If you hate affirmations, you have three choices right now. 1. Hate-read! That’s always fun. 2. Stop now and spend the next ten minutes reading or doing something else. 3. Activate your curiosity and hear me out.
You’re right, affirmations are dumb. It’s dumb to lie to yourself and try to hypnotize yourself into something that you know isn’t true. That’s not how I use affirmations, though. I use them, but first I put them through my process of inquiry. Aren’t you lucky that I’m going to share it with you? (Here you could practice an affirmation: I AM LUCKY, and ask yourself whether you believe that is generally true, or only just now). I am happy to make affirmations about my personal values, because I’m reminding myself of things I believe are important. I AM PATIENT, I remind myself, the few times that I need a reminder. I value patience and I practice it. I’m fine with giving myself credit for that. On the other hand, I would not do the affirmation I AM BEAUTIFUL, because I don’t give a care. That’s not a quality that matters to me. In fact, I find the concept annoying. I also absolutely hate the expression “comfortable in my own skin” because every time I hear it, it makes my skin crawl. Like, what are the other options? Comfortable out of your skin? Comfortable in someone else’s skin?? I fit the description - I have a fantastic body image and a very high regard for my physical self - (and see how I sneaked in a few extra affirmations there) - but I certainly don’t need to use other people’s preferred language to express that about myself. I will be delighted when this phrase falls out of favor and I can quit hearing it. That’s another step in my affirmation interrogation. If I generally like the concept of someone else’s affirmation, I will rephrase it and adopt it for myself. It’s poetic. Maybe one person might respond better to an affirmation in the form of a haiku, or a request, such as MAY I BE PATIENT or: I’m getting better At tolerating these jerks Though I don’t want to. I AM A POET! Argue that one if you like. I say if you claim to be an artist, then you are one. Presto change-o. I also think affirmations work very well as missives of gratitude, such as I FREAKING LOVE TACOS or THIS IS MY FAVORITE! Hang around me long enough and you’ll find that I say stuff like this all the time. Pro tip: You can do this stuff without ever publicly declaring that you are doing it, or making any kind of issue out of it. This is especially important if you find yourself amongst naysayers or those who describe themselves as “fluent in sarcasm.” Ha, now there’s an affirmation if I ever heard one! It comes up in dating profiles all the time. I AM FLUENT IN SARCASM. *snort* (That one is definitely not mine. I think sarcasm is very lazy, mean, and not at all funny). The thing about affirmations is that for most of us, our self-image is far behind where we are actually presenting in the world. Try to compliment a woman - any woman! - and watch what happens. She will fight you. It’s like we’ve collectively decided that there’s a moral hazard in graciously accepting someone’s compliment. That’s the same feeling that makes us so squirmy about affirmations. It feels icky and gross. We’re much better at the nasty kind of negative self-talk, such as: * i am an idiot * Or * i suck at this * Or * i should never have come here * If anyone comes along and tries to talk us out of these dreadful thoughts, we feel compelled to argue our point. Please, let me explain to you in meticulous detail just why exactly I suck so much. I’ve spent some time convincing myself that what is truly important is that this other person, this tricky complimenter, is reaching out and trying to make a connection. Rejecting a compliment is more than just rejecting a gift, it’s rejecting a person and telling them that their opinion and their act of caring means nothing to you. Also, what if they’re right? What if, when they tell you YOU’RE SO SWEET or MMM, YOU’RE THE BEST HUGGER, what if they’re right? What if you allow that factual statement to define you such that you bring more of that desirable quality into the culture? What if compliments are people’s preferred way of building a better world? What if they’re... a performance evaluation? This is how I got myself into trouble. I started forcing myself to do public speaking because I knew myself to be a physical coward. <— Negation alert! Part of public speaking is learning to accept evaluations. You have to accept that if people who don’t know each other give the same feedback, then objectively it’s true. For instance: “Nobody can hear you in the back of the room.” Okay, thanks for telling me! I steadied myself to hear a constant barrage of difficult feedback, because I like to challenge and push myself [yeah, you know what that was just now, *nod*]. Instead, people kept telling me: YOU ARE SO FUNNY! Dang. Now how am I supposed to get my head around that? I didn’t agree with this assessment, but I kept hearing it. People from entirely different clubs would say the exact same thing, over and over, that I had “such a dry sense of humor.” I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but what am I going to do, call these people a bunch of liars? I had to accept that whatever it was I was doing, the audience liked it and wanted more of it. Who was I to refuse? As an affirmation, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I AM SO FUNNY, because that’s practically inviting my inner self to step up with an attack and a negation. I can, though, tell myself that my strong points in speaking are humor, research, and informational speeches. What comes out of that kind of affirmation is a resume. It leads directly to a dispassionate and objective assessment of your marketable skills. That in turn leads to better jobs and contributing at a higher level. Is it fair for a surgeon to affirm that I CAN SAVE LIVES? Is it fair to say something like I AM ACCURATE or I AM CAREFUL or I WORK HARD? Can we grudgingly allow ourselves to admit, secretly and in private, that maybe we’re not 100% terrible? If we come across an affirmation with which we disagree, shouldn’t we ask ourselves why we feel that it is not true? Something like I AM WORTHY or I DESERVE TO BE HAPPY? This is how I use affirmations. I introduce something that is new to my self-concept, something that objectively seems to be true. I talk myself into why this is true and why it matters that I agree with it. It’s allowed because we’re allowed to grow and change. In fact, we’re supposed to, partly because it makes life better for other people. Whatever you are, be a good one. “Don’t overthink it!” I hear this a lot in my martial arts classes. True to form, now I’m overthinking overthinking. Or am I? I’m getting my head around the difference between athletes and people like me.
