Welcome the Struggle

I remember vividly a 5-year-old version of me sitting outside on the front steps of my childhood home staring down my untied shoes. With teeth clenched, I declared that I would not go inside my house until I figured out how to tie those laces. Tongue between teeth, I worked the loop, swoop, and pull over and over again. Palpable frustration built in my chest. Why wouldn’t it work? Why couldn’t I do it? The sun was setting, and it was starting to get darker outside. I decided I needed a change of scenery so to the back steps I went. More looping, swooping, and pulling… Until finally, there it was, a bow. I untied it and did it again – another bow! I entered the house triumphant choosing to celebrate with a frosty glass of milk.

While we have all faced much more consequential struggles in our lives than learning to tie our laces, this memory is one I draw on again and again as a reminder that struggling is how I learn and where the growth happens.

Life constantly presents us with the opportunity for struggles and it is up to us: 1) whether we choose to engage in the struggle at all, and 2) how we approach the struggle. Whether the struggle is working on developing a new skill, handling a challenging assignment at work, figuring out how to scale your business, dealing with a difficult colleague, or one of the many other challenges we are presented with in our lives, choosing to engage in the struggle and being open to the lessons that comes from failing is crucial to learning.

Through struggle we learn to accept that we have opportunity for growth. Struggle shows us that we are not yet a finished product. Carol Dweck in her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, wrote about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Much has been written about growth versus fixed mindset, but to summarize, if you have a growth mindset, you view intelligence, abilities, and talents as something that can be changed with effort (i.e. struggle leads to learning and growth). Those with a fixed mindset view those same traits as something that are fixed and cannot be changed over time (avoid the struggle because it is useless, and you will never get better).  

Neuroscientists determined that how your brain reacts to mistakes depends on your mindset. Meaning if you embrace struggle as an opportunity for growth, it will become an opportunity for growth. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle explains that in order to become a top performer, you need to struggle at the edges of your ability and fail in order to breakthrough to better performance. In sum, struggling is necessary to get really good at something. Sitting in struggle and knowing that it is OK to be uncertain opens the mind to be curious and to try new ways of achieving an outcome. And maybe the next time, the next attempt, will be the right one.  Channel Thomas Edison, who said: “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

So, welcome the struggle. In fact, look for more ways to invite struggle into your life to facilitate growth.  And if you have been struggling with something and can’t seem to think of one more approach to try, look for a new point of view. Ask a friend, family member, or colleague. Ask someone with no domain expertise how they would approach the issue. Turning to a coach as a resource to help you with your struggle is also a great way to get fresh insight and perspective.  It’s also OK to take a break and rest for a while. Sometimes a breakthrough can only come after some rest and a change of scenery.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison

You Are Not Too Much

To those of you who were told we are too much, this is for you.  Too much what?  It doesn’t matter.  Too loud, too aggressive, too big, too small, too loud, too shy, too confident, too standoffish, I could go on and on with this list.  Let me tell you something right now.  You are not too much.  You are just enough.

You see, we aren’t all supposed to be the same.  But sometimes who you are makes other people uncomfortable.  That reaction of others to you isn’t about you.  It is about the person who told you that you were too much.  They were bothered by you and your just enough-ness.

How you showed up in that moment did not invite feedback.  That feedback was forced upon you in an attempt to dim your light or to make you feel less than.  Don’t let it. 

I have numerous experiences when how I showed up caused discomfort in others, so they wanted to cause discomfort for me.  A story that comes immediately to mind was when I was a junior litigator (that’s someone who appears in court for those unfamiliar with the term), a partner included in my review that I “had too much of an edge.”  Truly, a baffling critique of a lawyer who is supposed to appear in court and strongly advocate for her clients.  

The world needs whatever you have extra of.  It is not a weakness; it is a strength.  Your introversion makes you thoughtful and you can add a new dimension of thinking to a project that will make it better.  Your big volume makes you heard as an advocate for yourself and others.  Your body is a good body because all bodies are good bodies worthy of respect, autonomy, and stylish clothing.  You don’t need to shrink or change yourself to be worthy.    

You are just enough. Just as you are.   

