فصل دوازدهم

CHAPTER 12

HARMONIZE LIFE

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

MAYA ANGELOU

Lunch was about to be served, and I watched hungrily as the waiters passed by with heaping plates of steaming food. As one waiter swiftly skirted around our table, I caught the eye of my friend sitting across from me. I smiled, embarrassed she had caught me stalking the food, but she didn’t smile back. She opened her mouth to say something and quickly closed it back up as if she was afraid the words would fall out of her mouth and onto the table in front of us.

I noticed her eyes well up with tears, and then she let forth a string of words so fast, I almost didn’t catch them, “IhatetotellyoubutIampregnant.” Pregnant?! Really?! I’m not sure which one stung me first, the realization that she was the fifth friend to share the same announcement that month or the bitter understanding that I had become the person everyone wanted to avoid with their good news.

I contorted my face to force a fake smile and told her not to be sorry, that it was cause for celebration. And then, with that stupid smile plastered on my face, I quickly excused myself to go to the bathroom where I cried the ugliest cry you’ve ever seen—complete with hiccups and a runny nose. One woman opened the door to come in, took one look at me, and hightailed it out of there. She was not about to walk in on that hot mess.

I splashed cold water on my face to minimize the damage and headed out to face my friend. Thank goodness for the stack of shoestring fries waiting for me at the table to help me hide my salty cheeks.

I was happy for her—I really was. But I’m going to be honest with you, I also felt sucker punched. How was it possible that everywhere I looked everyone was pregnant? At that moment, I had nine friends at various stages of pregnancy, and I think every celebrity to grace the pages of a magazine was sporting a giant beach ball for a belly. I couldn’t seem to get away from the fact that everyone was pregnant. Everyone but me.

THE WORLD IS NOT AGAINST YOU

It’s hard not to wallow when you think you’re getting cheated. When it seems like everyone else has what you want without even trying—getting married, receiving a promotion at work, or running a thriving business. It can feel like you are the only one in the whole wide world not finding success.

The good news is that it’s not really true. Everyone wasn’t pregnant; it was just my perception. Technically it’s called frequency illusion, which is the phenomenon where an idea or concept you’ve been thinking about suddenly seems to pop up everywhere even though you never noticed it before. You might have experienced this when shopping for a new car. Suddenly that brand of car is next to you at the light and turning in front of you and parked across the street. When it’s a car, it can feel like a funny coincidence, but when it’s something big, like trying to get pregnant, it can feel like the universe is playing a mean joke on you.

Our brain can overlook countless items in our surroundings, but once our brain takes notice of something it considers significant (in my case, pregnant women), it starts to pull those occurrences out of the background noise. Because of our selective attention,1 it feels as if they are appearing again and again in our world. Really, the truth is, those things were there all along; we just didn’t take notice. It’s our mindset kicking in.

We started this book together talking about mindset and here we’ve come full circle. Because that, my friend, is at the heart of productivity—especially in the terms we talk about it. When you work to live with priority and you create an intentional life for yourself, 90 percent of it is the lens you use to view the world. Your brain scans and categorizes all those millions of bits of information it’s inundated with every second. It comes down to choices.

Now I know changing your life circumstances isn’t always possible. Sometimes all you can change is your perception or opinion about the situation. The bottom line is, you can’t control reality, but you can control how you react and respond to it. Tough times and hardships are inevitable in everyone’s lives, but how we view what we’re going through is completely up to us.

Elaina* is one of those women who was simply born to be a mom. When her father died, she willingly placed her own childhood on hold and stepped in to take care of her younger siblings. When it was time to have her own children, Elaina felt she was ready—she was excited to be the perfect mom. She read every book and did her very best to do everything just right.

Her son, Davis, is an extraordinarily bright and creative child. When it came to school, though, he just couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. Won’t apply himself . . . can’t sit still . . . disruptive. . . . At every teacher conference, Elaina heard these words thrown out again and again, each one feeling like a sharp slap across her cheek.

Elaina began to wonder, “Why me? I looked around at all the other moms proudly comparing their success stories on the playground, and I felt inadequate. Why had this happened to me? I did everything I could to be the best mom. Why wasn’t I doing better?” Elaina decided she needed to change the way she felt about parenting. She had always longed to be a mother, and she was tired of feeling like it was a chore. The constant questioning of herself was exhausting, so Elaina chose to give herself some space to readjust her mindset.