It’s also the difference between anyone who is “natural” at anything and those who aren’t. What am I doing in class that qualifies as “overthinking”? I’m asking questions when I’m doing something wrong, for instance trying to block a head shot and instead smacking myself in the face. What “everyone else” is doing is practicing the block over and over. Makes sense, right? The part that doesn’t really make sense is why an otherwise intelligent person would keep showing up in a room only to make hundreds of mistakes and punch herself in the eye with a boxing glove. This is the essence of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. I’m in the room because I believe I can be taught, eventually, despite all evidence to the contrary. I believe it is necessary to my wellbeing to push myself to learn new things. I believe strength comes from facing obstacles and overcoming them. “Everyone else” is there for more or less the same reasons: enjoying the difficult workout, needing an outlet for intense competitive drive and physicality, or simply loving martial arts culture. Why are my fellow students grasping things so much more quickly than I do? A young man in my classes hit upon it the other day. He’s young enough to be my son and he started training as a beginner around the time I got into the advanced class. He’s already better than I am. “Did you do sports in school?” I explained that when I was in school, girls weren’t allowed to play sports because Title IX wasn’t being enforced. The only option for us was girls’ softball, but that was a league sport. “That makes no sense,” he said, mystified, and then explained why he had asked. He had two female friends who wanted him to teach them how to skateboard. One got it right away, and she had a sports background. The other, a musician, struggled terribly. He saw it as a matter of time spent rather than a matter of aptitude. I’ve thought about this for a long time, and it’s interesting that it would be obvious to a young person. My husband, for instance, started on athletics as a preschooler. He can’t even remember exactly when he got on the swim team. It’s just always been a part of his life. He participated in every possible sport offered in his region. Does swimming at age five have anything to do with swinging a sword at age forty? Evidently! What all these “natural” athletes have that I don’t is a track record. (Sometimes literally on the track team!). They were up and moving their bodies at a younger age. Every year of our lives, these “natural” athletes have spent a significant part of their day in motion while I sat on my butt reading a book. They acquired what I have to learn. It did NOT come “naturally” - it came from deliberate practice. It came from doing different things as children. It wasn’t always even their choice; their parents may have pressured them and insisted that they do stuff they deeply loathed doing. In some cases, they’ve built a different physical framework than I have. For instance, my thirteen-year-old training partner is shockingly heavy for her size. If someone told me she had a titanium skeleton, I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s been practicing martial arts since the age of three, and her bones are undoubtedly denser than those of another child. Her body composition is also probably much more muscular and lower in fat. These “natural” athletes have been building better cardiovascular fitness all this time. By ‘fitness’ I mean that exercise actually grows more blood vessels and expands the lungs, among other changes. While I was sitting around reading for thousands of hours, I was not building that same infrastructure. The biggest difference is in proprioception, I’m sure of it. My classmates are able to watch something demonstrated once, maybe twice, and then copy it. I watch the same movements and I’m completely befuddled. I have to see the same motions at least five times before I start to get it. Often I’ll misremember whether to go left or right. I have trouble knowing where my body parts are. I can only seem to track three out of four limbs. If I’m moving both legs and grabbing someone, my other hand seems to float off on its own. After a year I’m still being constantly reminded to keep my hands up. In my mind, I am! I can’t tell when my butt is sticking out. It feels like motions that should be in 3D are only 2D for me. What I’m worst at is moving with my face blocked, when I can’t see what I’m doing. What I have is like being tone-deaf, which I’m not, or having a tin ear for languages, which I don’t. Colorblind, I’m not either. I’m fairly good at yoga, probably because I’ve spent so long in two dozen familiar poses over the years. I’m competent at ballroom dancing because I went to the kind of dance school where you drill the box step hundreds of times and learn where to put your arms separately. What I’m telling myself is that I’m already good at certain things, because I spent time on them when I was younger, and I’m not yet good at other things, because they are new to me. I seem to be overthinking things in class because I lack the facility to copy what I see. This is strange to sporty types who have done it all their lives. They can’t understand why not everyone can do it. They don’t understand why everyone isn’t like them. They’ve never experienced being awkward or inept in the kinetic world. To them, it isn’t a subject of study. This is part of why I stay in a class where objectively I don’t belong, because I have as much to teach as I have to learn. If they can teach me, they can teach anyone. The main visible difference between a child’s bedroom and an adult’s bedroom is that kids leave stuff strewn all over the floor. Adults have stepped on enough LEGO and other small toys that we prefer an open field. We appreciate the luxury of walking barefoot across a room without getting punctured by a tiny plastic accessory. Children use these items to mark their territory, assert their aesthetics, avoid boring chores, and also because they don’t know how to do otherwise.