Please consider this an invitation to share your “too much” story with others so we can learn from it.  And if you can’t get your own inner critic to stop calling you “too much,” consider coaching to learn a new way to talk to yourself. 

Setting Birthday Goals instead of Making Birthday Wishes

In recent years, I have started using birthdays as deadlines for achieving big goals. Last year, I ran my first half marathon. As an athlete growing up, distance running was my mortal enemy. Running wasn’t fun, playing basketball and running a soccer field was fun. Running was boring and painful. I couldn’t figure out pacing or how to breathe without getting a stitch in my side. Building the stamina it took to run long distances felt too hard and unpleasant. And so I didn’t. Over the years, I half-heartedly tried and failed at becoming a runner a number of times while I was searching for my athletic identity as an adult.

Fast forward to season one of the global pandemic. We were home. Home all the time. Home all the time with the same people. We were trying to figure out home schooling and getting groceries (and wiping down those groceries with sanitizing wipes…). We were too anxious to leave the house. Too anxious to spend time with friends in person, and mostly too burnt out for another Zoom happy hour. I needed exercise because it helped me think and feel better (and boy, did I need to feel better), but going into the gym wasn’t happening and adding to my paltry home gym at the time wasn’t a possibility due to supply chain issues. Enter running. Again…

Could it be any different this time? Yes, because it can always be different. I was different and so were my circumstances. First, I had a dog (a just pre-pandemic pup) who loved to exercise and took to running like a duck to water. She was most excited on the days she saw me stretching for our runs. Second, running was one of the rare times that I had space alone for thinking or sometimes not thinking. Third, I reset my expectations on what it meant to be “a runner” and started small. I started with a slow pace and shorter distances, breaking up running intervals with walking. Gradually, it got easier. I could run longer distances. I needed fewer walk breaks. 5K, then 5 miles, then 10K. Then I decided I was going to train for the 13.1 mile half marathon distance and that I wanted to run it for my next birthday in January 2021.

During that training season, my Dad got sick. Really sick. And instead of giving up running, I didn’t… While during that time, we all felt like we couldn’t help my Dad, I could control my running. So I did. I took him to doctor’s appointments and then I ran. I called his medical team and then I ran. I brought him to the hospital and then I ran. We received his terminal cancer diagnosis and then I ran. I called my friends for support and to cry and rage and then I ran. Many times I felt that I was quite literally running away from my problems. While everything else felt like it was spiraling out of control and we were dealing with the weight of our grief as a family, I stuck to my training because it felt good to be able to achieve something even when everything else felt so awful.

So on January 17, I completed my 13.1 mile journey (with my trusty runner dog) and 11 days later, my father passed away. 2021 wasn’t any kinder or easier than 2020. We lived through what felt like year 100 of the pandemic. I faced the unpleasant realization that simply bending over could be enough to throw out my back. I grieved. But I remembered that having a goal I was working to accomplish gave me focus and a respite from the things in life that felt chaotic and out of control. So I worked to find a new goal and this time I wanted that goal aligned with my professional purpose. What would I do next? I realized the work that resonated throughout my career was helping others find their own paths to success. This realization brought me to professional coaching. I attended the ACT program at Brown University to obtain my leadership and performance coaching certification for the technical skills to better help others turn their goals into action plans. And I set my own goal to launch Crisilid by my next birthday.

And here we are…

So what’s the moral of this story anyway? I suppose it is this: I know what it is like to struggle with where you are and what you are doing. I also know it takes resilience, determination, and the support of others to get you through when things seem too hard. Some may say that my goals weren’t that grand or challenging so completing them was no big deal. But they were MY goals. Comparing my running to Des Linden’s or my new business to a Bain or a Deloitte would be demoralizing and a waste of time. Shifting our perspective on our goals helps us keep them in sight. Moving forward on our own goals means first setting ones that are personal to us and then working to get a little bit better than we were the day before. And avoid comparing your chapter 1 to someone else’s chapter 20.

I don’t know what my next birthday goal will be yet, but I am looking forward to the inspiration. I’d love to hear about yours. And if you would like assistance setting and attaining your next goal, birthday or not, schedule time for a coaching session.