Finding Your People Through Finding Your Arena

Instead of looking for your people, focus on what you love to do.

The quote in the photo is attributed to Maya Angelou.

Have you ever wondered how you’re supposed to find “your people,” whatever that means? I have. I’ve been lonely all my life. In fact, some of my first memories are of feeling lonely. If anyone needs to find their people, it’s me. Maybe you feel the same.

Maybe, like me, you’ve tried and failed your whole life to do just that. I’ve tried reaching out online, going to Meetups, attending services at churches with rainbow flags prominently displayed in front, and on and on. I’ve reached deep, challenged myself, put myself out there, just like my therapists said I should. And all for nothing. I never found my people that way.

Exasperated, hopeless, angry, I resigned myself to my loner-hermit existence. Some of us are just meant to be alone. It’s okay, I thought. I’m a misanthrope, what did I expect? I don’t like people and they don’t like me. Back to my cave. It’s cozy there. I get to write and live in my head, it’s all good. So I wrote and wrote, because that’s what I love to do, and I started putting stuff out on a blog.

And then something totally astonishing happened. I mean, this was really unexpected (love it when life throws a surprise at you!). People started reaching out to me. Turns out I had been doing it all wrong before. You don’t find your people through seeking out people. You find them by establishing yourself in your arena. I still like retreating to my cozy cave, but I can feel my community around me, and the more confident I grow in my arena, the less lonely I feel.

What do I mean by arena? This term comes from Brené Brown, and she got it from a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave in Paris in 1910. The gist of Roosevelt’s arena concept is this: when you are challenging yourself in an area of life that you deeply care about, facing the inevitable failures head on, falling down and getting up over and over, you will (and this is the part Brené adds) look around and see people in there fighting with you. These are your people.

Here is the part that I add to this concept: there is more than just one arena. Imagine a complex of arenas. Over that way there’s one where they’re creating medical breakthroughs. Look the other direction and you’ll see one where they’re ministering to the sick at heart. There’s one filled with jokers and comics, because we all need to laugh sometimes. There are arenas for people who really like knitting, or parenting, or scuba diving, or playing video games. And somewhere in there is your arena. That’s what you need to find, because inside you’ll find your people.

So how do you find your arena? To some extent, it’s about experimentation. I tried the academia arena, it wasn’t for me, but I gave it a go. I tried the Washington, DC arena, and while I really enjoyed being in the midst of all the excitement, that wasn’t for me, either. I tried the internet startup arena, nope. I tried the corporate arena, NOPE. I tried the arenas of community involvement and volunteering, and while I appreciate my time spent there, ultimately they’re not for me, either.

My arena is writing about ideas. I’ve always known that, but sometimes you have to venture out and apprentice yourself to life before you circle back around. In the parlance of the current era, I’m a content creator. I research, I think, I analyze, I imagine, I write. And I put that stuff out into the world through my blog and podcast. This is my joy. I never tire of doing it (or rarely), I never have a paucity of things to write or talk about, it gives me life. In this arena, I feel confident of my belonging. I don’t worry about whether or not I’m good enough; I just keep doing what I love and enjoying myself.

That’s the feeling you should be looking for. You’ll know you’ve found your arena when you are so energized and engaged by what you’re doing that you’re prepared to face the inevitable failures. You’re able to see them as part of the privilege of being there. Now, at the beginning you may still lack that self-confidence, and we all grapple with insecurity now and again, but you’ll feel that urge inside of yourself that pushes you forward. Maybe you start at the edges of the arena, and you look at the people there at the center, and you wonder if you belong.

Just keep doing what you love to do, and eventually you’ll be there at the center. And your people will be all around you.

Why I Gave Up on Ambition

The question to ask is, does ambition make us unhappy?

“So what are your long-term goals?” she asked me. “Where do you see yourself in two years, in five?”

I was interviewing for a position at a DC-based think tank. I answered, “I don’t really think about the future. I don’t care that much.”

“Well, I guess that’s…refreshing,” she said after a pause. I could tell from her expression that she did not actually find it refreshing at all, but flippant. Who was this lazy-ass person wasting her time, was what she was thinking.

Okay, the truth is I didn’t have the guts to say anything like that. I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure I said something along the lines of “I have exciting ideas about contributions I want to make and a progressive career path blah blah blah.” After all, I used to believe that’s how I was supposed to think. Plans, goals, up and at ‘em. I used to have an ego about these things: I was going to make something of my life. I pursued an important career because I thought that’s what smart and talented people who have the privilege of opportunity do. I worked hard, too hard. I burned out.

When you live in a culture that worships ambition and the attendant hard work it requires, it can feel so wrong to say “I’m not ambitious.” But I’ve been thinking that maybe, just maybe, ambition can be damaging. During the years I had ambition, I was unhappy. I never felt like I was achieving enough. There was always something more I needed before I could finally feel like I’d arrived. I always felt like I wasn’t getting enough appreciation or recognition for my contributions. I worked so hard all the time, exhausting myself, and the rewards that accrued to me weren’t satisfying or fulfilling.

What an awful way to live. Now, I do think many ambitious people find satisfaction going that route. They must, because they keep doing things that way. They like the chase, the big dreams, the thrill of expectation that there’s always more to be had. But I found that kind of life hollow and exhausting. Happiness and fulfillment were always out there on the horizon, never right here right now.

The problem with ambition, see, is that it can make us believe that more is needed to feel satisfied, and it draws our focus away from the small moments in the here-and-now that are the true measure of happiness. Gratitude and mindfulness practices are popular because they draw us back to these present moments. But what if you lived in those moments permanently? What if in each moment you felt like you had what you needed, you felt whole, settled, and at ease? What would a life comprised of many such moments look like? Would you cease to achieve anything? Would life lose its luster when you aren’t feeling excited about all the things the future will give you?

Does giving up on ambition mean you’ll become a lazy couch potato whose biggest achievement today is putting on some pants?

Not at all. In fact, you may end up achieving even more. You’ll be focused on expending your time and energy on the things that fulfill you in the moment, which will have the effect of creating momentum in your life, and that can lead to big things. You’ll probably find that these big things begin to almost happen on their own, with comparatively little effort on your part, because you’ll be excited about the stuff you’re doing right now and that will give you the right kind of energy to tackle the challenges that come your way.

Here are some of thing things I’ve accomplished since I started living my life for the small here-and-now moments: I finished a novel (after 15 years of failing to do so); started a weekly podcast; been consistent with writing a weekly blog post. During the ambitious phase of my life I got a PhD, but here’s what I was actually doing: waking up dreading the day; doing all the things I “should” be doing, often to the bare minimum of acceptable standards; climbing back into bed exhausted and mourning the loss of another day that wasn’t satisfying or happy. Oh, and drinking to anesthetize myself, let’s not forget that part.

As soon as I gave up on big ambitions and began to focus on enjoying the moment, that’s when stuff started happening for me. I felt momentum, excitement, fulfillment. And yes, happiness. I’m not without dreams for myself, but I practice detaching from outcome. The future can, and will, take care of itself. The power to effect change in our lives lies in acting in the current moment, and leaving the future open to possibility.

Learning This Decision-Making Principle Will Inoculate You Against Burnout

Make decisions based on energy, not time.

Our way of life is harming us. We’re not happy, as a people, are we? Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by life shouldn’t be normalized. Busyness shouldn’t be worshiped (though it’s easy to see why it is in our culture: business/busyness). The answer isn’t to figure out how to be more efficient and productive so we can fit it all in (where does it end?!). There’s no getting around it, the answer really is to do less. But how do we do less without feeling like we’re falling behind? How can we begin to change our lives so that we don’t burn out, we feel happier and more relaxed, and space opens up for us to pursue our true desires?

Let me start with a question. Do you make decisions about energy based on time, or decisions about time based on energy?

If you’re like most people in a Western(ized), postindustrial culture, it’s the former. You make calculations for what you can get done around how much time it takes to do it and time availability in your day. It’s a pretty simple equation: you expend energy based on time. Another way to put this is that you prioritize time usage over energy reserves (with the assumption that you’ll find that energy somewhere). This decision-making methodology will inevitably lead to exhaustion or even burnout for most of us.

But it seems like the obvious and correct way to do things, right? For example, you need to mow the lawn. Do you have a spare hour on Saturday afternoon? Yes? You schedule it in, and then you do it without thinking much about the energy side of things: you mow the lawn regardless of whether you feel like doing it. It seems natural to do things this way. When you have a long to-do list of things you (feel you) absolutely have to get done, there really is no other way to guarantee you do it. You have to find or make the time, schedule it in, and get to work.

It’s not wrong to do things this way. But it does lead to a particular experience of the relationship between time and energy that can be unpleasant. Feeling overloaded, overwhelmed, and exhausted are the extreme effects, but often the unpleasantness manifests in more subtle ways. Feeling chronic dissatisfaction, unfulfillment, tiredness, boredom, malaise. All those existential problems we associate with modern living. But this is not an inevitable consequence of modernity. It has to do with how we manage that relationship between our energy and time.

