Reschool Yourself

Tag Archive: perfectionism

Forget “All or Nothing”

remote_web

Darren and I joke about my tendency to approach life with “all the arrows.” The reference comes from the trigger finger that I have with the TV remote. When I’m fast-forwarding through commercials on our DVR, I’m inclined to ramp up to five arrows, top speed. Darren usually opts for three arrows, so he doesn’t overshoot and have to backtrack. I, on the other hand, lean more toward maximum intensity than a happy medium.

In the same way, I want to do things to the best of my ability. If I write, I want to absorb myself in writing for hours. If I exercise, I want to commit to a regular workout schedule, and I want to sweat.

The problem is that having a child — especially one who has never slept much — leaves me so little time to myself that an “all or nothing” approach to my hobbies usually translates to “nothing.” Since Evan was born, and especially since he became an active toddler, I’ve rarely had time to exercise, read, write, and play music to the level I want to. I used to do Zumba twice a week and read books before bed. Now I’m lucky to catch a Zumba class once per month, and I’m so tired at the end of the day that I usually just watch Jimmy Fallon’s monologue and scroll through Facebook on my phone before I crash. At times, I’ve felt like pieces of me have gone missing, that I’ve lost touch with the things that make me who I am.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that if I want to do the things I love, I’ll have to do them in small doses and incorporate them into life with a small child. Lately Evan has taken a liking to music, so in the evenings I’ll play the guitar and sing, and he’ll beat on a little drum his grandma gave him (using a plastic maraca and a salad server as drumsticks, naturally). I may be singing the ABC song and “If You’re Happy and You Know it” over and over, but it feels good just to be playing music again.

I take the stairs at work because it’s usually the only exercise I get aside from lugging around Evan’s 26-pound frame (and also because I find elevators to be super awkward). Over the weekend, I dusted off Jillian Michaels’ The 30-Day Shred DVD and managed to do the 20-minute workout twice. That’s more exercise than I’ve done in a very long time, and something that I can make happen at least once a week. Another option is an app called Seven that works all of your major muscle groups in seven minutes. I don’t use it very often because seven minutes doesn’t feel like enough, but seven minutes is better than zero minutes.

I’ve come to understand that during this phase of my life, I have to steal moments for myself, and that means letting go of my “all the arrows” M.O. It may take me months to finish reading a book, and years to finish writing one, but I’m learning to accept that doing a little of the things I love is better than not doing them at all.

Photo: Phil Long

September 8, 2015 Personal Development, , , , , 2 Read more >

Making Space for New Ideas

lighthouse

I was 28 years old when I realized that I didn’t like where my life was headed.

To most people, I’m sure everything looked fine. I was in good health, was working full-time in the youth program that I’d co-founded, and had a busy social life in San Francisco. But I knew in my core that I wasn’t fulfilled by it all, and I wasn’t ever going to be. The hard thing was, I had no idea what I’d do instead. So I kept plodding forward.

I fell into a deep depression that winter. I felt like I was being swept away in a current of my endless To-Do lists for and social commitments. It was so bad that even when my family came together for Christmas at my parents’ house, which was my favorite thing in the world, it couldn’t lift my spirits. From behind the closed door of my childhood bedroom, I could hear my mom and sister laughing together in the kitchen. Normally I would have walked down the hall and joined them, but I just sat there by myself, because I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. I knew that if I didn’t make a big change of some kind, and soon, I would be in real trouble.

The only thing I could think to do was to get away and clear my head. I’d always wanted to take a reading retreat and hole up in a cabin somewhere, just me and a stack of good books. My nonprofit salary didn’t leave me much disposable income, but I found a hostel on the coast that was surprisingly affordable. After Christmas, I packed my Jetta full of books, art supplies, and my laptop — strictly for reading and writing, not for email — and drove out to the beautiful Half Moon Bay.

It was revolutionary for me to wake up and have the whole day to myself, with no plans or obligations. I jogged. I journaled. I sat on a bench and watched the waves crashing on the rugged cliffs below. At the hostel I sat by the fire and read for hours. Taking that retreat was the kindest thing that I’ve ever done for myself, before or since.

A day or so into my stay at the hostel — which I’d planned for two days but extended to four — I began to have ideas again. Actual ideas. I was used to keeping my mind and schedule so full at all times that I could only execute the tasks in front of me; there was no space for anything new. My brain was like a hard drive that was one hundred percent at capacity. Removing myself from my daily routine and endless To-Do lists — laundry! email! grocery shopping! — opened up a patch of fertile ground that allowed new ideas emerge.

