John Littlewood (1885-1977), a mathematician at Cambridge University, statistically calculated that every single one of us is entitled to a miracle a month. This is known as Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. So if none of your smackdowns are working, you’re still not out of options! Help is on the way!
Today’s Smackdown is a guest post by one of our favorite bloggers, MFK over at Open-Source Career. Thanks MFK! This way we can take the day off to work on rectifying that pleasure deficit!
I am prone to a) inserting myself into totally-out-of-the-comfort-zone situations and b) getting totally overwhelmed as a result. Since part a) is what helps me grow the most, and generally pays the biggest dividends, I have had to find a smackdown to combat part b). I’d like to share it with you by way of my favorite example.
Dispensing with my comfort zone entirely.
I graduated from a very small liberal arts college with a writing degree and then for the next six years worked exclusively in and with non-profits and lived a freewheeling lifestyle of clubbing, tattoos and underground commix. Suddenly one day I decided to pursue an MBA and a life in corporate America. This decision was borne not from cool-headed thinking, but from the emotional aftermath from a political takeover of my agency and the firing of my mentor.
Talk about out of comfort zone. Not only did I have no undergraduate education whatsoever in business or economics, I had no corporate experience at all. Nor did I even own a suit. Nor do I really have a head for math. Or skill at golf.
But I had decided to join a top-30 ranked business school, study finance (math math math!), sell out into a corporate job, hold my own with the “golf playing assholes,” as I mistakenly thought all corporate types were, and wear a suit. And because I’m both a perfectionist and competitive, I took it upon myself to kick ass at it all.
Talk about overwhelmed. Totally, utterly, unbelievably overwhelmed.
Sick to my stomach every day. Not eating. Completely unmoored. Once, I turned to my friend in the program, Dave, and said, “Do you feel like you’ve been set on fire?”
Dave, who was an engineer, had a head for math and a corporate background. He said, “Absolutely.” MBA school is intense. Dave was on fire. I was five-alarm.
Somewhere during that first semester, I rented the movie Broadcast News on a whim. This is the 1987 film wherein Holly Hunter plays Jane Craig, a high-powered, ambitious TV news producer. Jane Craig is a gal in the boys club, she is brilliant at what she does, she is kicking ass and taking names, her personal life is a mess, and she is overwhelmed. Jane Craig is On Fire. Here was my role model! How did she power through? Would she teach me how? You bet.
Jane’s smackdown is now my smackdown:
Reserve 10 minutes every morning to freak entirely out in private. Haywire freakout. Lunatic freakout. At the top of the lungs. Jane’s is sobbing, hysterically, the big kind of sob a gal does not want the boys club to find out about. She does it regularly; it even seems scheduled. Each time she does it, there’s a point where suddenly it’s completely over. She shuts it off like flipping a switch, picks up her purse, straightens her shoulders, goes to work and kicks ass. Nobody knows about the freakout. She’s blown the release valve and being on fire doesn’t matter any more.
This worked for me before finals, when juggling too many assignments in too little time, during job interview season, before my first presentation to the President of my Fortune 50 company. Jane’s smackdown is tremendously freeing.
Try it out. Let your fire burn.
Yell, swear, sob, shake yourself all over like you’re possessed, speak in tongues. Let your inner dork, your inner weakling, your inner angry lunatic, your inner ‘fraidy cat, your inner incompetent come out. Do this alone, in the morning, before the day. Do it loudly. Make it physical. Then switch it off. Set aside your fear and your overwhelm, go about your day and kick ass.
I have to laugh. Somehow it took me this long to learn one of the most fundamental dating Smackdowns ever.
Step One: Assume he digs you.
That’s it.
But in my entire dating history, I’ve done the opposite: I’ve always assumed the dude, whichever dude it was, did not already dig me. I assumed I had to woo him, earn his interest and attention, do more, be more, Do My Best, Be My Best, and win him over.
Um, hi? It’s not that fun to hang out with someone who’s working so hard to impress you?
No wonder they all seemed to lose interest fast. I was starting with the wrong assumption, and the Inner Critic was always eager to chime in and confirm my low self-confidence.
Speaking of which… the Inner Critic would like to point out that this new approach sounds pretty darn arrogant, verging on hubris. Who the hell am I to assume anybody digs me?
