Welcome to the Situation

I am guessing that we all agree that how we think about something impacts the experience we have with it. You wouldn’t still be here if you weren’t already pretty much on board with the idea that your brain is really powerful and can change your lived experience.

Examples include:

• If you think that you have choice about how much fear you take on, you feel less overwhelmed by individual news stories. When you feel pursued by bad news, worried that you’ll get swept away by the currents of negativity, then every news story is cause for concern.
• If you think that your partner is genuinely doing his or her best under difficult circumstances, it’s easier to overlook the dirty dishes and/or the nagging. If you think he or she is “taking the easy way out” then those dishes and the nagging become cause for a 2-day argument.
• If you believe that the world needs more laughter, you will see silly posts, emails, and videos as something for which to be grateful. If you believe, on the other hand, that what we need now is to take everything very seriously, those posts will annoy you and be more evidence of how shallow everyone is.

These examples aren’t here to make a case that one belief or thought is better or righter than another. It’s the opposite of that, actually. This is to draw your attention to how your thoughts create the experience you are having.

It was not the the news story, the dishes or the silly posts that made you experience your world as you did. Those things just exist. They’re neutral.

Instead, it was your thoughts about those things that created the experience that you had.

If you are familiar with the Cognitive Behavioral therapy modality or The Life Coach School’s “Model” you may very well know this already. But, when it’s your first time thinking through it, you might feel A LOT of emotion.

Lots of people get really upset at this idea. They feel that you are blaming the victim, or telling them that they had the “wrong” thought, or generally feel like they’re being handed a bunch of blame for every hard thing in their life.

My outrage took the shape of arguing (somewhat incessantly) the point that all of my thoughts were “rational” and “reasonable” and therefore, “right.”

Here’s how those conversations went with a CBT therapist of my acquaintance:

Me: “He said ‘you suck’ and I said ‘you hurt my feelings!’”
CBT Therapist: “He can’t hurt your feelings. Only you can hurt your feelings.”
Me: “What the hell does that mean? He said I suck!”
CBT Therapist: Yeah, but you could have chosen to see that as a good thing.
Me: “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT! When someone says ‘you suck,’ it’s RATIONAL to get angry and have hurt feelings! What do you want me to do instead, give him a hug and say “Thanks, I love you, too!” That’s not normal! And, anyway, it was his intention to upset me!”
CBT Therapist: “You can have any thought you like! You can be mad if it’s what you want to do. What I want you to know is that you aren’t mad because he made you mad, you’re mad because you designed your own thoughts to make yourself mad.”

Around and around we went: me arguing that I was right, when really, I was hurt.

• Hurt that she would insinuate that I could have experienced such rudeness without feeling hurt, angry and frustrated.
• Hurt that my somewhat mature response (in this case, telling him how i felt) wasn’t “good enough” for her, even when I felt like I had succeeded by not punching him in the face.
• Hurt that she would insinuate that every bad things that had happened to me could have been avoided.
• Hurt that she would insinuate that I don’t have the impact on others that I thought.
• Hurt, basically, that everything i had been taught about life and thoughts and causality could be wrong.

Eventually, I landed in the middle, fully agreeing with myself and with her.

First, just for the record, my thoughts were rational and reasonable! No one would blame me for having the default reactions to what happened to me. If someone smiled at me I could like them. If someone yelled at me I could get angry. If someone turned me down, I could decide I don’t want to be friends with them anyway.

If I like the way my life is going, I can keep my thoughts, just as they are.

But, what is also true is that if I don’t want to give this rude person the power to upset me, I could choose a different thought and have a different experience.

We have now arrived at the CBT model

Welcome to The Situation

According to the cognitive behavioral model we live our lives inside “the situation.” The situation is neutral in the sense that it’s not in an of itself upsetting or gratifying or exciting, or… anything, really. It just is. The situation in our example would be that i was talking with a man who said the words “You suck.” to me.

Choose your Thoughts Wisely

Your mindmanager (more on her, soon) watches the situation unfolding and comments on it to herself. “That was rude,” she says. And, thusly, you have had a thought!

Cue the Amygdala!

When I’ve decided that someone has been rude to me, I do not take it well. I might feel hurt. Sometimes I feel betrayed. I almost always feel super annoyed. All of these “negative” feelings trigger hormones that activate the amygdala and launch me into emotionally appropriate behavior. Once I’m hurt, betrayed, or annoyed I’m going to act that way. In fact, trying to stop an emotion train when it’s already on its way out of the station is HARD.

It takes a herculean effort to walk back fury, annoyance, desperation, betrayal, and hurt in the nanosecond between the thought and the feeling. (It’s way, WAY easier to intervene during the thought.)

Feelings create behaviors

Once you are all up in your feelings, you are going to act accordingly. In our example, my thought “that was rude” led me to say “you hurt my feelings.” If i had thought “That’s weird that he would say that, I wonder what upsetting him” maybe I would have asked a question or let it go. Who knows.