I came into the retreat knowing that I needed to make a change in my life and hoping that I would figure out what it was. It was my last night at the hostel when I finally realized what was making me so unhappy. In addition to overscheduling and exhausting myself, I had been pushing myself to do everything perfectly. I was afraid to take risks and make mistakes. I’d grown so used to doing what I thought I should be doing with my life that I’d lost sight of what I wanted to do. It eventually dawned on me that all of these habits had all begun in school.

When I asked myself what I wanted, the answer was, “A fresh start. A school do-over. A chance to come out a happier person the second time around.”

The idea for a project began to form: What if I could go back to my childhood classrooms, from kindergarten through college, and do school over again?

That was the beginning of the Reschool Yourself project. It seemed like a nutty idea, but over the next few months after I left the hostel, through a series of emails and phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I received permission to do the project. I spent the fall of 2008 at my old schools, reliving many of my childhood experiences, and writing about how they were changing me. I finished the project much more grounded and whole than when I began. Shortly afterward, I moved across the country and began a completely new line of work. And yes, I ended up a lot happier than I was when I began.

If I hadn’t taken time away from my busy life in the first place, I can almost guarantee that I would never even have had the idea for the project. I would have miserably continued down the wrong path because I simply didn’t know what else to do.

We all have ideas just below the surface, waiting to appear when we create the space for them. It could be as small as a solution to a problem we’ve been wrestling with at work, or as big as an epiphany about the next chapter of our lives. But because we’re uncomfortable with silence or being alone, or because we’re addicted to being busy all the time, we fill up every spare second with noise. The shower is just about the only place that’s quiet and free of distractions, so it’s no wonder that people often have big ideas there.

I realize that most of us aren’t able to do exactly what I did and take four days off for a retreat, even during the holidays. It certainly wouldn’t be feasible for me now that I have a baby. But that doesn’t mean I can’t create the space to have new ideas. Lately, I’ve been working on not automatically pulling out my phone when I have a few seconds of downtime. When someone is running late for a meeting or I’m in line at the post office, I have to actively resist the sweet siren song of Facebook. Instead, I’ll just be still for a few moments and let the ideas come as they may. This weekend when I was in line at the grocery store, I thought, I want to bake something tonight. Hey, I can make a king cake!  If I’d been scrolling through post after post on social media, I wouldn’t be enjoying a piece of cinnamon goodness topped with colored sugar for dessert tonight.

There are other experiments in creating space that I’d like to try, as well. Here’s an excerpt from a Wired profile on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos:

Bezos spends hours at a time thinking about the future: trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web, particularly on Mondays and Thursdays, which he tries to keep unscheduled. “I catch up on email, I wander around and talk to people, or I set up my own meetings – ones that are not part of the regular calendar.” His surfing isn’t always confined to retail: Let the record note that on a Thursday in January he spent five hours on the Web using (his wife) MacKenzie’s MSN account, plumbing the depths of his space fascination and learning more about “roton” rockets.

If Jeff Bezos has the time to leave two days per week unscheduled, then I can probably reserve an hour a week, or even a few minutes a day. I’ll bet if every day we shut off all of our devices and just took a few quiet moments with our thoughts, we’d all be a little more grounded and have some new ideas that just might change our lives.

 

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

January 20, 2015 About the Project, Personal Development, , , , 2 Read more >

Shutting the Door on the Resistance

shutdoor

I’ve been working on a book on the Reschool Yourself project for the past six years. I would very much like to have it finished by now, but I understand why I haven’t. It’s simple: It’s the resistance.

Steven Pressfield describes the resistance as “an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It’s a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.” He writes:

Resistance is what keeps an entrepreneur from making the cold calls he knows he has to, to get his business rolling. It’s the force that keeps an aspiring painter away from her studio, or makes a writer back off from the blank page. Resistance stops us from going to the gym, from meditating, from donating our time to a cause we believe in.

The resistance looked a little different for me each time. At first, it came as the daunting question, How in the world do I write a book? It was much easier to do other things — like clean the house and watch TV — than sit down and try to figure it out.

