Tag Archive: challenge

Recommitting to the Goal, Again and Again

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Right now, I’m in the midst of the two biggest challenges that I’ve ever chosen to undertake. What they have in common is that there is no linear path to the destination. Instead, there is a roundabout route with detours, roadblocks, and occasional dead ends. And, of course, there’s no road map.

My first challenge is parenting my toddler son with patience and compassion.

For me, taking care of a newborn was a piece of cake compared with parenting a toddler. I would take the spit-up and dozens of diaper changes and feedings every two hours around the clock in a heartbeat if I could trade the irrational tantrums, the constant demands and interruptions, and the times that my toddler bites me on the leg repeatedly and laughs about it. To him, it’s a fun game.

The last item has me at the end of my rope. I’ve read that toddlers bite for a number of reasons: to relieve teething pain, to get a reaction, to seek attention, or even to show affection — not because they will grow up to be a Dexter Morgan-class psychopath one day. But still, when I am trying to cook dinner and have to ward off his little fangs in my leg again and again, I find myself getting furious and exasperated instead of giving him a firm but loving course correction.

A major reason that I handled a newborn with relative ease was that I was on maternity leave then; the only thing I was doing was parenting, and I could recoup any lost sleep during the day. Now I am working a full-time job outside of the house, then I start my second shift as a mom, and after that, my third shift as a writer. Every day, I am exhausted.

I’ve found that parenting is a series of daily victories and failures. Among today’s victories were making my son giggle by playing peekaboo, and reading him the same books several times in a row. Among today’s failures were handing him to his father when he was screaming for no discernible reason, and saying, “You deal with him. I just can’t right now.”

I hope to do better tomorrow. I fail, I learn, and I recommit to being a loving parent. I focus on the goal of teaching my son to be a kind, resilient, curious person, and doing whatever it takes to get there.

My second challenge is writing the Reschool Yourself book.

As incredibly difficult as I’m finding it to be the parent of a toddler, it’s been even more difficult for me to write a book. I wish that reading a whole lot of inspirational, female-protagonist memoirs translated neatly to producing one myself, but unfortunately that has not been the case. I wish that writing countless blog posts added up to writing a book, but it turns out that they’re completely different beasts. Blog posts are short and make a single point. Books have a plot and structure, characters and dialogue, and a narrative arc that keeps readers turning the pages. Their sheer word count is daunting.

The six years that I’ve been working on the book have been comprised of a series of peaks and valleys. I’ll get some inspiration that will put fuel in the tank, and then it will run out and I’ll be stuck again.

Seth Godin describes this phenomenon as “The Dip,” or “the long slog between starting and mastery.” He describes the excitement that we all feel at the beginning of a new project, and the inevitable letdown once the novelty wears off and the hard work begins. All of a sudden, things get real. When they hit a low point, that’s the Dip. Godin says that if the goal is not worth the effort — that is, you don’t really want it, or your hard work won’t ever pay off — you should strategically quit, and quit fast. But if it is worth the effort, then you’ll be in the minority of winners if you keep going through the Dip and come out on the other side. A key to succeeding, he says, is knowing that the Dip is there, and that you’re currently in the middle of it.

I’ve let the Dip stop me from finishing the book many times, but what’s more important is that I’ve eventually picked myself back up and recommitted to my goal. Each time, it’s difficult to overcome the pure inertia — the habit of not working on the book — and the self-loathing I feel for having failed once again. But I do it anyway. I will keep pushing through Dip after Dip and recommitting to my goal as many times as it takes to get the book done.

I am also trying to keep in mind a vision of what it will feel like to achieve my goal, to run my hands over the cool, smooth covers of my book and to hear readers say that my words made a difference in their lives. The comments that people leave on my blog posts give me little glimpses of this feeling, and they refuel my tank when it’s running low.

To recap, what I’ve learned from being in the midst of these two tough challenges: Envision how you’ll feel once you achieve your goal. Know that you’ll hit peaks and valleys along the way, possibly more times than you can count. Celebrate your smallest of successes, forgive yourself for even your biggest failures, and recommit to your goal as many times as it takes. I’ll be right there with you.

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by keltickleton.

The Highlight Reel Is Not the Full Picture

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The quote above is from an Anne Lamott piece in Salon about forgiveness that really struck me. I love how she puts this. I tend to think of “people’s outsides” as “the Facebook version of their lives,” or “the highlight reel.” It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that everyone else has a picture-perfect life, while yours is humdrum at best — or that you’re the only one who is having a tough time. The reality is that our outsides tell only one part of the story. The high points may be authentic, but they’re only part of the full picture.

