Category Archives: Behavior Change

Posted on

Decathexis: How to Stop Procrastinating and Find the Energy to Fuel Your Goals

When I reflect on 2016 thus far, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of what I’ve gotten done. I’ve had a lot of fun, launched a new business and experienced some major personal growth revelations, but I also wrote a book I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about writing since around 2012.

Today is National Fight Procrastination Day, which feels like the perfect occasion to share another recent revelation I’ve had. It’s not so much about how I stopped procrastinating on the book itself; I’ve already written about that some, about how I got on purpose, decided to make myself available and went into Monk Mode to focus and get that done.

The revelation I think you’ll find helpful at fighting your own procrastination is something that came up when I finished the book and transitioned out of Monk Mode. When I came out of Monk Mode and knew the book was fully buttoned up and something I was proud to have spent nine months working on, something I would be proud to spend 2017 promoting, something intense happened. Something called decathexis.

Cathexis is something psychologists talk about as the energy you put into a project, relationship or area of endeavor. Freud defined cathexis as being part electricity and part occupation. I think of it similarly, as the time, energy, creativity, soul and any and every other resource, including money, you invest into a priority person, project or experience.

It follows that decathexis occurs when those resources return back to you when you complete a project, de-prioritize an endeavor or end or shift your focus from a relationship.

When I finished the book, I spent maybe a week or two recovering, but almost immediately noticed an incoming woosh of fresh, creative energy and time that I was no longer spending on the book. I have been redirecting that woosh toward other projects, electing with intentionto make the most of this decathexis, aiming it at other things that are now moving up my priority ladder. (Note that some of those things are other writing and business projects, and a couple are around cultivating key business relationships, but some are also fun, like the Pretty Dress Club my friends and I have started to ensure nothing beautiful but “impractical” wastes away at the back of the closet.)

One of the most common reasons people procrastinate is that we think we lack something we need to move forward on our biggest, boldest goals and dreams. There’s just no time. We’re exhausted at the end of the workday, or after the kids get to bed. No energy. If we had the cash to take some time off, to hire a coach or to take the course, we would, but there’s never enough. Never enough. Never enough.

But I’ve realized that decathexis is an always-accessible strategy we can use to tap into the resources we do have so we can aim them at the things we care about the most. There is enough. There is plenty. The challenge is this: we’re not always seeing how we’re currently investing the resources we have. And we’re not always aware of how much control we have to reallocate those investments. We run on autopilot.

The decathexis I experienced when the book was done was crystal clear, because of the nature of the project and the intentional investment of time I’d put into it. But the truth is that I’ve experienced decathexis probably hundreds of times in my life, and know that it can and should be wielded intentionally, too. You don’t have to complete a major life project or check something off your bucket list to tap into your inner wells of creativity and energy and time and money via decathexis. You don’t have to leave your energy to chance or accident.

There are only two things you do have to do to harness decathexis: stop doing things that are not truly important, and shift that cathexis, that investment, to things that are:

  • Stop doing things that are a time suck, but not bearing fruit.
  • Stop doing things that make you feel de-energized.
  • Stop doing things because you think you should or because someone told you-you should, 30 years ago.
  • Stop investing your money into things, things and more things, unless they truly delight you or expand your capacity to create or experience life.
  • Stop spending time trying to change other people or investing all your focus into relationships where you feel like you’re butting your head against a wall (Note: this doesn’t necessarily mean to get divorced, fire everyone or stop speaking to your mother, though it might. It means to put an end to dysfunctional relationship patterns, not necessarily to discard people.)

Here’s the hardest one: stop injecting your resources into patterns and projects that are kind of half-working or hobbling along, just because you’ve always done so. Actually, even harder: stop doing things that are awesome, but are clearly not aligned with who you want to be or furthering what you want to create in your life.

Catch this principle: every relationship, every project, every exercise into which you invest fifteen minutes here or two hours there, represents an investment of your time, your energy, your soul, your love, your money, your resources. You have the power to decide where you aim those resources, and in fact, you are making that decision, more or less intentionally, all day, everyday.

If you never feel you have what you need to move your dreams and goals forward, and you want today to be your own personal Fight Procrastination Day, get real about what you can stop investing your precious personal resources into. When you intentionally withdraw and redirect those resources, you’ll find a secret portal to a near-limitless internal source of energy, enthusiasm and time for creating the things, developing the capacities and cultivating the human connections that truly matter the most.

Posted on

Vote For You: A Commencement Address for Graduating to the Next Level of Your Work and Life

Last week, I had the great honor of delivering the Commencement Address at one of my alma maters: California State University Bakersfield, where I did my undergrad and master’s degrees, before getting my law degree from UC Berkeley. I’ve shared the speech script privately, and those who have seen it have urged me to share it publicly. Enjoy.