Eventually I decided to jump in and just start writing the book as best I knew how. It came in small fits and starts. I’d get up in the morning before my husband did so I’d have some quiet time to myself and get on a roll.  Then I would hit a roadblock in my writing and give in to the resistance, until I worked up enough courage to start again. Years passed like this, more quickly than I could have imagined.

When I had a baby in the summer of 2013, I understood the difference between my internal resistance and tangible, real-world obstacles. Whereas before I’d had to contend with the resistance alone, now I had to deal with it AND find the time and energy to write when every ounce of it was already going toward keeping a newborn alive.

Now that my son is a toddler, I write after he goes to bed. On good days, I put him down around 8 pm and write for an hour or two. On bad days, I listen to the resistance when it says, “Don’t you need to finish a bit of work? Don’t you deserve to decompress for a while after a long day?” And by the time that I’m done with these things, it’s too late and I’m too tired to start writing. I go to bed feeling like a failure.

I’m doing the Your Turn Challenge this week because I want to shut the door on the resistance.

Committing to doing something every day doesn’t give the resistance any opportunity to weasel its way into your mind. It cuts off any discussion about whether you’re going to do it or not. There are no excuses or negotiations. A commitment doesn’t leave room for if you’ll deliver — only for when and how.

I’ve already used this tactic to beat the resistance once. While I was doing the Reschool Yourself project and spending each day at my old schools, I knew that I was going to blog about my experience each night. Because of that commitment, I lined up the rest of my waking hours to make sure I could deliver my post. Throughout the day, I would think about what I would write that night, so when I sat down I was ready to start typing without hesitation, and I sat in front of the computer until I published the post. I wrote about eating lunch in the school cafeteria, going to a middle school dance, and staying in my college dorms.

At first, I had to grind out each sentence. I would delete every other word because I couldn’t capture the perfect phrasing that I heard in my mind. But as I kept writing day after day, whether I felt like it or not, the words began to flow more easily. I even began to look forward to writing. This momentum slammed the door on the resistance and kept it out. But once I finished the project, I started blogging more sporadically, which cracked the door open and let the resistance slither its way back in.

I hope that posting every day for the Your Turn Challenge will shut that door on the resistance again and seal it tight. I hope it will translate to moving my book forward every day, whether I edit a section of the manuscript, put fresh words on the page, or publish a new blog post. I hope that being part of a blogging community will encourage all of us to make our big dreams happen.

The week, I’m sure that the resistance will tell me that I’m too busy or too tired to write a blog post every day. I’m sure it’ll say, “Cut yourself some slack. You have a full-time job and a 17-month-old. You should relax tonight instead of writing. Just post something tomorrow.”

And I’ll tell the resistance, “Thank you for sharing” — or, as Pressfield recommends, “Go to hell” — and write my post anyway.

 

This post is part of the seven-day Your Turn Challenge hosted by Seth Godin’s team. Flickr photo by t0msk. 

January 19, 2015 About the Project, , , 1 Read more >

A Mantra for the Holidays: “What’s Not Wrong?”

 

rsy-inspiration-holiday

This holiday season, I’ve been nostalgic for the kind of Christmas that I was lucky enough to have as a child. It was my favorite time of year, hands down. My family and I would drive out to a local Christmas tree farm in my dad’s truck, sitting four abreast, and cut down a divine-smelling Douglas fir. Back at home, we would put carols on the tape deck — Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and New Kids on the Block’s “Merry, Merry Christmas” were our favorites — and string colored lights on the branches. We’d unwrap newspaper from each ornament and smile as we remembered the person who gave it to us or the fond memory that it brought back. My sister and I helped our mom make fudge and three kinds of butter cookies, and on Christmas Eve my family would go to Mass, eat a home-cooked meal, and open presents. The whole season was filled with excitement and real holiday cheer.

Now that I’m an adult and a parent and I live far from my childhood home, I’ve had a much harder time getting into the Christmas spirit. I now understand why the holidays are the most stressful time of year for a lot of people. Everyone is rushing — to get work out the door before vacation, to drive out to the mall and pay for their purchases, to get the house clean and the meal prepared before family arrives. Then there are the financial strains. Being practical and money-conscious, the whole concept of Christmas shopping is stressful for me, because I don’t want people to buy me anything out of obligation, and vice versa. On top of that is holiday fundraising and sending Christmas cards and taking Santa pictures and braving the long lines at the post office. AND, AND, AND. There’s a lot more effort that goes into preparing for Christmas as a grown-up than as a child, and it’s difficult to accept that it isn’t the magical, carefree time that it was back then.

