Why I’m breaking up with self-improvement

It’s official — I’m breaking up with self-improvement.

If these words seem strange coming from a life coach, then allow me to clarify. I’m not breaking up with the coaching process or with my goal of living a better, truer, happier life. But I am breaking up with the idea that self-improvement is something we need to “do”.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, then you know that I’m a sucker for a new idea. It’s an affliction that can be almost crippling in the modern era, when more new content is published on a daily basis than anyone could ever hope to keep up with.

For years now, I’ve been gamely trying to keep up with at least the ideas that seemed most important even though I knew I’d never be able to keep up with them all.

But somewhere along the way my intention got twisted. I started with clean curiosity and play, but eventually the sheer quantity of things I’d never know overwhelmed me and I found myself anxiously believing stories that weren’t true.

The answer is out there, I just have to find it.
I’ll never find what I’m looking for.
I’ll never know everything I need to in order to be happy and successful.
I’ll never be ready to start.
I need to know more.

If you’ve ever lived with stories like these, then perhaps you already know they aren’t true. But I got so wrapped up in my hunt for the answers that I wound up with blinders on.

Which is why I’m breaking up with self-improvement.

Because the answers I need aren’t in some book, or the next email newsletter from some thought leader, or some blogger’s YouTube video.

As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching,

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao, [also translated as “in the pursuit of wisdom”]
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

Mitchell, Stephen (2009-10-13). Tao Te Ching (Perennial Classics) (p. 54). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Although I love knowledge and knowing things, my true fascination has always been with wisdom.

When I seek wisdom over knowledge I find that the answers are waiting for me in my own heart, my own truth, my own integrity — not waiting for me outside in someone else’s books.

I already have my answers. I just need to stop searching for them long enough time realize they’re already waiting for me.

You already have your answers, too. Even when it doesn’t feel like it — especially when it doesn’t feel like it.

All you have to do is listen.

This is so, so important because all those things I listed at the beginning: that better, truer, happier life you’re looking for — the instructions for creating that life aren’t in any book.

And as long as you remain busy looking for answers from the outside, you remain blind to the answers already waiting for you on the inside.

The path to peace, joy, gratitude, and all good things doesn’t lead out into the world.

Instead, it leads deep into the wild depths of your heart — the dark and mysterious places you’ve been afraid to linger.

Peace comes when you realize your dark and shame-filled places are what make you complicated, beautiful, and capable of immense compassion.

Joy comes when you realize how outrageously lucky you are to be here, now.

Gratitude comes when you still the frightened, ravening voice in your head that needs more, more, more in order to feel safe.

The path to wholeness and healing is an inside job. It happens when you turn to look inside and face into the answers that are already waiting for you.

Remember — enlightenment is the journey, not the destination.

Much love,
Jessica

P.S. If you’d like some extra support on this journey, I invite you to work with me as a private coaching client.

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

February 21, 2016

Permission to break the rules

Here’s how it happens. It starts when everything is humming along smoothly.

You’ve identified your goals, you’ve broken them down into next steps, you’re plugging away, you’ve got your self-care dialed in and everything is rosy.

Your schedule is full, but not too full. You’re feeling energized, excited. You’re having fun.

And then there comes a moment when it starts to shift.

Maybe it starts at work. Maybe your job becomes a little more stressful than it was before. Or maybe the shift starts at home. Maybe you get sick or someone you care about gets sick or maybe a friend asks you to help them with a project you hadn’t planned for.

Slowly, insidiously, the “extras” creep in — until before you know it, you’re not humming along smoothly at all. Instead, you’re running on a treadmill that just keeps going faster and faster and faster and things are suddenly not so rosy any more.

Or at least that’s how it happened to me.

Cue new year, new goals, fresh energy, and bright plans. Cue increasing work stress, an extra course I signed on for, and a radical commitment to show up differently in the world in 2016.

Lights, camera, action, and… epic fail.

—

I started off 2016 with the very best of plans and intentions. I was looking forward to taking big, bold actions and really showing up in the world in a more courageous way.

