Cannonball Coaching

One of the annoying things about being a coach is that I more clearly see my own patterns of procrastination and avoidance.  I can see what I’m doing and I know how I would work with a client on this stuff.  I can’t lie to myself with excuses and rationalizations because I know they’re bullshit and that I have the choice to change my behavior.

The upside to this is that I have empathy for my clients, and other people in general, when they’re trying to change things in their lives.  It’s not easy but it is doable with the will and desire for change.

Maybe it’s time to schedule an appointment with myself!

How it can already be the 26 th of January, I do not know.  Too late to write about resolutions?  Not really.  I´ve been thinking about this post since several people asked me if I had any new year´s resolutions.   I didn´t waver.  The answer: no.

It´s not that I´m against resolutions.  It´s just that I make resolutions all the time.  Some are bigger and more meaty, some are small things that seem insignificant, but what they really are is me actively thinking about how I want to live my life and how I want to be in this world.

I don´t meet them all.  In fact, meeting them all is not really the point for me.  It´s the process of trying new things, playing with new ways that interests me.  I mean, if I´m sitting here feeling sluggish and I think getting more exercise would help, why not decide right now to get more exercise and come up with a plan?   I may not have the plan in this moment, but I can decide that I need a plan within a week.  Why wait for the new year?  If I want to read more, why not decide now to add that to my routine.

There will always be too many things to do.  Always.  There will always be an answer for why to put something off.  But really, what´s the point of waiting?  And if something really is too much right now, because sometimes it is, then make a point of letting go of it for now and getting on with the rest of life.

What is your resolution for the day?

Following up on my last post which asked whether a good enough marriage is good enough, I couldn’t help but notice this bit in a New York Times magazine article (12-13-2009) about new ideas in 2009.   One of the new ideas:  less is more. The article refers to technology (cameras, mp3 players, etc.), but maybe the analogy can be extended to marriage.  Maybe a good enough marriage is not only good enough, it’s great!  (Wait, that may be too much pressure.)  Lo-fi marriage anyone?

Good Enough is the New Great

“Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere,” Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called “The Good-Enough Revolution.” Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, “ease of use, continuous availability and low price” are more important.

High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom. And at war, a country that has a fleet of F-16 fighter jets that can cover 1,500 miles an hour is now using more and more remote-controlled Predator drones that are powered by snowmobile engines.

Lo-fi solutions are now available for a range of problems that couldn’t be solved with high-tech tools. Music played from a compact disc is of higher quality than what comes out of an iPod — but you can’t easily carry 4,000 CDs with you on the subway or to the gym. Similarly, a professional television camera will produce a higher-quality image than a phone, but when something important happens, from the landing of a jet on the Hudson River to the murder of an Iranian protester, and there are no TV cameras around, images recorded on phones are good enough.

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.ROBERT MACKEY

I read a long article in the latest New York Times magazine about marriage: Married (Happily) with Issues.  The author, Elizabeth Weil, decides to take on the project of working on her marriage, even though she says things are pretty good.  Having spent many years working on my marriage and talking with friends working on their marriages, I couldn’t resist reading.  It’s ten pages long and on each page I thought, “I’ll stop now…I know all this stuff,” but I kept right on reading.

I’m fascinated by how couples and humans in general interact, and I liked where the author was going.  My husband  (who will surely object to what I am about to say) lives in a world of the dream, the vision of how it could be, the beauty, the perfection, the harmony.   I am more pragmatic (and realistic, I think!) and believe we’ll have our good moments and our bad moments, and they will happen all by themselves.  That is not to say that I don’t think working on a marriage is a good thing.  We have done a lot of it and it has definitely made both of us happier, together and as individuals.  But when is enough enough?

Here is a link to the article.

In case you are not up for a 10-page read, here are some of the things that really stuck out for me.  Near the beginning of the article, Weil gives a little background on her relationship.

Dan and I married on July 1, 2000, in Olema, Calif. I wore a white dress. Dan was 32; I was 30. We vowed to have and to hold, to love and to cherish in sickness and in health, etc. We were optimistic, cocky and vague about the concept of marriage. We never discussed, or considered discussing, why we were getting married or what a good marriage would mean. It all seemed obvious. I loved Dan; I loved how I felt with him. Ergo I wanted to be his wife.

Oh my god!  This is like a tailor-made reason why I want to work with couples that are getting married!  I have been asking myself lately if maybe I had been wrong, maybe couples today do talk everything through ahead of time.  But I realized, no, my instincts, and experience talking with people is right: we tend to ignore what we don’t need to deal with right now.  Better to put stuff on the table up front and work from there, than waiting to go into therapy down the line.  In my mind, being open to the fact that there will be sticky moments, annoyances, and sore subjects will only strengthen any partnership.  Living with the illusion of perfection and harmony puts too much pressure on everyone.

The author then poses what I think is a crucial set of questions.

What would a better marriage look like? More happiness? Intimacy? Stability? Laughter? Fewer fights? A smoother partnership? More intriguing conversation? More excellent sex? Our goal and how to reach it were strangely unclear.

