Life Lessons – Page 11 – Life In Limbo

On Practicing & Starting Small

September 18, 2014

I’m not very good at starting small. I am excellent at jumping into things with two feet and a long list of requirements for success, and after some time (a week, three weeks, 3 months..) getting burned out and giving up entirely. I’m grateful that it’s in my nature to be so enthusiastic about things, but my follow-through has always needed work.

I often read about trigger habits and doing the minimum, tiny goal in the hopes that it will eventually prompt you to do more but without the expectation of needing to do more. For example, setting the tiny daily goal to put on your running shoes and get outside your front door. The idea is that just getting outside is enough on its own, but that it’ll also probably prompt you to go further, do a little run or maybe even a long one before you go back home. You’re taking away the pressure by giving yourself an incredibly easy small win right off the bat, which will hopefully lead to more small wins over time.

Unfortunately, it’s also in my nature to barrel ahead and do too much at once. I don’t tend to care about small wins and I don’t give myself credit for them. I always feel like I can and should do more, push harder, have bigger wins. It’s not hard to see why eventually I get burned out and give up – I’m not very good at lowering my own standards for success or being gentle with myself. This, I realize, is both a blessing and a curse.

In the spirit of small trigger goals and daily practices, this week I’ve started using the free workout app Seven. I learned about it on Entrepreneur, and The New York Times also had a great piece about it in Well. Sure, it would be better to go for a 30 minute run every day, or hit the gym a few times a week. True to form, when I first started using the app I wanted to try doing two of the circuits every day, or maybe three! But that kind of all or nothing thinking is what ends up burning me out. I never start by setting the bar low because it never seems like enough for me. This time around, I’m letting a (challenging!) seven minute workout every morning be enough. I know I can do that much. Maybe it will trigger more habits, maybe it will be enough on its own – it doesn’t matter. I am starting very small. I am hoping to stay with it. I am hoping to come back to it every day.

I’ve realized lately that I’m not good at practice. I like things that I can finish and be done with, wrap up, move on. I think this is a common attitude but unfortunately that doesn’t make it much easier to deal with or overcome. Most things in life that I think are important are daily practices that we are (hopefully) never, ever finished with. Meditation, exercise, creativity, staying in touch, eating well, patience, gratitude: all are practices. You don’t get to an end point with exercise and get to stop. You don’t ever reach the pinnacle of success in gratitude and then are set for the rest of your life. You have to keep practicing, each day, slowly but surely, over and over – and there is no “until….” because there is no end point.

This is very hard for me to grasp, let alone put into practice. This is why I flame out every running season, or after a few months of consistent yoga practice, or after a week of meditation when I don’t feel like I’m improving. I find it difficult to stay with things that can’t necessarily be measured quantitatively, or shouldn’t be.

With many of these important practices, I’ve been trying to keep myself in the mindset of taking it one day at a time. Building up slowly a chain of successful days, and trying not to break the chain. Starting fresh each morning. Showing up at the mat or in the chair or in my running shoes as if for the first time and seeing what happens. Being less invested in a particular outcome, and especially less invested in ever being “finished”. This is not easy for me, and I am usually not very successful in embracing this perspective. But investing in and sticking with things that are practices with no end point is in itself a practice. So at least I can try, every day, for as long as I have.

Right now I’m practicing a seven minute workout, eating mindfully, showing up to my yoga mat, morning pages and meditation. What about you?

How To Have Deeper Connections

September 2, 2014

Over on the podcast this week, Laura and I are talking about having deeper connections and more meaningful conversations with people.

The episode was inspired by this article about changing small talk into smart conversations, and this article on how to be polite. I for one, absolutely hate small talk. I’d much rather be in a corner somewhere reading my book than have to grasp at straws for conversation topics or talk about the weather. When I meet people that I can sense are kindred spirits, I’m usually a bit too enthusiastic to start talking to them about heartier topics.