You might have heard that this is an election year. Ok – I’m seeing fear on your faces. Don’t be afraid! I’m not going to name any names or tell you who I think you should vote for.  But there is one vote that you will make this year, this month and possibly even this week that will have a much greater impact on your life than who you vote for for President. And I am going to campaign for you to make that vote in a very particular direction, for a very particular candidate.

If you leave here today remembering nothing else, remember that I told you to vote for you. Vote for you.

Let’s talk about:

  • why I want you to vote for you
  • how you can do that
  • what it will take to consistently vote for yourself going forward, and
  • what will happen in your life when you start consistently voting for yourself.

Why Vote for You

The word vote comes from the Latin votum and vovere, which mean vow, to promise or wish. What I love about vow and promises and wishes is that they all imply future. They imply a commitment to or a hope for the future. And they all imply transformation. They all suggest the belief that there will come a time when things will be different and better than they are right now.

That is inherently optimistic and energizing. That is WHY you should vote for you.

How to Vote for You

But you’re probably wondering HOW you can vote for you, or what I mean by “vote for you”.

There are two different things you’ll need to do, over and over again, to vote for yourself in life:

  1.  You will need to pick yourself at times when no one else would or no one else will or no one else has yet
  2.  Voting for you also includes choosing situations that are beneficial for yourself and your long term ability to live into your dream for the future. Even when it’s really hard, make the choices, small and large, that create conditions conducive to your long term growth and your ability to do what you were put here on this planet to do.

You just heard about the most recent high points of my journey, but it wasn’t always like that. I met a professor here at CSUB named Dr. Beth Rienzi, who became my mentor. The day I met her, when I was 16 and very pregnant, she said: “It’s clear to me that you’ll be going to grad school.” And she started doing things then to prepare me for that, and did in fact involve me in doctoral level research and publishing, expose me to academic conferences and generally groom me for a bigger universe of possibility than I could have even imagined at the time.

She voted for me. And from then on, I made it my own job to vote for myself, to pick myself, to insert myself and say yes to opportunities and situations where no one else would. At some point, the rest of the world caught on, and started voting for me, too.

When you leave here and enter the workplace, you might see an opportunity or role or future that you would love to have, but don’t think you’re ready for. Maybe no one in your family has ever done anything like that before. Or maybe you just don’t know how to do the thing you’d love to do.

Let me let you in on a secret. NO ONE really knows how to do big things before they do them! Really, no one. I’ve worked with some of the best and brightest CEOs in the world, and I’ll tell you: they’re all guessing. They study and build skills and recruit really smart teams and get wise counsel and then they guess.

This is the definition of an executive decision: to be willing to guess, wisely, but make the decision when others would freeze up in fear or dither in uncertainty.

The takeaway is that If you have a dream in your heart, a spirit of excellence, a commitment to always learning and the opportunity arises, the only question you need to ask is “why not me?”

That doesn’t mean you say yes to everything. But it does mean you do things you’re not yet ready for, things you’re not yet qualified for, and things you haven’t done before. And it does mean that when you’re starting something big and new for you, and you feel really uncomfortable, or like you’re afraid of exposing yourself or being rejected,  or like you’re an imposter, you resist the urge to turn back. You resist the urge to crawl back into your comfort zone. And instead, you tell yourself that this imposter feeling—this freak-out moment—is a sign.

It’s a sign that life is about to get really interesting.

It’s a sign that you’re onto something good: something that will grow and develop you.

So, vote for you.

Vote for you when you face new opportunities, or the opportunity to create a new opportunity

Vote for you when you pick mates

Vote for you when you interview bosses (that’s how I think about taking jobs)

Vote for you by taking care of yourself, and not overextending yourself

Vote for you by building good habits around your health and your finances

Vote for you by building the habit of ruthless prioritization. Understand that that means you will say no to lots of things that are amazing, in order so you can say yes to things that really matter.

What it takes to VFY

Now. There are a couple of things you’ll need to be able to consistently vote for yourself:

1. First, know what you believe in. That’s how we pick the people we vote for, right? They give us these manifestos, and that helps us have clarity that they want and will work for the same future we want. Well, you need to cultivate that level of clarity about what you believe in, what you stand for, what future you want to create and WHY in order to consistently vote for yourself.

You don’t have to sit in a room and wrack your brain to think up a clear vision or get clarity on your purpose. Cultivate clarity about what you stand for and believe in through activity. Be out there, doing and trying lots of things.

Remember the miracles of biology, chemistry, cell replication and divine creative power that got you here, and take seriously the idea that you are here for a reason. Over time, you will learn what kinds of things you don’t want to work on, people you won’t work for, things you won’t do, not because you don’t like them, but because it pulls you out of your purpose

2. The second thing you need to vote for yourself is this: the power to vote.

In politics, the power to vote is called “enfranchisement”. Franchise is from the french word for “freedom”.

You might not always feel like it, but you have SO much freedom. You get to pick anything you want to do with your life, with your time, and you get to pick it every single day – even if you have been told you couldn’t, or your family has never done that before, or whatever – those limits only have the level of power you give them.