“The floor is lava” is a game we used to play as kids. It’s the sort of thing one child teaches another, like all the rude little verses we call back. “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” The point of “the floor is lava” is that you have to jump around on the furniture, and if you touch the floor, then you fell in the hot lava. It’s a really exciting excuse to hop on the couch. One of the reasons kids will tolerate having stuff all over the floor is that they are nimble enough they don’t really need a floor at all. In a narrow enough hallway, they’ll crawl up the walls. Another reason kids tolerate having a messy floor is that they have a lot of really small toys. This is a function of culture, of what’s available to buy and own. It’s also a problem created almost entirely by adults. Kids don’t have any money and they can’t drive. All of their stuff, their messy messy stuff, came from THE PARENTS and their ilk. Yes, kids will bring home pebbles and pine cones, but it’s a duty of parenting to explain why that stuff belongs in the natural world and why it isn’t fun to step on stuff barefoot in the dark. It’s also up to the parents to be a filter between affordable materialism and a livable space in the home. If you don’t want your kids to make a mess, quit bringing them tiny toys. Set boundaries with the grandparents. Sit down with them and sort and purge a few times a year. Teach them what the heck is meant by the mysterious directive, “Clean your room.” What children have in common with my people, the adult chronically disorganized folks of the world, is that they all struggle with categorizing things. Sorting and grouping is challenging for them. They don’t know what to do or how to do it. They have no idea what ‘done’ looks like. This is something they can learn, but not something they can ever be expected to figure out on their own. That’s where an organizer like me comes in. I understand that they have all the creativity, intelligence, and desire to please that they could ever need. All they need is someone to patiently walk them through how to sort things into categories, many times, many times, until they start to understand. They also start to be supported by a visible, clearly marked system. The room itself starts to show what to do and how to do it. My people tend to have stuff on their floors, just like little kids do, because of a series of reasons. They don’t see it - especially in the bathrooms, where most people with vision problems are not wearing their glasses or contact lenses. They aren’t looking for it, because “bare floors” is not a metric in their world. There may be a lot of boxes and large furniture and stacks and piles obscuring the small objects that have fallen to the floor. They may have cats or other pets who climb and jump and knock things to the floor and carry things off in their naughty mouths. They may have physical issues, like knee or back pain, that prevent them from bending or kneeling. They may simply be struggling with depression. Mostly, though, they’ve just reached adulthood without anyone teaching them the painstaking process of categorizing the small items. Since the floor is always scattered with small objects, it never gets vacuumed. Because it never gets vacuumed, cleaning the floors is never a task on the schedule. Because cleaning the floors is never on the timeline, every object that hits the floor stays there. This is how the problem compounds over time. My people tend to be bright and creative, yet also pessimistic and prone to fatalism. Their reaction to stress and drama is not “time to do something about this” but rather “oh well, oh dang, not again, why me.” My people tend to catastrophize and make problems seem worse than they are because they believe they are powerless. This mindset is compounded by the chaos in their physical surroundings. They are unskilled at estimating how long it takes to do things. They often see chores and other aversive tasks, like financial planning, cooking, or exercising, as moral issues or personal failings or character flaws rather than simple practical jobs to be done. They’ll cling to the same housekeeping techniques their grandparents used. In their minds, “cleaning” or “housework” takes days, it’s physically exhausting, it’s incredibly boring and humiliating, and it must be done alone, in deep silence. (When I was a kid, housework meant we had company coming later in the day, and that meant party food. It wasn’t that we liked dusting or cleaning our rooms, it was that we knew the clock was ticking toward chips ‘n’ dip or pizza and movie time). Another way to look at it is that tiny toys and other objects don’t need to be picked up one by one, while crawling on your hands and knees. There are three fast and easy ways to do it, if you do it yourself. One is to stand up and use the top edge of a mop to scrape all the stuff into a pile. (You can also buy an object called a “toy rake” to do this job). Another way is to kneel on the floor with a magazine or a child’s board book in each hand. Use the bindings as scraper tools, like windshield wipers, and scoop all the tiny toys toward you. The third way is to buy a robot vacuum and let it pick up the tiny toys in its ashtray, so you can shake them out afterward. With kids involved, you can set a timer and make toy pickup into a game. It’s also important to have a sorting system that is clear and obvious, a system they can reach and that they are old enough to easily understand. Praise the behaviors you want, reward the results that you like on a regular schedule, support the system so it continues to work, but understand that punishment, lectures, and blame are demotivating for children and exhausting for you. With a bare floor, you can do a lot. You can dance around and do the Sound of Music twirl. You can play and wrestle with your pets and your kids. You can get down and relax with some yoga stretches. You can pace back and forth. You can stumble around at night without hurting your foot in the dark. If you drop an earring or an aspirin, you can spot it and pick it up. A bare floor is an asset, something that it’s easy to take for granted. If the floor is lava at your house, start imagining how you can start walking on it again. Mysteries surround so much in the workplace. One of these is why certain people get promoted and others don’t. Why are certain people chosen for certain projects while others are not? I have some insight about this. There’s this thing that I call “the meeting after the meeting.” If you weren’t there, you’d have no way to know about it.
