately trying to ignore the ringing in your ears and your heart pounding out the intro to Rock And Roll as you try to figure out if the code you wrote last week just brought down the power grid for North America.
You know that tiny awareness you get? The one that says you’re about to head down the wrong path? That’s the one we’re looking for. When things are scary, it might feel like this… frightened, defensive, but in cooler moments it’s more like Jiminy Cricket – a small alert.
Somewhere inside you, while you stare at the loop you swore you wrote an exit for, or you try to remember if you saved that report before you closed it, or you comb through the contract to see if the clause you really need to have is there, inside you – you feel a small twinge. Your mind taps you on the shoulder and asks you to notice that you’re in a panic, a thought flickers, a brief image of stopping.
You swat that unneeded information away and double down on the drama.
Lashing out feels inevitable… but it’s not.
Soon, you’re spinning through code, sending out emails and, if it’s really bad, snapping at people around you. Ever been there? Oh, come on. For sure you have, if nothing else, your kids got you there at least once. I mean, that’s what their entire job is.
Now let’s roll back the story. The mess hits the spinning blades of an air movement machine. Your amygdala wakes up with a roar. It’s time to get invisible or get gone. But then, you realize, that was Suzy’s contract or the code in question was written by Bobby-Jean Mckarfurkle, or the power went out and that’s why the document was lost.
Now what happens? Heart rate falls and you get a bit of euphoria. Now, you take a minute to map out the most logical place for the cause of the failure, happy to be helping out, or you spend a moment recalling all you know about this contract and others so that you can tackle this calmly, or you start a new document recalling that the last time this happened, your second version was better.
What’s the difference? In one situation, you were at fault (and therefore, going to die) and in the other, it’s someone else’s problem (and therefore, you’re going to be a big help.)
In which case are you most effective? Right. And, even if it was your fault, which behavior set is the more desirable? Right again. This is why being able to reframe quickly from being the star in a big drama to being the side kick in a small situation, is such a fantastic skill.
This is the “Anxious Yawn”. Dogs do this when they’re on the fence about how to behave. If you can get yourself just a small interruption, you can choose a new path.
Enter the “twinge”, the “sparkle”, the anxious moment, the tap on your shoulder. Remember that moment when your mind offered the observation that you were in a panic? You swatted it away in the first scenario. That’s the little handle you can grab and use to exit the drama zone and move over into a better way to be.
When the wad of bad news smacks against the propeller of life and flies right back at us, we can’t stop the initial reaction. We’re going to have the muscles of steel. Inside us Jon Bonham will start whaling away at our rib cage while Robert Plant reminds us it’s been a long time but we, for sure remember how this one goes. Oh yeah. Oh, oh yeah. You just have to suffer through this part – but get ready – wait for it – when your mind reminds you that this is a panic – grab onto that handle and pull.
If you can name the feeling, great. It’s panic. Sit with that. Let it move through you. Give it ten solid minutes if you need it, but I bet you’ll be on the way to reframing.
Sometimes though, we can’t name the feeling, can’t stop and observe it. The drive to action is too strong. I’ve noticed this when I’m building new habits. An impulse to change course (do the habit) is swatted away. But if I can catch that impulse and simply commit to the action it’s pointing to, I can stop the process right at the action and redirect, without understanding my thoughts or my emotions.
Here’s what this looks like. Crud. Fan. Freak. Mind taps lightly on your shoulder, a small awareness that you’re in a panic. You’ve trained yourself to notice and follow these tiny awareness moments, so you pause. You quickly realize that the small indicator is signaling to you to tell the person in contracts you’ll call her back, or stop and realize you’re IN North America and the power is actually on, or just stop and wait for your pre-frontal cortex to come back on line.
Notice that you don’t actually have to deal with the feelings or thoughts. They’re in there. Your thought is as – Oh, small twinge, I act on those – and even without you recognizing the feelings or engaging with the thoughts, you shift that action using awareness and your prior training. From the action shift – hanging up the phone, stepping back, waiting without reacting, you get to interrupt the flow and then, naturally, you’ll notice your thoughts becoming more ordered, more like – I can fix this, the contract might have the clause in it, the server with the reports was backed up last night. You don’t feel as good as you might if Suzie had caused the problem but you can start to look at things logically, feel more in control, and start to take actions that actually get you the right results.
Look, changing behavior is best engaged with a feeling of curiosity, because, hey, you’re already OK just as you are, right?
