The self-help books that taught me the common sense my foundation wasn’t built on and why my husband doesn’t need to read them.
I’m walking up and down the stairs for my daily postpartum workout, because it didn’t require anything specific, but successfully elevated my heart rate, reading Rory Vaden’s book Take The Stairs…it was quite fitting.
I had a lightbulb moment in Chapter Two (probably my favorite chapter of the book), when Rory talks about indecision. I rushed to the edge of the loft and read the excerpt excitedly, down to Ian, my husband, in the kitchen, and proceeded to tell him how earth shattering this information was to me.
He looked up at me and said “And?”, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I turned around, bewildered at the natural brilliance of this man, proceeding down the stairs, book in hand, thinking as I turned around to go back up the stairs, how interesting it was that this excerpt meant nothing to him when it was ground breaking to me.
I went back to the edge of the loft and said to him “You know Babe, I think the foundation of your childhood was so strong and healthy that what comes as common sense to you, is literally shocking and revealing to me, in the best way.”
I read the basics to how a person should behave, interact, perform, anticipate, defend, survive and thrive and it’s a revelation.
Rory argues in chapter two that indecision could be the more expensive route than making the imperfect choice. I thrive on the planning season, the research feels productive and allows me to not make a decision that boxes me in.
My mind begs me to not put her in a box.
She can’t breathe in there.
Decided decisions can feel like a box. Announcements definitely make me feel caged in. I get the feeling that when something is announced, everyone is watching and I hate to let myself down, much less anyone else.
I don’t see my husband struggle with this. He makes decisions and goes along with them without a stumble. But there’s something powerful about choosing a path and then deciding to become the person who makes it work.
This is why I believe that it is important to allow our kids to be decision makers. I won’t be making all the decisions for them, we will be there to make sure they carry said decision to completion, but I think it makes for a better character and a better life, instead of one where they are perpetually dabbling in various things with serious dreams in the backs of their mind.
Being raised to organize my decisions around other people’s reactions, every personal choice does not feel like a simple action. Even as an adult that has very few people to respond to, a decision in the back of my mind can feel like disobedience, exposure and danger.
But acknowledging this, learning this about myself and seeing Ian operate in the exact opposite has allowed me to see this pattern as a flaw and learn to correct it, because reality is my decisions don’t need to spelled out, some of them can just be and that’s perfectly alright, even thought every fiber of my being is telling me opposite.
So while my husband makes decisions that are healthy and then simply proceeds into them without a second thought, I’ve made it my mantra to tell myself:
I chose this.
I am allowed to choose it.
I will solve what choosing it requires.
I will not renegotiate with myself every morning.
I may change the strategy without abandoning the promise.
It may sound stupid to some people, or maybe you understand where I am coming from, because you’ve been there yourself.
My husband laughs and he’s just happy when I’m grounded, whatever that takes.
When I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, I couldn’t put it down. It became my Bible. I carried it with me everywhere and devoured it. The truths and identity I found in there was akin to when I read Rachel Hollis’s Girl Wash Your Face in my early twenties. It was groundbreaking in my mind and changed me forever. A girl reading about her brokenness from a girl writing about her brokenness.
People don’t want to talk about what’s broke, but I swear calling it out is how you fix it.
I would read Hollis’ book and walk up and down the hallways of the Adult Family Home I was running whispering frantically to myself “Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are that you can just choose something different?” As Hollis reminded me over and over in her writing, that I, indeed, could. And I did. I quit the business I hated. Was never meant for the medical field but it made my mom happy. I got my bachelors in marketing and business. I started my own business’. Some failed, some thrived. I experimented. I tried different things. I enjoyed the heck out of it.
The book that Hollis wrote, told me I could (along with some really awesome mentors I had my life).
The book the Pressfield wrote, gave me a name for what I felt was stopping me from reaching the next level, resistance.
“You can” wasn’t cutting it anymore. I knew I could, and I did. But that gave me infinite doors and it was time I chose one, as least for foreseeable seasons and I felt that even when I chose on Monday morning, why was I not further along on Friday evening?
It was freeing to know that some of the most successful people that I look up to, also felt this way from time to time. That the fear, perfectionism, procrastination, self-doubt and self-sabotage was not some defect, something wrong, with me (any enneagram 1’s around here?)
The more meaningful a project is to your development, the more resistance you may feel towards it. Fear and self-doubt weren’t necessarily evidence that I needed to retreat.
IT WAS GROUNDBREAKING.
I’m sorry we’re going to use that word and similar words to it, a lot. Not sorry.