AGAIN: None of this is about the right response. It’s just about observing that it was the thought that created the feeling that created the behavior.

Behaviors feed back into the situation and accumulate into results

The situation is also partially created by you. How you have behaved up until this moment colors the situation you find yourself in right now, and what you do in this moment will color the situation you live in tomorrow. This is how our behaviors over time accumulate into the results we create in our lives. While that’s worth knowing, it doesn’t in any way diminish your ability to respond differently tomorrow, however.

The CBT model is a powerful tool when it comes to managing your mindset, mindscape and mindmanager. All three of these pieces of the mind can be adjusted, optimized, and experimented upon with your thoughts… which in turn will change your feelings, behavior and results.

Mindmanager to the rescue! …Maybe.

Listen, there’s a reason that “change is hard” is one of the biggest headnodders* of all time. We suck at changing our lives! This is why we continue to engage with truly terrible ideas! Here are three terrible ideas I am still engaging in on the regular:

• Never exercising. Despite being known most of all as “that women who went from never exercising to being a triathlete,” I spend most days chilling on the couch, especially right now.
• SUGAR. Despite being almost entirely “sugar free” because of that whole autoimmune thing last year, I bought a 5 pack of Trolls Oreos on Amazon because I NEED IT. (Yo, there are POPROCKS inside. You need them, too.)
• Speed reading. When I get interested in a book, I become compulsively committed to finishing it.I read fast already, but I also have a setting that kicks in that is way more about finishing than savoring.Then, I’m done with my book and SO SAD it’s over. I’ve known this forever, and yet I finished “The art of inheriting secrets” in 36 hours.Errrggghhhh, so frustrating. Because now I don’t get to read it anymore! SMH.

Today is just another example of our whole lives. We know what’s up.

Said another way, we already know what we need to do differently!

So why don’t we? And why do we get so emotional when someone suggests that we could, in fact, respond differently?

Because change is hard. It’s hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.

But hard doesn’t mean impossible, or even unmanageable. Hard means effortful. We have to be strategic and understand what we are dealing with. This is where the three-part workspace model of the mind comes in.

As a reminder, the workspace of the mind has three interwoven parts, each of which can be supported to help us better manage our mind and change our lives.

Mindset: These are the lenses that fall into place and color/frame the way we interpret what’s happening to us. Fundamentally, a mindset is a pattern of beliefs. Beliefs are ingrained thoughts. And thoughts are things we can choose with effort in the moment.

Mindscape: Your brain is capable of time travel- freely moving from the past, through the present, and into the future. Your mindscape is the current (and shifting) “location” of your mind. Where in time are you choosing to spend your life? Are you choosing the present moment where your experiences are able to change, expand, contract, and adjust? Or are you projecting your mind forward in the fields of “what if” and “yeah, but” that characterizes our worries about the future? Is your mind roaming the past, worrying over painful experiences, revisiting discolored memories, and strengthening repetitive thoughts?

Mndmanager: If you’ve ever taken a cognitive development class, the mindmanager is a lot like the “central executive.” The mindmanager has a LOT to do, and most of it doesn’t involve your conscious mind. Which is to say that managing your thoughts is the least of your mindmanager’s worries. This means that when you go to enage in the effort to change your thoughts, your mindmanager is going go to resist. She will, instead, point you to familiarity.

“What’s up familiarity, you old hound dog!”

Your brain is most fundamentally designed to keep you alive.

It does so, in the purest form, by creating and re-creating familiarity.

Ah, familiarity: When I feel safe, warm, and comfortable with something simply because it didn’t kill me last time.Bliss.

The pull of familiarity is strong. It’s strong, in large part, because it’s your mindmanager’s shortcut. “Go over there and hang out with familiarity, Amanda,” she says to me, “while I take care of all this adult business.” If your mindmanager is your parent, familiarity is Nickelodeon. Mindmanager assumes it’s safe because it’s kids tv, and you are interested enough to watch, even if you aren’t that into it.

But, familiarity has a dark side (so does Nickelodeon, btw. Have you watched any of those shows?). Lots of the things that are “always around” aren’t that great for us. The sugar, the sedentary-ness, the hours and hours of watching the news, the Facebook scroll of death…It’s familiar, so we do it again and again, even though it’s draining our life force.

How do we get your mindmanager out of default, familiarity mode and into active participation?

Mindmanager thrives in BALANCE. When she’s out of whack she drops into default mode, relying on familiarity and habit rather than strategy and effort. There are two dimensions that need to be balanced if you want mindmanger to lend you a hand and help you change your life: one is passionate detachment, and the other is engaged retreat.

Passionate detachment is about your interest. Are you doing things that you care about? Are you “all in?” If yes, then you are experiencing “passion” and mindmanager is willing to get involved. However, this passion needs to be tempered with detachment from immediate, predictable outcomes or mind manager will get overwhelmed by the intensity of your reactions and fears and stick you back in front of the tv. The sweet spot in the middle of this dimension is passionate detachment and it marked by your enthusiastic engagement with the goals and and flexibility with outcomes and timelines.