She didn’t know what that would look like, but she knew she needed a change. She used her daily commute to allow herself space to think and simply open up her heart to understanding her situation. Morning after morning she got in her car and searched for clarity. Early one day, while sitting at a stoplight, it hit her: her situation wasn’t a punishment. She realized Davis didn’t happen to her; she happened to Davis. She was a gift given to him—he was lucky to have a mom who wasn’t willing to give up on him.

Since coming to this epiphany, Elaina has felt stronger as a parent and has looked at her role as Davis’s advocate in a completely different light. She’s come to realize that it’s not about being the perfect parent—it’s about being the best parent she can be for Davis.

You see, we get caught up in asking if our glass is half full or half empty—we forget that sometimes it’s not even our glass at all. Some of the events and trials and tribulations we experience aren’t about us at all. When we can grasp that, it can change our perception of how life is treating us.

We need to focus on what we can control, including our emotions, desires, judgments, creativity, determination, and, of course, mindsets. This allows us to grow beyond the things we can’t control and change our attitudes toward them instead.

We have to stop getting caught up in the pointless things in life we can’t control—including what others think of us, or what they say when we say no or when we prioritize. It’s easy to get caught up in others’ opinions of us, to mold ourselves to fit their tight constraints of what it means to be “right” even at the expense of ourselves.

Actress Viola Davis knows a thing or two about creating your own mindset when life seems to be against you. Growing up with an abusive alcoholic father, she would wake up some mornings unsure if she would have food to eat, but she didn’t let that keep her down. She shared, “They tell you to develop a thick skin2 so things don’t get to you. What they don’t tell you is that your thick skin will keep everything from getting out, too. Love, intimacy, vulnerability. I don’t want that. Thick skin doesn’t work anymore. I want to be transparent and translucent. For that to work, I won’t own other people’s shortcomings and criticisms. I won’t put what you say about me on my load.” Viola is right. There’s no need to accept the burden of others’ criticisms. When we keep our focus in the sweet spot of what we can control and our priorities, we can live happier. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that standing strong and sticking to your priorities is always easy, but I can promise you it will be worth it. It will take sacrifice—we have to stop trying to do it all.

The girl in the cape isn’t me—and I don’t want her to be. I have no interest in being Superwoman, but there are times where I feel compelled to try. Even worse, I sometimes feel others trying to clip that cape on my shoulders, and I start to feel the weight of it dragging me down. You have probably felt that too.

Ultimately, though, it’s your life, and it’s up to you to choose how you live it.

YOUR FUTURE IS YOURS TO WRITE

When we get caught up in focusing on what we are “supposed” to do, we just keep going through the motions of life rather than doing what we really want to do. We assure ourselves that someday this cycle will stop, that once certain conditions get better, everything will improve.

We tell ourselves these stories:

I need to work weekends until I make partner, then I’ll have time to spend with my family.

I have so much to do. I just don’t have the luxury of going out with my friends.

Someday things will be easier and I’ll get to do the things I really want.

Unfortunately, “someday” is like a mirage on the horizon; each time we get closer, it keeps moving farther and farther away. Truly, without effort on our part, nothing will change and our priorities will continue to be put last.

If we wait until all of our tasks are done to sit down and enjoy what’s most important, that time will never come—there’s always some sort of urgent work to be done. When we don’t take the time to actively choose how we spend our days, each task on our list feels urgent and unavoidable. It feels justifiable to postpone date night with our spouse, miss a movie with friends, or skip the gym (again). We end up putting it off, exhausted at the end of our day and too tired to enjoy the things we, in our heart of hearts, truly enjoy most. That’s not the way we want to live.

Stop borrowing from today to make tomorrow great. Instead, let’s choose to make the most of today, knowing that when we spend our days focusing on priorities, we are investing in our future.

I met Savannah recently on a trip and was instantly struck by how much she embodies this idea of taking time for herself in order to invest in her future. Upon first meeting her and hearing her speak with a true excitement for life, it seemed like she’s got her life all figured out. But like many of us, her path has been filled with stones and rocks.

A competitive gymnast throughout her childhood, Savannah happily grew up spending long days at the gym. Her parents’ divorce when she was fourteen, though, meant she suddenly had to quit the team. Losing this sense of identity caused her to compensate by partying too much. She felt lost.

She knew, though, that there was something out there for her—she just wasn’t sure what it was. On her eighteenth birthday, she bought herself a one-way ticket to the Virgin Islands. She knew no one there and had no idea what she would do when she arrived, but as the wheels of her plane hit the ground, she vowed to stop partying so she could find clarity in her life.