What if you decided to switch that relationship? Make decisions about how to use time based on energy? How would you do that, what would it look like?

It would look like living life in a way that appears, on the surface, to include two states of being we have an absolute abhorrence for in modern Western culture: being lazy and wasting time. It’s important to understand that terms like these are judgements, not realities. They belong to a paradigm, or worldview, that influence how we conceptualize work vs. inactivity. Here is the trade-off life gives us within this paradigm: either we run ourselves into the ground (feeling overwhelmed is normal! Everyone feels that way, it’s just part of life), or we let things slide, give in to our baser natures that want to waste hours, not just minutes but hours!, scrolling through Instagram while Netflix plays some inanity in the background. Neither of those choices are any good, in my opinion.

Here’s a different paradigm: feeling satisfied regardless of how much you get done, ending each day calm and happy, and not worrying at all about whether any given activity, including Instagram scrolling, is lazy or wasting time. How about not feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and inadequate to the tasks of our lives? How about not taking account of every minute spent, living in a constant fog of time-is-getting-away-from-me anxiety? It can take a long time to change your life in this way, but where you start is by making decisions about time based on energy.

This is what it looks like. There are all these things you think you need to do…dig deep and examine that. What’s going to happen if you don’t do them? Is someone going to come and arrest you? Probably not? The things we think we need to do are tangled up in all kinds of largely subconscious beliefs about our identity, what other people think, perfectionism, you name it. The next time you have something scheduled in on that Saturday afternoon, ask yourself if you feel up to it. Do you have the physical, mental, and emotional energy to tackle it? In other words, will it either energize you to do this task, or at least not deplete you? Yes? Do it. No? Use that time to do something you do have the energy for, even if it’s scrolling through Instagram. Because if that’s what you feel compelled to do, it’s because your brain needs a break from strenuous focused tasks. If you feel like taking a nap, that’s your physical body telling you it needs a break. Feel like reading? Your emotions need some quiet time.

Wait a minute, surely I’m not suggesting you do stuff based on whether or not you feel like it? Yeah, I am. Not all the things—obviously living your life entirely like this isn’t feasible for most. But you can start small and then gradually make changes in your life as you gain confidence that everything isn’t going to fall apart if you do things this way. You will learn to trust yourself that you will get done the stuff you absolutely have to, and you’ll feel better doing it because you’ll have greater energy reserves. You may even start enjoying that must-do stuff more, now that you’re not so depleted all the time (I actually learned to enjoy mowing the lawn, which used to make me cry in despair every time).

Dealing with your knee-jerk, culturally indoctrinated reactions to doing things this way is going to be your greatest challenge. This is a transformational process. It will entirely change the way you live your life, what you see as important, and how you feel. But it takes practice. The resistance you will feel at first is a normal response to going against cultural norms. It can feel like you’re breaking some kind of law (you are, a cultural law). That’s why the question, “Is someone going to come and arrest me?” can be an effective counter.

You’re going to have to fight with yourself for a while around this, because cultural indoctrination runs deep. It took me some years to get to a place where most of my decisions are energy based. Yes, it means I end up not getting a lot of things done. I’ve realized I never needed to do most of those things anyway. Like I said, the answer really is to do less. And what a difference this makes in the quality of my life. I feel like I’m living my life, rather than it passing me by in overstuffed chunks of time I’ll never get back.

What Would Betty White Say?

It’s never too late to achieve your creative dreams.

I can’t emphasize this enough: it’s not too late for you. You’re turning 40 soon and still haven’t written that novel? Not too late. Turning 60 and still haven’t written it? Not too late. In your 70s and thinking to yourself, why bother now?

What would Betty White say? I think you know what she would say.

It’s not too late for you.

Here’s something I like to say: late bloomers bloom the brightest. Why? All kinds of reasons. You can probably think of a few yourself. I’m not going to list any here because my intention with this post is different. I’m here to tell you not only that being a late bloomer is awesome—better than being an early bloomer!—but also that we all have the capacity to be late bloomers, regardless of whether we already bloomed early.

That’s because what we all are is repeat bloomers. We are perennials, not annuals. We are meant to live out many iterations of blooming throughout the length of our stay here on earth. We excel at reinventing ourselves if we give ourselves permission to do that regardless of age.

You want to be a painter at 50? Go do that. Learn classical guitar? Do it. Make the rest of your life the brightest blooming part of it.

Never stop blooming.

Change Your Future by Switching Out This One Word

The difference between “look” and “feel.”

So I know that’s a bit of a dramatic title. But this one little trick really can make a huge difference in your life if you let it. First, though, let me ask you a question.

Do you remember what you wanted your grownup life to look like when you were a kid?

I love asking people that question, because you get the most diverse answers. One of my friends told me she doesn’t remember having any specific dreams about the future. Another said she wanted to be a professional thinker (hey, me too!).

We are often asked to visualize our futures. It’s almost a cliché that at some point you’ll be asked where you see yourself in six months, a year, five years. Our perspective of the future is very conceptual. We are encouraged to think about what we want it to look like, in order to set goals we can then work toward.

What if instead we asked ourselves what we want our future to feel like?

To do this effectively, we need to eliminate all visual aspects of our answer. Our first reaction to this question is probably to imagine a situation, thing, or person we think will make us happy. Try cutting out the visual. Close your eyes and go into your body and ask it how it likes to feel. Pay attention to your body’s response when you ask it what feeling good is like.

For me, feeling good is a lightening and lifting in my chest, like I’m uncurling from a fetal position and throwing out my arms to embrace the sky, sun warm on my face. That’s how I want my life to feel like.

Now comes the challenging part. It’s tempting to want to embed your desired feeling back into a visual picture of all the stuff that’s going to make you feel that way. Resist this temptation! Nothing’s wrong with wanting things, but we’re trying to work a little mental magic here, so we need to de-link our desired feeling from our conceptualized futures. Instead, think about the things in your life that make you feel the way you want to feel now.

For me, it’s when I’m authentically who I am online in a way that leads to genuine connection with others. Or when I’m reading, researching, thinking, or writing. Or when I’m being my natural, unguarded and un-boundaried self with my dogs.

Now comes the easier part. Keep doing the things that make you feel the way you want to feel. Do them more. Do them every day. Find more things that make you feel that way. After a while, you’ll discover you attach your happiness less and less to the stuff you think you want, and more and more to the things you’re actually doing. You’ll have learned how to be in the moment rather than the imagined future.

But we still need or at least want goals, right? It’s difficult to live 100% in the present moment. Most of us are working toward something in life most of the time. Let’s take a look at how we can rewrite goals so they put us into the present moment rather than that imagined future.

Here are some of the things I think about when I am imagining what I want my life to look like:

• Thousands of Instagram followers.

• Money coming in.

• More friends.

When we switch out that one little word, go from look to feel, it changes how we see things. Here are some things I think about when I am focused on what I want my life to feel like:

• Having fun making dorky TikTok videos.

• Challenging myself to develop a business that fits into a creative model rather than trying to fit my creativity into a business model.

• Meaningful connection with other creatives who are putting their work out there.

See the difference? The second list of goals is both more specific and focused on how I feel. It is oriented around values such as having fun, challenging myself, and creating meaning for myself and others. Plus, these are all things that are already a part of my life. By doing this exercise, I’m learning how to value what I already have and training myself to focus on my feelings rather than acquisitions. This frees up my mind to find other creative and fun ways to continue to feel good about my life.

It takes practice to change how you think about your future, but if you work at it you’ll get to a place where you realize your happy future has arrived, and you’re already living it! 

What the Heck Does a Dissertation on International Water Treaties Have to Do With Creative Identity?

Do you feel like a real creative or artist, or are you just trying to be one?

The other day I opened my dissertation file for the first time in three years. I haven’t looked at it since 2018! When I was done with it, I was done. And because I had decided not to continue on in academia, I haven’t had to think about it since. My dissertation was about international water politics, but believe it or not, it actually informs the work I do in my creative business. Before I get into that, though, here’s the title of my dissertation. Take a deep breath before you read this.

Treaties as Endogenous to State Interest: Politicization and Securitization of International Water Treaties in Bilateral Riparian Relationships.

LOL. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, and I’m sure you’re wondering how the heck that informs my current work. The subject matter doesn’t, but its theoretical underpinnings do. What I was really studying was how identity determines behavior and constitutes our subjective realities. The thread of commonality that runs through all my work, including my fiction, is this: that perception, and particularly how we perceive ourselves, creates our realities. In my dissertation research, I looked at how state identity plays out in international political conflict over water. In my current research on creativity, I’m interested in how changing our perspective even just a little can make us feel more creatively fulfilled, and thus constitute a creatively fulfilling life.

