Getting Unstuck

A few weeks ago, my alarm went off at 5 am as per usual, and I rolled over and turned it off, as I had for more days in a row than I was willing to admit. I buried my head in my pillow and refused to acknowledge the day before me - the meetings, the laundry, the emails, the dishes, the tough employee conversations, the closets that threatened avalanche at every opening, the looming budget presentations....all of it. I knew that some yoga would make me feel better and equip me for my day, but instead, I opted for my phone and the social scroll that made me angry, sad, jealous, and a whole host of other feelings.

I was not living my best life. Not being my best self. But I couldn't shake it. I told girlfriends and my husband all the reasons I couldn't make a shift: the pain in my leg and my hip from my spring "break" (the broken ankle on the shores of San Diego), no time, busy camp schedules, high stress at work, on and on and on.

I was, in short, stuck. STUCK. That morning a few weeks ago, after a particularly soul-crushing social scroll in the dark as my husband snored softly and slept soundly, I had an epiphany. I needed to treat myself like a client. If someone came to me, telling me all the feelings and excuses and yearnings for it to be different but not feeling like they had any idea or self-discipline to do what they needed to do to make it so, what would I tell them?

Find a little space

It's hard to know, when you're stuck, whether you should stop something(s) or start other things or throw away everything and start over or where to even start, which is why rolling over in bed and putting your head under your pillow is often the safest choice. The thing is, you don't have to figure out everything right then and there, you only have to decide to take one small action today that brings you closer to what you want, almost to prove to yourself and your lizard brain that you can do it. For me, that morning, in that predawn scroll, someone had shared a free 21-day meditation series from the Chopra Center. On impulse, I subscribed and only afterward realized that I HATE to meditate. But for some reason, I decided that I would commit 10 minutes every day to laying down in the dark and listening to the guided meditation, for at least a few weeks. I decided all of this in a single moment and almost didn't realize what I had done until the email reminder appeared for me the following morning.

Take one step, and then don't do anything else for a while.

I "suffered" through that meditation for a whole week before I knew what the next step was. It occurred to me (during a meditation) that I couldn't calm my brain to focus on the meditation because I was holding on to all my to-do lists in my head. I had to-do lists of to-do lists. I have long been a devotee of David Allen's Getting Things Done method of organization, and realized I had fallen WAY off the wagon here. So the following weekend, I did a collection of all the tasks and ideas and problems and slips of paper and files and notebooks that were holding my ideas and hopes and dreams and questions about my future. And I put them all together.

But not into one big list that would only depress me further. I separated items that I really had to handle immediately in order to clear my brain and give me space to figure out the bigger life questions. There was a NOW, LATER, and SOMEDAY list, and I was ruthless about how I categorized things. Was it really a NOW item, or was it something I could put in that list that would be a convenient excuse not to get to the bigger, harder items on the LATER or SOMEDAY list? Those closets? Turns out, they were not that important. I made a deal that if they went on the LATER list I was mentally ensuring that they would not be forgotten, but they weren't critical in the grand scheme of my life right now.

Don't forget about the inputs

When I get stuck and finally get motivated to get out of it, I can get too focused on the doing part - getting busy on scheduling people to talk to, taking care of tasks in order to cross them off the list, or focusing on the getting part of getting organized. I rarely make space to take in information or ideas that might help me fertilize and nurture the bigger, harrier questions or ideas bouncing around in my head.

I managed to get through all twenty-one days of that meditation, missing only one because we were camping and I was out of range to download a meditation that day (which was totally a great excuse, if you ask me - I couldn't meditate with my earbuds because I was out in nature with my family!) And when it ended, I realized I was forming a habit of getting up when my alarm went off, not to work or exercise or other such unpleasantness.....it was to just lay in the dark and focus on my brain a little bit. So I made a slight change and decided to grab a book and go out into the living room, turn on a light, and read for 20 minutes. The book I chose was a motivational/inspirational read....one which I usually buy, leave on my nightstand and then self-flagellate for not reading and choosing to binge old episodes of Friends on Netflix instead.

A month later, I decided to start to leave for work as early as family life would allow, and to go to a coffee shop near work so that I could do even more reading and writing and thinking, and starting to work through some of those LATER and SOMEDAY items on my list that required I have some time and space to figure out.

Acknowledge your progress

If you're paying attention, you'll realize I started this forward momentum by deciding I could trade in 10 minutes of my daily dose of predawn social media stupidity for 10 minutes of listening to someone speak calmly and rationally in my ears while I was still warm in my bed. I now have been rewarded by this trade-in and have further invested in giving myself 20, 30, 40 minutes a day; granted, not always in my pajamas, and not always in a row, but still. It's something.

When I wake up still tired or regretting eating too much at dinner too late or the second glass of wine from the night before, I remember that I actually will still feel better if I at least get up to read, have some water, and think about what kind of day I want to have, and also to goad my lizard brain into not f'ing up my streak of having done this every other morning this week/month.

And then I get up. Not because it's the first thing on a list of a million I have to do today, but because it's the next right step for me to take right now. And that's enough for me, for now.