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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

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.

Dare+TrustSo 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.

 

“It’s not that bad” and other lies we tell ourselves

I want to say a few words about toleration. About putting up with the aspects of your life that “aren’t that bad”.

“It’s not that bad” is how we stay stuck for years in situations that make us miserable.

“It’s not that bad” is a lie that we tell ourselves, usually because not telling the lie means facing a scarier truth.

“It’s not that bad” is the lie I’ve told myself for years about my chronic back pain.

And you know what? On the one hand, I’m so right. My pain is really not that bad.

Compared to all of the people out there suffering from truly debilitating chronic pain, my wimpy little back pain is barely a blip on the record. It really is not that bad.

But the thing is that when you play in the Suffering Olympics, no one wins — why would you want to when the prize is nothing less than abject misery?

And yet the ego longs to play. The ego longs to be the best at everything — including being the best at suffering.

For years I’ve used this as an excuse. I’ve told myself this lie that my pain doesn’t deserve my attention because “it’s not that bad”.

It’s like saying that poverty in America doesn’t deserve our attention because “it’s not that bad” compared to poverty in Africa. It’s an equation that really just doesn’t compute — surely both are tragedies in their own right?

The same is true of our personal suffering. All suffering deserves our attention, from the smallest ache to the fiercest agony — our suffering deserves our attention, our compassion, our tender care.

This is what I’ve learned about suffering.

Tolerating our suffering doesn’t make us martyrs. It doesn’t make us kinder, more loving, and more generous people.

Toleration isn’t adequate to transmute pain into love.

To enact such a feat, an act far more courageous than toleration is required — an act of acceptance, an act of surrender is required.

Putting up with the places where we chafe against the edges of our life doesn’t make us any kinder or more noble than our fellow man.

Because the real truth is that even if “it’s not that bad” — it’s also not that good either.

When we’re willing to suffer “not that bad”, we deny ourselves “good”, and we shut down our ability to witness our suffering compassionately.

Putting up with our dissatisfactions almost always does exactly the opposite — it makes us discontented, more easy to anger, less able to extend compassion to others, and more apt to wallow in our righteousness.

When we’re wallowing in our suffering we can’t be of service to those who need us.

Which is the real reason why we have to look at the places where we’re tolerating — the areas of our lives that don’t suit us. We have to look at the aches and the pains and the discontents and the frustrations — because only when we do this can we move into a kinder, more beautiful, and more generous life.

The kind of life we always knew deep in our hearts we were capable of.

The kind of life we’ve yearned for.

The kind of life we thought we’d never be lucky enough to have.

The kind of life that is available to each and every one of us when we’re willing to look our discontents square in the face and fight our way through to the something more we’ve always dreamed of.

Because healing begins when we dare to tell ourselves the brutally honest truth.

All of which is a rather long and dramatic way of saying that I’ve gone ahead and signed myself up for some physical therapy and have been taking a deep dive into mind-body coaching techniques because I’m done tolerating being in pain all the time — even when it really is “not that bad”.

What kind of life do you yearn for? Where in your life are you done tolerating a situation that causes discontent? I’d love to hear from you in the comments! And if you’d like to take this conversation deeper, I invite you to work with me.

I’ve spent my whole life asking the wrong question…

I have an uncomfortable confession to make. You see, I was born with a question on my lips and I’ve spent pretty much entire life trying to answer it. Which is why it’s been uncomfortable for me to realize in the past month or two that I’m pretty sure I’ve been asking exactly the wrong question all my life.

That question, by the way, is “why?”.

Since I was first old enough to formulate this question it has plagued me — amounting to a total span of time far greater than the normal four-year old fixation.

One of the lovely women I coach with has dubbed me “the one with a hypothesis for everything” — and it’s so true.

Every mystery, every puzzle, every question — I am fixated, transfixed, addicted. I chew them over and over in my mind, obsessed with figuring out the why of things until I happen upon a plausible explanation. Only they is my curiosity sated.

But.

As I’ve been thinking about 2016 and what I want to do in the coming year(s) of my life, I’m starting to realize that the question “why?” is ultimately a trap.

“Why” leads invariably to a line of questioning in which the world becomes an murky, impossible place and every decision is weighed down by 10,000 confounding variables.

Under the burden of “why?”, even the simplest decision becomes impossible.

