The inspiration for this post is a series of conversations that I’ve had with friends and coaching clients in the last few days, with the common theme of ‘but where do I start?’ These are people who want to change and are up for doing the work, but they feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of action that they could potentially take to bring about that change. I understand that. I’ve been there, and it’s often been the single biggest reason for a paralysis that, in my case, has been known to last for years. I could really have used some good advice about where to start, and I have now learned (the hard way) a bit about where to start, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to pass it on.
Start with physical self-care
I know it’s boring. I know it sounds banal. But everything I’ve seen and experienced and learned has reinforced my conviction that this is the single biggest factor that contributes to well-being, by miles and miles and miles. Really it is. And not just well-being, but (perhaps more importantly for some) resources. If you want to do a lot of stuff and it feels too much, then it makes sense to start with the activities that are going to generate resources. In my experience (this is not science), nothing generates resources as quickly as physical self-care, and conversely nothing drains them as quickly as lack of self-care.
Physical self-care is easy to talk about and hard to do. My basic list is as follows: decent night’s sleep, minimal or no alcohol, reasonably healthy food, some exercise, something enjoyable most days and some time outside most days. That’s fine unless you’re an insomniac or the parent of a young child or you have an addictive personality or no money or you live in an inner city or work a very demanding job (or two jobs) or are disabled or a full-time carer or lots of other scenarios that I have not thought of.
So do what you can. Go to bed a bit earlier. Drink a bit less, or eat a bit less sugar or processed food. (If you have repeatedly tried and tried to do this and you can’t, you can get help here or here.) Go for a walk at lunchtime if you can. Five minutes will make a difference.
Ask yourself ‘what would I do if self-care were my absolute highest priority, because I absolutely knew that it was the cornerstone of getting everything else done and being okay?’ Then do about a hundredth of that. I do this for a living, darn it, and I still only do about a hundredth of the self-care that I’d like to do and think I ought to do. Self-care is hard and in general we’ve been doing the other thing for a very long time, and habits take a while to change, and we have lots of resistance, and we’re socialised to think self-care is self-indulgence, and we have lots of important things to do.
The important things in self-care are (a) being willing to make it a priority, and (b) letting a very small amount be enough. Both are hard, but very worthwhile. I’m putting it up here as number one because it truly will make the most difference.
Get some help
Help can come from anywhere. It doesn’t have to be professional help, although it can be. It doesn’t have to be new or external help – it can be a colleague or a friend or a family member. It doesn’t have to be a named person – it can be a blog post or Facebook status update. It doesn’t have to be someone you know. It doesn’t have to be only one person.
The important things about getting help are (a) being willing to ask for it, and (b) being willing to accept it. Both are hard.
I just wrote a long paragraph about the importance and the liberating value of truth-telling, and then I deleted it because, y’know, it’s obvious. This is not a step where instructions are useful. The problem is not figuring out what to do. The problem is actually doing it.
So just do what you can to move yourself as gently as possible to a place where asking for help would be easier. If you’re bad at showing vulnerability to people you know, seek help from people you don’t, and vice versa. Try practice runs. Watch Brene Brown’s inspirational TED talk on shame and how to become free of it.
And keep reminding yourself that we are not meant to do all this stuff alone. We are community animals. We tend to like helping people, so asking someone for help is likely to be rewarding for them. Asking for and accepting help is natural, not broken. It’s a sign of strength, not failure.
Practise patience
Change does not usually happen fast. This is a shame.
I am very good at making project plans that involve my becoming a perfectly competent, wise and serene human being within about ten days. These plans tend not to work, at which point I get very pissed off and demoralised and start thinking about hitting the chocolate again, because I feel overwhelmed and the mission seems impossible. This is rubbish and unhelpful thinking.
In my experience, the overwhelm comes not from the amount I think I have to do, but from the time in which I think I have to do it. Right now, I’m paying attention to doing good creative work on my thesis, and managing my time better, and getting more exercise, and rehabilitating persistent bad health, and connecting to a sense of purpose in my wider professional life, and dealing with uncertainty in my personal life, and getting over my fear of failure, and developing a better relationship with my body, and probably other stuff too.
If I try and do all this by Christmas, I’m stuffed.
If I take a bit of action every day and let it be enough, I’ll get there eventually on all of them, and I don’t have to postpone being happy until I’ve finished.
Letting go of my timescales for change is one of the single most useful things I have ever done. In fact, thinking about it, that was the point at which I actually started to change, because I was letting go of what was paralysing me.
Patience is not easy. It takes work and (ironically) it takes a while. But as timescales stretch out, possibilities become tremendous.
Surf your energy
Here are some of the things that I could be doing that would be better uses of my time than pissing around on the Internet:
* Meditation
* Gentle physiotherapy exercises
* Swimming
* Writing
* Working on my thesis
* Working on wider professional stuff (e.g. reading that isn’t directly related to my thesis but is connected to personal growth or wellbeing or system dynamics)
* Playing the ukulele
* Making collages
* Playing with the cats
* Clearing out the attic
* Going to bed early
* Interviewing
* Spending time with family and friends
* Watching back episodes of Strictly Come Dancing It Takes Two
* Organising my archived emails (and, in particular, amalgamating my lists of PhD-related memos and actions)
* Ordering papers and books from the library
* Food shopping and menu planning
Note that not all these activities are productive. So what is the difference between pissing around on the Internet and watching Strictly? Simply that the former drains my energy, whilst the latter builds it.
I tend to spend a lot of time pissing around on the Internet because it gets to 8.30pm and I can only remember the items on the list that feel like work and I’m out of energy for work. If I kept the list with me, I’d probably be able to find something on it that felt attractive at the time, and do a bit of that. And then I’d have more energy to do something else.
Paying attention to energy has really made a difference to what I do, and to how I coach. Asking the question ‘what do I have the energy for?’ or ‘what will build my energy now?’ seems to be much more productive than ‘what ought I to be doing?’ I get more done, and I see people getting more done, and we feel better because we have more energy and we’re not putting ourselves under pressure when we’re out of resources. Sometimes all I can do is play with a cat or two, but even this does more for me than checking and rechecking my Twitter feed.
If this feels overwhelming, then I have massively screwed up this post. What I am trying to say is that you can start more or less anywhere if you do it with care for yourself. The idea is to take the actions that will make it easier for you to take more actions, rather than the ones that are too hard or too painful and lead to stasis. It’s like going to the gym for five minutes rather than an hour and a half. It doesn’t feel like much, but you’re far more likely to go back than if you try and run a marathon the first day. Be slow, be kind and be gentle. It will happen. It won’t happen as quickly as you would like, but it will happen.
October 31, 2011 at 1:43 pm |
(nods) I completely agree with everything you say here, not only in the sense of it sounding good when you say it, but also in the sense of having arrived at basically the same conclusions on my own.
It is clear to me, though, that there’s a difference between the state where I know these things and act accordingly, and the state where I know these things and don’t act accordingly.
Which, well, duh, right? Of course there’s a difference: I do or don’t act accordingly. But that’s not what I mean. It’s increasingly clear to me that that’s a symptom of something else, and what that something else is is not yet clear to me.
To some degree it’s self-perpetuating, of course: if I do the work today, I’m more likely to do the work tomorrow, and if I don’t, I’m less likely. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the whole picture.
October 31, 2011 at 1:46 pm |
I think the point of this is to try and raise awareness about the best ways to tip the state from not acting into acting, where best means “most likely to work”, or “easiest”, for a psychological rather than practical value of easy.