Engaged retreat is the other dimension that needs to be balanced. Another word for engagement, when it’s gotten a little out of hand is “hustle.” Engagement is about hard work, persistence, and the grind. All good things… that will eat you alive if you aren’t careful. Engagement MUST be balanced with regular retreat- simple pleasures are best: sleeping, eating, downtime, and connection with loved ones.

Now, these aren’t continuums where your goal is to land at a particular place and stay there; these are planes of experience and your goal is to move freely around them. The key, actually, is to avoid getting stuck in one of the quadrants.

When you get stuck in a quadrant, you will experience one of the four-horsemen of the workpocalypse.

• Too much engagement and too much passion? Burnout comes to call. It’s time to accept what is (detachment) and take a dang break (retreat!).
• Lots and lots of passion but no action? Procrastination has settled in. The key for you is to lower the stakes and accept that nothing is ever going to be perfect (detachment) and then trust yourself to go for it (move into action)!
• No passion but under the gun to perform, perform, perform? Welcome to Bored-out. Like burnout, but with glazed eyes and carpal tunnel. The key here is to develop some passion- spend some time thinking about your “why” and drawing connections between what you are trying to do and your long term hopes and dreams. Then, force yourself back into the cycle of engaged retreat- take regular breaks!
• No passion, no engagement? It might be time to move on, my friend. The Fizzle is hard to walk back. But, if it’s important to you then your number one goal is to generating some passion. Figure out what about this boring, disengaging situation drew you into it in the first place and build from there.

Mindmanager is willing to participate in your efforts to change your mind and pursue your goals when you orbit around the sweet spot. If you find yourself unable to gain a foothold against your own bad habits and tendencies, place yourself in the model and find your most important next step.

As I always say, your mindmanager needs to give a sh*t and be given a break.

This will help to bring your mindmanager back onto your team.

*PS- A headnodder is something people say and the rest of us need NO MORE INFORMATION before start nodding in agreement.

F*ck It!

This message is brought to you by the coronavirus, two and half weeks in.

[Tuesday, March 31st, 6pm] I think the lesson from today can be summed up neatly with this two-word, oft stated phrase in the Crowell Home: F*ck it.

I’ve decided that for today Imma let go into the mess. Really relax into the chaos. Settle into the shit, and get comfy.

Here we go:

I spent my entire day on zoom, which was glitchy AF as the entire world suddenly logged into it (F-You, Zoom! YOUR internet is unstable!) “connecting” with clients (F-You social distancing! I want to hug my people!) and being emotionally available (F-You self control! I’m going to dip my OREOS in wine!) while also taking care of my kids (F-You color coded homeschooling schedule! One tap for the next 5 hours? SCREENS!) and trying to stay on top of the mountain of videos I’m creating for my classes (F-You youtube auto-translate! Why must it take 73 clicks to find you?!?).

And for good measure: F-YOU New York Times app of doom, Facebook panic button, and [SAY IT WITH ME]:

F-THE-H out of you, Coronavirus.

Fuck all that, is what I’m saying.

I’m going to let my kids watch tv and tell my students the videos are delayed. I’m going to get a drink, lay on the couch, watch “Some Good News” and cry (all those “gratitude for healthcare workers” videos make me weep). Or maybe watch the Office and laugh. Or just close my eyes and pretend I’m on a beach far, far away from Zoom where the coronavirus does not thrive. And I’m gonna look like this, because F-YOU middle aged body!

Tomorrow I’ll re-engage my brain, hop back into the drivers seat and see where The ^Almost Daily Catalyst takes me.

What do you need to say f*uck it or F-You to?

I hope you take that break.

P.S. Are you committed to changing the world with your work? Don’t forget to sign up for the Almost Daily Catalyst where we send monthly articles and tools you can use straight to your inbox! Sign up here.

What’s a Mind, Anyway?

My posts for the past week boil down to one piece of critical advice: During the coronavirus crisis (and, actually, always) it’s very important for you to realize that you have CHOICE about what you think, what you feel, and how you act.

Not total choice, obviously, but a heck of a lot more choice than most of us are exercising.

And listen, I’ve heard every version of how that’s not true:

“Some people have depression and anxiety or worse, Amanda. They aren’t at choice about how they feel.” They have more choice than they know, and I want them to see if they can find some. Will their choices make them feel all better? NO. But I’m not going to let that stop me from encouraging them to do what they can to feel more at peace TODAY.

“Some people have lost their jobs and have no money and nobody is hiring right now, Amanda. What do you want them to do?’ I want them to know that even SUPER hard times don’t have to be the only thing happening in your life. Where can you find joy? What delights you? How can you get a little bit of that TODAY?

“Some people are sad, angry, and frustrated, Amanda! And what’s wrong with that? You shouldn’t shame people who are feeling entirely rational, albeit negative emotions.” I would NEVER shame anyone for feeling badly.