The good news is, you can train yourself to honor these small impulses long before you have to dodge flying muck. Look around you. What are you already trying to change? Let’s say you’re checking email too much during the day. Be very curious. Notice if you have a tiny impulse reminding you that you shouldn’t be checking. If you feel that urge toward turning back to your work, notice it, then honor it. Don’t dwell on this. Don’t analyze it or make a big deal. Like a dog who sees an unexpected squirrel, just chase that positive impulse. You might think – I follow these small impulses – and turn back around.
There’s a wall of resistance for this, and you just let it slide by. Just this once. Next time you can do email, or eat that cookie or whatever. But for now, just let it turn you around.
That’s it. Simple but effective. The payoff is huge though. If you can train yourself to be easily turned by what I like to think of as “the sparkle”, or the “twinge”, you’ll have it there for you the next time you want to duck and pull the plug on a big whirling fan of drama.
Mystikos N Kettle Cove Lucky In Love RE OA OAJ THDA, AKA – Jersey Girl 2009-2020 What awareness can teach us about handling difficult situations
Let’s just get it over with. On Friday, April 10th, 2020, we made the decision not to take extreme measures to prolong the life of our wonderful dog, Jersey.
Click here to listen to the blog.
All over America, and the world, people were having similar experiences. They were making decisions about whether to bring a loved one to the hospital, they were dropping their precious family member off at emergency room doors and then not being allowed inside.
In Paramus, NJ, I sat in my car and waited for the Vet to call me. We discussed Jersey’s symptoms, the evidence of cardiac distress, the decisions were made to the ringing of my cell phone as I bawled my eyes out in the virtual glass bubble of my minivan driver’s seat.
My husband was miles away, unable to leave home because of the health risk.
We had minutes to choose, try to take action or put her out of her suffering. I didn’t know if I’d get to hold her. We made the decision. The staff did me the great, great service of rolling my amazing Jersey out to the loading dock – and I was grateful. It was freezing cold, she was sedated but I held her, and then it was over. Papers were handed to me; the cart was wheeled away. A truck was waiting to unload supplies, the staff, waiting for this crying, messy and maybe dangerously infected woman to leave. I had to figure out how toget the car out of the fire lane, traffic was backing up and then I was on a major highway, literally in shock.
At one point, I wanted to know if I was going too slow for my lane. My husband was talking to me via cell phone, and I kept saying, “I don’t know how fast I’m going.” I was looking at the dashboard but nothing made sense. Finally, I recognized the speedometer. 74 in a 65. He stayed on the phone until I pulled in my driveway. The whole thing, including the hour ride each way, took only 4 hours.
I’m sharing this with you because I’m not alone. I’m not going to argue if a dog or a human has a greater value or the love is deeper. I’m just saying, I was lucky. There is no loading dock at any hospital for people to say goodbye to their loved ones. No looking into beloved eyes. No touch of a hand for comfort. I know how I feel, and I know I had just the barest scrape with what so many thousands have gone through.
Worse yet, I know what happened after I got home.
My brain got involved. I had suggestions for myself. I suggested I’d made the wrong decision, I questioned and tortured myself. But the truth is, there were many thoughts I could have engaged with, and what I was getting from my brain was the “fast track”.
Fast Track Thinking
Our brains are very tuned to negative events. We need to be. It’s important to remember what we were doing just before we fell over a cliff, cut our feet on rocks or got pounced on by a tiger. So our brains prioritize that. We don’t do a good job of differentiating these negative events, so a harsh word from a co-worker, a near-miss with a speeding bus and the pain of losing a beloved one are all lumped together. If we survive all of that, our brain decides our thoughts, actions,and feelings were successful. The next time we have that event, our brains are going to pull all those thoughts back out.
Good times.
Here’s another thing, our brain isn’t going to agonize over getting us just the right thought. It’s looking for fast and close enough. There’s nothing wrong or bad about that, but it’s important to understand.
Same Stuff, Different Day
Did you ever notice that you can have very different outlooks on the same situation, even one day apart? In my Reboot Your Day Job program we go through activities designed to help you see this up close and personal, but for now, let’s stick with some easy to recognize situations. Day 1 – you discover you’ve missed a critical appointment. The sky is falling and you imagine all the worst things. Day 2 – You decide to try and fix it, you call, apologize and then reschedule. Everything is fine.
Have you been there? Good.
That one’s easy to see. More subtle, when you journal every day about the same objective,you’ll notice that some days you are feeling positive and other days negative about your ability to achieve it. Same objective, same you, different thoughts.
What does this tell you? First of all, it tells you that nobody’s in charge inside there. Your brain is just dishing out whatever is on the fast track at the moment. If you want to learn more about this – read Your Brain At Work – by David Rock.