Smackdown! The important part of this process, Inner Critic, is the fact that I behave differently towards someone who I think likes me, compared to someone who I think could take or leave me. And because I’m behaving differently, he’s going to behave differently.
Also, oh Inner Critic, go read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
Single ladies out there, I invite you to start daydreaming. Begin with the assumption that he digs you… And go from there!!
(Thanks Elin, for teaching me this!)
Yesterday, a series of things happened that made me realize I am experiencing a pleasure deficit. First, I had a lunch with some really groovy folks. Jocelyn Hale, the Executive Director of the Loft Literary Center, Dennis Cass, the author of the hilarious and fantastic book Head Case, and Pilar Gerasimo, Editor-in-Chief of Experience Life magazine. We were discussing an article that is coming out in the December issue of Experience Life called A Real Pleasure in which the staff of the magazine describe how all the latest research in the fields of positive psychology, neurology, and psychoneuroimmunology show that pleasure is good for us. Yet, each of us at the table admitted to not taking proper care of ourselves by doing activities that really gave us joy. For instance, I absolutely love massages but I haven’t booked one since before Eva was born. She’s 8 months old.
Then I ended up at the eye doctor yesterday afternoon with what turns out to be a case of episcleritis. My left eye is all red and it hurts. Why? Because I’ve been staring at the computer for too many hours in a row. You got it. I’ve been working too hard, with too few breaks for fun.
The final straw was a voice message from Clare. She admitted she was totally exhausted. She’s working two jobs and has to work through the Thanksgiving holiday without a break.
Consider this quote from the Experience Life article: “Pursuing pleasure and feeling stress, it turns out, are mutually exclusive – which means that embracing pleasurable experiences may present not just an opportunity for warm fuzzies, but a very real antidote to stress and a very necessary ingredient to sustained well-being.”
Instead of letting the Inner Critic freak out on me and tell me I can’t possibly get up from the desk since there is so much to do, I flipped it the bird. After a business phone call I must take at 10:30 a.m. CST, I am outta here! If you don’t hear from me for the rest of the day, you’ll know I am off visiting a flower shop and inhaling as deeply as I can. Or maybe I’ll be tasting a cup of joe in my favorite coffee shop. Or perhaps I’ll even book a massage for later this very day. The only errand I’ll run is to buy myself a pair of reading glasses – promise!
So what will you do today, right this minute, to increase the joy and pleasurable experiences in your life?
It might be hard to describe when the Inner Critic is at its worst, but this is close: your mind flashes horror movies at twice the usual pace, the Critic spits invective like a high-speed demonic slam poet, and the rest of your body is literally, physically in pain.
It’s a juggernaut… but you can stop it…. But with the Inner Critic in such high gear, sometimes your tactics have to get a little weird.
This is a new one for me but it’s so simple, I’m hooked on it. The first step is to decide not to be in pain right now. You may need to work through it later, but for right now, you choose peace.
And the second step is to visualize a gray screen, which doesn’t sound weird except that you’re not visualizing it in your mind. You’re not trying to replace the horror movie loop. Instead, visualize the gray screen sitting right at the base of your spine, near your tailbone.
That’s it. Choose, see, and hold the image for as long as you want.
We received an award for our blog! Check it out: It’s the Superior Scribbler Award and we got it from another blogger over at The Erin Experiment. Thanks Erin! And there are rules that go along with this award.
So we will get back to you with five bloggers to check out! We’ll update this post with a few of our favs. Besides Erin above, who is a superior scribbler and fellow stepmom, here are five bloggers we will pass this award along to:
1. MFK at Open-Source Career. It’s an awesome blog about one person’s search for the perfect career.
MORE TO COME!
But winning this award highlights the fact that we’re attracting a lot of readers to our blog. (Yay! Thanks everybody!) So will we find ourselves confronting the Inner Critic even more now that we know people are reading us? Will we be paralyzed by the knowledge that what we write is not for our eyes only? Or will we be able to do what we both feel called to do and continue helping people get around their Inner Beasties so they can live their best lives? Hm. Stay tuned.