And I never said that exercising your choice about how you think, feel, and act during the coronavirus would mean that you will feel great all the time.
How bizarre would that be? Our world is in crisis, people we know are sick (and maybe we will be, too), and there are real worries about how we are going to recover from this economic free fall. Being present and intentional often means feeling sad and angry and frustrated. That’s totally fine.

AND! Being present and intentional can also mean feeling grateful. It can involve laughter. Sometimes it means that you restrict your exposure to the news so you can be present with your kid without that crushed feeling in your chest. Sometimes it means that you tell your husband that “If pajamas are on my body, NO ONE WILL SPEAK about the coronavirus!” All of those things are allowed.

Being alive during a global crisis does not mean you have to BE in crisis.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

So, if that’s true and we have more choice than we realize, how do we go about exercising that choice? Or, said another way, how do we manage our minds so that we can live intentionally while feeling more peaceful?

At the center of that question, is another question: What is a mind?

There are actually a lot of answers to this question! In all the related fields (neuropsychology, personal development, meditation and hypnosis, etc.) every answer they come up with seems to be controversial! Which is kind of weird, when you think about how basic that question is.

Whenever that happens (which happens a lot in “the literature” around fundamental ideas), my go to strategy is to look at all the options and then come up with my own working definition and then see where it takes me. I’m always looking for the position that leads to the best advice about living an intentional and adventurous life.

Answers range from “your mind is your brain, obviously” to “your mind is your bridge to universal intelligence, obviously” and everything in between.

I like to think of the mind, most of all, as a workspace. This is where we go* to observe our world, navigate our emotions, make choices about our thoughts, and, well, exist.

Our mind is the only place that is entirely our own, so we have to take care of it.

In my theory (which I’ll someday give a name…) the workspace of the mind has three interwoven parts, each of which can be adjusted to support our ability to choose.

Mindset: These are the lenses that fall into place and color/frame the way we interpret what’s happening to us. Fundamentally, a mindset is a pattern of beliefs. Beliefs are ingrained thoughts. And thoughts are things we can choose. We’ll talk about how to be strategic about dismantling and strengthening our thoughts, beliefs, and mindsets so that you (and not the mindless status quo) can be the boss of what happens in your mind.

Mindscape: It’s helpful to think of your mindscape as the almost physical space occupied by your mind. Is your mind crammed so full of half processed trauma, disorganized memories and repetitive thoughts that you want to punch me in the face every time I tell you have a choice about what you think?

Or do you maintain your mindscape so there’s room for introspection, innovation, and creativity? We will discuss what kind of maintenance will help you make/keep your mindscape a place you want to spend time.

Mndmanager: If you’ve ever taken a cognitive development class, the mindmanager is a lot like the “central executive.” Or Joy, from inside out. Or Genius, from Herman’s head.Your mindmanager has shit to do, and only some of them involve your conscious brain. It’s for our mindmanger that we need to engage in self-care. And if you struggle to believe you are good enough, It’s your mindmanager who needs a bit of an identity upgrade.

When you understand the pieces of your mind, you are better able to intervene with intentional choice when things go a little crazy around you. And that’s our goal.

*PS- It’s totally wrong to say we “go” there. We ARE there. The fact that there is a “there” means that we “are.” Our mind IS our physical existence. Without our minds we are either nothingness or released back to universal intelligence/God or whatever it is that happens after death. But for this life, this crisis, this moment in time, our mind is where we are. Let’s take care of it, shall we?

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There’s Always Hope in the Humans

On Friday we discussed how to counteract the negativity and fear that threatens to consume us by tapping into the beauty around you. You may not remember, but beauty was part of a three-part list, along with hope and opportunity.

Just like beauty, hope is available to us at all times if we choose them to see it.

If you’ve had even one “emo” moment in your life, you’ve probably had this two-part thought:

“What is hope, anyway, and isn’t it entirely naïve to be hopeful?”

This usually comes up when you’ve experienced a moment of chaotic unpredictability [Like that time the entire world decided to work from home (including the kids!), except for the doctors and nurses who HAD to go to work (but without fundamental protective gear) because a highly contagious virus was on the loose.] At times like that, you begin to seriously worry that things “Won’t be OK.”

One of our sincerest hopes is that things “Will be OK.” Hope, generally, is the feeling that we can anticipate how things will go, and that if we do things right they will go “our way.” When things start to spiral out of control, we “lose all hope” and when things start to line up and follow the pattern we declare ourselves “cautiously optimistic.”

The beating heart of hope is predictability.

Most people oscillate between believing in order (and feeling hope) and believing in chaos (and feeling at the mercy of shifting tides). While some people land in a stubborn commitment to one or the other, insisting either that “everything happens for a reason” or that life is inherently chaotic so “we all better get what we came for (YOLO!),” I land somewhere else.

If the heart of hope is predictability and “the world” appears to be driven by chaos, then the question for me becomes: What CAN we count on to be predictable?

I’ve spent the last two decades in a concerted study on the question of what it means to be human and I’ve found a few things.

Here’s one thing I’ve found over and over: Human psychology is complex… but it is also extremely predictable.

