At the beginning of this quarter, one of my ABC Model goals was to write no less than three and no more than five posts per week (one of the tactics from Effortless that I wrote about in Book Brew 43). While I have written a few posts so far this quarter, they haven’t been within the range I have set for myself (closer to about one per week). Part of it was because, even though we chose to scale back on photography this year, October was still a busy month for photography sessions. Part of it was because I was still mulling over the information I read and working through synthesizing it all. And part of it (sounds like ManBearPig here) was, if I’m being honest with myself, just being overwhelmed with the anxiety of the upcoming election and allowing that to cloud my focus.
So today, I made the conscious decision to sit down and review all of the various notes I have left myself, emails I have been saving, newsletters I have set aside, and make sense of it all. What I found was quite interesting, as I wasn’t expecting to find any common thread across any of it since all of the pieces have been collected over the past three weeks or so. Yet, I found a thread here that linked with a thread there, and a chain started to form. I’ll do my best to weave it together into something coherent.
The first thing I came across today when I sat down at my computer was Seth Godin’s newsletter, and his blog post that stood out was titled “Choose Your Fuel Wisely.” In his post, he says, “Choosing to care about what other people care about surrenders your agency. You’ll find that success feels hollow, because it’s their success, not yours.”
That hit on so many levels for me. One is a thought that has been on a loop in my head since waking up to the election results the other day - “I will not give up the power of my inner peace to someone else.” Basically, I am not willing to surrender my agency.
It also rang a note of a similar tone to a chapter I just finished in Nudge titled “Following the Herd.” In it, the authors point out a few things:
The takeaway? Don’t be a lemming (no offense to the lemmings or the great game), choose to think for yourself, keep control of your agency, and don’t conform.
To say that I have had some of both recently is an understatement. When I started reading Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture I signed up for the author’s newsletter, which I will admit I either don’t read or just glance through before deleting. However, the one sent at the beginning of this month caught my attention and I held on to it to read later.
In it, Bush talks about how anxiety is a state of arousal and to combat it we should embrace and welcome it rather than fight it because fighting it only makes things worse, which allows us to sit with the feelings to observe and understand them, realize that the anxiety is not actually dangerous.
There is a lot in there I have learned over the years from studying Stoicism and Buddhism, but as I believe I have mentioned before, sometimes it takes hearing the same thing 100 or even 1000 times for the messages to really sink in.
To solidify this message even further, I read the following quote from Tony Robbins right after, “The world needs people who refuse to live in fear, who refuse to be divided, and who choose to think critically.”
Two things I read this morning talked about choosing who you surround yourself with can have a drastic effect on your life. In Nudge, they provide numerous examples of how the people around you can influence/nudge your behavior in unconscious ways. For example, if your group of friends is overweight/obese, you have a higher likelihood of also being overweight/obese. In his newsletter, Dan Kennedy says that the key to success is to surround yourself with the right people - people who think big, who act boldly, who aspire to the same level of success.
All of this also ties in nicely with Godin’s post on choosing your fuel wisely. In Book Brew 16, I talk about how we are what we consume. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t heed Tony Robbins’ advice of standing guard at the door of my mind over the past few weeks, and permitted the consumption of the spoiled food of social media; which ultimately led to the anxiety discussed in the string above (see how this is all weaving together?).
I have to label this one in the plural because this shit has been everywhere, and I just have been ignoring the signs.
I even have the following two messages (among many others) on my desktop background:
So how did I lose focus, allow the wrong group to influence me, leading me towards fear and anxiety, and allowing others access to my inner peace? The best I can come up with is I’m human. I’m fallible. And once you start to pull on one string, many others start to unravel with it.
The question now becomes, where do I go from here? Well, first thing is I’m going to weave this thing back together (well, more likely crochet since I know how to crochet, and I don’t really know how to weave, but that’s getting outside the point). There are a few methods I will use to do this, two of which I’ll share here.
Ultimately, it comes down to pulling back my beams and focusing on what is most important. I realize this was a super long and very personal post, but I hope that the information contained in it may be helpful to someone else. In this crazy, stressful, overly content-saturated world, we each would do well to stand guard at the door of our minds.