When I first really understood this, I took it like a punch to the gut. Click the link at the top for this blog’s recording to hear that story. What that means is that the sentences in my brain that I had believed were real, meaningful truths, were more like random chance, sort of like having a thousand Magic Eight Balls inside my mind. I was so angry.
I’m over that now. Now, I understand that what I think about most frequently will resurface more often than other thoughts. I also understand that what is surfacing is somewhat of a hack. I understand that thinking a thought, doesn’t make it true, or meaningful or useful, but it does make it more likely to come up again.
From a business perspective, you can see the effects of this when someone unfamiliar with a problem is invited in to assist. Often, they ask some question that is both simple but profoundly important to solving the issue. Everyone else in the room does a facepalm because the question is so obvious. Why does this happen? As we focus in on a situation, we start to fall victim to our own internal fast track as well as groupthink. Our brains stop offering alternatives, not because there are none, but because, well, we’re built that way.
I also understand that once a decision is made, the consequences of that decision or action are now just the situation we find ourselves in.
I’ll never know what might have happened if I made a different choice. It could have gone well or horribly. I’m not a bad person for choosing. I’m not a good person for choosing. I’m a person who made a choice. Right now, I feel like shit, because I’m grieving. I don’t need to try to control that by changing the topic to something else – like what-ifs, or my own failures. I could wallow in remorse, second guess myself and stay up there, in the world where maybe I can control this situation. But that painful path is just an escape from the real truth which is – I miss my dog. Just that. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.
If you are suffering in the aftermath of a situation, questioning your choices, or having vivid thoughts about a loved one suffering, please reach out. Click here: I’ll be happy to coach you for free. I will not try to sell you on coaching. Please reach out, – these thoughts don’t have to keep going. It’s OK to take a step toward feeling better.
The more I question myself or relive that day, the more likely those thoughts are to come up again. That is the way our brains are designed.
In business, we can protect against these limitations by inviting in more people to brainstorm, letting go of the need to be the one with the answers and investigating questions. Contrary to what we sometimes see on TV, a group of informed people, asking all the questions they can think of, is the best way to find a new thought, new hope, better outcomes.
I want to grieve, but I can also decide to focus on remembering her entire life in vivid detail, not just the last four hours. In her entire life, I’m very proud to say, Jersey Girl ran several 5Ks with me, spent hours and hours at the dog park, helping me make good friends, got featured in the local paper for her fashion sense, visited her nursing home patients, some of them, more than 70 times. Imagine that? She worked for over eight years at our local hospital, visiting twice a month. She competed in sports, earned ribbons and vacationed at Canine Camp Get Away.
It is the nature of our brains, that the more I times I think of those facts, the more often my brain will offer me them when I’m reminded of her.
Social media not reflecting your reality right now? Here’s how to use restraint to help.Click on the recording to hear the blog. There’s riff on why a coaching session is like sanitizer for your brain.
Welcome to another week of the new normal. I’ve received some emails from people praising all the time they’ve spent with their family now that we’re all under shelter in place rules. Social media has been full of suggestions about what we can do with all this free time we’ve got on our hands. Am I the only one who hasn’t all of a sudden had more time to read or walk my dogs?
I’m pretty sure there are a lot of us out here feeling more pressure than ever before.
If we’ve got our kids home from daycare or school, then we’re trying to keep them studying, learning, praying they don’t fall behind, all while we’re either working from home or worse yet, not working at all.
If we’re still showing up on the job, and a lot of us still are, then there are all the extra precautions. We are changing our clothes before we join the family, maybe we are trying to live separate from the family and sleeping in the guest room, or living in the garage, trying to keep our families safe. For some of us, we can’t make that choice because we have to come home and care for our families.
Once you get past that, there’s the fear. The other night my husband was soundly sleeping while I lay awake. I heard him cough in his sleep. As I lay there in the dark, I wondered if I’d brought home the virus with me. He’d been home, isolated, for over a week, but I hadn’t yet started to work from home. There in the dark, I began to cry. What if my choice to go to work resulted in illness or worse for him? My heart pounded in my chest, fear beating at my ribs. I thought: What have I done?
Look, today’s situation is not what any of us wanted, but it’s the road we’re on now. Like every other situation, we have many choices about how we think, feel, and respond. It’s through mindfulness that we can start to pry out what our options are.
It’s been tempting to dump my original plan for this year’s blog, but I’m not going to. I believe the skills I’m showing you are as relevant today as they were a month ago. I’m going to use business examples and also examples from the pandemic. So here we go.