If you want to live a life of engagement, be on fire about your life, and be a person of growth and impact, I’ll give you one rule of thumb for how to choose what you do with that freedom: look for the problems, the frictions, and the sticking points in the world. And devote your time to eliminating them.

Look for the problems in your own life, your limiting factors, and focus your energy on eliminating them.

Look for problems in the world that make you angry or things you wish were different, and focus on making them different.

At work, look for the frictions in your company or in your customers lives—then get good at spotting and removing those frictions.

Then, team up with other people who are focused on looking for the problems in the world and who are on fire about getting rid of them.

I believe this is the single most powerful way to become a person of service, influence and impact.

3. The third thing you need to vote for yourself is to stop being your own opposition.

We’ve all heard negativity and critique and internalized that over the years. In order to consistently vote for you, you’ll need to rewire the way you talk to yourself. Learn how to bless yourself and your vision with your words, and slowly you’ll find yourself extinguishing your limiting beliefs

  • You vote for yourself every time you reject mediocrity, even your own.
  • You vote for you every time you refuse to settle for less, from the world or from yourself.
  • You vote for yourself when you master your habits. Stop letting bad habits create emergencies in your health and your finances that pull you out of your power and your purpose.
  • Vote for yourself by surrounding yourself with people who are for you, who will champion you, and will say so, about you and to you.

What happens when You Consistently Vote For You

Think about what happens when we vote a politician in. That night, they have a victory party. They express gratitude to everyone who helped them get there. That’s like today for you.

But what happens next? They stop campaigning and start using the powers of their new office, their new capabilities, to take on the future that they envisioned when they first asked for the vote.

Just like a newly elected politician, you are just getting started on your most powerful days, your most prosperous season. You can leave here and take your new capabilities out into the world and start consistently voting for yourself, every day, to take on your new future.

So do me a favor, when you have to choose between one thing or another, don’t play small or give into the urge to stay in what’s comfortable. When you have to cast a ballot for where to work, what to do, who to work with, whether to start a business or write a book or put yourself out there in a way that is vulnerable or scary, remember that you are here to bring something to this world that nobody else could bring, and vote for yourself. I’ll be voting for you, too.

Posted on

10 Books That Taught Me How to Create Products and Marketing People Care About [Reading List]

 

10 Books That Taught Me How to Create Products and Marketing People Care About [Reading List]

I speak a lot about the epidemic of disengagement, and try to share some of what I know about how to create products and content people care about

But there’s never enough time. I always have to leave a lot out. THIS IS UNFORTUNATE. I’ve got a lot to say.

What often gets left out are the references to books that have been so formative to my approach (now the TCI approach) to research and strategy. These books have been foundational to the we go about helping our clients ENGAGE customers, drive loyalty, capture hearts and minds. They were my early textbooks and more recent inspiration for creating high-value content and products that transforms people’s lives. They will help you engage in lifelong love affairs with your customers, too.

So, here they are. I suspect you’ll learn as much from them as I have.

Enjoy,

T

#1: Lovemarks: A future beyond brands

Author: Kevin Roberts

Why You Should Read It:  Blew my mind when I first read it, as a young marketer – a vision for brand love that, while very emotional and not so quantifiable, laid a foundational belief system for how we could and should be trying to connect with our customers.

#2: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Change

Author: Simon Sinek

Why You Should Read It:  Straight-up inspiration on how to create change in your company and in your customers’ lives, largely through content. Big thought shifts. My favorite bit: “Dr. King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech, not the ‘I have a plan’ speech.

See also: Sinek’s TED Talk: How Great Leaders Inspire Change

#3: Coaching: Evoking Excellence In Others

Author: James Flaherty

Why You Should Read It:  Beautiful methodology and systems for using narrative to help surface new possibilities to people and create behavior change, something all great transformational content does.

#4: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas

Author: Warren Berger

Why You Should Read It:  Most ineffective customer research, design and even marketing strategies fail in that they start with the wrong question, asked at the wrong level. Berger is a master at showcasing just how unlimiting asking the right question can be. Can be a power tweak to almost any part of your business or work: vision, product design, strategy, customer research, marketing, etc.

#5: If the Buddha Got Stuck

Author: Charlotte Kasl

Why You Should Read It:  Modules of wisdom on how to get unstuck, including compassionate healing from past stuckness, traumas – can use in your content or to shift your own stuck programs, thinking, teams

#6: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness

Authors: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Why You Should Read It: Too often, we build products and content to solve a customer problem with logic. News flash: humans aren’t always logical. This book is a perfect primer on behavioral economics: the biases and decision shortcuts common amoung we perfectly illogical humans, and how different institutions can help people make better decisions.