I think we as human beings hold on to some sort of ideal, but if we really break it down, it’s not at all clear what we’re really looking for.  And, will we know when we’re there?

This bit from the end of the article really resonated with me and also made me feel somehow relieved.

In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and flexibility to live one’s own life — not happiness. This is a crucial distinction. Similarly the “good-enough marriage” is characterized by its capacity to allow spouses to keep growing, to afford them the strength and bravery required to face the world.

This was not going to be one of those articles that tells me I’m doing it all wrong!  Or telling me there is one way to do it.  It feels real.  My husband and I love each other.  We also drive each other crazy.  We have good moments and we have bad moments.  But there has always been room to grow in our relationship, and that’s what keeps us together.

I have known for a long time that I clench my jaw when I sleep. My teeth are proof of that.  I’ve also had a sort of vague idea that I clench my jaw during the day, but lately I’ve consciously been paying attention to when my jaw is clenched. And what have I found?  All the time!  It’s pretty shocking to me.  Every time I tell myself to notice, there it is, tight.  And that can be literally twenty seconds after I relaxed it after noticing that it had been clenched.  A clenched jaw is my default position, a pattern ingrained over years.  No wonder I’m prone to headaches.

I know I didn’t always do it, so I’ve been thinking about why I started doing it.  There is an expression about setting one’s jaw against adversity or something like that.  I think that’s what I did.  And I think this solid jaw has helped me get through some really hard times and made me who I am today.  In other words, clenching served a purpose.

But I guess what I’m wondering now is do I still need to set my jaw against life?  I’m reminded of something I read recently in Raising Cain, a book about bring up boys in today’s world.  The authors talk about strategies we develop as children to survive our circumstances, whatever they may be; an abusive parent, a school bully, being overweight.    But they point out that often these strategies that help us as kids, actually hurt us in adulthood.

This really resonated with me on the jaw front.  Clenching my jaw helped me get through hard times, but I am a different person now, with different tools available to me for coping.  I don’t need to clench anymore, but the pattern is so ingrained that I’m not sure I can shake it.  I have decided to try, and am wondering whether some day I’ll find that a relaxed jaw is my default position.  A symbolic acceptance that my world is safe.

What’s a pattern you have, physical or mental, that my not be serving you anymore?

I started two separate blog posts yesterday, but couldn’t seem to communicate what I wanted.  I like both ideas and I want to write about them…choice and editing ourselves, but maybe I’m not ready yet.  I think in the past, I would have stewed and stewed over this and felt bad about not finishing or felt bad about posting something I wasn’t happy with.

That’s why I’m writing this now.  I want to take action and not be stuck in my desire to be perfect or at least perfectly presentable.  I almost published one of the posts as an act of defiance, but I thought it better to do something new.  Even as I write this, my little internal voice is telling me this is not worthy of putting on my website, but I feel if I am to get past my “post block” I need to put something up now.  Before the block grows into something bigger and paralyzes me.

So here you have it.  My post today is me pushing back.  Pushing back in.  Saying I want to be present and out there, even while I want to hide under the covers!

When do you push yourself forward despite the discomfort?  And what does that bring you?

Last weekend I watched the Wizard of Oz with my 8-year-old.  It was his first time and the first time in a long time for me.  I was struck how much the overarching message of the film ties into a coaching philosophy:  we have all the power and knowledge within us now.  We just have to find ways to access it.

Sometimes it takes a journey down a yellow-brick road, being chased by a green witch with flying monkeys, but sometimes it simply takes someone reminding you of what you carry inside.

What knowledge or power do you carry around that you aren’t acknowledging?  What is stopping you?

I did something the other day that was hard for me. Really hard. There were a lot of reasons it was hard and I could see that many of them were tied to emotional stuff from the past. Irrational, maybe. But real to me. I considered not doing it. Wouldn´t that be a form of taking care of myself? I often put the well-being of others ahead of my own, so I wondered whether this would be a good time to give myself a break. But every time I said to myself, “Okay, I won’t go,” a little voice or a feeling sprung up keeping the question alive. I finally decided that if I couldn’t embrace the decision not to go, I should go.

So I went.

On my walk home, I realized that if I hadn´t gone to the meeting, I would still be chewing on it, asking myself questions and playing out different scenarios. Avoidance would only bring me temporary comfort, so the action that took the best care of me was to face the discomfort.

What are you avoiding in your life? Where can you give yourself some relief right now?

As you can see, this is a new look for my website.  It was hard to let go of the beautiful, stylish and graceful website that I had before, but I realized it wasn’t right for me.  It was too advanced, too nice.   I couldn’t just make changes or add a blog post and that left me feeling (voluntarily) bound and gagged.  And what’s worse, I was using that as an excuse for not getting into action.

So, no more excuses.  I will miss the comments telling me what a beautiful website I have, but I’m hoping that this new site will show more of me and pull people in.  It will be a living, breathing site because I will post regularly and keep tinkering with things until I get it right…and since there is no “right,” I will simply keep tinkering.

I ask myself now, what was I holding on to with the old website?  What am I opening myself up to now?  And you?  What are you holding on to?