Let’s talk about the R-word: restraint.
We hate that word. We don’t like to be restrained in our homes, and we don’t like to restrain ourselves from overeating, box in our time, constrict our choices, or restrict our actions. We want to be free, baby, free.
Take a good, long look at the dog in the photo above.The harness and restraint are allowing the dog to ride in the car. Using the harness system, he can safely experience a world beyond the four walls of his owner’s home. So is it cruel to clip him into his seatbelt? I think most of us can see that it’s an act of kindness. It’s an opportunity.
That’s how I want to view restrictions- as gifts I give myself. One thing I’ve learned is this – you never figure out how to change anything in your life until you restrict yourself somehow.
Restraint opens up the gate to new ways of being, working, achieving, and sometimes, just surviving.
I think we all get how restricting ourselves in the short-term yields benefits in the long term. Don’t smoke today, and you’ll be healthier tomorrow, eat less today, stay home today… all of these restrictions yield a greater good tomorrow, for ourselves or our communities.
Here’s what we forget about restriction – and this is what gives me hope in this terrible time – being not able, or not allowing yourself, to function as you have been, is the fastest door to innovation and change.
Right now, we can’t get PPE the way we always have. Three months ago, if you had asked us how we would get it, I bet the answers you would have received would be the same circle of options – federal stockpiles, common suppliers. You wouldn’t have said Eclipse Mattress will start making and donating thousands of surgical masks. You wouldn’t have said – you know what, we’ll get them from Facebook and Goldman-Sachs.
Being unable to solve a problem the way we always have before
is exactly what generates new ideas, new hope.
As the nation and every business owner on the planet tries to find ways to solve for the shortage of tests, the need for PPE, the need for ventilators, we can apply this same concept in our immediate lives.
For those of us trying to manage challenging schedules and increased demands, placing restrictions on how long we’re going to spend on a task,forces us to focus and come up with solutions that we wouldn’t even consider if just doing what we always did was an option.
You’ll see this in business when managers use restraint by taking opportunities off the table. It’s not an option to deliver after the deadline, now what? They might further restrict the conversation by saying it’s not an option to work ourselves more than 50 hours a week, so now what? How do we create the product without overworking?
At first, our brains resist this. It’s not possible, we think. We’ll have to work eighty hours a week. If we relent and allow ourselves to work that many hours, our brains are actually satisfied. What we believed has been proven true. We didn’t need to expend any effort on a new idea. Sneaky, huh?
To use restraint effectively, you have to honor that restraint far more times than you allow yourself to blow through it. You know this from dieting, from quitting smoking.
What we forget is: before we exercise restraint, we can’t yet see the how.
Before I quit smoking, I couldn’t imagine how I could get up, have coffee and leave for work without a cigarette. I literally, couldn’t think of how I might be able to do that.
Now that I’m tobacco-free for over 20 years, I see exactly how it’s done.
That’s the thing. You have to be able to believe in the future you can’t yet see, in order to accept the current restraints and start working on “What now?” “How next?”
You can apply this same thing to your current situation. For any obstacle you’re facing, your brain will offer you better solutions when you restrict your options. Keep taking the unpalatable solutions off the table until you find a solution that sounds good. Then try it. If it works, great. If not, the answer isn’t to go back to the unpalatable solution, the answer is to come back and look for another good answer.
Finding creative solutions to problems (when familiar solutions don’t work)
There’s a third use for this powerful tool. You can put restrictions on your mindset.
Laying there in the dark, feeling afraid was not the end of the story for me. I had a choice at that moment. Changing the past was out of the question; changing how I viewed my past was.
For those of you on the front lines, you are making choices every day. Do you reuse your mask? Do you walk off the job? Do you send your children to a relative? Do you speak out on TV about what’s happening? Do you go into one more room? Help one more patient? Do you show up at your register and or do you call out sick? If you’re in IT, do you go in and fix the machines that are needed by the folks working from home? Do you show up and ship things? Deliver things?
If you are a front line worker and need a safe space to clear out your thoughts and feelings, schedule a free session here.
For those of you laid off, you are making decisions about what to do with your limited resources.
All of us, we’re making decisions every day during a time in which none of us know what will happen next.
Here’s what you can absolutely restrict right now. You can promise yourself that you will not go back and condemn yourself for your choices. You can restrict yourself to making conscious decisions about what you’re going to do, why you’re doing it and then, no matter what the result is, you can commit right now that you won’t waste a minute using your choices to beat yourself up.