When I was in graduate school, I took a fiction writing class from Andre Dubus III, the author of House of Sand and Fog and the Garden of Last Days, whom my fellow classmates and I fondly called Andre Whom I Love. He was a masterful teacher and there are a few things he said that still resonate with me more than a decade later. While guiding us in the process of writing a novel, he told us to follow where the story led us. We were to excavate each idea and if it led us to a dead end and we had to go back, that material was not wasted. He maintained that there was clearly something important we had to learn about the story by heading off on that side road, even if we never used it in the book itself. Of course, I thought that was bunk. I didn’t want to waste time messing around with something that wouldn’t pan out. I wanted instant success! Re-writes, are you kidding me? No way! I wanted a novel to jump fully formed from my brain onto the page without a mistake! Ha.
I thought about that class recently as I considered all the times I have gotten excited about a project or a career plan or a guy that turned out to be a dud. The Inner Critic could very easily have its way with me if I let it. But you know what? I’m not sorry about all those experiences. Don’t get me wrong. I would much rather have just gotten it all right from the beginning and not found my path from F-bombing things up repeatedly. But now, my life is richer for all my screw ups, painful or embarrassing as they were at the time. Yes, I am even grateful for the tattoos (3), and the extra pounds I used to carry around (100), and the summer of excess in Prague. (I traveled to the Czech Republic after I’d lost the weight, what can I say? Grin.)
The other thing Andre said was, “You have to jump naked into the abyss!” Perhaps I remember it so well because he also leaped up onto his desk while he said it. But after a screw up, you have to take another leap of faith. Even knowing it might be another wrong turn, you have to jump. It’s not just one big leap and then you’re done, either. I have found that I have to renew my energy again and again to take that next step. Because there are times, believe me, when I would much rather just spend my days on my ass watching old movies or reruns of Law and Order. But if I want to create a life that I feel good about, I have to keep getting up and trying again and again and again. It’s a lifetime’s project.
This is not a new idea. But it feels new when you actually apply it to your own life. In fact it feels like a novel idea over and over again. So what do you feel like you’ve messed up lately? And how can you use it to your advantage?
All of a sudden, without warning, the Inner Critic starts bashing away at you. It seems to come out of nowhere; maybe your life was going perfectly well and then, Wham!
You might just be cold. Seriously! You’re trying to warm yourself up with rage and frustration! (!!!!!) Put on a sweater and socks, pour something steaming, and snuggle into a blanket.
This is one of my oldest and most reliable smackdowns (and any time the thermometer dips below 60, I have to relearn it… ah the joys of cyclical consciousness.) I learned it from William James (1842-1910), the psychiatrist and philosopher; he suggested that sometimes a physical sensation causes your emotions, instead of the other way around.
Jacque found a great article about it, too:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/23/warm.hands.study.ap/index.html
I have to be honest. This week has sucked. Last night I could feel the pull of the whirlpool of negativity grasping at my legs and I was too tired to fight it. For most of the evening I had a scowl on my face that I tried to keep on the inside since my stepchildren were over. It’s rare that I get into that bad of shape since I’m an optimistic person by nature but like I said, this week has sucked. The voice of the Inner Critic was loud with messages of fear, anger, grief, fear, anger, grief. Like most everyone else in this country I had some really bad financial news. And that was only one of the crappy things that has happened within the last four days.
But last night my youngest stepdaughter impulsively came in and gave me a hug. “You’re the best stepmom anybody could have,” she said. ”I’m so glad Dad married you.” And a few minutes later, “I’m so happy you’re my stepmom and I have a little sister now.”
Out of the mouth of babes, right? This girl is 8 and she is one of the most intuitive people I’ve ever met. When she was three if I was in a bad mood but had a smile plastered on my face, she would walk over to me and start petting my hand. She wouldn’t say anything, but she somehow knew that I was a human being in need of comfort.
Her hug and words of appreciation helped me climb out of the spiral. After she went to bed I made a list of all the really wonderful things that have happened this week. I was asked to teach at my favorite place in the world: The Loft Literary Center. I found the perfect location to hold the Smackdown the Inner Critic Workshop (More on this later!). My daughter held my hand while she fell asleep. My husband volunteered to take this Friday off so I can work while he watches the baby. My stepdaughter hugged me.
It’s a complex world. We can feel happy and sad, angry and appreciative all at the same time about the same thing. So if you’re feeling like sh*& this week, what is the flip side? What good things have happened, too?