But, as usually happens when one makes a grand plan, a combination of unintended consequences and unforeseen circumstances conspired to help me fall flat on my face.

It wasn’t so much that I’d made a bad plan (in fact, I think it was a great plan!), it’s that plans never work out they way we expected them to when we made them.

My mistake was not in planning, but in failing to ditch the plan immediately when it first became clear that it wasn’t working. My mistake was that I struggled valiantly on.

I grappled with stressful deadlines all day at work and then came home to coach clients on the phone. I stayed up late writing blog posts and beat myself up for letting my meditation practice slip when it was pushing 11 pm and the choice was between meditation and rest.

My failure was my choice to engage in the struggle. And I’m going to admit that the results were less than pretty.

—

Due to heightened stress at work, I became less able to handle the stress of a packed coaching schedule outside of work. As my time filled up, my commitment to the routines and practices that replenish me waned, and as my ability to care for myself faded I got angry.

I got angry first at “everything” outside of me, my job, other people’s demands, and so on. I numbed my anger by staying up late catching up on TV shows I stopped watching years ago.

I transferred that anger to myself for “making bad choices” and for “not taking care of myself”.

And finally I got really upset with “the rules” — the systems and structures that I had created in my life. Systems and structures which I had put in place to support me suddenly began to take on an ominous and gloomy feeling.

—

In the end, I did the only sensible thing I could see to do. I took a page out of Brene Brown’s book, Rising Strong, and wrote myself a freaking permission slip which read “Permission to break the rules”. And then I cancelled everything I had “committed” to.

I cancelled sending out my weekly newsletter last Friday. I cancelled keeping up with the telecourses I’m taking. I cancelled some of my available coaching hours. I cancelled everything that felt stressful and aggravating and horrible in my body.

I spent some evenings watching TV, yes — but when I’d watched an episode or two I went to bed instead of staying up until the wee hours. I went to bed before 9 pm some nights and I slept a few ten hour nights.

I started exercising again. I started meditating again. Because I was going to bed so early I actually started waking up in time to meditate in the mornings before work (which I have never before managed to do).

Suddenly I can breathe again. I’m writing again and exercising again and meditating again. I’m sending out my newsletter on Monday instead of Friday and you know what? I gave myself permission to break all the rules but in the end, I’m only three days late.

—

If there’s a lesson in this, I think it’s that there’s no shame in quitting. Sometimes the only way to start moving forward again is to stop trying so hard for a while. Sometimes the only way to figure out what you need is to stop everything you’re doing, so that you can get really quiet and tune in to what it is that you’d actually like to be doing.

I think we get so muddled in the rules that sometimes we wind up missing the forest for the trees. We tell ourselves painful lies about how we should be able to keep our shit together when we feel like we’re falling apart, about how we should be able to handle our situation gracefully, and about how it’s bad of us to skip our meditation or our physical therapy exercises or, or, or.

The kinder, more honest truth is that sometimes life gets ugly and murky and we don’t handle it as gracefully as we’d like to. And that’s perfectly OK too, as long as we’re not telling ourselves a story about how we’re bad people because we fell flat on our face and scraped our knees and now we’re feeling a mix of anger and shame and the petulant need for a cry.

So if you’re like me and you’re off to a shaky start in 2016, I humbly invite you to write yourself a permission slip that reads “Permission to break the rules” — and then go ahead and cancel everything.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what happens next.

Much love,
Jessica

February 11, 2016

Self-righteousness is the enemy of self-respect

I started reading Brene Brown’s most recent book, Rising Strong, recently. I am a die-hard fan of her work, so really the only surprise there is that I waited as long as I did to get around to reading this one.

Rising Strong is, as all her books are, wonderful and enlightening. I’ll be sure to post a complete review once I’ve finished reading it, but for now — here’s a passage that grabbed my attention:

“I am clear on the fact that self-righteousness is a tremendous threat to self-respect… I must accept responsibility for my own life and my decisions. When I was finding fault with everyone who walked by that day at the airport, my self-respect was suffering. That’s why things felt so dark.”