My team had a job to do. Part of that job was to keep showing up to work until we were sure that the equipment our company needed to be in place was set up. I am married to, and in love with, an at-risk man. I looked at the options, I took every precaution that made sense to me, and I did what I believed was right.
In that same situation, with no new information, I would do the same thing. So there in the dark, I had a choice. Was I going to lay awake and worry, blame myself and make myself sick over it or was I going to own my choice and stand by my decision?
Neither option was going to change the past. Neither option was going to make me a saint. I let all the recriminations go.
I restricted my thoughts to the present moment. What was happening right now? In the moment, we were both just fine.
Would you kick this cute little guy in the face? Of course not. So why are you doing that to yourself?Looks like a long blog… take a shortcut and listen to it instead. Check out the pictures below first. Rock on!
A few years ago, some friends and I hiked the John Muir Way, a trail that bisects Scotland. The hike was fantastic. It led us through pastures, fields, towns, and beside canals. Did you know that you can smell the scotch in the air around a distillery? I kid you not. At one point, we spent a day passing fields of sheep. It was May, so there were lambs. If you’ve never been around ’em, they bounce around in little groups. With different levels of curiosity and courage, these little cuties follow you along their fences and, sometimes, scramble underneath the wire and then scurry back inside. I was utterly charmed.
I also worried about them, I wanted to make sure they got
back into their fields. I wanted to
engage with them; I couldn’t take my eyes off them. One thing I didn’t want to do was put them
in a cubicle and make ’em sit in a chair until their spines were misshapen and
their eyesight went.
I wouldn’t do that to a lamb, but I’m all too willing to do that to myself.
Why is that?
Today, let’s open up the Awareness Toolkit and take a look at unkind behavior towards ourselves.
Before we start, let me clarify here – we’re STEM people, we
have projects and deadlines, we have bugs, defects, and production problems – sometimes,
we just have to dig in and do the thing.
We have to fix it, finish it, or get it working again.
Collaboration is our lifeblood. We know that investing in our social network
is key to getting through difficulties, so we make sure we help out other
people. We brainstorm, listen to peers as
they talk through an idea, or interrupt ourselves to help others hit their goals.
If we’re not doing this to some
extent, we won’t succeed.
When we overdo these behaviors so that our health, relationships,
or positive outlook suffers, then we’ve entered the dark zone of sacrifice.
For me, it’s the forced march. I fall into the habit of working long hours
without a break. I forget to drink
water, I resist getting up, I pile up snacks to give me little boosts of dopamine
as I work to my own detriment. I don’t notice
that I’m getting less and less done, and I’ve crossed the horizon into
diminishing returns.
For others, it shows up as giving up their own
desires to say yes to other people.
It can show up as skipping lunch because you’ve accepted too
many meetings. Doing one little thing,
to help someone, then another, then another, until you’re staying late to catch
up.
We can fall into overdoing our good habits of determination
and collaboration. Our thinking takes on a more extreme turn.
We think that something is more important than ourselves,
we believe if we don’t complete this task or say yes to this request, the
results will be threatening or even catastrophic. We convince ourselves our value is tied to
achievements. Sometimes, looking at
our current situation, we tell ourselves, just this one more time. Next time, we’ll plan better. Meanwhile, we’re staying later, we’re feeling
resentful, and we can’t even list our results for the day.
Any of that sound familiar?
Listen, lambkins, it doesn’t get better until you become
aware of the issue and of the ways it goes wrong.
This behavior stems from a positive intention. We presume
our self-sacrifice makes us team players. We’re tough, dedicated, and have the
ability to go the extra mile. At work,
most of us want to be excellent. We want
to go above and beyond. We also feel
like none of this could have predicted. This
is the reality, we need to sacrifice for the good of the company. True dat, right? NO!
Hey, I got it right this week… here’s the whiteboard of where we start on this journey.
Here’s what our behavior,
driven by this positive intention, looks like:
Changed or canceled personal time – we move
our vacations, are afraid to plan them or take them, we miss birthdays or
family celebrations, we get home just as the kids are going to bed. Not only once or twice, but on the regular.
Forced Marches – Long hours, extreme effort,
unrealistic expectations.
I just did this last night. There
were three of us working on a production issue, which we knew we could resolve,
but the root cause would become obscured.
One of us had a hard stop that blew right by as we egged each other on,
looking at one more thing, checking one variable, trying to get to the complete
answer. It was made worse because we
already gathered sufficient evidence, an hour before, to prove the source of
the issue.