In first year when I first met one of my closest friends, I’d only known her a few days before I sat down on her bed and asked her what she thought the meaning of life was. It’s a bit embarrassing now, but at the time all I knew was that my brain was starved of meaningful conversations after days of nothing but small talk, so the question just came out without me even thinking. Of course, she took it in stride and we’ve had plenty of deep (and shallow) conversations since.

I’m just like that – for better or for worse, I always try to take things to a deeper level. Sometimes it can get heavy, but most of the time it’s just comforting to talk about real feelings and hopes and goals with people that I trust. I don’t have a huge number of friends, but I am so lucky in that I know I could call any of the ones I do have right now and launch into some deep conversation and they’d be right there with me the whole time. The people I’m blessed to know have depth and layers and are able to really engage.

Since coming to Korea, it’s been great to know that I can form meaningful friendships on my own outside of university. That might seem like a “duh” statement, but to me it never felt like a sure thing. But being here, I’ve made some really true friends I’m able to talk to as if I’ve known them forever. It’s a pretty beautiful thing.

In the episode we talk about how to have more meaningful conversations, how to foster deeper connections with strangers, and how to take your friendships to another level. You can listen to the episode and find out more here.

How To Stay Above The Line

June 24, 2014

On the podcast today, Laura and I are discussing “The Line”, a concept she introduced me to a few months ago. The idea is this: there is an imaginary horizontal line running through your life that you can be above or below at any given time.

Below, you’re a lesser version of yourself – jealous, insecure, petty, rude, afraid, playing the victim, feeling sorry for yourself, blaming, whining, moping, criticizing, and otherwise being a small person. Above of course you’re the best version of yourself – generous, kind, compassionate, patient, optimistic, present, helpful, aware, taking responsibility, and acting and reacting gracefully. When you’re below the line, you allow your circumstances to drive and justify bad behaviour. When you’re above the line, you recognize that bad things will happen, but your reaction to them is your responsibility alone.

What I love most about this concept is that it’s so intuitive. I think most people, myself included, can tell when they’re below the line. I personally can feel it almost physically, it’s this sense of guilt or shame or disappointment in myself that I feel in my gut when I’ve acted or reacted in a below-the-line kind of way. And we can also tell when we’ve been above the line, because it feels good to be above.

It’s so normal to be below the line, and so human to have automatic reflex reactions to negative situations based on our fears and insecurities. It’s much harder to act gracefully when bad things happen, to flip your script to get some perspective and practice gratitude. It’s the struggle of our lives, most definitely. We don’t have to stay above the line all the time (and we probably couldn’t even if we tried our darnedest) but we do have to try. We do have to try and stay present and aware to how we’re acting and use our internal compass to tell us which side of the line we’re on. We have to fight against our automatic tendencies and patterns. We have to try and live above the line and only make short visits below. It’s really very hard, but it’s also the whole point if we want to be the best versions of ourselves.

I’ve been finding it so helpful to just have this metaphor and language to use in everyday life. Today as I was running at the track, annoyed over and over again by all the oblivious walkers taking up the whole width, my internal monologue was something like “thelinethelinethelinethelinetheline”. It helped me shift my focus to my funny podcast and the lovely breeze, and reminded me to practice compassion and just do the best that I could under the circumstances.

In the elevator coming home it was sweaty tired me and a pursed-lipped older woman, but as I was avoiding eye contact, already thinking ahead to all the things I had to do before work, I thought “thelinethelinetheline” and looked up at her. She smiled and laughed, mimed running, and said some things in Korean I wish I could understand before getting off on her floor. That’s all, that’s the whole story. It won’t change my day or hers, but it was a little moment we shared, a small pocket of human connection. Both of us were above the line – being open instead of closed, friendly instead of avoidant, kind instead of annoyed.

You can listen to the whole episode, which includes our tips for staying above the line as much as possible, right here.

