Our society is set up to reward doing.
What awards have you won?
How many non-profits have you started?
How many toys do you own?
How many degrees do you have?
And yet, we experience rewards (and the rest of life) through feelings.
Where is the disconnect?
Hell if I know.
Maybe we think that we can win at life if we achieve more.
Society sure sends us those messages ad nauseam.
But what I do know is that we don’t want to win awards.
We want the feeling we think we will get from winning awards.
Like pride or vindication or value.
We don’t want to own more clothes or beach houses.
We want to feel admired or important.
Underneath it all, people are looking for emotional transformation. They’re trying to buy the feeling they believe the object or experience will give them.
Try this:
If you want a deeper, fuller life experience, fill your life with things that give you the feelings you are seeking.
Define what you want to feel:
Excitement, hope, relief, belonging, control, confidence, joy, comfort, or even possibility.
Steer your ship in that direction.
Then when you are in the thick of it, stop and feel your feelings all the way through.
Even the bad ones.
Feel it in your bones and skin and connective tissue, all the way to the edges of your body.
That’s what makes life complex and deeply connected.
DOING to chase a feeling is exhausting.
Targeted action (towards feelings) guides you closer to the way you think things ought to be.
Suleika Jaouad’s cancer has returned for the third time.
I’m sure that prompts people to give all sorts of well-intentioned advice.
“Live every day like it’s your last.”
According to Suleika, this is terrible advice.
“It’s exhausting to live every day like it’s your last.
To carpe diem the crap out of everything.
It would be chaos.
We would be cheating on our spouse and emptying our bank account.
Instead, I had to shift to a gentler mindset and
Live every day as if it were my first.
Wake up with the sense of pure, uninhibited creative freedom.”
Her suggestion: Instead of living like it’s your last, live life as a series of “tiny acts of creative alchemy”.
Yeeeesss. It sounds much more peaceful to intentionally live with child-like wonder.
One strategy is based on fear.
The other on awe and amazement.
I am sharing a peek behind the curtain at what a coach is looking for when they coach you.
Yes, there are a lot of things, but secretly we are looking for patterns.
How do you treat yourself when you run into a rough patch?
What do you think about the people around you?
Patterns… good and bad.
If you find patterns that are painful, then you can change them. Yay!
But I also like to lean heavily into good patterns.
I noticed that often when I do things well, I do them slowly but consistently.
Like self-piercing earrings.
When I was in 6th grade, I got self-piercing earrings.
The device is a circle-shaped earring with a needle at one end and a small loop at the other. The needle eventually goes through the loop.
Pinch the earring each day and a month later your ears are pierced!
I know that sounds like torture to some of you.
But that’s a pattern I have repeated over and over.
With saving for retirement.
With weight loss.
With business building.
I don’t rip off the band-aid. It’s a slow transition for me.
I don’t jump into a cold pool. I gently lower myself, so my head doesn’t explode.
I am not someone who comes in hot and loses interest in a hurry.
I don’t come in hot and stay hot.
And I don’t struggle to find direction.
There are pros and cons to all patterns.
But I feel better about my health goals knowing that if I turn the ship a few degrees at a time, I have a history of big success.
What are your patterns?
(Did I just refer to myself as a ship? Hmmm… maybe a small schooner.)