My sister and I have this joke about the empress. According to a tarrot reading, my sister needs to rely more on her “inner empress”. What does this mean? Well apparently the emperor card stands for searching out and controlling the world, while the empress waits for the world to come to her.
This actually is in line with a thought process I had myself about being yourself.
Feeling free to be yourself = happiness. Feeling like you cannot be yourself is the root of ALL unhappiness. But how to be yourself is another very difficult story.
One way is a method I like to call, “Letting the empress take the wheel”.
For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
Lots of traveling
Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
Takes a long time
Hard to know what to focus on
Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
Look for a way to make my life easier
Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
Takes time to understand the customer’s process
Hard to formulate what I need
Hard to understand how to design it
Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Clearly articulate what I need
The interfaces
What the style is
The processes
The data structures
The priority
Get help on the UI
Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Get the clarity I need:
Why they are asking the question?
What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
What do they already know or understand?
Pause
Think about my gameplan
Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
Building mockups
Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
Significance: What special signature will be mine?
Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
Boring meetings/trainings
Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
Giving demos and presentations
Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
Significance: Why am I showing this?
Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.
I’ve been struggling with an idea recently, the question of how and when to charge for coaching services and when to propose coaching to someone.
The way most coaches approach this is by simply thinking about every hour they spend with someone as a billable hour. They do a “free” intro or demo sessions. I find this approach problematic for numerous reasons:
I love solving problems and delivering value. The reason why I think coaching is the right career is that I would do this stuff even if it was for free.
I hate thinking of every hour of my time as billable. Does every conversation that I don’t get paid for mean that I’m bleeding money everywhere?
I don’t know how to propose coaching, what will the difference be from talking to them? Won’t they feel like I’m charging money for something that should be free?
I don’t see why I shouldn’t prioritize my friends and help people for free? Why should I prioritize only people who pay me money?
I thought about it a lot and I realized that when I want to pay for a coach is because I want to be able to take it seriously. I don’t want a friend, I want someone who can help take me to the next level (emotionally, career and success-wise).
I realized that I can help as many people as I want to for free. I can prioritize friends and spend time with them without thinking of billable hours. But coaching is different. It isn’t just about brainstorming solutions to problems or being an empathetic ear. It’s about taking professional responsibility for someone’s success. The difference between a friend who hired you as a coach from an ordinary friend is that by hiring you they are asking you to meddle with their life!
There are three questions I can ask to see if they would be a good client:
Should they invest in themselves?
Are they doing something that requires coaching?
Do I feel confident that I will be the best coach for the job?
If the answer to all three is yes, I will push to sell them on coaching. If they are friends, I can tell them I will help them and give them advice for the rest of their life for free, but it wouldn’t be coaching until they invested in it.
The price of coaching is a mix of what would be an investment for the client, what would make ME invest, and what value I would be delivering.
In terms of differences in details:
Much more structure (cadence for meetings, methods, note-taking etc.)
Different mindset (clients’ goals are my goals, not my friend’s goals)
I was struggling really hard on making videos recently and struggling even harder to figure out what I’m doing with my life.
I know this is in large part to the enormous pressure that I put on myself in order to do well and it makes me very angry that my parents brought me up in such a way, a way in which I feel constantly paralyzed with the fear of anything less than perfection.
There are a few things that I found relief with:
MENTALITY 1: The focused mindset
Let everything else fall away but the feeling of what you are aiming at (whether it is to walk, to move, to express) and the sensations within your body. Feel the right time to strike, to act.
MENTALITY 2: The meditative mindset
Let everything fall away, most of all, your identity. Feel the universe around you and wait patiently for something to surface, let all conscious thoughts and solutioning to dissolve like sugar in water. Only sensations remain, and the vastness of space.
MENTALITY 3: The unchained mindset
Give yourself permission to do and think about everything and anything. Accept yourself for everything. Give yourself permission to do anything. Imagine that you’ve already done it and give yourself permission to do it.
In the end of the day, I realized that it’s not about what you do with you life. You can do anything. You can always change your mind. It’s more of a question of what you want to do right now if you can do anything that you want.
There was a big journey I went down in terms of working on myself, becoming more mature and being able to live a free and meaningful life.
I started by thinking that you needed to meet your own needs
Then I thought you needed to be good at asking for your needs
And finally, I thought you needed to process traumas and emotions
But I realized that they are all part of the same things and have different parts to play.
In a way, everything is about not abandoning yourself and taking care of yourself. You surround yourself with people who you can talk about what is on your mind truthfully and emotionally. They help you understand what you need. You are able to then give yourself what you need and walk down further along the path of understanding different parts of yourself that are in pain.
From processing emotions, we can truly love ourselves, and the people around us, and be present in the moment.
There is a sense that being with people who don’t accept us, don’t allow us to feel safe speaking our truth is self abandoment. In a way, even if someone meets some of our needs (for example is attractive enough to make us feel special), if we settle for someone who doesn’t love us or allow us to be ourselves, we are putting ourselves down.
Not allowing ourselves to meet our own needs (for example, asking for validation from others because we refuse to give it to ourselves) is self abandonment.
Refusing to look deeper, and shielding parts of ourselves from the world (for example, keeping a confident outward appearance when we feel anxious) is abandoning parts of ourselves and placing the outside world’s comfort above our own.
I’ve been doing pretty well on the social front of the Sales conference, keeping in touch with myself and keeping my boundaries. But the same problems that plague me at home, plague me here.
Specifically, sleep, or lack thereof. I’ve been exploring the feelings that keep me distracting myself with games, videos, and other things. I’m trying to understand this desire, this hunger for stimulation that I have within myself.
It feels like a hunger, and hunger comes from emptiness. I wonder what I am missing in my life. I feel that it might be blood flow. I want to feel like this amazing warmth and flow to my body where my mind and body is open and stimulated.
Meditation has been a great boon to me, I’ve used it to calm down, to get answers and to reduce the inflammation I feel from lack of sleep.
I’ve also explored other physical avenues such as stretching, warmups and self massage.
My feeling is that self-massage comes first, then, mobility exercises and finally stretching.
Here are some of the videos I did today that were pretty good:
But my journey in this has just begun.
I really feel the need to understand what is the appeal of gaming and watching interesting videos internally. Perhaps that isn’t even the key. Perhaps the key is to give myself more freedom and permission. Perhaps this is a trigger for caging myself in and shaming myself so I’m not fully in touch with myself.
I’ll at least give it a shot. I realize there is a big fear in me that if I let myself do what I want, my life will go off the rails. I am going to face that fear and feel it and see where it leads me.