Dealing With Feelings Post-Graduation + An Update On My Life in Korea

June 10, 2014

Somehow it’s been over a year since I graduated from university and since then I’ve had a roller coaster’s worth of highs and lows. I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the most beautiful places in the world, and to have found opportunities that I didn’t realize would be possible for me. I also spent several months working at a job that required me to serve people through a drive-through window in -25C weather while living back at home after 4 years of living on my own. Needless to say, in the past year I’ve felt on top of the world and I’ve felt totally distraught. I’ve felt hopeful and hopeless. I’ve felt confident and I’ve felt totally unsure of myself. I’ve felt so, so close to my loved ones at times, and at others I’ve felt very distant and lonely.

For me though, the good has far outweighed the bad. Even at my lowest points I still felt generally loved, supported, and grateful. Life has brought me wonderful experiences and opportunities that I never could have predicted or expected and that’s a pretty exciting thing. The past year has taught me so much about choice and acceptance and gratitude and being humble and staying positive and taking care of myself. It’s been difficult at times, but it’s also been so exciting to feel like I’m growing and making progress.

I try to be transparent on this blog and in my life because I think it serves precisely no one to pretend that everything is always great all the time. As you know, for the past three months I’ve been teaching English at a private school in South Korea. Yesterday, my boss told me that our school is closing down at the end of July. Everything is still very uncertain and confusing, but the gist is that I need to find a place to live and get a new job. Yesterday I was mostly panicking, my brain going a mile a minute trying to figure out what my options were. I also spent quite a while in denial, hoping I’d wake up from a bad dream, and a bunch of time feeling sorry for myself. Today, I’m alternating between feeling totally overwhelmed and feeling like it’s going to be okay.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still upset and I’m still scared. Living in a country where you don’t speak the language is hard at the best of times and this, safe to say, is one of the worst things that can happen for a foreign teacher abroad…and I say that without any self-pity. And I know that it could be worse – some teachers get only a few days notice before their school closes, or turn up to find the school shuttered – in the grand scheme of things, my situation is better than some.

There is a lot I still need to figure out, but: I’m okay. I think I’m going to be okay. I think (I hope) that everything is going to work out. I can’t help but think that if this had happened to me right after graduating university I wouldn’t have been as well equipped to handle it. I’m proud to say that I haven’t completely fallen apart. After a minor panic attack in the bathroom, I reached out to my friends and acquaintances and asked them to put out feelers for me. I’ve been feeling all the crazy feelings I’m having (and I’m having lots of them) and putting them all out into the open where they seem smaller and sillier. I’m trying to square my shoulders and say “abundance abundance abundance” over and over and over to myself. I decided pretty early on that I was going to try to make this work, on my own terms.

I still don’t know how things are going to pan out. Like I said, there are lots of feelers out there, plus I’ve been researching lots of positions on the job boards and I’ve already heard back from one employer. I don’t know what my life is going to look like in two months, but this is a good reminder that nothing is ever certain or guaranteed. One year after graduating, I’m proud that I’ve grown into a person who knows she has a choice to either wallow and wring my hands or to react as gracefully as I can muster and take action. I know that I can make the choice to be strong and generous instead of indulging the part of me that badly wants to use this as an excuse to be petty and small and selfish and to eat a lot of ice cream – which, let’s be honest, I still might do. I don’t always make the right choice every time, but I’m trying my best.

We recorded this episode of the podcast yesterday morning, before I found out that my school was closing. We talked about handling weird feelings that come up after graduating from university and going out into the “real world”. Little did I know the real world was going to feel so much more real in only a few hours!

The situation is scary and uncertain, but I’m trying to feel confident and to have faith even though I feel pretty overwhelmed. It helps that all my loved ones have nothing but confidence in my ability to handle this and to figure it out. They believe in me more than I believe in me, and while it’s hard to take their word for it, I’m trying. I’m trying to stay calm and fake it til I make it. Stay tuned.