My own Facebook timeline is Exhibit A. Of the last few posts I’ve made, four are pictures or videos of my 15-month-old son being adorable, and one is an article about loving life in Mississippi. All of these moments and sentiments are real, but what doesn’t show up on the page are all of the other moments that have lately stretched my patience thin. I’ve been sick with a bad cold for the past week, which has coincided with Evan cutting four molars at once and my trying to wean him from breastfeeding. Consequently, he has spent a large portion of the week wailing and shedding heartbreakingly big baby tears. He’s been waking up at 3 am crying and then rising for the day around 5, which has left me feeling exhausted and eager to get through this phase.

On Thanksgiving Day I posted a photo of Evan enjoying little portions of turkey and all the fixins, but what I didn’t say is that he had raised hell all morning while Darren and I were trying to cook, to the point where it was hard to remember my blessings. I also didn’t mention how much I missed spending the holiday with my family, and when I didn’t get to join their Google Hangout because of a tech glitch, I nearly cried. That stuff doesn’t get a lot of likes on Facebook, so I keep it to myself.

When all we encounter are people’s outsides — the pleasantries exchanged in passing, the smiling family Christmas cards adorning our refrigerators, the vacation photos on Instagram — it’s not unreasonable to think that everyone else is having a better time than we are. They seem more successful, happier, and luckier in love, and their kids never throw tantrums in the middle of the grocery store.

The truth is that any given day is a blend of the sacred and the mundane and the challenging, and that we have no idea what’s really going on with people under the surface. It’s a relief to remember that we all have some degree of “screwed-up-idness” inside. ALL of us.

I love Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook feed (and really, I love her in general) because she makes a point of sharing her whole story with readers, not the sugarcoated version. This week she posted about how she has committed to exercising for 20 minutes per day in spite of how much she loathes it, but every day she tries to make excuses and talk herself out of it. Then she goes ahead and does it anyway. Several women commented that when faced with a dilemma, they ask themselves, “What would Liz do?” To this, she responded, “Often WHAT LIZ WOULD DO is get a little weepy, feel a little overwhelmed, beat herself up a bit…and then eventually get sick of her own drama…and only then: ACT. (I’m working on eliminating some of those preliminary steps!)”

In a recent talk, Gilbert said, “For me, peace comes when I … embrace the beautiful mess that I am,” she says. “And embrace the beautiful mess that you all are, and that this world is, and just let it be that.”

No matter how we present ourselves on the outside, we’re all a beautiful mess on the inside. So let’s stop comparing ourselves and embrace that, shall we?

Oh, the Inertia

It’s the moving boxes that have never gotten unpacked. It’s the cracked windshield that you keep meaning to replace. It’s the blog post that doesn’t get written…and gets harder to start with each passing day.

It’s inertia, “the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest.” And that physical object, oftentimes, is me.

The worst part about inertia, in my experience, is that the more time that passes without change, the guiltier I feel. The inertia gets even stronger, and I know that when I finally just do the thing that I’m putting off, the little surge of relief and pride I get for finally crossing it off my list will be overshadowed by deep self-loathing for not just doing it when I was supposed to. Now who would sign up for that?

It’s helpful when there are outside forces that push inert objects into motion. In our last apartment, Darren and I couldn’t let dirty dishes sit in the sink very long because we had a total of three spoons and three bowls to our names (you can guess that it was a bachelor pad before I moved in). If we didn’t wash them, we’d have to resort to pouring our morning milk and cereal directly into our mouths. Even worse, there are cockroaches in the South that invade even the cleanest of homes, and it’s unwise to tempt fate.

Loved ones and coworkers are also good for nudging, or shoving, you through the inertia. Reminders and deadlines help. So does the exasperation of a partner. I’ve gotten so fed up with a couple of Darren’s old boxes that I’ve just dumped their contents on the living room floor. He has to help me sort through them if he wants to rescue items like his beloved Daredevil action figure from the giveaway pile. (Darren just said to me, “We did save that, right?” Yep, you did!)

For me, the thing that builds the most inertia is this very project, Reschool Yourself. It’s been nearly six months since my last post, and it’s been two and a half years since I finished the RSY experience. The book has been knocking around the inside of my head since then. To gear up for writing it, I’ve read other project-based memoirs like Julie and Julia for inspiration; I’ve gone to creative nonfiction workshops; I’ve written a proposal and bits and pieces of narrative; I’ve made contact with a few great literary agents.

So now it’s time to stop preparing to write the thing and just do it already. I hope it’s published. But even if it’s not, it will free up a lot of bandwidth that’s currently tied up in thinking and fretting and feeling guilty about it. Best of all, once the book is done, whether the big publishing houses love it or not, I can share it with people who have said that they could really use it. One told me, “This book needs to be in the world,” which was just the kind of loving nudge that I needed.

So here’s to blowing the dust off old projects and breathing new life into them. With each breath comes another step forward.