This is why when I work with clients, I focus first on how they see themselves vis-à-vis their creativity and their creative practice. I ask them: Do you see yourself as a artist/writer/musician/creative? Do you identify as a creative or artist, or is your creative work something you are just attempting? For example, if writing is your thing, do you feel like a writer, or are you just “trying” to be a writer (be honest)? Without fail, my clients always say they feel they don’t quite have the right to call themselves a creative or a writer or an artist or whatever it is they’re “trying” to be. Usually it’s because they haven’t had “success” with their art (exposure, money, etc.). Often it’s also because they don’t feel they’re doing enough – “real” artists spend more time on their creative work, are more dedicated, are recognized as real artists by their peers.

All these feelings are based on a certain perspective that it is other people who get to decide what you are worth, what the value of your work is, and who you are. Once other people decide they want to buy your work, you’ll be a real artist. Once other people see your success, you’ll finally be able to stop saying you’re “trying” to be an artist. You’ll have arrived.

Except, if you live your life from within this perspective, you’ll never arrive. Not really. Because the truth is, other people simply don’t have the power to determine who we are, no matter how much we want them to. No praise will ever be enough, no amount of money. You know this is true. It’s not that praise and money don’t matter – they do! But that stuff isn’t ever going to give you the feeling of being settled in yourself, living the life you’re meant to, living your purpose.

You know what will? Taking back your sovereignty over yourself. You decide who and what you are. And once you realize that you have absolute authority over your own identity, you understand that all those extrinsic measures of worth are arbitrary, constructed out of the human mind and burnished with a sheen that is supposed to look like truth. But it’s no more true than anything else. You’re not a real artist unless you make money off your work? Says who? Exactly. Only other humans who have no more right than you to decide that’s true. Or to put that another way, you have just as much right as anyone else to decide things about yourself and your work.

Do you want to know what makes you a real artist? Here’s the big secret. It’s so simple yet so profoundly life-altering when you begin to see it clearly. You’re a real artist if you feel like one. That is your truth: your feeling about yourself and your work. And here’s how you start getting that feeling. By deciding that you are already what you want to be. You’re already an artist, a writer, a musician, a creative. You have a right to decide that! And you don’t have to base it on any “evidence.” What will make it true is that you feel it’s true. I know that sounds very uncomfortable. Things aren’t true just because we decide they are! Well, sure, this isn’t going to work in many cases, nor should we believe that all truth is arbitrary. Obviously. But in this case, when it comes to your own creative identity, you can decide what your truth is.

Step into that identity, claim it as your own, wear it proudly, and your actions and behaviors will start to follow on that and constitute that reality in the world. I should know, after all I did a dissertation on this process! And I went through this process myself when I decided I’d had enough of feeling depressed about not fulfilling my creative potential. So take that first step, and say it out loud to the universe: I am a creative (artist, musician, writer…).

The Difference Between Becoming More vs. Less of Who You Are

What if we leaned into the stuff that’s “wrong” about us?

One of the most intriguing aspects of modern culture is our deeply ingrained belief that we must continually be working on improving ourselves. There’s always something we need to work on. Better time management, less lazy. More veggies, fewer bowls of pasta. This work never ends. Some of this has to do with capitalism – most of the things we buy aren’t necessities, they’re to improve ourselves and our lives. Self-improvement is big business and a ubiquitous advertising technique. And some of our obsession with self-improvement is a consequence of reaching a level of wealth where we have leisure time to spend on it. But I believe part of it is that we are afraid being ourselves. Think about it. Most of the self-improvement we are called to do involves becoming less of who we are, not more. Like there’s some kind of magical state of moderation of the personality, where our “good” traits at least equal if not outweigh our “bad.” And we apply this to our lives, too, where we are always trying to balance out or overload the productive/good side of the scale.

When our work begins to drain us and we feel such dread about it that our productivity falls, what is our response? To try harder, stay later, feel bad about ourselves. When we slack off on our exercise routine because life is calling us to focus on other things right now, what is our response? To try harder, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from our muscles, and feel bad about ourselves.

Let’s try a more amorphous type of dissatisfaction. What if you feel like something’s just not right with your life, you’re not sure what, but you are plagued by a constant sensation that there’s more out there for you. But you have a good job, many privileges, and you’re cognizant of that. What do you do?

If you’re like many of my clients, this is what you do: tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have, that something’s wrong with you for not being able to be satisfied with it, and you try harder, stay later, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from your soul, and feel bad about yourself.

But what if the answer is to step further into all the stuff we feel guilty about? Yes, you have privilege. But you’re still unhappy. That’s okay! It’s allowed! Step into that. You can appreciate your privilege but you don’t have to feel grateful for stuff that makes you feel like shit. Got it?

What about this one. You got a degree, maybe even multiple degrees, for a certain type of job. You invested time, money – maybe even other people’s money – in them. Then you get the job. You don’t like it. It drains you to the extent that your life feels dull, gray, and perhaps full of dread. What do you do?

Do you tell yourself that there are things you do like about the job, that you appreciate this or that aspect, that it’s a good job and you’re grateful for it? Do you expend major energy convincing yourself that you can like it enough to keep doing it, because after all it’s what you’ve trained for?

What if the answer is to step into your dislike? What if you stopped punishing yourself into “liking” your job and just decided you’re going to be honest about what you hate about it? What if you let yourself feel the full extent of your antipathy toward what you are forcing yourself to do every day? What if you let yourself stop feeling grateful?

Your life would stop being so dull and gray, that’s for sure. And you’d realize that you probably have to do something about your situation, that it’s not okay to just exist in it and keep going for as long as you can until you burn out completely. Things would become a bit clearer. And all you need is a little crack in that shell of excuses to begin to move forward.

Instead of punishing ourselves into doing things “right,” what if the answer is to step more fully into our “wrongs”? What if leaning into our lazy allows us to find more time and space to do what really matters to us? What if leaning into the boredom or dread we feel about our job gives us the impetus we need to take steps to change our situation?

What if we don’t need to change ourselves at all, but become more of what we already are?

My Favorite Three Pieces of Wisdom

These changed my perspective on life and work.

I am notoriously picky about the advice I take. Well, that’s maybe putting it lightly. Anyone who knows me well knows that I don’t generally take advice easily or gladly. I’m stubborn, know my own mind, and I’m an independent thinker who, I’ll be honest, thinks she knows best when it comes to herself. But once in a while I hear something that really makes an impression on me. It sticks in my mind and becomes something I refer to often as I make my way forward in life. I’m going to share with you three pieces of wisdom that have genuinely impacted my thinking. I hope you find them as valuable as I do!

Neil Gaiman’s secret freelancer knowledge.

Fooling around on the internet some years ago, I came across Neil Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I recommend watching the entire speech, because it is full of real wisdom about living life as a creative, but the part that rocked my world begins at the 14:10 minute mark. The secret to being a successful freelancer, which many creatives are and increasingly people are just generally as our economy shifts in that direction, is to possess two of the following three skills:

1. Do good work.

2. Get work done on time.

3. Be nice to work with.

Any two are fine! If you do good work and get it done on time, people will tolerate your unpleasantness. If you do good work and you’re really nice, they’ll probably be okay with it if you’re sometimes late on deadlines. And perhaps most importantly, if you are awesome to work with and always hit those deadlines, your work doesn’t have to be quite as high quality as you’d think.

What I love about this advice is that if you’re anything like me, you read those three things and think, “I can do all of them! If you only need two to be successful, I’m definitely going to make it!” And that’s what this advice is designed to do: make you feel more confident about your chances, but also to show you that success isn’t the result of some magical formula. Just do good work, be on time, and don’t be a jerk.

Enjoy the hungry times.

I was a teenager during VH1’s glory days of behind-the-music content, and it was on one of those shows that I saw an interview with a band that was mega popular in the 80s but had disintegrated due to all the typical problems – substance abuse, interpersonal conflict, manager woes, and missing money. I don’t remember which band or anything from that interview except one quote that went something like this: “The hungry years were the best years.”

This blew my mind. Like most young people, I assumed the best times were when you arrived at success – in this case, fame and money. Sure, this band mucked it up by being druggies and fighting with each other, but that wouldn’t happen to me if I ever achieved fame and wealth (Right? Right?!?). Or whatever the equivalent success was for a nerdy introvert like myself. It was the way the guy said it, wistful and sad, that got to me. Suddenly I could see the band in their younger years, all united in their cause, playing tiny venues and excited that they had twenty people rocking to their music tonight instead of ten. I could see how the getting-there years would blow the having-arrived years out of the water. This was my first lesson that the journey is better than the destination, even when that destination is what you think you’ve always wanted, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Ignore the critics in the cheap seats.

This comes from Brené Brown, and in my opinion it’s her most valuable piece of wisdom, particularly in this era of judgement and shaming. It’s based on Teddy Roosevelt’s man in the arena quote, and the gist of it is that there are people who are brave and get out there in the arena, and there are people who opt to stay in the spectator seats who will judge and shame their every move. Particularly when you fail. And if you are in the arena, you will fail. A lot. It’s just part of being brave. Here’s what Brené says about this and how she handles it:

1. It’s not about winning or losing, it’s about showing up and being seen.

2. If you show up, there is only one guarantee – you will get your ass kicked. Especially if you have committed to creating in your life.

