Use the Discomfort

by | Nov 4, 2014 | Divorce and Separation

Use the Discomfort

Today I woke up feeling unmotivated. I tried to work for a bit, decided it wasn’t going anywhere, and took a break instead.

I got to thinking about how cold my house was, the pilot light on the boiler had probably gone out again. I emailed my tenant to ask him to check, then started thinking I should really just call a heating and plumbing company to come do the annual maintenance properly.

I sat with that thought a while longer. I didn’t love the idea of my tenant constantly having to relight a pilot light that wasn’t his problem to begin with.

So what was actually stopping me from making the call? My last few experiences with the company I usually used hadn’t been great. The previous year, when someone came out for the annual maintenance, my tenant mentioned the repair guy had spent the entire hour on his phone texting. Unsurprisingly, the pilot light kept going out again shortly after. I called them back, same repairman came out, and this time he actually did the work, and unsurprisingly, the boiler did what it was supposed to do: heat the house. On his way out he told me he wouldn’t charge me for the visit, like he was doing me some enormous favor. I recognized that tone, it was the same one I got from the receptionists every time I called.

Those were the thoughts that had been keeping me from picking up the phone. What actually got me to call this morning were the more uncomfortable ones: how much I was inconveniencing my tenant, and how this wasn’t exactly responsible-homeowner behavior on my part.

The receptionist was rude. She told me they were busy for the fall, grudgingly offered an appointment in two weeks, then informed me that next year I’d need to book my service in spring or summer instead.

After hanging up, I sat with the fact that it had gone exactly as I’d expected. I realized I’d been quietly justifying sticking with this company for a while, they did decent work eventually, and I didn’t know of anyone else to call. That annoyed me. Here I was, a customer they clearly didn’t value, still handing them my business anyway. That annoyance was what finally moved me to actually look around. Turns out there were other companies doing the exact same work. I called one, and the repair technician is at my house right now, as I’m writing this.

I woke up unmotivated this morning. What actually got me moving wasn’t inspiration, it was discomfort. And the worse that discomfort got, the more motivated I became, not the other way around.

It’s not fun being in an uncomfortable spot. But today reminded me those spots can genuinely be useful. Use the bad place as a stepping stone toward wherever you’re actually trying to get to.

I’m (Not) Worried About You

by | Oct 27, 2014 | Divorce and Separation

I’m (Not) Worried About You

“I’m worried about you.”

I’ll never forget when someone said that to me. It was the last day of my back-to-work training course, and the facilitator looked at me with genuinely understanding eyes and said, “I worry about you.”

Out of twenty women in that class, she worried about me specifically. Being an introvert, I couldn’t bring myself to ask why in the moment, I needed to go home and sit with it first. By the time I’d processed it enough to want an answer, she was already gone from my life, and asking why she’d worried about me over email felt like the wrong way to find out.

So I came up with my own reasons instead, and they weren’t good ones. I talked myself into believing there was something genuinely wrong with me, not a great thing to be telling yourself, especially in circumstances plenty of people would already call worrying: recently divorced, two young kids, trying to re-enter the workforce from scratch.

Fortunately, that same course had also paired me with a coach. She told me I was fantastic and going to be a real success. Guess who I eventually called back?

It took a while, two months of quietly worrying about myself before I couldn’t take it anymore. When I finally reached a breaking point, I knew exactly who to call: the person who’d actually made me feel good about myself.

That’s the approach I’ve always tried to bring to my own work with people. Not a financial coach who makes someone feel bad about their spending habits, but someone who sits down with them, helps them find the path that actually fits their life, and then genuinely cheers them on to get there.

The People Pleaser trap

by | Oct 22, 2014 | Communication & Conflict, Divorce and Separation

The People Pleaser Trap

I got to start over- thank you, divorce- and my first real step in starting over was figuring out who I actually was and what I valued. I know by now that if I’m not living according to my own values, I end up unhappy, unmotivated, and generally unsuccessful at whatever I’m trying to do.

I keep seeing this exact lesson play out in conversations with other people too, over and over.

Today it happened again.