Savannah started with the one thing she knew she loved—being active outdoors. She headed to a water sports shop and offered to work for free in exchange for knowledge. Seven days a week she arrived before the sun rose to rake the beaches and begin her work, and in return she received training on teaching paddleboarding, sailing, and windsurfing. Each day as the sun set, she left work to head to her second job at a restaurant so she could cover her rent.

Three years later she was running her own catamaran charter focused on healthy eating and yoga—passions rediscovered from her former life as a gymnast. She found harmony in her newfound life, but even when a person finds harmony, it isn’t always smooth sailing.

In 2017 hurricanes hit the Caribbean, causing mass destruction. Savannah could have, again, lost her identity, but she looked at this disaster as a new opportunity—a chance to explore. She mused, “While I love the crystal-clear waters of the beaches, it does limit me from seeing the mountains and rivers.” The idea of river guiding had appealed to her for some time, but it had always coincided with her charter season—it was always just out of reach. As she explained, though, “The hurricane opened up a new opportunity, and I thought to myself, This is my time.” Most people would find that a hard choice to make—seeing a hurricane as an opportunity—but that’s what Savannah did.

She chose to head to the mountains of Colorado and, through guiding, discovered “the way a river moves is a very different dance than the ocean.” With her new knowledge, Savannah now plans to drop anchor in exotic ports around the world where she’ll charter her catamaran half the year and then run river expeditions during the other half, exploring different parts of the world in a unique way.

She shared with me, “If I spent all my time in the mountains,3 I would miss diving with sea turtles, but if I only swam the warm waters of the Caribbean, I’d never get to see the sun set on the mountains.” Savannah has taken her passions and made them into one beautiful, harmonious life for herself—one that is no longer out of reach.

Just as Savannah scans the horizon searching for rocks and waves in the water to help her guide her boats, she is now looking forward to her future and navigating herself toward the life she really wants. She is actively making choices to create that future for herself.

You may have noticed in many of the examples I’ve shared that some of the women didn’t know at the start exactly what the future held. They just knew there was something better out there, and they opened themselves up to the possibilities.

This joy-of-missing-out journey will sometimes lead us outside our comfort zones. And that’s a good thing. Our comfort zone is a dangerous place to live long term because as much as we seem to enjoy comfort, we are often happiest when challenged and making progress toward our North Star.

We love our checklists, but this space outside our comfort zone doesn’t always have them—and that makes it hard to feel confident in what we are doing. The growth is difficult and can be filled with doubt. There will be times where the critic inside our heads will make us question everything—maybe even blame us for the disruption we’ve been feeling.

When we begin to intentionally invest our time, energy, and focus on important things today, we end up with a more abundant life and more accomplishments in the future. We feel good about what we’ve gotten done. I use that term invest here very purposefully because that is what we are doing with our most precious commodities. Let’s invest them in things that matter to us.

Remember those 72 hours we discovered back in chapter 10? Those 72 hours we have left after work and sleep have been accounted for? Let’s look at those 72 hours a different way; let’s look at them as money we have to invest. If you had $72 to spend for your week, would you start handing out five-dollar bills to anyone who asked? Or would you budget your money and make sure you took care of the important items like food, rent, and your bills? We think nothing, though, of handing out our time to anyone and everyone who asks. We wouldn’t invest our money on things without some sort of return on investment, and yet we are quick to give away our time.

The return we are looking for with our time is generally stronger relationships, better health, or reaching our goals. We need to spend our time like we do our money, on the things that matter most—our priorities.

I can imagine the critics rolling their eyes and reminding me there is no time to invest—our schedules are already so full! I hear you. Let’s get back to our idea of thinking of time as money, because I think that will help bring this idea home.

Most of us have a limited amount of funds in our bank accounts—just as we have a limited amount of time we can spend. What happens, though, when our car breaks down? Do we just say to ourselves, Oh, well. There’s no money to fix the car, so I guess I can’t go to work? No, we somehow find the money to pay for it because it’s a priority. We tighten our belts a bit, we stop getting our Frappuccino from the coffee shop, we skip the highlights in our hair, we cut back on the sushi dinners. We focus our money on the priority and save in places that aren’t as high on our priority list. Time works exactly the same way. We need to cut out the less important things that are pulling us in a million directions and instead focus on our priorities.

This is why the discovery process I talked about in section 1 is our foundation. It’s so important to know what direction we want to go. That helps us see where we want to invest our time. Productivity is not doing lots of stuff fast. It is purposefully and consistently moving in one direction. The direction we want to go.