There’s also always a “meeting before the meeting,” and you only know about that if you’re on the setup crew. The meeting before the meeting, and the meeting after the meeting, may or may not have some overlap. The first and most important factor for both of these meta-meetings is that the people involved are available at the key time. This may be because it’s their main priority, it may be because they’re merely interested enough, or it may be because of total coincidence. Any person who is cross-scheduled or too busy to come early/stay late is going to miss out, most likely through no fault of their own. I started to become aware of these meta-meetings when I was a young office assistant. As the person tasked with setting up tables and chairs, laying out handouts, making coffee, bringing in trays of breakfast pastries, and setting up catered lunches, I saw a lot. I saw that some people come to meetings early to stake out a favorite seat, review their notes, hide out, take calls, or set up presentations. I saw that other people hung around after the meeting because they couldn’t stop talking about a project or because it was their only chance to compare notes during a busy day. I had a broad awareness of who worked on which projects, because almost everyone on staff relied on me to help at various stages. I copy-edited and rewrote sections of technical documents. I collated giant stacks of binders. I ran packages up and downstairs, working to beat the clock before FedEx and UPS stopped by each afternoon. I took notes, interrupted meetings with phone message slips, and summoned people from their cubicles. I was everywhere. In many ways, I was also the resident bartender. People of every rank from every department would lay out their burdens of resentment, frustration, and wishes on my non-threatening underling shoulders. When you routinely bail people out on tight deadlines and do their scutwork, they either mistreat you or adore you. It takes about ten seconds to figure out who is in which group. The mean people never understand why the kind people get extra attention, or why their projects somehow wind up farther up the queue. (This also works at coffee shops, by the way). Years have gone by, and now I see side meetings from a different perspective. Inside groups are created because the people who always meet before the meeting have accumulated many extra hours together. They have more time to get to know each other. They have a longer track record of working together on mutually desirable goals. They have deeper trust and they feel more collegial. They share values along the lines of punctuality, organization, preparedness, and other qualities related to work ethic. The rest of us probably share values related to other, competing projects; obedience to a taskmaster; or anything else unrelated to what the people who meet before the meeting are doing. There is another inside group of people who meet after the meeting. Sometimes this group is created in reaction to the group that meets before the meeting. It can be like a rebel alliance. The post-meeting group lines up due to enthusiasm, but sometimes also to pushback against a new program. What are we going to do about this?? Sometimes the meeting after the meeting comes from ideation. Someone comes up with an appealing idea, someone else is on the same wavelength, and they can’t stop themselves from chattering about it. Others are drawn in by curiosity. If there’s anything that should be encouraged and supported in any organization, it’s the spontaneous ideation meeting. Unfortunately, the majority of people in the corporate world are not strong in ideation, and these are the people who tend to move into management. They regard spontaneous ideation meetings with suspicion, even disgust. Knock it off, you slackers. It’s been forty-five seconds and you should be back at your desks, grinding on predictable tasks in isolation. There’s also something here about nominal authority versus earned authority. The true leader of a group, the thought leader, is probably a natural change agent. This is why this unrecognized and uncrowned leader is so threatening to the established order. This is also why this person draws the instinctual loyalty of anyone who cares about the organization and major projects. What people want at work is to feel like their contribution matters in some way. They like hearing what happened as a result of their paper-pushing and grinding away at their task lists. They want to know that if they answered someone’s call or email, that response helped the other person to get something important accomplished. They want to know that the right things are getting done. Weirdly, people are often out of the loop on this cost-free, simple and easy type of communication. Tell people why they’re doing what they’re doing. It got made, it got pitched, it got bought, the company made money, the test worked, the prototype is up and running. Thanks, everyone, great job. Is that so hard? A lot of what happens at the meeting after the meeting is communication that should properly have come from official channels. A lot of it is planning for projects that also deserves respect and recognition from higher-ups. Meeting after the meeting is a sign of a need for time, resources, and even an available conference room. If people are standing in the hallway or the parking lot, chattering away about company business, it’s either a very good sign, or it’s not. What are people talking about in the meeting after the meeting? Stick around and you might find out. Make Anything Happen. Isn’t that the best name for a book? Carrie Lindsey has made the perfect introduction to vision boards. It’s so approachable and attractive that it’s inspiring even to people like me who are not visual artists.
Vision boards are more than just a fun craft. First comes the vision, and that includes goal-setting. One of the strengths of Make Anything Happen is the clarity it brings to choosing goals, planning, and scheduling. My own annual goal-setting process takes a month and results in something like a six-page document. Carrie Lindsey’s approach is so simple, yet exuberant in comparison! This is as much of a lifestyle book as it is an art book. It’s very personal and approachable, and gives the sense of how Lindsey fits her home-based business into her buzzing family life. She has advice for everything from how to deal with distraction and feeling stuck, to how to work around kids and their chaos. Note: don’t fold your kids’ socks for them when you could be making art! Make Anything Happen includes some well-designed planner pages, like Goal Trackers and Vision Board templates. It teaches how to make art journals with multiple vision boards. There are plenty of examples for inspiration. I’ve already made my first vision board. Let’s imagine lots more! Favorite quotes: “Whenever I don’t know where to start, I start with cleaning my desk.” “...there’s nothing magic about hard work.” This is not a drill. I finally figured out how to speed-read OverDrive e-books! February 16, 2019 will remain one of the greatest days of my life, the day I got my heart’s desire. I’ve been trying to learn to read faster since I was seven years old, and now I can, and I’ll never ask for anything else as long as I live. Well, except for more pants with pockets.
