My Deep Gladness Meeting the World's Need

Where does your deep gladness meet the world's need? What is your native way of being in the world, and where does that meet a need in the world?

This is a post I've struggled with for a long time. I love Parker Palmer's work, especially Let Your Life Speak - but this central concept of the book is a struggle for me to answer. What is my native way of being in the world? How does somebody even answer that question? 

Am I the only one who doesn't know how to identify my native ways of showing up? 

I pause and I consider - when I am the me-est me, what does it look like? I'm attuned yet action-oriented. I show up as a disambiguator and a clarifier. I'm a helper, an encourager, and an empowerer. And I deeply believe the world needs these things. 

This deep gladness, this way of being fully myself, manifests in my transition into coaching and counseling. I want to help people reconcile their story, understand their strengths, take the next step, and own their story. Is this the "deep gladness" Palmer talks about? I don't know. But I do know that it's deep me-ness. 

What does deep you-ness look like? 

Burnout Part 7: Persistence

"And still she persisted." It's so much more than a quotable, meme-able political moment - it's also a truth for many people and for most women. I feel this deeply. When things get tough, what do I do? I try harder! There's beauty to this persistence, and I value my own doggedness. I also can look back in my life and see times that letting go would have been much wiser and healthier for me. 

My challenge to you is to admit, in one small corner of your heart, that unending persistence isn't always the road to success. 

But "no!" our hearts scream back! If we let go, what are we? We're failures! We're quitters! We can't do that! 

Those feelings are real. Many of us value grit and persistence so much that we see letting go of a goal as equivalent to weakness or failure. So, if we get frustrated or if more obstacles arise, we persist even harder. As Emily Nagowski asks in her book Burnout, when we feel like our two choices are "frustrated rage and helpless despair," maybe there's a third option. Maybe there's a quiet voice within us suggesting that we've done all we can and it's time to move on. 

If you need a little help determining whether it's time to persist or release a particular goal, you can try evaluating your options through a quick exercise. Take four quadrants of a piece of paper and list, both for the short and long term, some:

• benefits of continuing
• beneifts of stopping
• costs of continuing 
• costs of stopping

It's not failure to consider where in your life letting go could be success. That's wisdom, and that's burnout prevention. 

I'm a persister - I'm good at holding on and bad at letting go. And I recognize that there are areas in my life that have left me exhausted and depleted. Sometimes holding on is beautiful. Sometimes it is foolish and a waste of energy and passion you could invest in so many other places.

Where do you need to consider letting go?

Burnout Part 6: Dealing with Stressors

Last week we talked about dealing with stress - how do we help our bodies discharge the energy and anxiety we're holding internally? Now, let's continue to follow Emily Nagowski's Burnout advice and figure out how to manage our stressors better. 

Stressors can be categorized into two main groups: those we can control and those we can't. 

The way to manage stressors we can control is planful problem-solving. As professionals, we're generally pretty good at planful problem solving - identifying the goal and creating a plan to fulfill that need, and the stressor is diffused. Now, we may still need to deal with residual stress in our bodies, but at least the stressor is addressed. 

The harder stressors to manage are those we can't control or abstract, intangible, long-term goals. At the end of the day, these end up feeling the same to us: they're too complex, uncontrollable, or far away for us to get our hands around. 

We have three basic tools to deal with these stressors:

1. Positive reappraisal - this is the process of finding value in the journey. The key here is that we're not trying to silver-lining the challenge. We are trying to find ways that dealing with all of the stress actually feels worth it. An example here could be, "there is no way I'm going to find my 1 hour commute motivating or worth it, but I can enjoy the time to decompress and listen to a podcast or call a friend."
2. Change expectancy - that means redefine winning in this case. This is appropriate for goals that are too squirrely or long-term to really feel motivated by "finishing." So, instead, you get to find an incremental, specific, concrete outcome that is personally motivating and rewarding to you. Perhaps completing the year-long goal feels way to far away to be rewarding, but a goal to come away from our next planning meeting with achievable goals for the next two weeks feels more controllable and tractable.  Great, that's your new definition of winning!
3. Redefine failing - for stressors that are super challenging and perhaps unwinnable, how can you redefine failing to identifying inadvertent benefits along the way? There's more to success than just winning. Perhaps as you job search, you've found a bunch of places that don't feel like good fits and you're feeling defeated. But perhaps redefining those "failed" opportunities as chances to learn about the industry and/or identify what you *don't* want in your new company feels motivating to you. This is a way to quiet those stressors that are nagging at you so loudly. 

Abstract and uncontrollable stressors are hard work to find your way through, yet it's so worth it. These can be some of the biggest drags on our lives and our mental health. Through positive reappraisal, changing expectancy, and redefining failing we can satisfy our goal-seeking brains and find relief from the burnout of unsolvable stressors.