3. If you’re not also in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.

I honestly find this to be so powerful. Whenever you put yourself out there, there are people who are going to want to launch their shit at you, because they have a lot of shit and it’s making them miserable. They want you to take some of it on. Misery loves company. You don’t have to make yourself a target. Simply step to the side and let it fly on past. Your peers are the other people down there in the arena with you. Live your life. Do your thing. Be glorious.

Cultivating a Generalist Mindset for the New Era

Not an expert at anything? Maybe that’s a good thing.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I had a friend who said one day, apropos of nothing, “I want to be an expert. I don’t care what in, I just want to be an expert in something.” I wish I’d asked him then what it was about being an expert that he desired. I can’t ask him now, because he’s passed away, and I don’t know if he ever became an expert in anything. But I’ll always remember that offhand comment, because in a way, I understood what he meant. We admire experts in our society, as well we should. Most spend years learning their subject and know what they’re talking about. We should be listening to them. Except we often favor experts, i.e. specialists, at the expense of generalists, and that’s problematic, because generalists have so much to offer, especially now.

Generalists don’t have much cachet in our society. Even the term “generalist” sounds inferior, doesn’t it? It has that flavor of the dilettante about it: jack of all trades, master of none. Unfortunately, we tend to see generalists as people who haven’t put the time and commitment into becoming a specialist, perhaps because they’re too lazy or scatterbrained. But what if generalism is actually its own brand of specialist knowledge? What if generalists are valuable because they’re not experts in one specific area? Should we all be trying to cultivate a generalist mindset?

I think we should, and here’s why. The world is changing, and along with it, all the rules. We’re in an era of tremendous shift: our former reality is dying and a new one is forming. We all feel it, and most of us are scared. But if you have multiple talents and interests, you have a greater chance of thriving. The old world was set up for specialists. We were expected to specialize, each a cog in the machine. And now that machine is becoming obsolete. The highly specialized cogs, the ones that are only good at doing that one thing they were constructed to do, aren’t going to fare so well. Generalists will have an easier time repurposing their talents to match circumstances.

Here’s the good news: we are all natural generalists. We are all multitalented, but we’re not trained to see ourselves that way. Not sure what you have to offer the world? You’re already doing it, I can guarantee you. Take a look at your life, the activities you come back to again and again, that you’ve committed time and energy to. What do you always want to learn more about? What do you spend money you don’t have on? And perhaps most importantly, what do you find yourself “wasting” time on? It may not be obvious at first how it all fits together. Let me give you an example.

The generalist Tim Ferriss, most known for his enormously popular podcast and his bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week, found his first success with a sports supplement company he started from scratch. As a college student he used to mix up his own supplement powders from specialized mail-order ingredients. He combined this interest with skills and contacts he gained from a sales job he had at an IT firm just before the dot-com bust. But here’s the cool part. It wasn’t the sales job that made him so good getting people to buy his product. It was insomnia. As a kid, he couldn’t sleep, and he’d watch TV all night. And what’s on TV at night? Infomercials. He became obsessed with sales techniques, even calling up the companies to see how they attempted to close the deal once they had you on the phone. Because Tim Ferriss had insomnia and wasted all that time watching useless late-night television, and because he was obsessed with supplement formulas, he was able to become a successful entrepreneur.

What are you wasting your time, energy, or money on? What are the useless things in your life that might not actually be so useless?

Here’s the secret successful generalists understand: what you have to offer the world isn’t any one particular skill, talent, or area of knowledge, or even a combination of them. What you have to offer is YOU. Your whole self. You are your own brand. And what that means is that everything about your life is valuable in terms of the skills, knowledge, and experience it confers. Your job is to learn how to see it that way, how to value yourself and your experiences in a way that allows you to put it all together and manifest that in the world. Trust yourself. Follow your curiosity. Pay attention to your obsessions. And don’t ignore your wasted time and useless pastimes. All of it is you, and therefore all of it has value.

Intelligent Decision-Making Isn't What We Think It Is

Feeling good about your life isn’t out of reach.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

A problem I ran into when I was trying to figure out how to make my life one I was enthused to live was that I didn’t know what that actually felt like. I’d been denying my true desires for so long that I had no context for judging whether choices I made were good ones. What does “good choice” even mean? Maybe you’re familiar with this type of confusion, where you cease to be able to differentiate between decisions that are good or bad for you. It’s a common result of trying to convince ourselves that we actually want to do things we don’t. You may be thinking, “I never do that,” but if you are struggling to figure out what makes you happy, you probably do. Don’t feel bad about it. Our social conditioning is to sublimate ourselves to some extent to familial, work, and societal demands. But if life isn’t returning to you what you put into it, it may be time to take a closer look at your decision-making process.

The real challenge, you see, isn’t the things we know we don’t want to do. Sometimes we feel we have to do things we don’t want to, but if we are clear on the compromises we are making, we at least can make decisions for ourselves with full knowledge of that. The damage accrues from continuing to do things we don’t want to do and playing mind games in order to make that kind of life acceptable. Any time we tell ourselves “It’s not so bad,” or “This has a bright side,” or “Maybe things will change,” or the worst, “This is just what life is,” we are clouding our capacity to know what our personal good and bad are. We are teaching ourselves to ignore our signals. And this results in an eventual inability to make good decisions for ourselves.

There is a way to be more intelligent about choices, but it’s a counterintuitive process that contradicts what we usually think of as smart decision-making. Raise your hand if you think intelligent choices involve careful and thoughtful evaluation. *Waving my hand vigorously*. This is how I made decisions for years. With lists of pros and cons. By considering all angles. You know the drill. It seems obvious that this is the intelligent way to make important decisions. And it’s not a bad way to make decisions. Except we use it indiscriminately when it’s meant for a specific type of context and outcome.

When the results that matter to you are ones that can be measured and quantified, especially if outcome is the most important thing, this kind of decision-making works great. For example, I used this process before embarking on getting my PhD. I carefully and thoughtfully worked out my reasoning using indicators like my skill set and professional goals. I really covered my bases in terms of the forethought I put into the decision. Like, really. And lo and behold, I now have a PhD that qualifies me for several different career paths. Success! Good decision-making! Except, if you’ve read anything else on this blog, you know what actually happened. I got super burned out and stopped wanting to be alive. So…not good decision-making?

I thought it was a good decision. I thought it was what I wanted to do. I figured that if there were things I didn’t like about it along the way, it wouldn’t matter, because it was a good decision and would take me to good place in life. What I didn’t realize was that I was already so used to denying my true desires that I genuinely didn’t have a good understanding of what I wanted out of life. I was using the wrong type of decision-making process. I was thinking too much, being too “smart” about things. I don’t regret my decision to do a PhD, but I’ve certainly learned my lesson.

Intelligent decision-making isn’t about being smart. It’s about knowing what kind of decision-making process is appropriate for a specific context. An analytical, rational process may work well in situations where you have full information and can make reliable predictions about outcome. But it often won’t work very well in the personal and social realms. There are just too many complex variables, unpredictable factors, and unknowns. When it comes to making life decisions, all we can really know with authority is what something feels like to us now. We can know if something gives us a feeling of expansion and excitement inside, or if it causes us to tighten up and feel small and scared or we don’t feel as happy or excited as it seems we should. If it inspires us or fills us with a sense of dread. If we can’t wait to jump right in and experiment, or if the only thing we feel really enthusiastic about is an outcome. When the outcome appears to you in technicolor and surround sound while the steps to get there are murky, that’s something to pay attention to.

When I was trying to figure out what to do with my life after I finished my PhD, I decided that I would only do things I felt good doing. Not what I thought I wanted, not what I might want in the future, but what actually felt good to do right now. I’ve used that principle every step of the way, slowly building up my creative business from nothing. So if you’re wondering what someone with a PhD in international relations is doing running a creativity website – well, exactly. All this started from a kernel of nothing. None of it was planned or predictable. I simply decided to listen to how I felt about things. And when something felt good, I did that thing. This means that I’m genuinely enjoying the process of building my business, and as a result, my life feels fulfilling and meaningful. It’s a simple formula: do what feels good to you, and your life will feel good. It’s a night-and-day difference from my experience getting my PhD – which I’m sure looks like the greater accomplishment to the outside world. But you and I know that the real accomplishment is feeling good about life. For me, that has never been a given, and for a very long time I thought it was something that would forever be out of my reach.

Reconsidering Burnout Using the Third Option

The reason changing your life is so hard is because it always involves a loss of some kind.

Have you ever tried to empty a full dryer in one go, and every time you lean over to pick up a dropped sock or washcloth, you lose another? Not only are you trying to hold everything together, but you’re struggling to scoop up all the items falling to the wayside as well. That’s what life feels like when you have burnout. Like all your energy is used up just trying to scrape through the day, cleaning up messes. You have nothing left over for the things that feed your soul – and worse, activities that used to bring you joy no longer do. They become chores just like everything else. That’s no way to live.