Poor planning, lack of experience – when we run
out of time on projects, or can’t deliver results, we don’t look like pros. This is so hard to say because it kinda hurts
me to admit it.
As professionals, trapped in the
go-go, can-do mindset, we don’t do the less glamourous work of continually reframing
our MVP (minimum viable product). If all
our projects end up in a big push or fail to come in on time, we really owe it
to ourselves and the company to demand that we step back and re-evaluate. These issues are solvable, and we stop
ourselves from finding solutions when we don’t require them. I’m not saying it’s easy or that I have this
solved – it crops up over and over – like crabgrass. The key is to face it – be
aware.
Exhaustion, Stress, Resentment – I don’t think
I have to explain this. If you’re sacrificing
your health, your sleep, the breaks that your brain needs to thrive, it’s going
to show, and you’re going to get cranky.
Falsely Helpful – Oh my, we’ve all met this
person. We ask them for something, and it’s clear that they don’t have time to
help. We try to take our request
back. They won’t let go of it. We apologize; they insist that there’s no need. With a big, fake smile, they head off at a
hundred miles an hour to do what we’ve asked, and we’re left there, feeling
guilty. Don’t be this person. Just say no.
Being Kind to Yourself Is the Best Gift for your Team
Are you ready? Let’s turn this nasty cycle on its head.
Go from Self-Sacrificing to Self-Affirming.
Here’s where we end up as we become aware of the consequences of sacrificing ourselves to work and move to a self-affirming stance.
When we adopt a self-supporting
attitude, we remind ourselves that our health and life priorities are first. After all, we’re working for a reason. I’m pretty sure it’s not a deep desire to
drop dead at my desk while my family doesn’t even notice. Sad to say, this has been a real possibility
for me at times. The good news is I’m
aware of my propensity, and I’m not willing to live like this anymore.
As we’re faced with challenges, in this new mindset, we
tell ourselves, if I don’t finish, fix, solve, do whatever I’m tempted to
sacrifice for, then I’ll find another
way.We remind ourselves that
there will always be another emergency, but there’s only one of us. We can’t do anything well if we’re exhausted,
miserable, or running in circles.
Scary huh? Did you just reject all of that out of
hand? You’re not broken. You are right on track. My clients, and I, resist moving to a self-affirming
place. Here’s why:
We THINK this behavior means:
We’re selfish
We’re mediocre
We’re not a team player
We’re risking our job
All of that is pretty darn frightening. Better play it safe, and keep sacrificing, right?
If you need some help working through how to affirm your right to health, optimisim and a great personal life, just say the word. You can book a 25 minute session with me and I’ll walk you through your personal, specific issue. It’s free, it’s my jam, and I promise it’ll be useful. Click Here. I can help you – THIS WEEK.
NO! Because we’re wrong. When you act in a self-affirming way, you actually demonstrate this:
Belief in your ability to find better solutions – we love
to be around people who think there’s a better way and want to try to find
it! We love this. You’ll love being this person. Try it. You won’t always win, but others will want to
help you solve things better, and the more you do this, the more value you add
at work.
Stopping when your productivity falls, calling it a night
– nothing will help your team more than knowing the right time to call it a
night and send people home. Sometimes,
we’re all just waiting for the one person who has the backbone to say uncle.
Professional planning, designing, tracking, and
delegating – Once you’ve committed to never sacrificing yourself, you’re
going to need to change the way you work.
Don’t wait to figure this out before you stop overdoing it. You have to stop first, then you’ll be driven
to figure it out. This is counter-intuitive,
but it’s the magic key. When you have to
face the consequences of being self-affirming, then you figure out pretty quick
how to prioritize, plan, and all the other good stuff. Be brave! Jump in!
Self-respect, good health, smart breaks – think about
a person you know who doesn’t sacrifice their health for their job and still
manages to knock it out of the park. There’s
a man I’ve worked with who is like this.
He exercises, he leaves on-time most days, and he’s well respected. If he can do it, we can do it.
Treating others as competent – this is the most unexpected and beneficial side effect. When you treat yourself respect, when you don’t overdo it, you have to rely on others to do their jobs. You stop over-helping and that, allows others to grow too. In a way, you’re less selfish? What? Yep. True.
See this little lambkin?
This is us, heading off into the world of work. We have no idea what’s about to hit us.
Have some compassion for your innocent self, trying to do a
great job in a challenging world. There’s
no need to sacrifice yourself, lamb.
Are you killing yourself making everyone else happy at work? Think you need to stand up for yourself? You’re right – kinda.