Oh, and one other thing: an e-reader that continuously auto-scrolls like the old app I had on my Palm 3 PDA. This is my position. I support DRM to the extent that people shouldn’t rip off copyrighted material. Artists deserve to get paid. I’ll never understand why people are willing to take material from their favorite musicians or authors, refusing them just compensation. On the other hand, if I’m reading a book for my own personal use, I should be able to read it in whatever format I like. Mirror writing Upside-down Comic Sans Purple type on a fuchsia background, or vice versa Whatever I like! If I want to buy a paperback and read it upside-down, nobody will stop me. Why would they? If I want to design an app that allows me to read upside-down, and I have to strip the DRM to do it because none of the apps on the market have this feature, then I’m a criminal? Anyway. I’ve figured out this secret and I’m going to use it until someone stops me.
I’ve loved Outread for years now, and I got a second gift when I figured out how to speed-read books. I suddenly realized that the top speed in Outread has increased to 1500 words per minute! It was 1000 when I first downloaded it. I was able to build my speed from about 700 to the full 1000, and all this time I thought I had maxed it out. Will I ever be able to read faster with full comprehension? No idea, but it’s nice to know the option is available. Next question: Is there a way to do this on anything other than an iPhone or iPad? Answer: I don’t know, but you’re welcome to research this on whatever device you have. Next question: Does this technique work with e-books in other apps? Answer: It could, with considerably more effort. I tried with both iBooks and Kindle, and while I was able to highlight and drag to copy text, I wasn’t able to Select All for a whole chapter. If I were hellbent on doing this sort of thing with a Kindle book, I would play an audiobook while mindlessly highlighting and copying a bunch of chapters into Outread. I suspect it would take at least an hour per book. Next, next question: Would this work with scanned pages, like from Google Books? Answer: Not sure. I haven’t yet found an app that will do OCR and then turn it into text that I can copy and paste. Curiosity is compelling me to poke around, though, and I’ll certainly try. People are justifiably skeptical about speed-reading. It’s basically a party trick, like memorizing long strings of numbers or playing cards in a series. Neat, but why would you want to? I speed-read for personal use, because I want to and it’s a free country. Possibly I’m a mutant. I also listen to audiobooks on 2x, sometimes higher if I feel like the narrator is slow enough to make it worth digging out my old laptop. People do weirder things in private, at least I suspect they do. I also talk to myself and laugh at my own jokes, so heckle away. There are limits to speed-reading, though. I speed-read news if it’s entirely text, but it doesn’t work if the story is based around charts, graphs, or strings of numbers. I have to pause if there is a lot of specialized terminology, like engineering jargon or Latinate scientific names. I might skim an article on something that’s only of tangential interest to me (coffee or parenting or dating, for instance), but I’ll speed-read something if I really want to read the whole thing. I do read at normal speed if I’m there for the authorial voice. This is how I will probably break it down: Normal speed for horror, high speed for suspense Normal speed for literary fiction, high speed for pop fiction Normal speed for self-help, high speed for business books Normal speed for memoir, high speed for how-to manuals Readers tend to be traditionalists. Book sniffers, the lot of you! Oh, I’ll never let go of my... I’ll never use an e-book... Audiobooks don’t count... *shrug* whatevs. You do it your way, I’ll do it mine. I do sometimes savor a book the slow way. I don’t feel that every book performs at that level, though, and probably 90% don’t. That doesn’t mean I’m going to read fewer books! Sometimes I feel that the audio recording is richer and more nuanced than the text, especially if the author is narrating, and that the print readers are missing a layer of intent. Likewise, sometimes the e-book is better designed, making it easier to refer to footnotes or references in other chapters. About speed-reading, it’s possible that some authors would be delighted by this, especially for thrillers and suspense. Ultimately I think they all prefer that their books are read and enjoyed. Is speed-reading somehow worse than buying stacks of books off the remainder table and stuffing them into a bookcase, displayed but unread? I think not. All right, now I’ve shared my secret. I’m off to speed-read my next book. I had a bad night. There are always at least three things going on during heavy training: the physical battle, the mental battle, and the emotional battle. Sometimes there’s also some social conflict thrown in just for fun. On this night, I had a mix of all of these.