#7: Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

Author: BJ Fogg

Why You Should Read It: Fogg’s models for how computers can drive behavior change apply (IMO) to all products and marketing. He also originated the most elegant, useful model of behavior change for businesses/products that I’ve ever come across. This cuts through decades and decades of research and distills human behavior change down into models we use literally daily at TCI, and most effective behavior changing products I’ve ever seen use, as well.

See also: BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model

#8: Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence

Author: Rick Hanson

Why You Should Read It: All about the evolution of the brain and self-directed neuroplasticity. This provides the basis for content that helps customers feel better, more grounded, less distressed and more able to make change.

#9: Mental Models
Author: Indi Young

Why You Should Read It: My number 1 rule of customer research is this: DO IT. This is the actual primer on building research-based customer journey models from a design thinking perspective. (Side note: At TCI, we take a pretty different approach to the initial question, the integration of quantitative data, who we define as “customer” in customer research, etc. from what you’ll see in this book. But I’ve never seen a better resource for actual model-building.)

#10: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Author: Eric Ries

Why You Should Read It: Most product and R+D folks have probably already read this. Because of the challenges marketers face in getting budgets for content programs, I urge every single marketer to learn Lean Methodology and apply it to content programs. Launch an MVP, get feedback, optimize and iterate from there.

Posted on

Monk Mode: How and Why I Gave Up the State of Distractedness for Lent

I sweat a lot. After 20+ years of working out 5 or more days a week, my body detects nearly any degree of temperature increase as a signal of an impending workout. This makes for lots of interestingly sweaty moments.

As a result, on top of my yoga mat, I use an absorbent rug to give my hands some traction. The rug I’m using these days has a bunch of non-stick material in the spots where your hands and feet most commonly go, in the form of mantras and phrases from the lululemon manifesto.

Most of them are nice little notes with reminders to sweat (on it!), breathe and eat lots of veg.

But one, in particular, has been on my mind a lot recently, and it goes a little something like this:
“that which matters the most should never give way to that which matters the least.”

A number of you have reached out to ask what I’m working on. What’s shareable at this point is that I’m writing a book and ramping up to launch a business. Yes, at the same time.

But when Lent rolled around a few weeks back, I was in the midst of interviewing candidates for the community farm I helm the Board of, attending family weddings, facilitating a Retreat, and hosting an Alice in Wonderland themed birthday party at my home for a dear friend. I was meeting with sometimes 2 or 3 other entrepreneurs, colleagues and investors every day of the workweek.

I calculated that I was fielding an average of 6 invitations for meetings, every single day, and this doesn’t even include the never-ending flow of brunch invites. So much brunch is happening, guys. So much brunch.

All marvelous things. But, despite having recently quit the best job ever, I was busy. Too busy, even, to decide what to give up for Lent. I Googled what Lent is really for. It’s supposed to turn our focus back toward God (the most important thing), purify us, and prepare us for celebrating Easter. I decided that giving up food or Facebook or something wouldn’t really fit the bill, for me – I don’t really struggle with them. I’d actually sort of decided that I was too busy to figure this out, and was just going to honor Easter which a big brunch and keep it moving.

After a 6-day run at breakneck intensity, in which I got no writing done, I was on the yoga mat, de-chaosing my nervous system to onramp back into writing.I looked down, saw those words, and it became crystal clear that there was something I needed to give up for Lent this year: distractedness.

I know that phrasing is awkward, but it is also precisely accurate. At 40 years old, I know by now that you can’t actually give up distraction. There’s lots you can do to manage incoming distractions, but life happens, people you love will need you, and trying to stop the world from turning and events from happening is a little like trying to stop the ocean from creating new waves.

It’s a losing battle.

What you do have control of—utter control of, actually—is the way you allow your mental state, your calendar and your priorities to respond to the incoming flow of distractions.

I realized that I had allowed my mental state to shift from flow and focused creation mode to meeting mode or executive mode, which is what I’m wired for. Normally, taking meetings and nurturing relationships are the cornerstones of my career. But taking all those meetings during this critical, micro-season for my book and my business was keeping me from the creation projects that must happen right now for the longer-term vision to come to life.

Ultimately, I decided to give up the state of distractedness from my mission-critical creation projects for Lent. Here are the exact steps I took:

1. I created a decision rubric. I worked through a detailed outline and strategic action plan for the book and my company launch, and created a decision rule: for 60 days (a long Lent, certainly), my decision rule for whether I’ll take a meeting is based on whether it furthers the book (including its marketing and promotions) or the launch of the business.

Meeting with prospective clients, it might surprise you, does not fall into the “meetings I’ll take” side of the rubric. That’s a lot of what I’d been doing, and I’ve found that most prospective clients are urgent enough that it’s difficult to extract from the conversation, and that most of the great prospective clients for my business are so engaged that one conversation snowballs into 5 meetings and then poof! a week of writing is gone. I spent the first few days still taking meetings that had long been calendared, but am now well into the delirium of uninterrupted, deep work and thought time.