Nothing will suck the fun out of work faster than trying to please everyone. I should know, I attempted it for years. My results? Phbbt.
Ok, this is a long one… I riff on the whiteboard stuff and there’ll be dogs barking at the end. Enjoy!
I’m pretty excited about today’s blog because I took my time whiteboarding out the message I wanted to deliver, and guess what? I’m going to add it to this blog. So cool, right? Now you can get your information exactly as you need it. You can read the blog, listen to the blogcast, or review the diagram. Freaky good. AND BONUS: I did this to save myself time.
What? You heard me correctly there, Slick. I was selfishly attempting to figure out how to get two blogs done in the time it takes to do one. Why? Because you all don’t buy my products because of my blog, and frankly, I have housework to do. I want to shove my two side hustles into smaller boxes so I can pick up some personal time. See how self-serving that is? Does it change how you think about me if I tell you the personal stuff I want to do is exercise, eat right, and just enjoy my damn dogs before they croak? Ahh, now you don’t think that’s so selfish, do you? Well, you’re right where I want you. We’re going take a crack at getting you to drop your people-pleasing and start making your own darn self happy. You so deserve it.
My first attempt – too large to embed. If you want to get a clearer copy of this, just email me – Amy@RockYourDayJob.Com
The Big PP (People Pleasing)
My own story about trying to please people at work goes like this – I wanted to learn new things, I wanted to help, so I figured out how to support an overnight system. I was able to take on a rotation and give my teammates a break. That felt great! Go, team!
Years went by, I became a manager, but I was still supporting things overnight, during the day, all the time. My boss was new and made a big fuss about how many hours I was working, all the dedication I had. I felt proud – and tired. Years went by. The boss left. I had new bosses, new systems, and I was still up at night, up during the day, working fifteen hours on the weekend to get my inbox cleared out, etc.
I thought I had a time management problem. So, during a coaching session with Brooke Castillo, she coached me on my time issue. I’ll never forget it. First, she asked me why I was doing all that work. I’ll paraphrase the rest:
“Because
I want to do a good job,” I said.
“Why do you care if you do well?“ She asked.
Insert
lots of reasons, questions … and then
“Because I want people at work to think I do a good job,” I said. I hated to admit that. I like to believe that I don’t care what people think about me, but that day, she coached me through all my thoughts, and that’s what dropped out the bottom. Bummer.
“Yeah,”
she said. “That’s your work.”
Happily, she didn’t leave me with that. Instead, she went a step further. She asked me this:
“Do
you want to work all those hours?”
“No,”
I said.
“Will
they be happy if you work twenty-four seven?”
“Maybe,”
I said.
“But
you don’t want to?” Brooke asked.
“No,”
I said.
“So why don’t you tell them, ‘I know you’d like it if I worked twenty-four seven, but I wouldn’t’ ?”
Boom. That did it for me. Suddenly, my wants and desires were on equal footing with my employers. What I wanted – counted.
So here’s what happened next: I never said those words to anyone at work, but I thought them in my mind. I met with my manager. I said I was going to try something new. I was going to try to get some work-life balance. I didn’t ask for help with it. I just said, let me know if you see a problem and then, I set about learning how to shove my work back into a standard time block.
You know what happened? My evaluations went up. I kid you not. I slept more, delegated better, took myself off the rotation for overnights, and started learning how to work more proactively. Why? To please me. Who benefited? My employer.
Straight Trippin’, dude.
High-Five there, woman.
So what about you? Where are you killing yourself to make someone else happy? Really – get an example in your mind.
Now ask yourself this – do you actually control how they feel? Yeah – you saw that coming, didn’t you? I hope so. If we turn the page upside down, the answer key reads: NO.
Not today, not tomorrow, not in a box, not with a fox.
You can be workin’ your cubicle sittin’ butt off, and you’ll never make anyone happy. And frankly, you’re not paid to. You’re paid to deliver results – and believe me, your boss hopes you’ll finish in time to get some sleep, ‘cause you know, lack of sleep causes lower performance at work.
Okay,
so let’s tackle the BIG Elephant in the room – SELFISHNESS.
If
you want to make yourself happy, then you’re selfish.
RUBBISH.
That’s the worst bag of malarky ever, and we’ve all picked up our own sack of it as we stood at the cash register of our lives.
Toss that idea out. If you want to make yourself happy, then you’re human and maybe even enlightened.
If
you want other people to stop being happy, so you can feel good, then you’re
selfish.
Get
it?
Uh,
uh. Don’t go to … Well, if I don’t do
this burdensome task that will make me stay up all night, then someone else
will have to.
