Grow With Soul: Episode 121 - Mindset Q&A - Crisis, Comparison, and Cultivation
Today is the first Q&A episode of the new iteration of the podcast, and I have to say that everyone who submitted questions via Instagram knocked it out of the park. Your questions were so thoughtful and piercing, and it has been a wonderful challenge, and also a joy, to put this episode together. Your questions were also so numerous that I’ve had to split them into two episodes - your more practical, efficient work-y questions will come another day, but today is all about mindset and the emotional experience of this thing.
What I talk about in this episode:
Letting the world crash
Working out the non-negotiables
Seeking direction from inside yourself
Accepting and testing the hypothesis that you might just be worthy
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Read the episode transcript:
Today is the first Q&A episode of the new iteration of the podcast, and I have to say that everyone who submitted questions via Instagram knocked it out of the park. Your questions were so thoughtful and piercing, and it has been a wonderful challenge, and also a joy, to put this episode together. Your questions were also so numerous that I’ve had to split them into two episodes - your more practical, efficient work-y questions will come another day, but today is all about mindset and the emotional experience of this thing.
There are questions on peace in crisis, comparison, overcoming negative emotions and thinking differently.
How can one get balance when all the world around her is crashing down?
God I felt this. At first when I saw this question I thought “how am I supposed to answer this?”, and then I realised that I may be one of the better people to talk on this. The world has been crashing down around me for over a year. First, there was the realisation about my relationship, then the psyching myself up to end it. Then the ending, then the months where he wouldn’t leave, then the months where I moved out, how I’ve had to pay for everything in the meantime. Then there was selling the house, and there was the breast clinic and the UTIs and the knee injury, the family bereavements, the emotional and physical house of horrors that is dating, the dissatisfaction in work, the desperation to change, the desperation to stop the world because I want to just get off.
And I say this not to partake in some kind of vulnerability Olympics, certainly not to create some scale of whose suffering is more serious and justified. I say it just to say, I know what it’s like to have the world crashing down. Your version will be different to mine, but all of it is a crash. And the first thing I want to say is: let it. It is not your job alone to try to hold up the world, to be dashing around with saucepans trying to catch the falling pieces. So much of your suffering is in the holding, so let it fall. It will not be as bad as you fear it will be if you do, and other than death, nothing is un-doable.
Once the world has finished crashing (which it will, one day), when you and your loved ones are taking the pieces and building it back up, seeing the new shoots between the rubble, what will you not be able to live with yourself over? What will make ‘future you’ wish you’d differently, what will she squirm at, what will she regret? These become your non-negotiables, and everything else can fall away for a time. For me, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d allowed my health to continue to plummet, if I’d not kept up with financial responsibilities and if I’d not re-invested in the most important relationships in my life. So those things became my priorities and for everything else, including work, I did the bare minimum. And actually, the bare minimum is often more than enough.
Don’t think of balance as a destination but as a series of moments. I can feel a hint of this in your question, of wanting to be in a state of balance, of getting to balance. First of all I don’t think this is something that we really ever achieve. As Marlee Grace said on Stories the other week “the only consistent practice I maintain is coming back from abandoning my practice over and over again until I die”. Replace “practice” with “balance” - with anything - and you have your new rallying cry. It feels like the truest thing in the world to me, that balance, however you’re defining it, is never a place to live but a place to continue to remember to prioritise.
So, where can balance, or let’s call it peace (as I sense that’s what this question-asker is wanting) exist in moments? Maybe when you lock the door before you go to bed at night you open it a fraction and take a breath of the cold air and see if there are any stars, and if there are, think about all the eyes that have ever looked at them. Maybe you sit in the bottom of your wardrobe and close your eyes for five minutes. Maybe you drink your morning coffee without looking at your emails. Maybe you go for a walk. Maybe you keep your phone upstairs for a morning. Just moment by moment thinking, how can I feel peaceful? How can I choose myself? It doesn’t have to be a lot, it just has to be something. And you will come through this.
How do I work on my mindset of comparison and thinking ‘I’m not good enough in my business?’ How do you quieten the noise of others in the same space as you?
I think we think it’s “good business” to look at competition or other people in our space or the people we want to be like. We think it’s market analysis, or something. Maybe we really believe it or maybe we’re just telling ourselves that, but really we enjoy pressing the bruise by looking at people who are “doing so much better than us”. I’m going to tackle the first one first.