2. I communicated it directly, unabashedly and consistently. Where I live and work, things get done, built, created, started via relationship, conversation and action. My bias is toward yes, toward connecting and toward action. I’ve long cultivated that. And people know it, which is why the calls and emails come in.

I love that about myself, and my circle.

I got some help from my team in clearing everything I could from my calendar. And I also simply started fielding incoming meeting requests – even some from friends! – with some version of this:

Hey – I would love to connect soon. Here’s the deal. I’m in Monk Mode1 right now, working on my book and business. You know I love to connect with people, and I was finding that it was really distracting me from the things I need to get done right now. Do you mind if I reach back out in April or May to set something up? Thanks so much for understanding!

I’ve gotten maybe one response that gave away some irritation. I’ve gotten about 2 dozen that have expressed some form of admiration, appreciation or even flat-out jealousy. So far, verbatim, I’ve gotten: “I love that!”, “I admire that”, “I admire your directness”, “I want to do Monk Mode!!”, and so on.

It is a luxury to be able to focus most of your time and bandwidth on the projects you’ve always wanted to work on. Giving up distractedness is a mindset management move, not only a time management move. If you feel like you’d love to do Monk Mode, but could never get that much control over your own time, I’d challenge you to look at your calendar, look at what you do with your unbooked moments and get real about how you could devote more of your mental bandwidth to the projects or people you say you care about.

3. I observed my internal resistance without judgment. My nervous system is wired for a fast pace and for a lot of interpersonal interaction. So I definitely have experienced some internal resistance to Monk Mode, as luxurious as it really is. This mostly comes up in the following forms:

  • saying yes to invitations and projects, especially exciting ones
  • falling prey to calendar creep, that thing where you agree to do one 30-minute call and end up booking 6 hours of meetings that day, and
  • fantasizing about elaborate mental or logistical “prerequisites” to going into Monk Mode, like thinking about going away to my favorite retreat Ranch.

I’ve been treating these things the same way you’d treat your wayward mind during meditation: noticing the drift, and softly releasing it. This is a course of constant course-correction. I’m not even really tempted to be harsh with myself on this point, because (a) harshness with self never got anyone anywhere, and (b) it’s precisely my normal nervous system wiring that makes me an effective leader and entrepreneur and marketer and speaker and thinker.

This is just a season in which I can’t give way to that tendency to run on a constantly booked calendar. I’m allowing myself to down-regulate on my nervous system’s own natural timetable, just constantly reminding myself to say no, to keep the calendar clear, and to enjoy this experience.

Here’s what has happened in my world since going into Monk Mode: compounding energy, clarity and creativity. When I went into Monk Mode it was a lot like that financial strategy of paying yourself first, but with my time and my energy. And in the same way paying yourself first creates compounding interest on top of interest over time, I found myself finding new stores of energy, getting clear on things that had been foggy, then even clearer on more things, fast, and finding creative solutions to challenges that had been long stuck in my mental parking lot of issues to work out.

Flow has become my friend. Productivity, too. I’ve made about as much progress on my two important projects in the last 14 days as I had in the first 6 weeks of the year.

The projects I’m working on will bring to the fullest expression and impact the work I was put on this planet to do. I know that. They are the most important thing. So giving up distractedness from those projects for Lent seems more appropriate, in many ways, than giving up, Facebook or, well, all of those brunches.

TL; DR: Going into Monk Mode will churn up all sorts of creativity, energy, productivity and flow for your most important projects. Don’t let your most important things give way to anything else.

1. Hat tip to Jim Collins – I borrowed the phrase “Monk Mode” from a passing comment he made in the intro to Good to Great.

Posted on

3 Things That Happen to Your Life When You Stop Taking Things Personally

I have a deep relationship with Serena Williams. The fact that this relationship exists entirely in my head is neither here nor there. One time, I watched a video of her working out right before I went to a high intensity interval training session. Watching myself in the mirror the whole class, I couldn’t help but feel like my workout looked just like her workout. I ended up so sore I couldn’t parallel park for a week.

source: si.com

With that context, it should come as no surprise that I’m a little obsessed with the Sports Illustrated cover that recently came out commemorating Serena’s selection as the 2015 Sportsperson of the Year. Beyond the fact that it’s gorgeous and that I have a full-time seat on Team Serena, there’s something I love about her declaration of victory after a playing season that, by all accounts, was mixed. So much success, mashed up with injury, media tomfoolery and that painful loss.

Life is always, only that: wins and losses, mixed together. Interpretation, the way we choose to reverse engineer our personal stories, is everything. I recently produced a retreat attended by successful professional women, all of whom hold enviable job titles. When I asked them to tell me their career stories, many of them chose to retell their timelines in a way that disproportionately emphasized their losses, spinning their stories through the lens of personal failures, emotional wounds, bad breaks and times they made bad decisions.