There are a few forces that run so strongly through humans that they replicate again and again, even as circumstances shift and veer around us.

Said another way: no matter what is going on with the world, humans be human.

One very strong piece of human nature is about navigating the tension between connection to others and personal expression. In fact, much of human history (including our day-to-day lives right now) can be understood as we navigating this tension as the world does its thing around us.

What this means is that when we are tapped into our greater selves* (which happens a lot in a crisis!), we will show up for each other and we will capture that experience for all of human history to come.

We are wired to help each other, to love each other, and to care for each other and so we will. We will feel empathy and love. We will want to entertain others so we can feel the relief of seeing them smile. Families will step up for each other, friends will chip in, and strangers will make other strangers face masks on their home sewing machine.

We are wired to express our unique perspective and so we will. Out of this will come voices that can correct the arc of history. Beautiful poems and songs and stories will emerge that make us stop and notice their truth. Facebook posts will surprise use with their absurdity and make us laugh out loud (an impulse so important that we had to shorten it for ease of use). Someone will find the words to make us breathless with anger, weep with relief, and sing with joy RIGHT NOW in the middle of the coronavirus.

This is our calling as humans, the first and only species to observe our own dance with emotion.

So, is it naïve to have hope? Of course not. Human beings are predictable- we will create order and safety for each other. We will watch what’s unfolding and we will raise the alarm and put out the call to do things better.

There will be love and empathy and connection, and there will be art, stories, jokes, and calls-to-arms; we will help each other and then we will tell each other our stories.

And that means that things will be OK.

*PS- For my cynics, yes every one of us will have moments when we aren’t tapped into our greater selves. We will supermarket sweep the grocery store, buy all the N95 masks so we can be safe at the grocery store and price gouge hand sanitizer like a jerk on Amazon. And then we will go home and hug our kids, call our mothers and tell a funny joke. Hope is everywhere if you choose to see it.

Beauty is everywhere if you choose to see it

On Wednesday we talked about how psychologists estimate that it takes 10 compliments to counteract a single critical comment, 10 exposures to beautiful, hopeful images to neutralize the fear of seeing a scary picture. This rule of 10 dictates that fear will draw you in at 10x the power of hope, beauty, and opportunity.

In practical terms, this means you need to surround and immerse yourself in proof that the world is, in fact, beautiful.

How can we do that?

First, what IS beauty? I’ve been thinking about this and my current definition is that beauty is the honest expression of emotion. Human history is the parade of one unprecedented thing after another that simultaneously pulls us towards each other and pushes us away from each other. The expression of how that feels IS BEAUTY.

We feel connection and beauty when our heart says “I know that feeling… despite our differences, we are the same.” And beauty isn’t all hugs and pollyanna hand-holding (though… bring it on!), it’s honesty about pain, loss, and rage as well as connection, pride, and even routine.

Beauty is EVERYWHERE… are you choosing to see it?

Here are some examples of the beauty I see:

Hope is beautiful. (The Best is Yet to Come, Sheppard)

Connection is beautiful. (Kiss You Slow, Andy Grammer)

Home is beautiful. (The Road Home, Thad Fiscella)

Forgiveness is beautiful. (It’s Quiet Uptown, Hamilton)

Parenting is beautiful. (Sara Bareilles, Everything Changes)

Anger is beautiful. (Who I am, Eminem)

Routine is beautiful. (Fiddler on the Roof)

Pride is beautiful. (Empire State of Mind)

Sadness is beautiful. (Chopin)

Observation is beautiful (Georgia O’Keeffe)

Contrast is beautiful (Joan Miro)

Detail is beautiful (My Brother)

What do you find beautiful?

Go into it, seek it out.

Immerse yourself in it and savor it.

You need beauty way more than fear right now.

But you have to choose it.

I hope you have a great weekend, and I’ll see you again on Monday.

The Opposite* of Fear is Presence

The opposite* of fear is not a lack of fear. The opposite* of fear is presence in the present.

Are you present to the person you are with?

Are you present to the intentions that you set?

The goal you are pursuing?

Are you present to the opportunity of now?

How would you know?

Well, if you ARE present in the present then there is something you can DO.

There is a way to concretely impact “the situation.” You can start to write, or smile at the person in front of you, or take a break and read a novel, or hop on zoom with a potential client and deliver value however you can.

When you’re fully in the present, “the situation” you’re thinking about is yours to work on and it’s grounded in the real world.

If you are, instead, present to FEAR then you feel like you are wandering.

• Wandering in the past or the future, worrying about what was or could be.
• Wandering through the cultural milieu, engaging with a deluge of opinions, feeling like you’re pushing your ideological stone uphill or joining in a growing chorus of the same idea over and over. You KNOW this feeling. When I wake up and I’m swimming with or against the cultural riptide, I know I’m either seeking a mob of my own or looking for a mob to fight. In both cases, I’ve been carried away by fear.
• Wandering through the land of “what if” looking for ways to self-sabotage whatever peace you’ve created or excuses to keep you stuck in fear.