When burnout becomes extreme, it’s marked by a feeling of being trapped by the circumstances that are causing the burnout. The emotional exhaustion constricts your perception of options. It’s like being in a deep hole. Your world becomes black and white, either/or, with choices whittled down to their starkest binary: stay in that hole, or get out (somehow). But “get out” is rarely a feasible option, because it involves blowing up life as you know it. This is what burnout is: feeling totally, hopelessly stuck, your brain stumbling back and forth between two equally unworkable options. Yes or no, stay or go. And here’s the worst part about burnout: you don’t even know which option you want.

The good news is that this is a false set of options created by your burnout brain. Both are the same thing, two sides of a coin: reactions to being stuck. Both live inside that hole with you. What you need is a third option, one that exists outside of this hole that will crack open the mental constructs keeping you stuck in that either/or existence. The third option lives beyond the boundaries of your current perception.

At this point I know you’re thinking, so get on with telling me how to find the third option already! I’m not going to pretend that there’s some kind of life hack for this. One of the most challenging aspects of being stuck in burnout is that we usually have subconscious reasons for wanting to stay stuck. Changing our lives involves confronting difficult emotions: grief, failure, fear. The reason there’s a perennial market for life advice is that while it gives the illusion of being useful, it mostly fails. The only thing that works is changing your perception of your own reality, and this is no easy task. We cling to our way of seeing things because letting go feels like launching ourselves into chaos and insanity. To our subconscious, it feels like death. But it’s the only way to truly change your life.

Here’s the secret to the third option: it’s not actually a singular choice, but a way of seeing. You can begin to broaden your field of options by opening yourself to the idea of other options. They are real, they are out there, you will find them, and it can happen quickly, seemingly overnight – if you are ready. Wanting to change your life and being ready to change it are two different stages. We all start with wanting to change, but many mistakenly believe wanting it is enough. It’s not.

So how do you prepare yourself for change? Amazingly, it’s pretty simple – not easy, but simple. You have to consider that what’s holding you back isn’t a lack of options but rather your inability to accept other possibilities for yourself. The third option always involves a loss of some part of the vision you have of yourself and your life. That’s why it’s not easy. In order to be ready for change, you must ready yourself for loss. But you will ultimately end up gaining so much more. I say this as someone who has come out on the other side of burnout. Getting through it sucked, there are no two ways about it. But the rewards are well worth it.

Solving the Paradox of Pursuing Our Desires While Detaching From Them

This is a reader question. Let me know if you have one!

Letting desire be your compass while detaching from outcomes.

One of the major areas I work on with clients who are struggling with burnout and trying to reconnect with their creative center is how to differentiate between what they truly desire and what they only think they do. The latter consists of things they feel they need or should have, but that do not bring the happiness we associate with getting what we want. This failure of expected results brings with it an enormous burden of anxiety, confusion, and despair. Eventually this can turn into burnout, a dislocation or dissociation of the self from its true desires: the experience of living a life that does not fit.

A reader recently asked me about the seeming contradiction between what I recommend to clients, that they pursue their deepest desires (once they’ve identified them), and what many great teachings from around the world advise, which is to detach from desires. She struggles, she wrote, with letting her desires be her compass while detaching from outcomes. What she is hitting on is the essential challenge of desire: often we want something because of what we hope we’ll get from it, and it can be difficult to differentiate between this kind of desire and a genuine desire (what I would perhaps call a desire-need of the soul). Additionally, few people are free from all attachment to outcome. How do we sort through the seeming paradox of following our desires while detaching from them? To put this another way, how do we figure out what we really desire versus what we desire for the (expected; hoped-for) results?

First, is it wrong want something because of hoped-for outcomes? Not at all. Many people live this way and do just fine. But some can find that eventually they reach a point of disillusionment with life, where their disappointment in the results of their efforts becomes despair. Certain types of people are prone to this kind of burnout. Those whose life path must inevitably diverge from conventional or “correct” routes generally reach an existential crisis point in what could be termed the “faux results” phase of life. This is a time that comes after the “preparation” phase, which is full of maturation activities like studying, starting careers, planning families. The faux results phase is one of presumed arrival. Presumed, because it is not yet the time of real arrival. It is an in-between phase where many of us, perhaps all of us to some extent, grapple with the hard truth of desire: wanting something and working hard for it doesn’t guarantee any certain outcome, particularly happiness. The universe does not calculate rewards by any mathematics of merit.

If your reaction to this is anything but helpless rage, you are a better person than I. You should be enraged, because what we’ve been taught about the linear causality of effort = reward is wrong. It is at once too simple and too abstract. The imprecision of this formula is on par with flipping a coin. Yes, sometimes effort does reap expected rewards, but someone somewhere decided that this meant that it usually does, or that it always does when you make the right kind of effort, and turned that into one of our deepest-held cultural doctrines. In the Western world we tend to believe not just that effort leads to reward, but that right effort = just reward. The obvious problem here is that there is no way to morally or objectively fix the meanings of right effort or just reward. They exist only as conceptual leaky buckets into which we pour our prayers and wishes.

As my reader pointed out, there are other philosophical systems that have an entirely different reckoning of the relationship between effort and result. Notice that here I use the term result rather than reward. And therein lies the solution to the paradox of how to pursue your desires while detaching from them. When we personalize outcome, when we make certain outcomes a referendum on the value of our efforts, and by extension our worthiness, we will eventually and inevitably be personally devastated by results. The brittle kind of desire, where your desire is a prayer that says, "Please let this happen," is different from the supple kind that stretches and yields, or desire-in-the-moment for something that feels good or right, brings peace or joy or comfort. It is these latter two in combination that can help you find a balance in your desire. You can want certain outcomes, but a desire is always more comprehensive and abundant than this. It contains within itself its own realization: it is, at its core, an embodiment and manifestation of living from your own creative center. Your needs are met in the accommodation of what could be with what is.

None of this is easy. It certainly does not lend itself to a “five easy steps to achieve your best life” approach. If you’re anything like me, you’ve tried those five steps, therapy, and perhaps some medical approaches as well, and still struggle to figure out what you truly desire. The answers often exist in the place where truth breaks the bounds of logic, a place we find very frightening indeed. But nothing you’ll find there is worse than the feeling of living a life that isn’t right for you.

A Thought Exercise to Help You Break Free from Overwhelm

Censorious Cow definitely thinks we need to stop doing things we don't want to do.

During the years that I was suffering from severe burnout, I didn’t have to worry about cutting things out of my life that were causing me stress – my depression took care of that for me. I functioned, or rather, I didn’t function, at the bare minimum, doing only what I absolutely had to. It wasn’t much of a life, but one good thing came out of that time: I learned how to be ruthless about saying no. After I recovered, avoiding relapse became my priority. I knew I had to avoid overwhelm at all costs, but I also wanted to avoid those difficult feelings that arise when you say no and downsize your life (Am I missing out? Am I lazy? What will people think?). So I developed a formula to help me do just that. What makes this formula effective is that it doesn’t require you to give anything up you don’t want to, or say no to something you really want to do. Because here’s what I think: if the goal is to feel better, then this has to feel like it’s adding value to your life, not subtracting it, right?

This formula relies on a thought exercise, so in the beginning you don’t have to do anything except think things through. You only take action when you feel ready. There is no pushing or forcing involved, because that’s how stress comes into your life. It may seem counterintuitive to make changes in your life by doing nothing, but it’s an incredibly powerful method. The underlying mechanism is this: when your mind is changed, action naturally follows. You will do something if you feel enthusiastic about it. The key is getting your brain there. 

Here’s the thought exercise:

Mentally identify something you hate doing but feel you have to. The more you think about this, the more things you’ll come up with. Anything that makes you tense up and gives you a sense of dread belongs on the list.

Ask yourself if doing this thing will get you what you want, expect, or hope for. This is the difficult part of the thought exercise, and you’ll need to dig deep to figure out your real reasons for doing it. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to because it’s a clear case of A leads to B and we want B. But these cases are actually rare. Usually when we do things we don’t want to it’s because we’re hoping for results that are unlikely to happen, because they are either:

• too abstract (maybe if I do this it will make people like me), 

• illogical (if I stay in this job I hate maybe it will get better eventually), or 

• too complex or distant to work (if I post on Twitter every day maybe I’ll get more followers and maybe then when I finally publish my novel it will translate into more sales).

Now, these may all be good reasons to do something, if you are enjoying doing that thing. If you love posting on Twitter every day, have at it! But if it’s draining joy from your life for the sake of an unlikely outcome, that means it it has a very low ROI (return on investment). That’s all you need to know for now. Practice analyzing and evaluating things this way for awhile.