Not only did my retreat friends recall negative events much more intensely, they also tended to take “bad” things and losses very personally. Seeing so much of this style of interpretation come up at the retreat inspired me to share The Four Agreements – four beliefs author Don Miguel Ruiz suggests we adopt to release an enormous amount of suffering and live happier, bolder, more grounded lives.

While all four agreements are worthy of attention, the Second Agreement is a big one: Don’t take anything personally.

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

This brings us back to Ms. Williams. You can argue about whether she is the Greatest Athlete of All Time, if you’d like, but one thing you can’t dispute is that she is a stellar model for what happens to your life when you stop taking things personally.

Practicing not taking things personally is a challenge, but the upside of rewiring the way you see almost everything others do as being about them (vs. you) is enormous. Let’s use Serena’s recent life and interviews as Exhibit A. Here are just a few of the changes you can expect to see in your life when you stop taking things personally:

1. You become the ruler of your own belief system. See, when you take the things other people say personally, you hand over control of the steering wheel of your emotions and your life to another person: another person who is human, flawed, and dealing with their own emotional wounds and flawed belief systems.

When she announced her return to the Indian Wells tournament, after 15 years of boycotting the event where she and her sister were the victim of racial insults as teens, she wrote in an essay in Time: “There are some who say I should never go back. There are others who say I should’ve returned years ago. I’m just following my heart on this one.”

And when journalists asked her about the pressure to win Slam after Slam, she replied with a clear, internal compass, respectfully declining to take that pressure on as her own. The New Yorker quoted her before the Open as saying, “That’s the beauty of my career. I don’t need to do anything at all. Everything I do from this day forward is a bonus. Actually, from yesterday. It doesn’t matter. Everything for me is just extra.”

When you stop taking things personally, you become the sovereign ruler of your emotions and your actions – regardless of what others think or expect of you. If you can take it to expert level, you can be the boss of yourself and your life – regardless of external pressures or circumstances.

2. You learn who you really are, and what you’re really about. When you don’t take other people’s opinions, actions and words about you personally, you will slowly but surely learn what you really care about, what you want to do, what makes you happy and unhappy, and what your own vision for your life is. You give up the outdated storylines from your family, friends, coworkers, even your childhood that explain why you are a certain way or have never been able to overcome a certain thing, and those limitations disappear. You develop an independent moral compass and vision for your life, and your decisions become clearer, faster. You’ll live more boldly, and make moves that work for you and your personal value system, with much less regret.

Serena is clear on why she does what she does:

She plays for the love of the game: “I’m fortunate to be at a point in my career where I have nothing to prove. I’m still as driven as ever, but the ride is a little easier. I play for the love of the game.”

She plays for the next generation: ‘‘‘I play for me,’’ Serena told me, ‘‘but I also play and represent something much greater than me. I embrace that. I love that. I want that.’’’

She returned to Indian Wells driven by faith and forgiveness: “I was brought up to forgive people,” Serena says, “and I felt that I wasn’t doing what I was taught.”

And she’s equally clear on what she’s not motivated by, even though everyone around her might expect her to be. ‘‘You don’t understand me,’’ Serena responded to a New York Times reporter’s inquiry about how badly she wanted the 22 Grand Slam milestone. ‘‘I’m just about winning. It’s not about getting 22 Grand Slams.”

When you stop taking things personally, you get to write your own story. If someone else wants to tell a story about you, you either correct them or let them have their own story about you. But you don’t internalize it or take it on – you become impervious to their story, their poison, their issues.

3. You connect MORE deeply with others, not less. When I shared the Second Agreement with my friends at the retreat, one woman raised her hand and asked a fair question: “What about the good things? When people say nice, loving things to me, if I don’t take those things personally, won’t it impair my relationships?”

I believe it’s almost more important that you don’t take the positive things people say and do to you personally than the critical things they send your way. Why? Because the positive things other people say still come from a place of their dreams, beliefs, goals and agreements. Allowing them to be in control of your emotions, even your positive emotions, is still putting your emotional state into someone else’s hands.

When you practice understanding that nothing anyone else says or does is actually about you, you begin to have more compassion for the wounds that people who say or do unkind things toward you are experiencing. You become more able to connect with people from a place of mutual love, respect and a commitment to engaging in relationships that reflect the friend, lover, family member and professional you want to be in this life vs. coming from a place of quid pro quo, caretaking, obligation and name-calling. Relationships built on that foundation are deep, strong and healthy.

In talking about her relationship with one-time #1 rival and bff Serena Williams, Caroline Wozniacki told Vogue that following her broken engagement, “She wasn’t pitying me, like a lot of people were. I mean, it’s not like anyone died. I was in shock, but she was really helpful because she had been through it before. She didn’t sugarcoat it, and she didn’t look down on me. She was really there for me when I needed her the most, and that’s why I think our friendship is so strong now.”

Taking things personally is a massive limitation. It gradually erodes at your clarity and your boldness until you force your life into this little shape that no one else will find objectionable. Release the tendency to take things personally. Doing so is transformative, and will put you back on the throne of your emotions and your actions. Ask Queen Serena.