It goes something like this. You want to train, but you’re out of condition and training makes you sore, tired, sweaty, and uncomfortable. That’s the physical battle. You aren’t convinced that this activity is a good use of your time, money, or resources. That’s the mental battle. You feel like other people are judging you, that your body is your enemy, and that you’ll never get the results of those awesome people over there. That’s the emotional battle. Then maybe you have a naysayer who keeps trying to get you to quit, and that’s the social battle. That’s not me, by the way. Well, the physical part is, but that’s honestly part of why I train in the first place. I don’t do anything at all unless I’m convinced that it’s a good use of my time. I couldn’t possibly care less if other people are judging my physical appearance, and I’m not particularly competitive. Naysayers just make me double down on my commitment, because their presence means I’m onto something. I recognize the mainstream battles around fitness. That helps me to shrug them off. No, I have to go out and dig up my own special fitness issues. I’m studying Krav Maga, a non-joke sport that is officially not for sissies. Mentally I am convinced that Krav is the best and most effective martial art and that I’m training at the best school in the region. I believe that the combination of bodyweight, impact, and HIIT exercises is the optimum and that it is more time-efficient than other workouts. I also have all the grit and persistence in the world. Keep telling myself that. My mental block is that I am usually the weak link in class - slowest on the uptake, slowest in speed, physically weakest, lowest stamina - and that it holds others back. I keep coming back to the idea that I should put my membership on hold for a few months and come back after I put on a few more pounds of muscle. It’s when my head isn’t completely in the game that I start having more emotional issues. When I’m 100% convinced of something, then nothing but nothing can stop me. Finally, tonight, after a couple of hours of processing, I realized that this mindset problem is emotionally driven, and it’s compounded by my overall physicality. Everyone has the occasional difficult moment. They come in flavors. Some people default to anger and “why do these idiots always.” Others default to depressive “this is pointless, why bother.” For some it’s the self-hating “ugly stupid.” Mine runs to helplessness, specifically feeling physically powerless. My demons: night terrors, being susceptible to the common cold, this fainting issue I had in my mid-twenties, fear of Alzheimer’s disease, and, apparently, being pinned to the floor. Objectively, plenty of people have far worse issues. I feel dumb even thinking about mine. Thinking about it, it’s weird that I have no problems with certain things when I do with others. For instance, I’m not afraid of snakes, the IRS, public speaking, or being seen naked. In fact, I wouldn’t even be all that bothered by speaking nude at the IRS in front of some snakes. What I’ve learned from martial arts is that I’m not particularly troubled by wrestling or being thrown to the ground. I’m relatively unphased by choke holds, being lifted off my feet, or being attacked with my eyes closed. I can shake off being hit in the mouth, nose, or eye and keep going. I’ve been throat-tagged and continued on without a pause. I’ve had small cuts that bled and had to get a bandage (DON’T BLEED ON THE MAT) and gotten right back to it. Hands taped together? Yay, cool. Pinned under a blanket? Okay, got it. Bag over the head? Not my favorite but hey, I’m here to train. Gun disarms, knife fighting? Bring it on! I have two problems.
Okay, now how dumb is that? Ooh, yelling, help me officer. Out of all the dumb things to set someone off... At least the other one is more obvious and realistic. It was processing my issues with being pinned that helped me finally understand why this is a demon-level emotional block in my world. It’s that “physically helpless” feeling. Like any emotional block, it’s a package deal. Another person’s self-loathing might lead to a variety of self-sabotaging behaviors, while someone else’s contempt and rage might lead to an entirely different type of self-limiting issues. Mine is this emotional trigger that I am somehow powerless. It’s worth looking at where else I do and don’t feel powerless, or rather, where I do feel powerful and how I can bring that into the mat room. Powerful: bureaucratic red tape, foreign languages and writing systems, wilderness survival, panel interviews. Powerless: navigation, math. I’m good at lots of things! I’m good at learning! I’m good at talking myself back into commitments! Keep telling myself that. Now that I’ve found my demons and given them names, I can deal with them. I can come up with some strategies to take their power away. It’s my life and my body and I can make choices that make me stronger. Quitting, what would that do? Because certainly I have felt like quitting. The thought has crossed my mind so many times: “you don’t belong here, nobody wants to be your partner, nobody will judge you if you switch to CrossFit.” Those are emotion-driven and temporary distractions, irrelevant to my aims. 1. Be a quitter for life. 2. Lose all the many benefits of this training. 3. What, sit in a chair? Just start quitting things and become boring? I have another emotional demon hidden in there, the “nobody wants you here anyway, nobody likes you” demon that is a remnant of childhood bullying. When I’m pinned and I can’t get out and the instructor starts shouting advice at me, this puny feeling starts up this story. “Nobody is coming, nobody will help you, nobody is on your side, nobody is looking out for you, friendless and alone.” Really that’s pretty solid evidence that studying Krav Maga is a terrific and practical plan! Another person would ball up all that energy of being picked on, tricked, set up, and bullied and use that to fuel an intense and sacred flame of righteous fury. I mean, that’s one way. Some natural and biologically based reactions to being pinned would be aggression, an adrenalin surge, tenacity, and territorial instinct. GET OFF ME. My feeling of helplessness is contrary to survival; it’s not innate, it was learned - and that means it can be unlearned. I know exactly what I need to do, and the insight came as I was lathering my poor bruised shoulders with gardenia-scented soap, proof that I am fine and I do have control over my world. I need to build upper-body strength. I need to keep training. I need to visualize the specific circumstance of being pinned every time I go to my gym, and use it to fuel a strong sense of AW HAIL NO. I also need to tell the instructor that yelling triggers me, so she’ll yell at me more. The whole point of this training is, like everything, to enter the arena and fight the fight. Life is an endless rain of trouble and strife that will never stop. Quitting won’t make it stop. Nothing will make it stop. Might as well figure out a way to carry on, or maybe even prevail. If there are demons to be wrassled, at least I’m going to hit one with a chair before I tap out. If you call it a to-do list, you might be doing it wrong.