The next step is to apply this process to situations you feel powerless in. Say your job is making you miserable. When you ask yourself if doing your job gets you the results you hope for, you’re probably tempted to say that it does: it makes you money. But this answer doesn’t explain why you are doing that particular job. The answer to that question is probably something more like you hope it will get better somehow or you’ll somehow start to like it. Neither are likely. You may be thinking, well I can’t just up and quit. Agreed. Remember, this is only a thought exercise!

At this point, broaden your field of inquiry. Are there aspects of your job you do derive enjoyment from? Is it the actual tasks you have to do that make you miserable, or the context you have to do them in? Is the environment toxic? The point is to move yourself from “I hate my job but if I quit everything will fall apart,” to “I hate this part of my job,” to “But I like doing this,” to “How can I do more of that, or find a different job that has more of that?” Or something along those lines. The point here isn’t to make some grand decision about your job and your life, it’s to shift your perspective enough that your resourceful, creative brain starts working on possible solutions.

The final step of the thought experiment is both the easiest and hardest. Once you understand that something you don’t want to do won’t likely lead to the results you hope for anyway, the obvious solution is to cut that thing out. But actually doing that can feel impossible, especially if it’s a big thing, like a job. That’s why this is just a thought exercise! You don’t have to actually do it! Just think about doing it. What would your life look like if you cut this thing out? What does your life look like going forward if you continue to do it, knowing it’s not taking you where you want to go? What are your other options? Is there something you do want to do that could get you a positive result, even if it’s just that you like doing it and your life is happier overall when you do more things you like doing? Wait – that’s actually a major result! Because isn’t that what we’re talking about? Feeling better about our lives?

The truth is, feeling overwhelmed isn’t really about having too much to do. It’s caused by doing too much of what we don’t want to do. It’s a self-imposed condition. Sure, we’re at the mercy of many constraining factors in life, but we absolutely can develop the power to stop the overwhelm. We push ourselves to do so many things we don’t want to do, that harm us in the long term, because we hope they’ll result in certain outcomes that won’t happen. There have been studies that show that about 85% of the things we worry about won’t ever happen. It’s logical to assume the numbers are similar for things we wish will happen. If you can learn to identify where and how you are draining your emotional energy on low-ROI activities, you can refocus it on activities you actually enjoy that still lead you in the general direction you want to go. Which for most of us, when it comes down to it, is greater life satisfaction – which often really is just a matter of doing more of what we like, and less of what we don’t.

Leveraging the Eureka Effect to Get Out of Stuckness

You don’t have to live in the land of stuckness forever.

I’ve written this before and I will again: one of the worst feelings is when your life has stagnated and you’ve tried everything you can think of to fix it, but you’re still stuck. It’s like coming to the place where the sidewalk ends: you know the path must pick up somewhere ahead – maybe? – but you can’t see where. This is the land of stuckness. It’s desolate and frustrating and frightening, and it can feel like you’ll never find the way out. Learning how to take advantage of the eureka effect, which is when you have a sudden insight that shows you a way forward, can put you back on a path of real progress. It’s an experience you can’t force, but here are some tools that can encourage it along.

The Map

The reason we get stuck is because the map we have for how life is supposed to go is wrong. When the expectation we have of life as a linear progression clashes with our real experience, it causes a painful cognitive dissonance that we try to solve by forcing our way forward. This may seem to work in the short term, but eventually you’ll exhaust yourself and stagnate. The only way I know how to describe that feeling of having done all the “right” things, and life just laughs and throws shit in your face, is despair. It just plain sucks when you realize the map you’ve been given for life isn’t working anymore.

The key thing to understand is that what’s actually keeping us stuck isn’t our circumstances but our struggle to force solutions. Look at it this way: sometimes on your journey the sun’s going to go down, and you can keep floundering around in the dark hoping you somehow find the way (you won’t), or you can settle down in a cozy shelter and wait until dawn. Our culture doesn’t tend to issue maps that say “Here You Shall Stop Trying So Hard and Perhaps Consider Giving Up for A While,” so you have to write that part in yourself. Magical things can happen when you surrender to apparent failure – more on that in a bit. But while we’re here waiting for the darkness to be over, let’s take a look at the major impediment to moving forward.

The Compass

It always helps to be able to orient yourself when you’re lost. But most of us thwart ourselves by trying to get through the land of stuckness with our eyes turned backward on where we’ve been. Our past has a grounding force like gravity: if we let go we might lose the plot, float away into the nothingness of our uncharted future. 

Our past and future are like two countries with totally different cultures. You have to let go of the beliefs and expectations of the old one in order to thrive in the new one. And the concept of moving from one world, or mode of existence, into another is too big for us to contemplate prior to actually doing it. So we walk through stuckness backward. But trying to resurrect options and outcomes that are behind you is how regret keeps you stuck. It’s such a relief when you finally let go of that fruitless struggle. So let’s try surrendering our hold. It’s okay if this takes time and we’re not very good at it. The important thing is we keep trying.  

Now it’s time to talk about the magic part.  

The Signpost

You’ve probably heard the story of the bath-taking Archimedes, who was so excited by his sudden insight about how to measure the volume of objects that he ran through the streets naked, proclaiming his discovery. While running around naked and babbling in public probably would move your life forward in some way, it’s that aha! moment we’re talking about here. The eureka effect can help you out of your stuckness, but you have to know how to recognize it and use it.

Step 1: Remember what I wrote above about surrendering? This is required for an aha! moment to occur. When you’ve tried everything and found no way forward, that’s the signal that it’s time. It’s frustrating as hell, but you’ve got to let go of trying to control outcomes. It may take practice if you are used to holding on tight. Be patient with yourself. This doesn’t ever happen all at once or in totality. This is a practice, not a goal.

Step 2: The aha! moment is when you have a total shift in your perception that rewrites your reality. But it’s not actually a single moment in time. It’s an experience that builds in stages to a tipping point, because it involves a big paradigm shift. Most of us spend a lot of time and energy denying our aha! moment because of our commitment to the past. Don’t worry – your aha! moment won’t abandon you! Keep practicing your surrendering, and one day you’ll be ready for it. It may very well feel like a “moment” when it happens - but you’ve been working on it all along.

Step 3: I talked about how the past and future are like different countries. Coming to a place of acceptance that you have to leave the old one behind is the hard part. Once you’ve opened yourself to your new paradigm, the borders of your new country will open to you. This stage is marked by feelings of ease and positivity. It can feel almost miraculous, like you’ve been given a gift – this is the relief of finally getting unstuck. Run with it! There’s a lesson in those ancient myths where the protagonist is warned to not look back when they’ve finally escaped the underworld. Keep your eyes forward, hold your head high, and dream big. You are the hero of your journey, and you’ve made it through a dark night.

Life Lessons I Learned From Bungy Jumping

And now I never have to do it again!

It was the first morning of my post-graduation celebratory New Zealand group tour, and we were gathered around the breakfast table getting to know each other. Bungy jumping, first commercialized in New Zealand, was on everyone’s list of must-do activities. Except mine. Never in my life had I ever wanted to bungy jump. Sky diving, yes, sign me up! But something about throwing myself off a bridge, as opposed to a plane, was scarier. Maybe because the ground is so much closer, or because I had this idea that bungy is for adrenaline-junky types, which I am decidedly not. Nope, not interested in bungy, I told everyone. Not my type of thing. A day later I found myself standing on the jumping platform of Kawarau Bridge, the original bungy jump. I peered down at the turquoise water rushing by 43 meters below, trying to convince myself to take a swan dive while the guy behind me counted down from three.

Just two weeks before, I’d walked at my PhD graduation, and I had two panic attacks during the ceremony. What should have been a celebration was one of the worst experiences of my life. Later that evening I couldn’t even keep food down, all while trying to entertain my family and dissertation advisor. Awful doesn’t even begin to describe it. Here I had finally accomplished what was, without question, the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I finished my dissertation and defended it successfully while operating with what felt like the rubble of a nuclear explosion in my brain. I’d done it. The problem was, I didn’t want to continue on in academia. I didn’t want to do anything. All ambition, enthusiasm, and motivation I’d ever had for, well, anything was gone. My life felt like it was already over, all my chances used up. So I went to New Zealand.

I’d actually won the trip – on a whim I’d entered a drawing a travel blogger was doing to advertise her group tours, and what do you know. It felt providential, like the universe was awarding me for all my hard work. Hell yes I was going! But no bungy jumping, definitely not. Maybe some kayaking and hiking. That stuff’s peaceful, and what I needed was some calming time for rumination about my future. Nope. Wrong. I didn’t know it then, but what I actually needed was something big. Something scary to push me out of my comfort zone. As I boarded that plane in Orlando and settled in for a long haul, little did I know that within 36 hours I’d be standing on that Kawarau Bridge platform with bathroom towels and a huge rubber band strapped to my ankles. Bathroom towels, you guys. They use plain old bathroom towels to pad your ankles. Somehow I just couldn’t get over it. What do they do when they need new ones? Head to the local Target?