Posted on

How to Be Ridiculously in Charge* of Your Life

Beatrix Kiddo

 

I was talking with a relative recently, and the conversation took a turn to this laundry list of things that make her crazy. The list ranged from traffic to bar soap, to lines at the market, to public restrooms. It included rain and hot weather, hotels, all children under 8 and the times when the slats of one window shutter might are open at a different width than the slats of the neighboring shutter. People who move to or from her town were on the list. Making a lunch date and later calling to change plans? No. Unacceptable.

I pointed out that some of these items seem so likely to happen in everyday life that it might be worth reexamining her stance. But she said she was committed to her positions because she likes to do things “on my own terms.” Then she started telling me about the strategies she has devised for avoiding all of these things and many others. What she painted was the portrait of a very constricted – and constricting – lifestyle built entirely around avoiding what I saw as minor discomforts. Her efforts to avoid them have been mostly unsuccessful, I might add.

What she does succeed at avoiding, though, is joy.

Our conversation reminded me of this blog post I’d just read called 46 Reasons Why My Three-Year-Old Might Be Freaking Out, which included line items like:

  • His lip is salty
  • His brother is looking at him
  • His brother is not looking at him
  • His hair is heavy
  • The inside of his cheek feels rough (and my personal favorite)
  • His sleeve is touching his thumb.

This is amusing behavior when we see it in someone who has been on the planet less time than the shoes I’m wearing. It is more concerning in what I’ll call a seasoned adult.

My relative is an extreme case. But how different is her list of “issues” than what you or I do when we get all twitterpated in reaction to the various unchangeable realities, uncontrollable tragedies and relatively minor irritations of life?

We perseverate on whether we sounded stupid or whiny in that meeting last week at work, or whether we should have sent that email. Argh why did we send that email??!! We fixate on how our 15-year-old’s grades could ruin Her Whole Entire Life. We ruminate on the things other people said about us, did to us, might be saying, might be doing, how we might feel if they do or say that and what we can try to make them stop doing or saying future offenses. We go down internet rabbit holes about ISIS, sex trafficking, the drought, micro-bubbles, and the vaccination controversy, and we experience serious distress about what is happening to the world.

We hear about a friend’s nephew who has a condition and read everything we can about what causes it. We click on the “skin conditions” images button on WebMD, which we should know by now to never ever ever ever do.

Then we start fixing the world – or at least our world: we go organic, eliminate plastics, and start stockpiling provisions for when the big one hits. We hire tutors, enroll our kids in private schools, engage therapists and try to get even more parenting tips from Tiger Moms and Black Moms and French Moms.

Maybe fixing is not your thing. But you worry and process and project, as though if you can touch a possibility with your mind or make sure you have explored it in conversations with your friends, you can prevent it from happening – or at least not be surprised if it does.

But then one day, many of us have an experience that calls all that fixing and processing and projecting into question: something bad happens, despite our very best efforts to everything-proof our lives. Maybe something really bad happens. Your mother gets a bad medical report. You have an accident. The real estate market crashes. You go broke. Your troubled teen goes all the way off the rails. Your brother goes to prison. Your marriage falls apart.

Maybe two of those things happen in rapid succession. Or, if you’re blessed to be anything like me a few years back, maybe all of these things happen at roughly the same time.

But then another thing happens. You survive. Maybe you actually spot some patterns in all these catastrophes. And you see what’s not working in your life – even if you’re always the “righteous” one. (Especially if you’re always the righteous one.) Then, if you’re like me, it’s entirely possible that within the things you thought you couldn’t stand to have happen – the very things you thought would do you in – you find the clues to your very deepest emotional wounds and the unresolved issues that once had you so fearful, anxious or easily triggered by Every Freaking Person Place and Thing, like my relative.

If you’re really blessed, you might take this opportunity to detect just how delusional and draining, though well-intentioned, your efforts to avoid everything “bad” that might ever happen were in the first place. You might even see how some of the worst things that could ever happen to you, when they actually happen, turn out to be the best things that could ever happen to you. You still manage your life, take care of yourself, and address issues when they come up. You just release the expectation to somehow be immune from the human condition because of all your work.

When you start healing and dealing with all the stuff that these difficult events have brought up, what you might find underneath all the resistance and fear and deep-seated grievance is that intensely pure soul of yours, unbreakable and free. When you surrender your triggers and stop trying to dictate all the details of how the world happens to you, you might find a reservoir of infinite love and wonder, the infinite capacity to heal, the boundless power to feel and generate joy and energy. Down there, you’ll find the ability to respond effectively and from a place of stability and calm, no matter what is happening in your life at any given moment.

So then, maybe, you learn gradually learn how to thrive and love your life and to do your best and receive the best life has to offer in every situation. Even when things are hard, or you don’t know exactly what to do, or when there’s a sub-8-year-old kid around, or your car gets scratched, or your neighbor’s cooking smells gross you out, or your wife leaves you, or your new boss turns out to be Voldemort’s twin brother. Even when you break your foot or your glasses or your heart. Even if Something Really Bad happens.