Might be working on the wrong stuff For the wrong reasons At the wrong times For the wrong people. This is something I’ve been wrestling with lately. My task list has grown lately to the point that I’m exploding out of a textbook-sized day planner with pages for twenty distinct projects. Unlike my pants, it even has pockets. These are the problems of the multipotentialite. Everything sounds good and everything seems possible. It IS, it is, just maybe not all at the exact same minute. Darn you anyway, Time Dimension. I’m working on a particular project, something big. It’s the kind of thing that takes six months to plan. I’m doing it because it fits into a larger plan that is really important to me. I’m doing it because the skills involved are directly relevant to my interests. I’m doing it because it gives me the chance to work with a good friend. I’m doing it because that friend really needs my help and I want to be reliable for her. Other than that, everything about it is driving me up the wall. The WHY is perfectly in place, the HOW is a continual stream of hassles and frustrations. Meanwhile, I have another set of potentially extremely interesting projects that I really want to do instead. Just like the frustrating project, these interesting projects involve a lot of steps that are the kind of task I don’t like. Focusing on only one thing at a time! Reading complicated instructions in fine print! Filling out applications! Putting dates in a calendar! Choosing photographs of myself! *ugh* Why can’t there be a super-interesting, super high-value project that involves me sleeping late, reading in the bathtub, and eating cookies? What I’ve found out so far about GETTING WHAT I WANT is that it almost always involves my three least-favorite things:
Travel. Foot races. Trainings. Workshops. Hikes. Even a panel interview I did recently - yep, Saturday. Why isn’t there more worthwhile stuff to do late in the afternoon?? Poor me, highly ambitious person, born into the body of a night owl. (Note: owls do not usually wear shoes) (Also note, not one minute after I wrote this, a child walked into my cafe wearing an OWL HAT and RAIN BOOTS) I’m doing what I can to cope with all of this. Not the owl hat, the burgeoning project list. Try to stay focused. The first thing is to always subvert the project in some way. That means I look at the desired results and ask, is what I’m being asked to do really the smartest way to achieve these results? Surprisingly often, it isn’t! Perhaps more surprising, my ideas for ways that I’d prefer to do these things, my ways are often accepted or regarded as an upgrade. The trick to getting this across is first to explain that you want the same thing as everyone else, the highly valued end result. Also compliment specific things that are going well and thank everyone for hearing you out. Each instance in which you save other people time, money, or resources is an opportunity to build a reputation as a solver of problems and an idea-generating machine. (Problem: then they bring you more of their problems to solve). The second thing is that if you can’t subvert the project in tangible ways, you can still do it privately. There might be a requirement to do certain things or take certain steps toward your desired end result, things that you have no interest in doing. There is not, however, a requirement that you refer to them as ‘tasks’ or ‘chores’ or ‘to-do’s’ or ‘honey-do’s’ or what-have-you. You can call them whatever you want. You can also abandon ship and abdicate on the project, if you really hate it that much. As an example, I simply would not do something if it “required” me to wear high heels, cancel my travel plans for my wedding anniversary, work in a room with cigar smoke, or probably a bunch of other things. Nope nope, that’s a big nope. What I’ve been doing lately is to shift more and more of my focus to the desired end results, while I try to forget that I am often doing annoying things early in the morning when I’d rather be sleeping. This is why I call my “to-do list”: JUICY PROJECT OPTIONS! There’s something that I do that most people don’t, and that is to remind myself that I have control over how I spend my time. It’s my choice whether to work on something or not. I didn’t feel that way when I worked at a convenience store, but I did start to feel that way as a young office temp. I was broke as could be, I didn’t have two nickels until I was thirty, but I always felt that I had the power to walk away from a truly cruddy job or a bad boss. I often did! I figured, if I was going to be broke one way or another, at least I could choose the job with the least-bad boss and the least-worst commute. So I did. It’s my sense of power, control, and high agency that has brought me forward, onward and upward. One of the saddest things in the world is untapped human potential. It’s deeply sad when someone with massive gifts feels trapped, forced into a power struggle with a bad boss for low pay. Sometimes, of course, that is literally true - modern slavery is one of the all-time biggest targets for people with great gifts to tackle, should anyone be looking for a worthy project. Mostly, though, we are dragged down by the power struggle, to the point that we utterly forget about our ability to imagine something better into being. This is why it is so vital that we reimagine what we are doing. This is why we need more... JUICY PROJECT OPTIONS. Our electric bill was $292.77. I don’t mean that was our bill for a month, a cold and rainy winter month. I mean that was our cumulative electric bill over twelve months. It averages out to $24.40 per month. I’ve included the amounts at the bottom of the post for reference.