When you find yourself carried away by fear and absorbed by the tides of panic, your goal is to bring yourself back to presence in the present.

• How can you connect with someone real? Give a hug, say thank you, send a funny gif. Remember that in the present moment you can always be a force for good by seeing and appreciate someone else. That’s the fear-erasing power of love.
• How can you advance your intentions? What goal are you hoping to get closer to?
  /TANGENT/ I know that it can be tiring to hear that you need a goal when you are exhausted simply by surviving. It can feel like a lot of pressure or even “victim shamey.”
  But that’s a big, hairy misunderstanding.
  Now is not the time to write a book (or whatever) not because you SHOULD write a book. Now is the time to write a book (or whatever) because you’ve always wanted to write a book! Your goals are FOR YOU. And if you are scraping by on the fumes of your resilience right now then your goal needs to be something like “to have more joy, rest, and ease in my day to rebuild my resilience and be the mother/wife/roommate/friend I always intend to be.”
• How can you give yourself a little bit of luxury, grace, relief, and relaxation? Remember that when you are in the present moment you can always be e force for good by seeing and appreciating yourself in a concrete way.

Finally, I want to set some clear expectations: there’s a very good chance (like 99.9%) that you WILL BE carried away by fear; I get carried away at least once a day.

• It’s like I snap out of a trance and I’m knee-deep in the comment thread of an internet fight where therapists are slamming each other over “ethics”…
• or researching how many cases there are in Missouri (where, I do not, in any way, live)…
• or shopping in a panicked, Super Market Sweeps way on Amazon for the pens and powder and books and air conditioner filters that I MIGHT NEED.

It’s going to happen and then happen again.

Fear isn’t an artifact of this moment. As I said yesterday, there is nothing more ALIVE than feeling fear. We’ve been afraid since the day we were born and our last day on earth will be marked by fear as well. And that’s a good thing- fear is an important, life-saving part of life.

But that doesn’t mean that we have to be held hostage by fear against our will, our intentions, and our goals.

Every day, as many times as it happens, we can recognize where we are (wandering in the fields of fear), and then ground back down into the present through expressing love, pursuing an intention in a concrete way, and indulging in some self-care.

… If those feel a bit hard to access in the throes of the coronavirus press conference (note: stop watching those), then go primitive and forcibly push yourself back into your body. The fastest way out of the fields of fear is to experience your body in the now: do some jumping jacks, dance, run in place, shake it off, watch a Zumba video, do some yoga, walk the dog, try to do a single push up, see how long you can plank, ride your bike or “JUMP JUMP.”

… If that doesn’t feel accessible, SHUT YOUR SHIT DOWN. Meditation, hypnosis or a good old fashioned nap is in order, immediately.

… If that doesn’t feel accessible then you’ve probably pushed yourself a bit too far: take a hot shower, put on the sad movie, make some popcorn, have a good cry, and fall asleep in your middle of the day pajamas.

(PS- All of this applies to you mamas and poppas out there, no one needs to be better resourced than the parents, so take care of yourself).

My point is this: you can always find a path out of the fields of fear.

But you have to choose it.

PS- *Opposite is not the right word… counterweight is better… or opposing force.

Manage your Fear to Hope Ratio

Yesterday we discussed how there is nothing more fundamentally “alive” than fear. In fact, it’s fear that keeps us alive despite the tigers, freezing cold, and food scarcity that have historically plagued our species. Perhaps this is why fear is so much more powerful than hope.

Psychologists estimate that it takes 10 compliments to counteract a single critical comment, 10 exposures to beautiful, hopeful images to neutralize the fear of seeing a scary picture. The rule of 10 dictates that fear will draw you in at 10x the power of hope, beauty, and opportunity. During times of overwhelming fear, this means that you need to PROACTIVELY reduce the number of exposures you have to the fear and intentionally jack up your exposure to hope, beauty and opportunity.

How can we do that? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Remove the news apps from your phone and time box your news exposure. You can get everything you need in 5 minutes once a day! I always follow what I call my “daily heart attack” with some intentional. I find doing something like this helpful. This is one I do with my kids sometimes when the state of their world seems to have them tied up in knots. For them, that usually means that they have to stop playing video games, but I feel the same sense of frozen panic reading the news. There are endless meditation, hypnosis and flow apps in the world. Try some out; you’re going to need a way to walk yourself back from the edge.

Figure out your strategy for social media and stick to it. My social media strategy is similar to my news strategy. Limit and time box. I went in right at the beginning of this mess and put my most panicked friends on mute. They need to be who they are but my love for them doesn’t obligate me to be exposed to their fears in real-time. I go on once a day and go through my list: I check the coach and therapist groups so that I can see what today’s panic is about so I’m keeping my finger on the pulse of my tribe. Then I check out a few groups that are consistent sources of joy and constructive energy, liking and commenting enough to keep people encouraged, and then I log off.

This doesn’t have to be your strategy!