You do not need to be looking at other people; you need to be making great work. If you seek clarification or inspiration or direction, get it from inside yourself and from the people you want to serve - not from people doing the same kinda thing as you. There is barely ever a time you actually need to look at what others are doing, but if you do, go with a specific focus - for example, when I was writing my new About page I looked at literally two coaches I really respected just to see how they’d structured it. Then I got out of there. You don’t need to be following people who do the same thing as you unless they’re your friend and you don’t get swayed by what they’re doing. You literally don’t have to.
The last thing on this I’d say is “how can you be so different you don’t know who your competitors even are?” That’s where I’d love for you to get to. There isn’t anyone out there that I feel blows me off course because there isn’t anyone out there that is really doing anything the same. If you want to work with me you want to work with me, you’re not choosing between similar options. And you only get there by listening to the people you work with and following what fascinates you.
Now, to the bruise pressers. I was one of you. Maybe three years ago there were certain people I followed because I wanted to make myself feel a bit shit every time they had a new book out or were doing some kind of prestigious talking event or got a brand partnership or had something published somewhere. That gorgeous, painful, addictive, crushing, enlivening feeling of hating yourself a little bit more because someone else is better than you. But what we need to do is find a better feeling. A feeling that’s more positive, that lasts, that builds up to even better feelings. Confidence is one of those feelings; so is capability, peace, joy, creativity, competence, freedom - take your pick. When do you feel that better feeling - is it when you complete something, when you do some personal practice, when you exercise, when you cook? Whatever it is, when you feel yourself navigating to the profile of a person you use to feel shit about yourself, do that thing instead.
Focus on your own goals. I see this play out with clients. We will set goals and the direction they want to go in and I can see them so centred and confident in what they are doing, and then we meet again and they are starting to doubt because someone in a group they joined is having a 10k week and maybe they’re doing the wrong thing. Be good enough by your own standards. Set goals that are about what you want - how you want to feel, what you want your life to look like - and stand by them. Other people’s goals are good for them, but they’re not your goals.
And lastly, when you see someone who has achieved something or their business is a certain way, ask yourself “what kind of life would I have to have to get that?”. For example, I used to get comparison around people who were asked to do a lot of speaking gigs, but I actually didn’t want to be a person who had to organise accommodation and then drive for six hours, and then get all nervous and have to resize the powerpoint at the last minute, and then make small talk, and then drive back six hours. I wanted to sit at home and write. So grounding into the reality can help you knock out of comparison.
How to cultivate the mindset to get to where I know I want?
I feel the key to this is an acceptance of your worthiness to claim that thing you want. I’m not saying believe it because I’m not that hard a taskmaster. It is one hell of a leap to go from “I think this is what I want” to wholeheartedly believing in your worthiness and capability of having it. It can feel like too much of a stretch, too big of a task before you even start, and you can shy away from the entire endeavour.
Instead accept the possibility you might be worthy and capable. Just crack that door open so you can slip to the other side. No guarantees, no definites - just a hypothesis. And what do we do with a hypothesis? We test it.
What might a person who was worthy and capable of what you want do? What would be their first step? What would be their plan? Who would they talk to, where would they seek support (because they would seek support?) What would they - and this is crucial - stop doing? How would they approach tasks? How would they approach their life? How would they deal with stress? How would they respond to that email, how would they nourish themselves, what would they choose to do on an unseasonably warm day
It’s all about the decisions from here on out. The choices you make are going to define the speed and angle of your course alteration. The big ones, the little ones, the ones you take as your old sense and new self. Important - this isn’t a march of infinite progression where one “wrong” decision means you might as well give up; it’s a tug of war. Sometimes you’ll go one way, sometimes you’ll go the other, but you are at least trying, more often than not, to be the person who is worthy and capable of what you want.
“Be” is the operative word here. Don’t wait until everything is perfectly in place before you start having what you want, look around for opportunities. An unexpected afternoon with nothing in the calendar? An opportunity to go out into the woods. Finished that task quicker than you thought? Well, half an hour doing some painting is there for the taking. Not really feeling up for it? Perhaps there’s a chance for a slow morning.
The more you make those choices and start living in tiny pockets that life you want, you’re not only becoming the person worthy and capable of why you want - you are actually living what you want.
Your personal tips for getting out of daily emotional lows - how do you cope with them now?
I’ve umm-ed and ahh-ed over this question. At first glance I thought “oh yes, I get this” and then I thought “oh wait, no I don’t”. And actually the truth is that I don’t experience daily emotional lows as pain or sadness, but I do get exhausted and, I am realising over recent weeks, numbness. The first of these I believe is down to a hell of a year and a whole lot of cortisol in my body and my stress response currently being to just fall asleep at any given moment. The second is one I’m actively doing.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say this, but here we go. My screen time is currently upwards of six hours a day. And I can tell you exactly what that time is spent doing - going into my Explore page where I allow clips of The US Office and other noughties sitcoms, viral TikToks and Twitter memes, to simply enter my eyeballs. I am barely there, barely choosing; receiving but not registering moving images into my brain. I wondered what was wrong with me, and then I realised I was numbing.