Why is our power bill so low? Some of it depends, no doubt, on our region and the fact that we signed up for an alternative energy provider. We live at the beach in Southern California, where the temperature is the same most of the year. Mostly, though, it’s because we live in a tiny home and we don’t do much that draws power. We live in a 612-square-foot studio apartment. It has one external door and a standard sliding glass door in the same wall. This apartment isn’t great in terms of energy efficiency. If you stand next to the slider on cold nights, you can feel the temperature drop close to the glass. On the other hand, we have only five light fixtures: two in the kitchen, two in the bathroom, and one in the closet. Usually only two of them are turned on. We have one refrigerator and no chest freezer. We do not have a washer or dryer. We have to take our clothes to the laundry room in another building. We almost never watch TV. If we do, it’s generally a single episode of a 30- or 60-minute show. We also rarely have a desktop computer turned on. Our main power draws are charging our phones and my tablet, using the microwave and a countertop dishwasher, running an air filter, and charging the Roomba. I also use a flat iron and sometimes a hair dryer. I play the radio for my parrot during the day if we’re not home. For most people, their biggest power draw is heating and air conditioning. We don’t have an air conditioner, or anywhere to install one. It’s fair to say that our power bill would be higher if we lived in a different climate, and it’s also fair to say that we moved here on purpose. We were willing to drastically downsize and we now live in a quarter of the space that we had when we first got married. A QUARTER! Our entire studio apartment is approximately the size of the master bedroom in our old place. Or the garage. In fact I think it’s a little smaller than our first, double car garage. We’re able to live in a space this small because we got rid of almost everything we owned. I’m sure it’s more than 80%. A workbench, power tools, the lawnmower, the ladder, virtually everything that we used to store in the garage - gone. Almost all our appliances, a couch and chairs and two dining tables - gone. Almost all our books and three bookshelves - gone. Look, we don’t miss it. A lot of that stuff was inexpensive, worn out, or carried over from our respective first marriages. When we eventually move back into a slightly larger place, we can afford to upgrade with all the money we’ve saved. We spent some time visualizing and crunching numbers, and we downsized gradually over five moves, but we did it with strong intention. It’s no accident that our power bill is so low. In fact, it’s part of an overall plan and a concerted effort. We saved 48% of our net income in 2018. We did it by living in a tiny space, not owning a car, and prioritizing retirement savings over everything else. While saving that much of our income, we also went on vacation three times. That’s part of WHY we live so cheaply, because we’d rather spend money splurging on vacation than by dribbling it away on things like a higher monthly electric bill, cable television, or snack foods. Here are some ways we keep our electric bill low, other than simply living in a tiny little apartment: We use lap blankets when it’s cold. Feels snuggly rather than the futile effort to turn up the heat in the room. We use a heated mattress pad. Also feels very cozy and is more effective than heating the air in the room. We wear socks inside, and I go so far as to wear a sweater, sometimes two. I’m one of those people who never feels warm enough, and I’d rather bundle up than, again, blast the heater. We strategically open and close the sliding glass door in summer, planning when to let in cooler air or shut out hotter air. We’re also strategic about where to put the fan. (Helps to have an engineer around sometimes!). A few weeks a year, it feels either intolerably hot or annoyingly cold here. We remind ourselves that it’s temporary and it’s worth it to be a little sweaty or grab an extra blanket. The alternative would be to move to a place that actually has air conditioning or more than a one-foot-square wall heater. We could do that, but right now we’d rather save money. Save money and lots of it! Other couples fight about money. We sit around talking smugly about our high savings rate. During times when we’re taking the bus rather than driving, or wrapping ourselves in blankets because our apartment is cold, we’re bonding through shared adversity. It’s easier for us to make strategic decisions about our cash flow because we’ve shown that we’re both willing to make sacrifices for our mutual benefit. It’s even easier when we use the money we would have spent on heating a standard suburban ranch house to go on vacation instead. If you’re curious about our electricity provider, here’s a referral link: https://www.arcadiapower.com/jessica9228 And yes, if you use this referral link, I personally benefit from it. Arcadia Power January 22, 2019 $33.44 December 24, 2018 $30.60 November 20, 2018 $15.72 October 17, 2018 $5.00 September 18, 2018 $23.48 August 20, 2018 $24.76 July 23, 2018 $25.08 June 20, 2018 $25.51 May 21, 2018 $17.51 April 24, 2018 $5.00 March 26, 2018 $41.01 $6.71 (split billing because we moved to another unit in the same complex) February 20, 2018 $38.95 = $292.77 An Audience of One is a very intriguing book about the artistic process. Srinivas Rao clearly dwells in the other realms. There are plenty of inspirational books in the world on creativity. This one speaks with assurance on the untapped wellspring.
For those of us who do a lot of public-facing work, there can be a tendency to develop a sense of obligation and turn our output into a chore. Rao says this focus on external outcomes (such as profit) can make the work boring. We return to our involvement in the process when we let go of attempting to control the outcome. One way of doing this is to make something purely for ourselves, to remember why we first fell in love with this particular form. A focus of An Audience of One is on people who do something creative only for themselves. No readers, no viewers, no customers, no followers or commenters, imagine! These examples of devoted creatives have a way of elevating more activities to the level of “art.” Maybe a home cook is more talented than a professional chef; how would anyone know? On the one hand, this perspective should give courage to novices. Art is good for you! What you do matters! It’s fine to do it for yourself and nobody else! Rao cites something a lot of readers will want to know more about, which is Mindfulness Based Art Therapy. Apparently making art has measurable, positive health effects on everything from heart rate and blood pressure to cortisol levels and bodily pain. On the other hand, the perspective that we should make our own art for ourselves alone, that’s a potent idea. What if we took it all the way? What if we really made every single last thing that’s been swimming in our fountains? What if we never held back, what if it all came out and kept coming out? What if we? Swam out full fathom? These are the parts of An Audience of One that compelled me the most. Rituals, power questions, activation energy. Identifying and eliminating your tolerations. Dream work. Setting intentions before sleep. Wow! Some of these chapters maybe could be full-length books in their own right. I loved An Audience of One. It pushed my barriers and made me feel that I can and should be doing more with my work. It reminded me that there is more potential in my craft and my process. Rao mentions having three books that you refer to at least once a month, and this may become one of mine. Favorite quotes: When we focus on end results, we essentially defeat one of the main benefits of creative work: to derive joy from the work itself. The work itself defeats resistance. It’s rare for anybody to proudly state that they did “nothing.” |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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