So there I was, looking down at that turquoise water, and the guy behind me was shouting out the countdown. It was one of those defining moments when you make the decision to do it…or not. And in that moment I realized that I didn’t just need to find a new direction – I needed to change everything about my life. I had to take that leap into the unknown. That moment contained the seeds of what would come after: reconnecting with my creative spark and starting to write fiction again, my coaching business, and a feeling that maybe I haven’t used up all of my chances yet after all. Here are some of the lessons I learned that day and in the intervening days that have helped me move my life forward.

Trust your instincts, but listen to your intuition.

Bungy jumping goes against every natural instinct. It’s just not an evolutionary advantage to want to dive head first off very high things. I didn’t even want to do bungy! That is, until I did. I was suddenly possessed by the idea that I had to do it. What my instincts were against, my intuition was pushing hard. Instincts are fear-based. They’re what tell you to avoid walking through a dark park at night. Instincts are important, but their mechanism of action is negative. Intuition has a positive mechanism of action: it will tell you what’s right for you specifically. It’s what encourages you to forge ahead even when nothing is sure.

What makes us feel alive is challenging ourselves in BIG ways.

During my darkest days I got used to doing the bare minimum to get by. I didn’t have the energy or motivation for any extras. I spent years living that way, thinking I was protecting myself for further trauma that challenging myself could cause. And I don’t think I was totally wrong. I really wasn’t in any shape to handle the kinds of things that happen when you put yourself out there. But if we remain in our comfort zone, life becomes rote and uninspiring. And for creative people like myself that causes death of the spirit. Sometimes we need something really big to shake ourselves out of it. Bungy jumping didn’t solve my problems, but it showed me I was capable of responding positively to hard things.

Distraction cures worry. Really. 

In the hours running up to my bungy jump, my fear was almost surreal. I could not imagine how I would be able to do it. But when my attention shifted to something interesting (there was a lot of interesting stuff in New Zealand!) I completely forgot about what I was about to attempt. In those moments of distraction I felt calm, engaged, and content. My brain kept trying to make me feel like I had to worry about the bungy jump because my brain thinks it can control outcomes by worrying constantly about them. But the brain is like a young child who gets distracted by shiny objects. I fed my brain some interesting stuff, and soon enough it forgot all about bungy jumping…until it remembered again.

Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get through it.

I didn’t want to do bungy. Not before the jump, and certainly not in the long minutes of waiting in line to do it. I definitely did not want to do it when I was standing on that platform – check out my “I don’t want to be here!” smile and my death grip on that handle. You guys, that was one of the scariest moments of my life. But you know what was worse? Having to defend my dissertation. So when the guy counting down behind me got to one, I put my arms up over my head and dove.

You better believe I screamed as I went down.

The One Thing I Got Wrong About "Follow Your Bliss"

Figuring this one thing out changed everything for me.

This post is now a podcast episode!

Let’s be real: after enough living it’s easy to come to the conclusion that directives like “follow your bliss” are bullshit. The simple equation of do what you love = successful and happy life seems to only work out for a vaunted few. The rest of us mere mortals are just trying to survive each day with our sanity intact. We’re lucky if we have any energy left over to follow our bliss – if we even know what our bliss is. I used to think I knew. For me, it’s writing. But somewhere along the way it stopped being my bliss. After years of struggling to make something of my writing, my joy in it had evaporated. All meaning I’d found in it was gone; I no longer knew why I was bothering to do it at all. Eventually my burnout became so extreme I was unable to write. But I’m stubborn, and I still believed that I was meant to be a writer. That’s when I realized I had a fundamental misunderstanding of “follow your bliss.” It’s not bullshit after all – I’d just been doing it wrong.

The one thing I’d failed to understand about “follow your bliss” is that my bliss is incompatible with success and happiness as those are defined within our capitalist system. I know what you’re thinking. Sure, some people do succeed within that system by following their passion. A friend of mine built a lucrative party catering business from one hotdog cart. So what’s his secret? Nothing more than this: his bliss already fit the system. He’s an extraverted natural salesman. Me? I’m an introverted creative. Creative work by its very nature does not fit the system: it’s generative rather than productive, emerges on a slower schedule than what is profitable, and creative products don’t have a large market. It’s rare for creatives to make a living from their work – not impossible, but very, very difficult. And in order to do so, it often involves a sacrifice that kills their creative capacities.

The incommensurability between creative work and conventional work may seem obvious, but for creatives who are struggling to fit both in, or better yet find paying work that allows for at least some creativity, things get muddied. The problem is that creative work gets relegated to the leftover time and spaces, after the productive, money-earning work is done. And this never ends well for creatives, because it means that who they are is diminished and confined to the leftovers. When I finally understood that this two-track life would never lead to anywhere but burnout for me, everything changed. I realized I needed to shift the lens through which I experienced life. I will always have to earn money somehow, but I wanted to find a way to live from my creative center in everything I did, because that’s the only way my spirit could regenerate and thrive. I call this whole-life creativity, and it showed me what “follow your bliss” really means.

It should be called “living your bliss,” because that’s what it is, and I believe that’s how Joseph Campbell, the originator of the saying, meant it. He saw it as a state of being in which you have fully committed to manifesting an expression of your true self in the world. This is similar to what Brené Brown terms “wholehearted living,” but Campbell, a scholar of world mythologies, saw it as having an esoteric and spiritual dimension. He conceptualized the experience of following your bliss as being on your destined track, where your life is harmonized with what the universe wants for you. He alternatively called this state of being “refreshment” or “rapture,” that feeling of being truly alive. So following your bliss isn’t really about doing what you love – it’s about experiencing the act of living from that creative well of life itself, the place where wonder, astonishment, and joy come from. We can access that place through doing what we love, that is, doing the thing that allows us to speak the language of our soul into the world.

I used to think that following your bliss was hard, something only a lucky few got to do, but that was because I was forcing myself to accept and pursue the values of the conventional capitalist system while simultaneously attempting to keep the flame of my creative spirit alive – and I failed at both. But it was only when my creative flame finally burned out that I became truly capable of following my bliss, because I had nothing else to lose at that point. I committed myself fully to living from my creative center. This involves a tremendous amount of trust, both in myself and the universe, because it’s risky in every way: financially, emotionally, relationally, reputationally. Full commitment means entering a territory of total and uncharted uncertainty. You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy steps off the cliff? That’s what it feels like. It’s petrifying. But I still find it easier than splitting myself between my creative soul and my false conventional self. It took descending into that dark place of being confronted with my own failures and despair to gain the perspective I needed to start living my bliss.

We all have our own journeys and no one’s individual path looks like anyone else’s. But creatives come across similar obstacles on their way, and the biggest is trying to live their bliss in a society undergirded by a system that does not support the creative life. It’s an obstacle that reappears again and again, but we can diminish its power to block and divert us by claiming, and committing to, our identities as creatives. It’s okay if this happens in stages – in fact the daily devotional act of living from your creative center is, in large part, what it means to be a creative. Simply making the decision to try that today and the next day and onward is how you can begin to follow your bliss.

We Should All Waste More Time

Wasting time is a radical rebellion.

This post is now a podcast episode!

What was your gut reaction when you read the title of this post? Did you feel unaccountably uncomfortable? Did the judgy part of you clear her throat? In our culture we are given two ideological choices of how to use time: wisely, or wastefully. One good, one bad. When I first started wasting time as an intentional personal practice (yes, you read that right), I felt like a bad person. I felt lazy, ungrateful, spoiled…all the negative things we’re taught to think about people who don’t diligently apply themselves to getting it all done. The indoctrination runs deep. See if you can complete any of the following: 

• Early to bed, early to rise…

• Strike while the…

• Pull yourself up by your…

• Idle hands are… 

You probably know at least one – we memorize such sayings in childhood. There are hundreds more, proliferating everywhere from your Facebook feed to the walls of your workplace or gym. They glorify our cultural approbation of hard work, getting ahead, and keeping busy, and structure our understanding of how we should conduct our lives. Industrious activity is seen as the way to succeed, but it’s more than that. It’s ingrained in us as a moral virtue. People who work hard are good people; we admire them. We believe they should be rewarded because they deserve to be. 

Think about how we talk about not getting things done. It always carries a stigma. It was an unproductive day. I lazed about. I did nothing. Is it even possible to communicate this in an unequivocally positive way? The best we can do is something like, It was a restful day. But even then, we’re doing something of value – we’re resting so we can be ready for more work. Wasting time feels bad because we’re supposed to feel bad about it. 

This is why we have a cult of busy. Creating busyness in our lives makes us feel like we are one of the good people, and it allows us to signal our worthiness to others. Busyness is a social status symbol and a way of self-medicating difficult feelings regarding our own value. How much busy is ideal? Being a little too busy. The kind of busy that you can show off with that tone of light exasperation everyone instantly recognizes: I’m just so busy, I barely have a moment to myself! Feeling that overwhelm – or giving the impression of it – is how we know we are part of the cool kids’ club (cult) of busy.