Brown, Brene (2015-08-25). Rising Strong (Kindle Locations 1998-2000). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I have had a thing about self-righteousness for a long time. It’s an emotion I don’t like when I recognize it in myself and it’s an emotion that I struggle to deal with when it shows up in other people.

Basically self-righteousness makes me grumpy.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t fall victim to it just like everyone else. Sometimes people behave in ways I feel are inappropriate and that pisses me off and I get all self-righteous and uppity about it.

But I don’t like the person I am when I’m being so judgmental.

And those few sentences from Brene Brown put the finger on exactly why I find self-righteousness so irksome.

Self-righteousness is the enemy of self-respect.

(My hunch is that what follows is reasonably universal — but if it’s not true for you, feel free to skip to the end and let me know your thoughts in the comments. I love a dissenting view!)

We get self-righteous when we’re upset — and interestingly, as Karla McLaren points out in her book The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, anger is the emotion that helps us set and maintain healthy boundaries. For a more detailed look at McLaren’s view on anger, try here.

So we get angry, and then we get self-righteous, but usually the reason we’re angry in the first place is because someone violated a boundary.

It seems to me that the self-righteousness itself is the product of that anger — except instead of looking at how we played a part in allowing the violation of our boundaries, we choose to take the easy way out and blame the other person for “behaving badly” and not respecting boundaries we didn’t tell them they were crossing.

They shouldn’t have been mean to us. They shouldn’t have laughed at us. They shouldn’t have done that. They should have behaved more appropriately.

We get self-righteous.

But the self-righteousness is the product of a loss of self respect.

The problem began when we didn’t stand up for our boundaries, when we didn’t speak up about our needs, when we didn’t give them an honest no and when we settled for a resentful and dishonest yes.

And now we’re angry and we’re making it their fault because it’s easier than admitting that it is we who were at fault.

I invite you to do it differently as you move forward — I will certainly be paying more attention to this!

I invite you to notice self-righteous feelings as a signal that a boundary violation has occurred. That in some way you didn’t stand up for yourself when you should have. That instead of anchoring your words and actions in self-respect, you disrespected yourself — and now you’re angry because the other person followed your lead and disrespected you, too.

Notice, and then do it differently.

What would have been respectful of yourself, your needs, your boundaries in that situation? What was it you really needed to say, to do, to insist upon? What should you have been unwilling to tolerate or settle for?

Your turn! What’s an experience which left you feeling self-righteous? Do you think it was the result of a boundary violation? Was self-righteousness easier than the shame of admitting you didn’t stand up for yourself? Let me know in the comments below!

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

February 4, 2016

Courage requires faith

A few weeks back I wrote about my word for the year, which is DARE. We’re just past the one month mark in 2016 and it has already occurred to me that in my initial bedazzlement with the word DARE I neglected to think about an equally important piece of the equation: TRUST.

TRUST was my unofficial and belatedly adopted word for 2015. In 2015 I made some scary decisions (like starting to write a book and signing up for the Martha Beck Life Coach Training program) — at the time I didn’t know whether I was making the right choices or not, and I invested a lot of time and money into pursuits I couldn’t be entirely sure were right for me.

To not-know and do it anyway requires a lot of trust —

And trust that everything is going to be OK is something I’ve struggled with for a long time.

Somewhere along the road between high school and graduating from MIT I lost my certainty that there are no unrecoverable mistakes — a loss which has often left me with a feeling of waiting for the world to end around every next corner.

So when I picked the word DARE for myself in 2016, I may have been overlooking the small but crucially important fact that if I wanted to be more bold and more courageous, I was also going to have to learn to take my wavering trust to a whole new level.

Which is why I’ve actually since revised my word/theme for 2016. It’s DARE with a heaping side of TRUST.