Try taking one step in four different directions. Where did you end up? Not very far from where you started. Now take four steps in one direction. Where did you end up this time? You moved ahead, didn’t you? That’s the momentum we need. Newton’s law of inertia states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. You see, productivity = velocity. You just need to get started moving in the one direction you desire—toward your North Star.

DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR BEING YOU

I want to challenge you to make some tough choices. Choose to rethink what it means to be busy, choose how you spend your time, and choose how you treat your priorities. After all, if they are priorities, shouldn’t they be treated as priorities? They should sit front and center when you plan out your day each morning. We can allow others to take control of our calendars and our time with their own priorities and urgent tasks, or we can be in charge.

We have to keep in mind that the joy of missing out is all about harmony—not balance. We use counterbalance so we can lean into our priorities for a time in order to move in the direction we want. I have created what I call Quarterly Crusades. Each quarter I choose a top priority and focus on it. You might be working toward a promotion at work, hitting a personal fitness goal, or actively creating time for a passion project. It doesn’t matter what it is; what matters is that it’s important to you.

Every three months we need to sit down and decide what goals need to be set in order to move us forward in that area where we want to grow. We have to resolve that, for the next ninety days, we are focusing on this area. And then we need to plan. Using our priority list and the five Ps I talked about in chapter 9, we make sure this focused area is the first thing we schedule into our day.

We have to let go of other projects that are potential distractions to our success. In our desire to do everything, we scatter our attention in a thousand directions. We want to focus.

Now don’t get me wrong. Don’t be misguided and think this is permission to neglect all the other areas of your life. That’s not possible, and it’s not healthy. Life will continue to run, but when we have the clarity to know the direction we are moving in, we can prioritize where we spend our time.

Let’s go back to the bike analogy we used to describe counterbalance. When you turn a corner and lean into one side of your bike, do you let go of the handlebars? Do you stop pedaling? No. Everything continues to move, even while you shift your balance. Your hands hold on to the handlebars and your feet continue to push down on the pedals—they move automatically.

You see, this is where those systems we’ve discussed come into play. They allow life to continue moving, but they allow that to happen without you losing your focus. Nobody in the history of the universe ever accomplished great things by trying to do everything.

We find harmony when we counterbalance: we even out heavy workdays with lighter workdays, we fill our weekends with personal time instead of work, and we shift our mindset and remember life is not meant to be endured but enjoyed.

Part of finding this harmony, too, is forgiving yourself for mistakes you’ve made in your life. Maybe you have run your life like a circus and you are ready for it to stop. Maybe you have said yes far too often, or maybe you have spent so much time on other people’s needs that you have forgotten who you are deep inside.

It’s okay. It’s not what you’ve done in the past that matters; it’s what you do moving forward that counts. Failure is what you make of it. Failure is sometimes the road to long-term success.

One of my favorite illustrations of how failure can be transformative lies deep in the sandy ocean beds of Sri Lanka. The floor of the Indian Ocean is scattered with the quiet remains of over two hundred shipwrecks that met tragic fates over the course of thousands of years. Each one could be deemed a failure—a failed journey—but something amazing happened as these ships settled into the deep.

NOBODY IN THE HISTORY OF THE universe EVER ACCOMPLISHED GREAT THINGS BY TRYING TO DO EVERYTHING

These sunken vessels became part of the environment, and an abundance of marine life wrapped around them over time. They transformed from ghostly hulking ships into magnificent coral reefs teeming with life—fish, sponges, clams, squid, mollusks, and eels live and thrive among these lost ships.

There is a sad story behind every single wreck and its unfinished journeys, but from tragedy comes intense beauty. We need to have the same perspective about our own mistakes and failures, our stumbling blocks that have held us back in the past. Each one is an opportunity for growth, and yes, even for beauty.

This transformation to coral reefs did not happen overnight; it took time and patience before new life took hold. Your transition to living a life centered on priority will take time too. Time, patience, and energy are needed to start making the shift.

Know that change will not happen overnight and that sometimes victories are small, but take time to celebrate them and be encouraged that the life you want is out there. Give yourself grace to rediscover what makes you happy and be unapologetically you. Fall back in love with yourself and fill your world with people who support and love you. Spend your time in ways that feel like investments—invest in relationships and activities that fulfill you. Try to let go of what does not align with your priorities and the life you truly want to live.

What I want for you is more than a productive life: I want you to have the beautiful life you deserve. Now it’s up to you to go get it.