You can choose to check it every hour on the hour. You can check it once a week. You can put up a header image that says “Sorry I’ll be at the beach during COVID-19” and not look back. It’s entirely up to you and what you want from your day.

More than anything, I just want you to make some choices and be intentional.

Replace news and social media WITH something. A vacuum can’t survive in the infinite universe, so you know it’s not going to work in your life! By this I mean, you have to replace a habit with a habit.

Otherwise, what will you do in the bathroom, in bed, while your kids are off getting the crayons, and when you just want to sit and veg out?

You need a plan for those moments, too. I suggest you make yourself a list of approved websites, a few youtube playlists filled with cat videos or Zumba videos, and download some feel-good books on your kindle. Now, instead of endlessly scrolling through the New York Times App, I read some of whatever feel-good novel I’m reading.

Yesterday I real “The Art of Inheriting Secrets” (free with Prime Reading!) and it was exactly the escapist feel-good novel I was looking for.

What’s your jam?

Should you read Dirk Gently? Abe Lincoln, Zombie Hunter? Or Great Expectations for the 100th time? Whatever works like candy for your brain, get it downloaded and in place!

Tomorrow we will dive deeper into how to counteract fear with the opposite of fear: presence in the present.

For now, I encourage you to be as intentional as possible with your ratio of fear to hope. Nothing matters more.

Fear Has the Gravity of a Black Hole

Yesterday I wrote to you with a new Coaching With Gloria video about how you get to choose whether you live in a competitive world or a collaborative world. But it’s not only your beliefs about the competitive/collaborative nature of the world that you get to choose and then create by the way you show up, but it’s also way more than that. Two other huge reality markers that you get to choose and create are fear v. presence and scarcity v. abundance.

There is nothing more fundamentally “alive” than fear. All sentient beings have fear, even the single-cell organism in the petri dish will pull away from sudden bright light. And, the more complicated the brain involved the sneakier fear becomes; by the time you get to human beings (Oh, ye of the prefrontal cortex, most complicated brain structure on the planet) fear can show up in literally any costume. Here are some of fear’s favorite characters:

• Right in the middle of the best sales call of your life and become suddenly consumed by worry that your potential client will say “No”? Meet Self Sabotage!
• Finally get a little time to relax and can’t sit still or settle your mind? Introducing The Fret!
• Make a little money and feel, if anything, more worried about cash? Enter the Scarcity Mist!
• Start writing the long-form project you’ve dreamed about and two weeks in begin to freak out about how you’ll handle time-suck of travel during the book tour, how someone has already written this book, and how you’ll be so old when it finally gets done? You’re intimately familiar with Hurry!
• Get an unbelievable lucky break but turn it down because your family needs you and there simply isn’t time? Here’s one of my favorite fear characters, Guilt!”

But these are somewhat subtle compared to the way fear is showing up right now:

• Quarantined with your family during a global health pandemic while our economy goes into free fall? Meet COVID-19!

Given how disruptive fear’s more subtle pseudonyms are (like hurry, worry, and guilt), it’s 100% natural that we feel downright pursued by fear during this time. And if we lean into it, even a little, we can be overwhelmed by it and carried away. I log in to the New York Times App just to “check the pulse of the nation” and before I know it, I’m posting and commenting and researching and double-checking, off an on for HOURS, only later realizing that another day has passed and I haven’t made any progress on my book.

That’s one of MY stories of being drawn by the black hole magnetism of fear. It’s natural… and its important that I not beat myself up about it. It’s equally important that I recognize that behavior for what it is: a FEAR response.

It’s not always true that obsessively tracking the coronavirus is only a fear response- if I was a policymaker or a journalist that would be different, I’d need to know every detail that was available.

But I’m not.

I’m a professor, so it’s my job to know my university’s policies and supports, and then teach my students to the best of my ability online. It’s not my job to monitor exactly how many N95 masks are available on Amazon.

And I’m a coach for coaches and therapists, so while I will think deeply about how the coronavirus will change how people will decide to get the help they need.. there’s no need for me to engage in an intense online conversation about how much social distancing is enough social distancing. When I wake up and realize that I’m fully outside of my lane, I know that fear has carried me away.

Fear is sneaky: it feels rational and so easy to justify. You can live in fear and no one will judge you. Especially not me! But just know that fear will steal your joy, compromise your progress, and convince you that there was no other way.

But that is not true. You can manage yourself (your time, your mind, and your exposure) and experience far less fear than you do now.

That’s 100% true.

But you have to choose it.

And right now, as a tsunami of entirely justifiable fear sits ready to carry you away at any moment, is the time to start. Starting tomorrow and through Friday I’m going to share the three things I’ve learned about fear that help me minimize its impact and stay intentional:

• Tomorrow we will talk about how fear will draw you in at 10x the power of hope, beauty, and opportunity and what to do about that.
• Thursday we will talk about how the opposite of fear is not a lack of fo fear, the opposite of fear is presence in the present.
• Friday we will discuss how to seek joy without guilt, and how to be a force for sanity and peace at a time when the world sorely needs it.