In deciding what to have to dinner one must know why chicken might be better than beef, why Indian food might be better than Chinese, why it might be important to buy organic, etc.

Under the burden of “why” a decision cannot be decided under the auspices of reasons such as “because I want to” (why?) or “because it sounds good” (why?).

Instead, a decision must be infinitely logical and well defended. Under the burden of “why?”, all possible reasons must be vindicated and validated and living your life rapidly begins to feel impossible.

Which is why I’ve decided to start asking a new question: “Why not?”

It’s possible that I find this magical just because I’m going through a phase of some sort… but bear with me for a second if you’re feeling skeptical.

“I feel like having chicken for dinner.” Why not?
“I think I’ll meditate this evening before bed.” Why not?
“Should I skip class tonight and go to bed early?” Why not!

“Why not?” is almost always immediate permission to move in the direction you wanted to go anyways.

As a coach, this is probably something I should have figured out a long time ago — because I ask my clients why-questions a lot in order to help me understand how they see their world.

But I don’t ask “why?” or “why do you think that?” or “why is that?” very often.

Instead, I usually ask questions like “why would that be bad?” or “why would that be a problem?” or “so what?” or “who cares?” (or “why *not*?”!).

When we ask ourselves these “why not?” questions we can see immediately to the heart of the matter.

Because the answers that come up are always are excuses.

“I might fail.” “It’ll never work.” “I’m not qualified.” “I ate chicken last night.”

And our excuses are almost always… well, pretty darn lame.

But sometimes they’re also not lame and that’s fine too.

If doing something really is a bad idea then you’ll figure that out when you ask “why not?”.

That’s the brilliance of the question, really. It’s just waiting for you to look your choices in the eye. It doesn’t have any sort of an agenda.

Now it’s your turn! I dare you to pick a dream for 2016 and ask yourself “why not?” Let me know what comes up for you in the comments!

 

When it’s all just too much

In the past week I have crisscrossed the country by aeroplane for a wonderful weekend in California, spent a very brief night collapsed in my bed in Boston, and hopped on yet another flight to attend a planetary science conference in DC.

To say I am exhausted would be an understatement.

I knew going into this that my travel schedule in November was ambitious (I’m flying back to CA in a couple of weeks to spend Thanksgiving with friends and family) — but even though I knew it was a stretch I still found myself taken aback by my profound levels of exhaustion.

Which is why I’ve been doing everything I can to go to bed early and fit in the odd afternoon nap.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my recent re-commitment to prioritizing rest, and I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been taking my own advice.

Because the thing about refusing to rest is that it’s a kind of perverse self-flagellation.

You think “If I were better/stronger/etc. I wouldn’t need to rest” and so you forego your rest in order to prove your own goodness or strength and in doing so you actually make yourself weak.

If there was a way to not need to sleep I’d be all over it. But there’s not.

I’ve tried just about every trick in the book and none of them worked — so I’m forced to the conclusion that rest really is a non-negotiable if you want to be happy. (Or at least if I want to be happy — maybe you are made of sterner stuff!)

One of the things I’ve been paying attention to since I started life coach training is where suffering shows up in my life.

Byron Katie says “No one can hurt me — that’s my job” and everything I’ve seen so far would indicate that this is true (at least for emotional suffering; I think there’s still an argument to be made for others causing us physical pain…).

No one can hurt me without my permission.

No one can ask me to hook a work trip up against a personal trip unless I say yes and no one can tell me I shouldn’t be napping right now except me.

That’s the power of coaching and of Byron Katie’s method of inquiry — because in noticing our suffering we get to make a new choice.

We get to choose to take a nap.

We get to choose to say no if we want to or to say yes if we want that instead.

We get to choose to make new rules for ourselves and our lives — instead of feeling like our lives are cruelly dictated by the expectations of others, the culture, or our boss.

When you question the cause of your suffering you step out of the role of the victim and into the role of the hero.

You become the leader of your life, not because you have to, but because you choose to.

Which is why I’ll be napping on my flight home tomorrow and why I’ll be spending an unsual number of hours in my pajamas this weekend.

There are times when life is busy and stressful and complicated and messy and exhausting and brilliant.

And when life gets to be too much, sometimes the only way through is to crawl your weary bones back into bed — knowing that your life will be right where you left it when you crawl back out from under the covers again.