So I guess the true answer to your question is that that’s how I cope with daily emotional lows! I know that’s not the answer you were hoping for, but you know, we’re not all where we want to be and sometimes we go around another loop before we can move forward.
One sliver of hope is that I do now have a kind of internal daily alarm that tells me it’s outside time. Like a dog, once it gets to about 3pm my body and brain start asking for walkies. Often when I’m dealing with a problem or I can’t focus, a walk is my solution. I’ve done it enough that it’s an automatic response now, almost as automatic as picking up my phone - sad means outside. And that just came from habit and routine, rather than force of mind.
How do you overcome guilt to pursue the life you want?
This is so interesting to me. Guilt over choosing to pursue a certain life is not something I have experienced; and also, guilt is such a unique feeling experienced in a different specific way by every person. Perhaps you feel it as shame, perhaps as anger, perhaps as humiliation; perhaps in gnaws, perhaps it burns, perhaps it needles.
The real question here is “there is an uncomfortable negative emotion which is stopping me from claiming, or tainting my experience of, pursuing the life I want - how do I stop those effects?”. In this way we can replace guilt with any other emotion that is coming up - resentment, unworthiness, sadness. I think reframing the question in this way, taking the power out of the big, loaded words like GUILT and making them just a feeling within your body makes this feel easier to deal with.
Investigate this feeling. When do you feel it, and where do you feel it? Is it constant, is it infrequent? What are you doing or thinking about when you feel it most intently? How do you know it’s this feeling when you feel it? How does it feel different to other emotions? Where does it live in your body? What words come to mind? What pictures? Isolate this feeling from all the other mess of emotions.
When have you felt like this before? Say you get a tug in your chest. When before have you had a tug in your chest? Maybe it was when your kid banged her head at school and you weren’t there and you felt so guilty, and now you feel that same guilt. What story is that attached to? A story that mothers are selflessly always on hand to tend to their children, and not go off pursuing their own things? Maybe we have a root here.
This is all just information. It’s not to judge yourself, or anyone else from your past. It’s not to point fingers. I find that self awareness can so often become a reason one is the way they are, and not an excuse - it can stop at the awareness rather than saying “ok, I understand where this is coming from so I’m going to do this”.
Without any information on the stories it’s hard for me to say here in this podcast “and here’s how you overcome it!” As if anyone other than you can do that anyway. But this is, I hope, a start and the main thing is, in the asking of the question, you are so close to the tipping point where the wanting is stronger than the guilt. Your attention and energy has power; put the power behind the wanting not the thing that’s blocking.
How to stop being scared to make a change when not happy with work?
Don’t try to stop being scared. If you’re trying to stop being scared then you’re putting all your energy into stopping being scared instead of actually doing anything about the change you want to make. And it’s fruitless too. We are hardwired for fear; fear is there to keep us alive and it will be our constant companion until the day we die. Fear is useful, it’s what tells us to get the hell out of a bad situation, and it’s what tells us “this is important”. The things we feel fear about are the things that are most important to us. When I feel scared around a work thing I think “well this sucks but at least I know I’m onto something”.
So what we have to do is not stop being scared, but do the thing while being scared. A good place to start with this is logic. A very common thing to be scared about is finances, so get crystal clear on numbers. Often we’re scared to do this but actually things tend to feel more do-able when you know the exact, to two decimal places, figure you need to survive.
You can also use logic to show yourself that you have yet, in all your years of life, failed so badly that you ended up on the street. That the worst case scenario has never happened… but if it did what would you do? What would the back up plan be? Create yourself a safety net so you know that every time you get scared about something, you can stop the spiral going below your safety net.
Lastly, don’t spend too long looking at the big picture. I’ve used this analogy before, but when you’re climbing a mountain, if you look up at the summit every five seconds it never gets any closer and it feels more and more impossible. When you look at the five steps in front of you, when you take a rest stop, when you look back at the view from where you’ve come, when you look to just the next gate when you eventually do look at the summit again it suddenly feels much closer. Looking at the big picture can freak you out because you start to worry about how the hell you’re going to do step six and it’s never going to work. But when you’ve done steps one through five, step six is nothing more than the next step. So just do the thing that’s in front of you, because that’s the least scary thing.