That’s
where this always bogs down.
Change
that thought to:
Is this burdensome task my responsibility?
If no. Then, game over. Go home if you want to. Don’t stay late to make someone else happy if it’s going to make you sick, unhappy, miss dinner with the kids, or cause your dog to need a piddle-pad.
If yes, then ask this instead: I’m not going to stay up all night to do this burdensome task. I’m not going to give it to someone else (make sure this is really YOUR task; otherwise, give it back). So now… how am I going to solve this?
See that? That right there, refusing to kill yourself to do it? That’s what drives innovation. That’s how come my reviews went up. Each time I solved that problem, my life got better, and so did my performance.
Meanwhile, back to people-pleasing – Your wants, needs, and personal life, your desire to grow is just as important as anyone else’s. For you? It should be more so. You worry about you. Get your own house spiffed up. You can come back and lend everyone else a hand later – after you’ve walked the dog and had a good night’s sleep.
And that? Is just good to know.
If you would like a free 25-minute session – click here. It’s free, it’s on zoom, camera on or camera off. It’s my pleasure
Your dream wasn’t canceled, but if you’re not seeing it… maybe you forgot to renew. This week’s blog is part 5 of the 5-part series on permanent change
For the audio version of this blog, scroll to the end and press play.
I’d done it all.I’d worked through the lifestyle implications of the changes I want to make happen. I cleared out space for my new work. I believed it could be done, kinda. I was planning and doing, heading towards change when all of a sudden, it wasn’t in my frame of reference. I couldn’t see it and then I tripped.
This week, I was seriously trucking along. I was committing tasks to my calendar and executing them. I’d hit a major milestone on my side hustle and delivered results. At my day job, I was making progress on several fronts and I was keeping my health goals in line…I even got up early and went out for a run… in the dark… and yet…Boom!
A total eclipse of my plans.
A trainee showed up that I forgot was arriving. He smiled at me and I thought “Oh no! What am I going to give him to do?” I had to cancel a launch at my day job to allow for more testing and fixes. I fell behind on daily tasks for one of my side ventures. Then, I tossed all my health goals to the wind, plopped some cheese and crackers on a plate and went out to my porch, in 24-degree weather, to brood.
Stuff happened.
Stuff is always going to happen; it doesn’t mean we should go out on the porch and brood. If we do, it certainly doesn’t mean we should stay there. Especially if it’s dark and cold out.
The business of change is the business of renewal. Daily, weekly, any time.
Here’s the deal. All or nothing thinking is the enemy. At work, believing we know it all is the first step toward failure. When we think things are black and white, cut and dry, done and over, we lose. We don’t listen to other people’s ideas, we don’t try to think of improvements, we don’t run hard right up to the deadline. We give up, think small and don’t listen.
The same is true when we’re trying to change. If you indulge in all or nothing perspectives, you’re taking the easy way to failure.
Telling myself if I don’t do everything I planned, my plan is a failure, is ridiculous right?I’m being too hard on myself.
Or am I? I might be going easy.
It’s easy because I don’t have to sit down and evaluate where things went south and revise my plan. It’s easy because I don’t have to pick myself up and try again. It’s easy because I can just stop.
Too bad that’s not how we frame this type of quitting to ourselves. We don’t call ourselves out for this kind of cheating. Instead, we wallow a bit. I know I do. I feel like a failure, I ruminate on it, but I also give up. It feels bad, but it also feels like a bit of a relief.
The business of change is the business of renewal. Daily, weekly, any time, all the time.
So how are you doing on your goals? Did you set any for this year?
If you did, were you gung-ho for a bit?
How are you feeling now?
Or are you so gun-shy that you no longer set goals?
Here’s what I know:
You can always start over, every day and twice on Sundays.
If you shoot for the stars and hit Everest, heck, you hit Everest. Dude.
There’s more than one way to anywhere.
The business of change is the business of renewal – and revision.
Renew your commitment.
Revise your plan.
Do yourself the favor of seeing reframing and re-trying as the most compassionate things you can do for yourself. Because they are. There is no reason you have to take the best route to your dreams. Take any route, take all the routes. It’s a dream. It’s your inheritance as a human. A dream is a privilege.
The business of change is the business of renewal.
Whatever your dream is, whatever you want to achieve, don’t cancel it. Spend time with it. You were designed to go after it. It’s in your DNA.
If you would like to take the first step to permanent change, click here.
The business of change is the business of joy.
And that? Is something worth chasing.
Click play for the audio version of Don’t Trip on the Rug
