My commitment to myself
I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I've got to do or who I'm supposed to be/I don't want to be anything other than me. - Gavin DeGraw (Image by TuendeBede)
I try to build my plan for each day based on a realistic expectation for what I’m going to accomplish.
Despite my good intentions, though, there are a lot of days when I have to, as David Allen calls it, “renegotiate my commitment” to myself. I have to accept that there are a bunch of tasks I’m not going to get done and shunt them all over to the next day or the next week.
Sometimes, I’m disappointed in myself when I do less than what I had planned. But increasingly, I’m seeing it as a sign that I am developing more self-compassion and, strangely, self-confidence. I have less to prove. I’m okay just being me, clocking out and moving on to the next thing—which has turned out not to be tackling the hardest item on my to-do list at 3 PM on a Friday. What I’ve done already is enough. It has to be.
I had thought I was going to learn Spanish prior to an upcoming trip to Mexico. But like Aldous Snow in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was going to do that, but then “I just carried on living my life.” Maybe it was laziness and disorganization, but that’s not really fair—I was doing other things. This wasn’t the time to learn Spanish. It turned out to be the time for cooking complicated recipes, hiking, and reading fiction. That’s allowed.
A friend mentioned that comfort is really important to her. She was suggesting that this desire for comfort slows down her growth and causes her to resist uncomfortable things. But this friend is actually one of the most growth-oriented people I know, constantly trying new things. I believe that she craves comfort because she spends a lot of time challenging herself and needs to recharge. It’s perfectly reasonable for her to curl up with a doggie or two at the end of the day and watch some Schmigadoon.
When you run your own business or have a lot of choices about how you want to organize your time, getting things done can be addictive. To illustrate this point: I am writing this while riding on a city bus on a Friday evening, writing Monday’s blog post. There’s an illusion that you can get ahead, to reach a moment when all the work has been done and there’s nothing to worry about.
That golden moment of freedom never comes, of course; if you’re used to filling your time and challenging yourself to reach new heights, you’ll just keep doing that. If we want to seek peace and release ourselves from obligations, we might have to make a conscious choice and deliberately change our patterns of thought and action.
Just like changing any habit, it’s tough to remap our approach to achievement. But we can leverage the power of positive reinforcement to make it happen. We’ve got to look at the benefit we’re getting from the way we do it now, even if it’s kind of pathetic. Then, we can choose a new way of doing things and a new way of rewarding ourselves.
It was nice to think about knitting an entire tiny sweater for an upcoming baby shower. It would have been intense and enlivening to compress the entire project into just a few days; it would have been satisfying to hear the oohs and ahhs of delight from the sweater recipient and her friends. But there are two months until the baby comes, and the baby will have plenty of clothes besides. I don’t need to be the hero. I don’t need to burn the midnight oil. The only person who would really care if I were to get this project done would be me. Consciously and with no regrets, I dropped the idea and felt the sweet relief of the kid who’s just found out that school was canceled due to snow.
I still push myself when it matters, but the truth is that I can only really push myself on something when I’m not pushing myself on everything. I’ll save my energy for when it counts and enjoy the space that creates in my life.
In the end, my commitment to myself is toward joy and growth. These days, there’s just as much growth that comes as a result of resting and scaling back as from striving and pushing forward. I’m getting it.