I had a mini-meltdown the other day because I let all of this holiday pressure get to me. I’d been so proud of myself for turning around our Christmas card quickly, and for completing a mad errands dash that included picking up the cards, exchanging lampshades at Target, going to the pharmacy, and buying stamps before I had to pick up our son from school. But when I got home, I realized that the lampshades were the wrong kind, and the 4×6 card we’d designed looked too small compared to the 5×7 that we’d done last year. In that moment, all of the effort I’d gone to seemed to be for nothing. I could feel the dark clouds gathering over my head.

Darren tried to reason with me, as he always does when I get like this, but it was futile. I could see that the holiday cards on our fridge were of various sizes. I knew that not one single person would open the card, see our smiling baby boy, and say, “I would really enjoy this card, if only it were bigger.” In that moment, it didn’t matter, because I wanted the card to be different than it was, and because it wasn’t, it felt ruined altogether. That’s the trap of perfectionism, of course, and the reason that it’s a surefire recipe for unhappiness.

It took a mood-shifter — in this case, the star-studded musical sendoff for The Colbert Report — to snap me back to reality and stop ruminating. I could see that the lampshades and the Christmas cards and the rest of it all qualified as major #firstworldproblems. I was able to step back for a moment and ask myself, “What’s NOT wrong?” — and the answer was, “So much.”

Even though most of my family members live far away and I miss them, I am fortunate to have a family who loves me and would do anything for me. Even though toddlerhood has been very, very challenging, I have a healthy son who makes me laugh every day, and a husband who is a doting parent and my most unflagging supporter. I have a job that I love, a financial situation on the upswing, and a community full of caring neighbors and friends. There is PLENTY in my life that is not wrong.

I went back to Target the next day and exchanged the lampshades again, this time for the right kind. I got to see how much the Christmas card made my coworkers smile and accepted that it was great just the way it was. I made a point of listening to Christmas carols and baking cookies from my family’s recipe to get into the holiday spirit.

I’m coming to terms with Christmas being more of a crazy time than it was when I was a child, but perhaps I can make it as magical a time for my son as it was for me. No, our tabletop Christmas tree from Kroger is still not decorated, and it may not ever be this year. There will probably be a few more tense moments to come, whether the turkey isn’t ready when I’d hoped it would be or the baby wants to eat the cookies instead of the roasted vegetables. But in the midst of it all, I will keep asking myself, “What’s not wrong?”, so I can look around and appreciate all the things that Christmas is really about.

What’s NOT wrong in your own life? Leave a comment!

December 23, 2014 Personal Development, , , , , , , 8 Read more >

Giving Up The Struggle

You might have wondered how I feel to have all this “time off” while launching Reschool Yourself, given that I’m used to such a packed schedule. Since I left my full-time job in June, my planner has been almost appointment-free. I don’t need to be anywhere, though I keep my commitments to spend time at school. I could be using my afternoons, evenings, and weekends to catch up on all that I’ve missed during my workaholic Spark years. I could be investing it in getting healthy, balanced, and informed, as I’d hoped when I first conceived of the project.

I could be, but I haven’t been. I’ve actually used much of my time like this:

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October 3, 2008 Personal Development, , , , , 3 Read more >

Growing Pains

I’m feeling stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck. That’s all I can think to write. The whole point of taking a break from elementary school this week was to catch up on blog posts, but I can’t seem to finish a single post. I can’t even seem to finish a sentence.

On my To-Do list are around 50 posts about grades K-3 that I want to generate, dozens of features I want to add to this website, and 200+ miscellaneous items, but all I can do is sit here feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. Darren’s in town, and instead of spending time with him, I am staring at my laptop and deleting every other word I type.

Tonight I had a breakdown. I got misty-eyed in the coffee shop where I’d spent hours agonizing over a blog post that I never finished. I teared up when I walked out of the coffee shop and saw the parking ticket on my car. I full-out bawled when I felt like I was ruining the farmer’s market date that Darren and I had been planning for a month.

It was one of those days where I wanted to drop to my knees, look up at the sky, and sigh, “I give up.” It was a day when I was surrounded by reasons to be happy, but I still wasn’t. The farmer’s market was full of music and laughter and delicious local food. Darren surprised me with roses to cheer me up. We ate incredible calzones, followed by ice cream cones. And still I felt stuck.