That’s bullshit. Being too busy isn’t a badge of honor. It just means you overscheduled yourself. Of course some of the ways our time gets used are out of our control, but we all can make choices about how busy we want to be. Sometimes those choices are hard, and you have to make sacrifices. People who say they wish they weren’t so busy are really saying that they’re too scared to make those changes. They don’t know how to exist without busy.

I started a personal practice of wasting time because I wanted to stop feeling that overwhelm of having to get all the things done. I wanted to cure my burnout. But I realized the practice had a larger value than just changing my own life. Intentionally wasting time is a radical rebellion in the face of our cultural indoctrination. It’s a rejection of the societal moralizing (laziness is a sin) and the capitalist valuation of human activity (time is money) that keep many of us from living our best lives. We all know the world is changing, that we’re entering a new era politically, economically, and culturally. It’s time to examine and subvert our limiting indoctrinated beliefs.

So how do you intentionally waste time? Here’s how I start. Whenever that anxiety comes on that I should be getting all the things done, I sit. I do nothing. I don’t try to use the time to meditate or “rest.” I sit and stare at a wall or out a window and let my mind wander, and sometimes I switch on a tv show as background static. I sit through that urgent feeling that there are all these things I need to do and the accompanying discomfort of leaving them undone. I tell myself that the urgency isn’t real, and that most of these things don’t actually need to get done at all. Eventually my mind always comes to rest on something I want to do. And I do that thing.

This practice helps fill my life with spirit-sustaining activities to the detriment of soul-destroying busywork. Like any mindful practice it can be challenging, but you will begin to see changes in your approach to life if you stick with it.

No, We're Not All Broken

Nobody's broken, okay?

You know that Leonard Cohen song with the lyrics about there being a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in? It’s beautiful, right? Well, I hate it (sorry, Leonard!). You’ve probably come across this metaphor in another form: we’re all broken. This idea that humans are imperfect is supposed to make us feel better about our daily failures, I guess. Except it’s never made me feel better, not even once. It just doesn’t resonate with me. I’m already hyperaware of my inadequacy – why make it an essential feature of my personality? Are my only choices wholeness or brokenness? Because I choose wholeness. Or am I not allowed to do that?

Acknowledging our human brokenness is seen as a way of being compassionate with ourselves. Many of us do hold ourselves to impossible standards; we all feel we are failing at something. The idea is that we are still worthy despite our flaws. Sounds nice, right? But I don’t want to accept that my worthiness is a condition bestowed charitably at best. Sometimes you’ll hear a rephrase that seems to make it make it more palatable: we are all worthy because of our flaws. Our flaws, after all, are what make us human. This still doesn’t work for me: we’re right back to making brokenness our essential nature. I want to escape this paradigm altogether. 

I ask you: what if there is no such thing as flaws?

What if the things about ourselves that are labeled “flaws” are actually symptoms of us trying to accommodate ourselves to circumstances that don’t suit us? How many of these supposed flaws would be strengths in another type of situation?

What if your brokenness is a symptom of doing for others instead of yourself?

What if your flaws are actually strengths that are out of their element?

What if your life was about becoming more fully yourself rather than fixing yourself?

Metaphors like “we’re all broken” are what I call meaningless meaningfulness. They sound wise, but don’t stand up to critical scrutiny. You don’t have to limit yourself by accepting you are broken. You don’t have to accept your “flaws” to make progress in your life. In fact, outright rejecting conceptual paradigms such as these is how we can make our greatest leaps forward.

Think about those things that you consider your flaws. Maybe they’re the things about yourself you’ve always been made to feel aren’t good enough or need to be changed outright. I’m not talking about habits here, but aspects of character. Are you socially awkward, like me? What would this trait look like if you re-imagined it as a strength? Maybe it’s a manifestation of the fact that you are an observer by nature, someone who sees straight to the heart of things. Do you worry that you’re lazy, as I did for many years? Maybe the problem is what you’re focused on accomplishing – if it doesn’t inspire you to action, perhaps it’s not the right thing for you. Reframing it in your mind can help you begin to tear down limiting beliefs about yourself. There’s no telling where you might go in life, once you throw off those mental constraints.

Let the cracks be ones you make, and let the light be your light that you shine out to the world. 

How Do You Change Your Life When You Don't Know What You Want?

You don’t need to know where you’re going to get there.

One of the most frustrating feelings I’ve ever experienced is wanting my life to be different but having no idea what a different life would look like. My life had all those things lined up that you’re supposed to have, like career and family. From the outside it probably looked great. But I was deeply unhappy. I could barely drag myself through the days, doing the bare minimum to get by, stuck in an endless loop of self-recrimination and paralysis. Something was very wrong with my life, but I had no vision of what I might want instead. This is a common experience for intuitive feelers like INFPs and INFJs. The things we’ve been taught to want are often unfulfilling, but there aren’t many good alternative models for how life could be different. And because we tend to all be unique in our own ways, it’s doubtful that any model would ever suffice. We have to make our own way.

It’s not an easy path we walk, and it often looks dark ahead. But there are some things we can do to help us move forward and that may open up some surprising doors we didn’t even know were there.

Experiment with doing things the wrong way

We are all socialized to think certain life choices are the “right” ones. Even those of us who have rejected conventional mores have internalized certain beliefs about the things we should pursue in life. A big one for me was career success – I always thought I needed to get a good job that made use of my education and talents. And this isn’t wrong. But it’s also not right. 

You know what is wrong? Not making use of my education and talents to get an amazing job. So you know what I did? That. I did not get an amazing job. I did not make good use of my education and talents. I know – it’s cringy, right? And I wouldn’t have made this choice if my mental health issues hadn’t precluded me for a long time from doing much of anything other than a freelance gig here and there. But in the end that turned out to be a good thing, because it taught me that sometimes the wrong way is the right way. I realized that my education – which I am deeply grateful for, and recognize for the privilege that it is – is valuable because of the experience of it, not the specific credentials it confers. Understanding this opened up so many possibilities for me that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of.  

Consciously making choices that go against what we’ve been socialized to think is good or right is one of the hardest things to do. You don’t have to do it in a big way. In fact, at the beginning it’s helpful just to do a deep dive into examining what parts of your life exist only because you are doing what you are “supposed” to do. The best way to do this is to confront your fear of judgement. Ask yourself the question: am I doing this because I want to, or because if I don’t, people may criticize me?

Put away those big dreams

Some people do achieve big dreams – but not as many as you’d think. We’re inundated with bootstrapping stories about celebrities, sports stars, and social media millionaires, so you can forgive yourself for thinking that the formula is “big dream + belief in self + hard work = success.” But it’s not, at least not for most of us. Beautiful dreams are nice, but mostly they’re just dreams. One day you wake up and realize your life is just…normal, and you’re, well, you’re just average. Sure, you’re special, but in the way that everyone is special. Which is to say, not really that special. This can be a hard reality to accept for INFPs and INFJs, because while we may not be “special,” we are different, and we inherently believe our destinies are different as well. And they often are.

Here’s the thing: destiny isn’t something you decide on ahead of time. It’s an emergent property of how you live your life and the small choices you make along the way. So think small. Think today. You don’t need to know what big possibilities are on the horizon – you just need to know what you want to do now, and trust that it will turn into possibilities in the future. Find something that piques your curiosity and explore it. Always wanted to know about raising backyard chickens? Start researching. The trick is to get your mind busy on something that inspires it. Soon enough new ideas and inspirations will pop into it – and they may have nothing to do with chickens! Or who knows, in a few years you may find yourself buying a small homestead out in the country and starting up a chick-hatching business. (Chickens are my latest obsession….)

Very rarely does someone’s life change because they made a big change out of the blue. Usually you build up with little alterations until you reach a tipping point, and then suddenly a big change occurs. It may seem to come out of nowhere, but in reality the ground was prepared over time.

Practice radical faith in the process

You’ve probably heard the phrase “trust the process” before. But trusting it isn’t enough. Trust is based on a hoped-for or predicted outcome. You trust the sun to rise tomorrow. You trust your friends or partner to (hopefully) be there for you when you are struggling. Trust is safe. Faith is an entirely different prospect. It’s based on confidence in the face of uncertainty and confusion regarding outcome. Faith is inherently radical, because it isn’t attached to specific outcomes. And this is radical in our results-oriented culture. You can’t go into work tomorrow and tell them your new philosophy is to only do things that feel good in a way that also feels good, end product be damned.

But you can live your life in a process-oriented way. We’ve talked about putting away big dreams – which are results-oriented – and focusing on doing small things that spark interest and excitement in you. The radical faith part is believing that you are headed somewhere, even if you feel like you’re treading water. Even if the path ahead is dark. In times when you feel a need to change your life but don’t know what you want, having faith in the process frees your mind from obsession over trying to figure out where you are headed. Eventually you’ll probably arrive at more clarity regarding what you want, but more likely one day you’ll look up to find that your life changed without you noticing how. It can happen faster than you think.