I volunteer in a few different capacities, and this particular morning I woke up to an email from one volunteer coordinator telling me I wasn’t needed that week, after I’d already set the time aside. I also had an email waiting from a fellow volunteer, unhappy about how the whole thing was being coordinated.

Perfect, I thought. I could help sort this out.

I carefully wrote an email to the coordinator, thanking her for everything she’d been doing, and gently asking if she could clarify how she decided who volunteered each week, since it wasn’t clear to me, and probably wasn’t clear to others either. Maybe a quick note to everyone would help, I suggested, just to head off any resentment building quietly under the surface.

I must not have been the only one sending emails like that, because what came back was long and defensive. At the very end, she asked if I wanted the job.

Not exactly what I was expecting. I drafted an even more careful reply, apologizing that my note had apparently landed as an attack.

She wrote back with an even longer email and asked again if I wanted the job. She hadn’t wanted this role to begin with. She’d been strong-armed into it. Everyone was complaining. And so on.

I genuinely felt for her. She’d taken on something she didn’t want, and I understood exactly why, because at one point in her email she said it herself: “I’m a people pleaser.”

Oh, I know that one well. If there’s one thing guaranteed to pull you away from your own values, it’s being a people pleaser. You end up living according to someone else’s idea of what you should be doing, instead of your own.

She’d taken the job to please someone, clearly not herself, since she was practically being dragged to her computer to wrangle a schedule nobody was happy with. And instead of thanks for the effort, she was getting nothing but complaints, desperate to hand the whole thing off to literally anyone. If nobody stepped up, she’d probably just keep doing it anyway, since quitting would mean disappointing people.

I hoped, for her sake, that she’d quit regardless of whether a replacement ever turned up. I hoped she’d see it as taking a stand for herself, a real learning moment, rather than as letting people down. It would’ve given her the opening to start fresh, and to fill that space with something she actually wanted to be doing, something she’d have a real shot at being happy and good at.

A first step out of the people-pleasing pattern, and a step toward finally hearing her own actual values underneath it.

You’re Divorced? Congratulations!

You’re Divorced? Congratulations!

by | Oct 22, 2014 | Divorce and Separation

You’re Divorced. Congratulations.

What do you actually say when someone tells you they’ve separated? I’ve started thinking “congratulations” might be the right response, but I still haven’t managed to say it out loud. I still default to “I’m sorry.” Probably because I’ve been through it myself, and I know exactly how much it hurts.

What would I have done if someone had congratulated me? A lot of people tried some version of it, in their own way. Friends and family told me I’d be better off, happier, that things would get easier eventually. I didn’t believe a word of it. What did they know? They hadn’t lived it. They were all still tucked safely inside their own marriages, good or bad, and I mentally argued with every reassurance, twisting reality until I’d convinced myself separation really was as soul-destroying as it felt.

The people who actually were divorced looked on with more genuine commiseration. Yes, it’s hard, they’d say, and it takes at least two years, sometimes three, to really get past it. One man told me he considered himself lucky, since at least his job had stayed constant while everything else in his life fell apart around him. All I could think was: great, I’m getting divorced, and I don’t even have that. I’d been a stay-at-home mom before all this started, and now everyone was telling me I’d need to give that up entirely and go find paying work on top of everything else.

I spent well over a year in real misery. A year and two months, if we’re being precise. Then I hit a point where I finally thought: I do not want to keep feeling this way.

The thought that kept looping through my head during that stretch was: I’ve been a good person, I followed all the rules, I did everything I was supposed to, and my life is still a disaster.

Realizing that everything I’d done “right” up to that point had still led me exactly here was what finally pushed me to try something different. I felt like I had nothing left to lose. I was already in so much pain that it was hard to imagine feeling any worse, no matter what I tried next.

Oddly, that thought turned out to be motivating rather than bleak. I effectively got a blank slate. Nothing I did from that point forward could realistically make things feel worse than they already did, which meant I was suddenly free to try things I never would have risked before. There was genuinely nowhere to go from there but up.

Finding my new way forward has been real work, and genuinely hard, but it’s also been hopeful the whole way through. These days I think of my divorce as the actual beginning, the push I needed to build a life designed by me instead of dictated by everyone else’s expectations. So now, when I tell people I’m newly divorced, I remind them: congratulations is the right response.