Constantly declaring what we can’t or couldn’t stand, or obsessing about the state of the world in no way prevents bad things from happening. All we do when we list off things we don’t like or couldn’t bear is place limitation after limitation on our own happiness. When we do this, we are literally carving out the conditions under which we are willing to be happy and the conditions we are going to allow to make us unhappy.

As a bizarre result, we spend much of the best times of our lives, the times when things are going great, trying to brace ourselves against the waves of life, holding our breaths in anticipation of the tragedies that might happen, imagining how we would deal with them, and cooking up strategies to try to avoid them. In this way, we expressly deprive ourselves of the ability to be happy if bad things happen and if and if they don’t.

This state of constant emotional high alert and vigilance against the inevitable realities of life, the small stuff and the life events that help us grow is also known as generalized anxiety. This is well-documented. But this state also has three other very common, but slightly less obvious, side effects:

  1. It takes a vast amount of mental energy, time and even money to brace against the waves of life, fight the waves when they come, and to persist in the delusion of trying to construct a wave-free life. This is precisely the energy you need to live our your dreams and fulfill your purpose on this planet.
  2. I recently saw a question on Quora in which the parent of an 8-month-old asked how to make crystal clear to the baby that no nighttime crying or waking would be tolerated under any circumstances. Denying reality in this way, fighting the uncomfortable truths of how the world actually works and flailing away at issues that are either unimportant or unsolvable is a super fast path to being sad and depressed all the time.
  3. Every moment you spend perseverating on the past, present and future violations of the way you would do things if you ruled the world is a moment you are distracted from the actual, massive power you have to positively impact your world, the people in your life, and humanity.

There’s a fine line between being ridiculously in charge of your life and resisting reality to your own depleting, depressing, distracting detriment. This fine line can be found right smack within whatever it is you’re trying to change, control or impact. The dysfunction that is resisting reality commonly occurs when we try to change or prevent the fundamentally unchangeable realities of life:

  • We can’t, for example, change other people’s behavior, although in a strange twist of reality, this seems to be the thing most people spend their time flailing away at.
  • We can’t stop every person from ever saying or doing things that we don’t like.
  • We can’t make everyone like us.
  • We can’t perfect our way out of ever disappointing or being criticized by someone, because other people’s feelings are not within our control.
  • We can’t stop the truths that people die, you-know-what happens, poverty and injustice exist, and truffle fries do not the basis for a happy healthy body make – as much as we want to look for silver bullets to escape these realities, bemoan them or even rage against them.

Being ridiculously in charge of your life includes owning any of the following things we do actually have the power to change:

  • We can control and change our own behavior. (Though that seems to be the thing people feel the least power over.)
  • We can 100% choose which people to be in relationships with, and how much to give or take in those relationships.
  • We can show up with a spirit of excellence in everything we do.
  • We can be kind, loving, wise and discerning.
  • There are times when, as part of responsibly wielding this power we have over our own behavior, we can do things that impact various situations we’re in for the better. We can evaluate, strategize, action plan and execute on those plans.
  • We can support people and participate in movements that are fighting the good fight against injustice, poverty and the like.
  • We can change our emotional states, reactions and responses to things that happen and things people do in our lives.

To do these things is the definition of being a person of action and impact. Resisting reality is like saying we can’t stand it when the sun shines. This last bullet point represents the saner and easier approach: deciding to start standing it and to stop trying to dim the sun. Mastery of our emotional and behavioral responses to the things that happen in our lives is a lifelong path, but it is also, actually, a superpower. It unlocks untold energy and calm that cannot be disturbed by any fact or circumstance.

Mastering our emotional and behavioral responses to the things that happen in our lives is a lifelong path, but it is also, actually, a superpower. It unlocks a limitless source of energy and calm that cannot be disturbed by any fact, threat or circumstance.

Here’s an example. A friend of mine was recently getting ready for a beach vacation. She explained that she was working out super hard to get ready, because “I’d just love to be able to wear a bikini with nothing on top of it and feel super comfortable for the first time ever.” I said, “Look, sweets. There are two levers you can pull here. You can try to change all these things about your body in the next two weeks. Or you can decide to get comfortable wearing whatever you want. And that you can do right now. Like before we’re done with brunch.”

Being ridiculously in charge of your own life doesn’t mean trying to control the uncontrollable, or trying to “manage” every element of your life. And it doesn’t mean never feeling bad or being upset. It means having the integrity to recognize what is real, releasing the human tendency to resist reality when it’s uncomfortable, and developing mastery over yourself and only yourself. This superpower creates the freedom to enjoy your life, every day, at any time, regardless of what happens to you.

*H/t to Henry Cloud, from whom I borrowed the phrase “ridiculously in charge”.