Because when you’re deeply fearful, every act of daring is an eyes closed, nose plugged cannonball into danger and uncertainty, and the only thing you’ve got going for you is your trust that — whatever might be waiting for you in the water — you’re going to make it back alive.

And when you can really, truly trust that you are going to be ok, no matter the outcome of your daring, the choice to dare becomes what I have heard called “scareciting” (that’s scary + exciting).

But if you don’t have that trust, then asking for courage of yourself is just plain old petrifying.

After MIT, I spent a year or two thinking of myself as a coward.

I was lost in a place where I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, but I did know that I didn’t want to stay put. I could see different paths forking off all around me, writing, slam poetry, an MFA, midwifery, teaching — you name it, I probably considered it in those days.

The problem was that though I could see all of these options — at the end of the day I was too scared of making “the wrong choice” to just pick something and try it.

And so I stayed put (for years!) because it was easier than moving off into the great unknown and all along the way my thoughts whispered to me, coward, coward, coward, coward…

Which is why I picked the word DARE for 2016.

Because I now recognize that staying put wasn’t an act of cowardice so much as an act of self-preservation — to venture into the unknown without faith would have been more than an act of courage it would have been a stubborn and torturous excursion into sheer terror.

Your life isn’t supposed to terrify you — it’s supposed to scarecite you!

It’s supposed to be an adventure, and sometimes adventures are scary and thrilling and even a little bit dangerous — but at the end of the day they’re supposed to be scary+exciting more than they are pure scary.

If you’re going to take a chance, you have to have some faith that lose or win, sink or swim, you’re going to turn out alright.

What about you? Do you struggle with courage and daring? Let me know in the comments below!

P.S. If this post resonated with you and you’d like to take the conversation deeper, I’d love to invite you to work with me.

January 28, 2016

How to find joy

I believe in joy. After all, who doesn’t? And yet so often joy is something we think of as elusive.

Joy is the mirage we chase our whole lives — always searching for it around the next corner, the next raise, the next promotion.

Soon, we think. Soon I’ll have everything I could possibly want.

Soon I’ll have everything I need to be happy.

And then we get the job or the raise or the promotion — and inevitably it doesn’t turn out like we’d expected.

We’re disappointed.

We might be angry or frustrated. We might even feel betrayed.

—

There was a time in my life when I felt betrayed.

I felt like the way we talk about success and happiness in America had betrayed me, had led me down the wrong path — a path that had promised happiness but had ultimately left me mired in misery.

That time was post-MIT when I’d sunk everything into pursuing a dream only to look up and wonder whose dream it was that I was chasing.

I’d wrecked myself on sleepless nice and a ceaseless cascade of stress — and in the end it seemed that my suffering had bought me only what I didn’t want: a desk job I didn’t love, a paycheck I didn’t spend, and life in a city I dreamed of escaping.

And for a while, I felt betrayed. Angry. Hurt. Bitter. Exhausted.

—

That misery was the fork in my road, the moment in which I had to decide whether I thought that joy ultimately lay just a little farther down the path or whether I was going to have to venture off into parts unknown in order to find it.

I was pretty sure that joy didn’t lay farther ahead down the same well-worn path — but the problem was I was afraid to venture off the path.

I was afraid I might get lost.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been venturing off the path for a while now — in some ways for years.

And joy isn’t out there in the woods somewhere and joy isn’t on the path.

Joy is locked away in your own heart and the easiest way to find it is to stop looking and notice.

—

I can say this because I still haven’t moved far from the path.

I’m still working a desk job that increasingly I find I enjoy.

I’m still living in a city I wish I could move out of — but increasingly I find that the city is also beautiful in it’s own impenetrable way.

I realize now that I volunteered myself for suffering because I wanted the world to approve of me and of my choices — and I’ve learned that the only approval I really need is my own.

And you know what? The magic of it is that often these days I’m just ridiculously grateful and happy.

So often these days I just sit quietly and feel myself marinating in joy.

And what I’m learning now is that when you find joy within yourself first, it stops seeming so scary to venture off the path.

Jessica Ruprecht