Michele Woodward

Powerful Coaching. Powerful Results.

how to be happier

It’s a Time Warp

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Time has taken on a weird, bendy quality in these pandemic days. Quick quiz:  Without checking any available resource – do you know what day it is?

‘Nuff said.

People tell me the lines between work time and non-work time (and school time and family time and every other kind of time) have blurred and bled into one another in a crazy grid of insanity.

We’ve never been busier even though we have no commute.

We’re swamped although we don’t leave our house.

We’re burned out while all we’ve got is time.

It’s a time warp.

The other day a client told me that she’d spent eight and a half hours in back-to-back Zoom calls. When she finally lifted her head from her computer screen, her family had made dinner. She ate, then promptly fell asleep on the couch. Where she stayed until she woke up the next morning and got ready for her 8am Zoom call.

A friend shared that since she’s monitoring her children’s studies during the day, she works well into the evening. “I’m pulling more hours than ever, mostly because I feel so guilty about parenting during the work day,” she said.

Let me lay out a few facts for you, just as a reminder:

  1. We are in a global pandemic;
  2. As I write this, it’s only getting worse;
  3. We’re in an economic downturn;
  4. Which, as I write this, is only getting worse

It seems to me that we can all use with finding a way to manage our time, our selves, our stuff better. Fortunately, I know exactly how to do it.

Set some boundaries.

No doubt, you’ve heard those three words strung together before, said by me or by a million other well-meaning folks. “Set some boundaries, set some boundaries, set some boundaries” – like a droning mantra.

Sets your teeth on edge, am I right?

I know, I know: You haven’t done it because boundaries feel so harsh and self-centered.

And they might very well require you to say no.

Which feels very icky.

Because you’re a person who says “yes!” Happily, with an exclamation point or two.

Boundaries, you fear, may make someone so angry that they will never, ever, ever speak to you again.

To which, I say: Maybe that’s a good thing in a pandemic. One less person in your bubble. #Justsayin

Boundaries work because they allow you to know where your edges are. So, let’s think about one that’s easy to set and could help you a ton. Ready?

Your boundary is simply saying, “That’s it. I’m done with work for today.” And then push back from wherever you’re working in your home to do something else.

That’s all you have to do.

You can say this at any time of the day you want to say it. Personally, if I get an 7:15am start with my first client of the day, I’m pushing back from the desk at 4pm.

Which means that from 4pm on, it’s Michele Time.

I read books, I take walks, I exercise, I chit chat on the phone with friends and family, I cook, I watch TV, I listen to music, I eat.

I store up my energy for the next day.

Now some of you dear readers are saying, “Fine for you. But I have a JOB and other people have access to my schedule and put things on my calendar and I’m getting paid more than my dad ever got paid and there’s a shaky economy and I can’t lose this job so I need to hustle and never say no and deliver, deliver, deliver.”

All I can say is that coffee is probably not helping you.

I also can say that I have a JOB and people have access to my calendar and put themselves on it and I’m also getting paid more than my dad ever got paid and all the rest.

I still set boundaries.

When you believe that you cannot set boundaries due to external pressures, you are giving every bit of your power to those external forces.

It’s OK to hustle. I am all about the hustle. Just do the right kind of hustle.

The kind that fills up your tank, not the kind that depletes it.

And hustling within boundaries you set for yourself fills up your tank.

Start small by deciding when your workday is over and push back from your desk, knowing that you’ve hustled enough for today given everything you’re experiencing and enduring.

Give yourself and everyone else around you a break by saying, “That’s it. I’m done for today”, and go about your life.

This pandemic will end one day.  It will all become a misty watercolor memory and no one will remember that on a certain Monday in October you pulled a 15 hour day.

But you’ll always remember the toasty crunchy feel of the burnout you experienced because you didn’t set a simple boundary. That knowing will stay with you forever.

#justsayin #onemoretime #setaboundary

 

A Woman’s Journey To Heroism

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img_5799Books, movies, poems, songs and numerous stand-up acts have been based on Joseph Campbell’s remarkable work on The Hero’s Journey. And rightly so. Campbell’s intensive study of the hero lore of many cultures uncovered a similar theme – a monomyth – recurring regardless of time and place.

It’s brilliant.

And it’s also only about dudes.

In the monomyth uncovered by Campbell, women feature exactly twice: The Hero meets a Goddess who inspires him, and then he meets a Temptress who, well, tempts him. The rest of the time, he’s a guy on a quest sometimes accompanied by other guys.

I had taken a stab at examining The Heroine’s Journey in a blog post I wrote back in 2014 – it was mostly about how we have a new female hero showing up in today’s literature and film, embodied by the character of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games trilogy.

To really dig into the topic on a larger level, though, I had to do some thinking. I took out my journal and started writing to understand the similarities and the differences between a classic man’s experience and the hero’s journey of women I’ve know and read about.

I wondered where Campbell’s ideas intersected with what I’ve observed over my lifetime. The answer?

Not very often.

I had to refill the ink in my pen more than one time to get to the heart of the matter. And here’s what I think about a women’s hero’s journey. It starts like this: A woman is going along her merry way, doing whatever she’s doing. She might be stressed, she might not be. She might be rich, poor, old, young, whatever.

She’s living the life she’s living and then all of a sudden –

A crisis erupts. The floodwaters rise, the cow runs off, the husband runs off, the tornado’s a-coming, the rent needs to be paid, the boss is inappropriate, the nuclear reactor is leaking. Whatever it may look like, something bad happens.

And the first thing she does is try to fix the crisis. She mends and tends. She looks for solutions.

But there comes a time when she’s aware she can’t fix it – there’s no way it can be fixed at all – and has a moment of deep recognition that the only thing she can change is her idea about who she is and what she’s capable of doing.

Her identity shatters. Who she thought she was, and how she thought the world was – it’s all gone.

In the depths of her soul, she finally asks who she wants to be.

She embarks on a period of trial and error to find this new self.

In the course of her quest, she forms a tribe. These are women, men, children, animals who support her as she figures out who she really is.

She has experiences. She’s growing more and more conscious. She learns.

One day she has fresh awareness: She feels like herself. A new self.

A new crisis comes up, and she handles this one very differently. This new crisis allows her to see just how strong she is.

She has created a new life.

And the people in her tribe are safe. She can live happily and contentedly, thoroughly aware of her strength and resilience.

Women – does this in any way resonate? Clarify things for you? Give you hope that there is a path through any difficulty?

Now to the men who are reading these words – why does this matter for you? If you love a woman, or are father to a girl, and you want to be a part of her tribe, recognize that her journey toward a heroic life may be significantly different from the male hero’s journey you’ve been saturated in since birth. This may be why sometimes you don’t understand why the women in your life don’t seem to value what you value, or organize their lives the way you organize yours.

Because a man’s journey – according to Campbell – is an external adventure, full of battles where you can prove yourself.

And a woman’s journey – according to me – is an internal adventure, full of the kinds of moments which allow a woman rise up and know herself deeply.

Neither is right. Neither is wrong.

We prosper as human beings, though, when we respect and support the necessary paths each of us must walk to live our own heroic lives.