Growing pains and growth spurts
(of the emotional kind)
Quick note before the main post…..Come join me from the 3rd June on my next Happier Habits Adventure where for 4 weeks I’ll help you manage your emotional weather regardless of the actually weather! Details below.
I had a scary week.
Scary in that there were just too many balls for me to juggle.
Scary in that I was scared of some of the balls and I was scared they were going to fall and crush me.
Scary as I had a ball that was painful to catch but I kept catching it.
You know, the one you have that keeps you awake at night?
The one that wakes you up at night?
The one that follows you around all day?
During the last couple of decades of my midlife I’ve had a few of those painful balls that I just kept in the air, kept catching even though they were painful. Like you, I’m sure.
Worries about my divorce (that was a beach-ball sized ball.)
Worries about my mum dying. Then worries about her not dying. Then the grief when she did die.
Worries about my dad.
Worries about my teenagers (oh so, so, so many worries about my teenage girls.)
Worries about my weight, my thinning skin and thickening waist, my (lack of) love life, the date tomorrow, the state of my house, the state of my bank balance, the state of my menopausal belly.
Worries about how to build a business when all I wanted to do was coach and write.
The worries weaved through my days and nights alongside the happiness and achievements, the thrills and the contented corners of life. They do though, don’t they?
Worries weave through our lives like a thread that adds a hue to the everyday fabric of life, but then every so often one gets pulled and unravels the structure and we have to learn to re-weave. I don’t suppose I’m different to you.
Many of those are the big umbrella worries. Then of course there are the everyday ones; the what to wear for this important talk tomorrow; what to say at this important talk tomorrow; how to be in three places at once which I’m meant to think is normal but it can’t be because that is madness, yet here I am, living in the modern mayhem of juggling single parenting, parent-care, running a business and stretched beyond one hormonally-challenged person’s capacity; and the one that lurks in your stomach and brain for years on end - what to make for the fucking dinner.
And it’s easy to get caught up in the little worries, that we neglect the big umbrella ones.
That happened to me recently. I allowed the little ones to swarm like bees around a BBQ salad, so that I was so busy swatting I didn’t just remove the tomato.
I never intended to be a ‘business person’ but slowly realised I had to become one to do the thing I loved and make a living - coaching, speaking and writing. I can’t do them in splendid isolation; they had to come with awful things like budgets, tax, marketing plans and the worst of all business burdens - selling. Even writing that word makes me feel unwell. So recently, I got so caught up in the endless small fears of running a business, I got distracted from my overarching mission and ended up in perpetual fire-fighting mode.
Which is funny since I’m a coach and should know better.
I often ask my clients to set aside thinking about what they want their life to look like, and think instead about what they want their lives to feel like. I help them gain perspective; to either pull back to see the bigger picture and from seeing the whole map, plot a better course; or zone in on the one small problem that is disproportionately wrecking their head so much it’s overwhelming everything else.
Well, I got myself into such a state, I forgot to ask myself the same question.
But a conversation with another coach woke me up. I wasn’t asking myself the right questions. Of course I wasn’t! When we are spiralling in worry, churning the same queasy queries over and over and over again in our mind, it’s usually because we’re asking the wrong worry questions. See a shift, get perspective, change your thinking, and suddenly different answers appear.
(That’s why I find coaching so exciting and thrilling. I love watching someone start the conversation feeling they are so stuck they won’t ever find the answer, only to sit back and realise there are many ways to find the answer and that exploration is the adventure.)
It’s the crux of psychology. It’s rarely what is happening that hurts / holds us back / sends us into a state of fear. It’s what we think about what is happening that hurts / holds us back / sends us into a state of fear.
So thankfully when I was jolted back to my own knowledge, when I asked myself what I wanted my life to feel like, rather than ask how do I make this business work, it changed. I want less fear, more agency. I want to feel there is a structure that creates more ease (not necessarily is easy but has an ease as opposed to a constant jittery edge to it).
As soon as I did that, my whole thinking changed. Rather than worrying about the small tasks that keep floundering me, I knew I simply needed to ask for help, get the support I need and keep going with a renewed sense of ownership.
Then I read a great note on Substack (and I’m gutted I can’t find it now) about ‘toxic self-reliance’ - a term I’d never heard of before which is strange since it pretty much sums up one of my self-sabotaging tendencies.
I would normally use words like independent and resilient to describe myself (and what often hides my reluctance to face certain fears and show my vulnerability) but suddenly that term just made all the pieces fall into place.
I thought I’d learnt to be vulnerable. When my life fell apart and I had to rebuild, and I had to step out of my ‘independent’ comfort-zone and learn to ask for support, it was one of the hardest, and best, things I’ve ever done for myself. I did it that once, or possibly twice, in grand scale and it began a greater tendency to ask, but I forgot the vulnerable bit again.
So, here I was again, trembling (literally from fear) under the pressure of toxic self-reliance and I realised in that conversation, and reading that term, that I needed to be very vulnerable again.
I thought I’d done so much growing, experienced so much growing pains in the last decade, I was full height. But of course, this glorious life laughs in our silly little know-it-all faces and makes us grow (or die) again and again and again. And what I know is that the growing pains are real but the view from the height is better so grow on I will.
Shame shields solutions, and as long as I was ashamed of my weakness (a lack of knowledge around sales) I couldn’t fix my thinking.
And here’s the beautiful thing. The shame was all mine. I thought I should know something or be able to do something better than I did. Turns out, why would I? I’d never trained in it.
The moment I became vulnerable and started saying it out loud, the help arrived; not just from one person but multiple people. From podcasts, from Substack posts, from other peoples stories. Once I admitted my situation, others admitted theirs and I just started asking different questions.
In a Mel Robbins podcast recently, she said “Tension calls the next adventure” .… and so here I am, packing my rucksack for this next climb. And that feels so much better - a hard climb it might be - that curled in a foetal position in an abyss.
Learning to let help in means opening the walls you have constructed, and yes the damn bursts but also a lot of waste runs out, those wasteful thoughts. Until your mind runs clear.
To let go of the invincible ego is always a growth spurt but oh there is so much joy when you do. So I need to learn more about sales? OK, I can handle that. Better still, could I just bring someone else in to do it? You mean I don’t have to do it all myself??
No, said the coach I asked.
No, said the businesswoman friend I asked.
No, said the business mentor I asked.
Oh, fancy that. And I grew a little taller.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
When your thinking is driving you insane, change the thinking. Get vulnerable. Ask for help, advice, perspective. Weave a new thread into your fabric of life.
Come join me for my next fun and practical Happier Habits Adventure starting in the 3rd June. Spread over 4 weeks, it will be packed full of life-enhancing habits to help you manage your emotional weather, regardless of the actual weather! The tools I share will be life-long habits you can build easily into your everyday life… going deep enough to give you real practical, powerful tools to run your life rather than feel run down by it, but easy and light enough to fit around your life while you get on with the day job of being you, in all the roles and responsibilities that entails.
We’ll be covering things like
🌟 life and health audits,
🌟 habit hacking,
🌟 goal setting (not in a whip-led way, but based on redefining what you want in various areas of your life).
🌟 I’ll be explaining the three superpowers of midlife,
🌟 and most of all we’ll be looking at how you build life-long habits and practises for self-connection.
All the details are here.
I’d love to know how you think about getting unstuck, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
And please take a moment to like and share if you enjoyed it!
If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can do to have more good days, you can book a one hour 1:1 Discovery Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here.
Paid subscribers get a 10% discount - just email me at alana@alanakirk.com