When the stakes were practical (picking a mattress for my hotel, repainting a room, remodeling, building a garage, a fence, a workbench, etc.), I moved fast, I researched and made the decision. When it was about something that could matter, projects with the greatest emotional risk, such as: illustrating my book, recording an album, or writing in public (I’ve been writing in my journals for as long as I can remember, where no one could see, my thoughts safely tucked away), resistance has a way of making you productive in other things that should not be the priority.
I’ve been told I go in too hard on things. But I found its the best way to beat resistance. I go in hard and don’t stop until I’m starving, shivering with exhaustion and made real headway with the project or it’s finished. It can be difficult to live with someone like that sometimes. But there’s a mode for everything, some things are better done bit by bit every day. I just found that going all in sometimes with one core focus was the best way to win when resistance was strongest, even before I had a word for it.
My husband says you can’t get a home run if you don’t swing the bat. Work comes first, your confidence is not the admission ticket. To someone raised with healthy internal validation, this sounds so obvious…insert eye roll. People become competent by practicing, courage develops through action. Being seen to me while still becoming feels intolerably vulnerable. I want to emerge only after I have made myself unassailable.
So I did the dirty thing. It feels dirty to me because it goes against everything in me, self protecting mind. I announced the project when it was in the making. I did it small. Just a clip with a chorus and a short caption. Like it, don’t like it. It’s out there now because the pro shows up whether or not the work feels magical and rides the waves of the magic, devoting oneself to the project until it is magic. Emotional climate doesn’t have to be favorable to get the job done well.
Inspiration is not responsible for finishing what inspiration began, I am. The muse comes. She speaks. I listen. I proceed.
I almost told my husband to read the book, but then I understood that he did not need a philosophy to explain that fear was something you acted through and that discomfort does not revise the assignment.
Before I had twins, I read 10x Is Easier Than 2x. They’re in parallel. I always say that having twins isn’t double the work, because you’re already there. You’re in baby land and on baby time. Everything revolves around the baby, from rest to play to work.
This book insists that ten times is not a direct result of ten times the labor, because you’re already there. You’re simply going deeper in the thing you’re already doing and becoming so selective about it, that some task, patterns and behaviors could no longer accompany me into the next phase.
My natural instinct is that I must increase my capacity to carry more, that subtraction is a form of settling, failure, becoming smaller, boxing in or letting go of dreams. But the book reframes subtraction as the price of expansion.
I read this book back to back three times and then proceeded to tell everyone around me about it.
I do not suffer from a shortage of inspiration or desire. I want every aspect of ordinary life to be cinematic.
I remember in an argument with my husband early on and I burst into tears saying “But Babe, I just wanted it to be perfect”. He was so exasperated at this point that he just looked at me and said “IT WILL NEVER BE PERFECT!”
It was a ground breaking moment. I couldn’t believe it. “You mean, it doesn’t matter how hard I work, it will never be perfect?”
I figured if I wanted twice to result, I would work twice as hard.
But the 10x framework is probably the healthiest thing I ever learned because it taught me that I needed to become ruthless about what deserved to be carried asking myself in every season what had to change drastically for drastic improvement. Radical expansion and growth requires subtraction.
Circling back to my twins, I cut out a few things to protect my energy and focus on higher priorities for me. So I subtracted grocery shopping, my taxes and toxic relationships that made my cry in the shower instead of utilizing that time to be filled with creativity, inspiration and general lust for life.
Natalie Ellis’s book, The Freedom-Based Business Method, talks a lot about capacity, which is something I have built my whole life around. I work to protect and preserve my energy, because it is a limited resource. But to me, work carries a psychological weight representing freedom, proof, identity, possibility, safety and escape. To Ian, it’s common sense that work provides for a life, it’s not necessarily the end all be all.
My competence made it difficult to distinguish between “I can do this” and “This deserves access to my life”. My limited energy is not a personal weakness that needed to be conquered, as so many times I felt it was. Instead, it was a design constraint around which an intelligent life must be built.
There will always be people demanding that you live a smaller life. Sometimes, it’s my husband who’s on the other side of the table asking me why I am doing this or that. What is it I am actually pursuing and is it worth it? I want a bigger life but I know it requires enough structure to hold everything I love in it.
So, you’ll find me here inspecting every weak board, naming it and replacing it while already living on top of it. Ian’s statements and insight into my life are painfully basic, but to me they are seismic and I hope my kids read what I wrote one day and shrug: “And?” Because what was so interesting to me, was simply daily reality for them.
Xoxox,
Lauren
Next Week — Week 03 of 30
The hardest worker who hated her life.