More tomorrow,

Both, And: What We Need Now

Have you noticed how unprecedented all of this is? We’ve never had a global pandemic like this one, or a president like this one, and we’ve never been able to see into each other’s lives with the clarity the way that we can right now because of the internet. It’s all true, what we say: These are crazy, unprecedented, uncharted waters.

And, yet.

There’s a lot about this that feels familiar to me. We are still people, attracted to fear at 10x the force that we are attracted to light… and yet we yearn for proof of connection and compassion. We want to be seen and heard and loved… and sometimes, we want to be left alone. We want to feel agency, we want to feel important, and we want to contribute… while at the same time we want to let go, hide away and be left to our Netflix and Switch and novels. This “navigating equally matched competing forces” is one of the things that make us human, in my mind.

Being drawn by these competing forces within us usually leave us uncertain and unsure. What’s the “right” thing to do next? When we try to “get it right” and not be “too much of one or the other” we end up in a gross grey middle ground where we just worry and we don’t act:

• I want to be left alone AND feel connected, so I’ll just watch from the outside and yearn.
• I want to be hopeful but also rational and realistic and ahead of the (flattening) curve so I’ll just sit and worry about whether I’m being the right amount of hopeful.
• I want to feel agency and I want to contribute and yet, I want to avoid overwhelm and burnout and wasted time and energy… so I’ll wait for the perfect time and opportunity even though I know that perfect doesn’t exist.

What do you want?

This is why we get so upset with question that begin with “What do you want?” What do you want for your business this year? What do you want to do during your quarantine? What do you want to create? Those questions stress us out!

We think that the answer is “I don’t know!” but really the answer is “I want two opposite things and that confuses me!”

It’s always true. It’s psychological physics: you will always want two things with equal and opposing force.

You probably feel this strongly when you are offered the chance to work with a coach. You like the idea of “getting some support and growing your business” but you are also equally drawn to the idea that “it’s too crazy right now and I just can’t commit to anything.” So you stay in the grey zone, worrying; not signing up but not saying no, just waiting for the clock to run out.

And that’s probably happening on a million levels with a million things in your life… and the clock will run out. The program will close, the coach will move on. And you’ll stay where you are… but that’s the least of it.

The coronavirus will eventually run through and you’ll go back to work with or without your website rewritten.

Your kids will eventually leave home with or without the travel you wanted to do with them.

And, eventually, your time on earth will end, too; with or without the success and fun you were hoping for.

There’s another way, thank God.

Rather than trying to balance these two forces by meeting in the gross grey middle where worry reigns supreme, what if you allowed yourself to pursue both of them? What if you committed equally to growing your business and taking care of yourself? What if you pursued connection alongside alone time?

What if you recognized that you could alternate, rather than compete?

See, it’s the model that’s wrong, not the desire.

It’s our perceptions that have us trapped and stuck, not our realities. It’s true that this is an unprecedented time AND a deeply familiar one.

Both are true.

It’s a time of opportunity AND a time of worry.

It’s a time for connection AND a time for deep personal reflection.

It’s a time for supporting others AND watching Netflix in our pajamas for 8 hours straight.

You don’t have to choose, despite how your brain wants to trap you in its maze.

You can choose the Both, And.

I’m writing this to you AND me. I want all of us to wake up again to our hopes and dreams and goals and desires right now.

All of them, even if they seem to compete.

I am sitting here every day arguing with myself about writing my book, trapped in the competing thought “there’s no time with the kids at home” and “now is always the right time.”

I’m going to work to be 100% present with the kids AND carve out time when I can write my book. Both, And.

As for you, you can grow your business AND take care of your family.

I encourage you to choose both, and right now.

Both, And Includes Rest

Before I go, I want to touch base briefly on the other side of our promised “Both, And.” I will absolutely encourage you to build your business (one side), but I will also hold you gently to a commitment to self-care. This has been a hectic week of uncertainty, vulnerability and shifting realities, one wave crashing over us after another. If you feel like you’ve been pummeled, you’re right. It’s time to rest.

Yesterday, I slept for 2 hours and then read Percy Jackson for 2 hours in my bed. My kids played grand prix after grand prix of Mario Kart. My husband went for a run. We all ate Trolls Oreos (OMGSOGOOD- I swear, there are pop rocks inside).

It’s what we needed.

What do you need?

What would feel like absolute, unequivocal gentleness? Absolute grace and kindness?

• Is there something soft you can feel, something delicious to taste?
• Can you watch your favorite movie or read your favorite book? Maybe the one that makes you cry every time if you need that (Dirty Dancing), or the one that makes you laugh every single time simply because it’s so unreasonable (Wedding Crashers)?
• Can you watch a Netflix Comedy Special (or episodes of The Office) and laugh?
• Can you leave the dishes, uncork the wine, light a candle, and dance?
• Can you do a Celtic Cross tarot reading and lose yourself in the interpretation?
• What can you do for yourself that would feel like a gift from the universe?

Do that.

I’m cheering for you: All of you.

Your business AND your heart.