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September 16, 2008 About the Project, Personal Development, , , 7 Read more >

Reschooling Reason #3: Start with a Clean Slate

SlateI’m spending the week in Jackson, Mississippi, visiting my boyfriend. Darren is a graphic designer and one of my sister’s best friends from Loyola University, New Orleans. If you’re wondering how we met, we hit it off in February at Mardi Gras. Nothing spells romance like applying eyeliner to a pirate in a pink bandana while he whines, “Agggh! It feels like you’re drawing on my eyeball!”

One of my priorities for this visit — besides consuming all the buttery delicacies that the south has to offer — is for Darren to help me revamp the Reschool Yourself site. Lucky for me, he can understand language like, “The objective of the WP-SuperCache is to make the site static and not run any PHP” — yet has never memorized pi to the 100th digit, or attended a Star Wars-themed wedding.

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August 5, 2008 About the Project, Elementary School, Reschooling Reasons, , , 2 Read more >

Cutting Ambition Down to Size

GinsuMy Facebook status update for today is: “Melia wants just one moment without ambition.” What would it feel like, I wonder, to be completely content with something that’s merely good, rather than great? I honestly can’t imagine. When faced with any task, I feel compelled to do it as well as it can humanly be done, and I’m constantly surprised when it ends up making me unhappy. Here are just a few pieces of evidence.

Exhibit A: Girls’ Dinners. My girlfriends and I have regular dinners where we take turns cooking for each other. When it’s my turn, a simple idea like “Spanish food” grows into a culinary tour through the regions of my beloved España. The meal might begin with a three-cheese plate served with a baguette and red wine from the Penedès region, followed by a tortilla española and sautéed spinach with toasted pine nuts and plump raisins, culminating in a dessert of flan drizzled with caramel sauce. As you’d expect, I always run out of time and end up ignoring my friends while rushing to prepare this type of gourmet meal on my own. I use every dish in the house and most likely end up flipping the tortilla onto the floor, blackening the pine nuts, and realizing too late that the flan needs to be chilled for an hour before serving. Then I proceed to pout throughout the meal while my friends assure me that it’s delicious. ¡Que aproveche! Bon appetit!

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July 17, 2008 About the Project, , , 3 Read more >

My Day of Doing “Nothing”

I am writing from the same couch where you could have found me over 24 hours ago, wearing the same pajamas. I haven’t showered or put in my contact lenses, and I have crossed off a grand total of one item — a brief phone call — from my Saturday To-Do list.

To my usual self, it would appear that I have done nothing today. My usual self would be annoyed about all the items left for tomorrow. It would sigh and fret over the opportunities missed by spending a full day vegging out. My enlightened self, on the other hand, that fleeting self that I’m always chasing, knows that I’ve accomplished a lot more in my day of doing nothing than one would think.

If it weren’t for my throbbing headache, the one that has stayed with me on and off for days, I would have gone through with the day’s agenda. I would have walked over to the Carnaval parade before going to the bank, two grocery stores, and the gym. I would have done the sinkful of dirty dishes and vacuumed the rug, then would have driven an hour to a friend’s graduation party. I might have then stopped by another friend’s birthday at a beach located an hour in the other direction before driving home. But my headache kept me glued to the couch, too exhausted even to get up and brush my teeth.

I almost never get headaches, but for the past couple of months a potpourri of health issues has started cropping up, practically a new one each day. It’s like the menu du jour in hell: “What’ll it be today: the cracked lips or the numb toes?” I know that I’d be healthy if I could just listen to my body’s needs, sleeping when I’m tired and exercising when I’m restless instead of pushing through physical fatigue in order to do more. I pulled an all-nighter last Wednesday to complete a copywriting assignment, and at 5 a.m. the anxious tightness in my chest that has been growing for months screamed at me, “You need to stop and breathe!” But I could not take a full breath, and being on deadline, I ignored my body’s warning signals and soldiered on.

I’ve been this way since I was little, not wanting to miss out on anything, trying to cram as much activity into a day as humanly possible. My mom loves to remind me of how, as a toddler at naptime, I’d tell her, “I’m not tired! I don’t want a nap! I—” and fall asleep mid-sentence. There’s even a photograph of me (see above) reading two books at once with a bottle dangling from my mouth, eyes at half-mast, my mind fighting off the sleep my body knows it needs.

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May 25, 2008 Personal Development, , , 9 Read more >