Practicing

One of the most useful reframes I’ve adopted is the concept of practice. It started when I moved to the Bay Area from flatlands: I was intimated by cycling all these hills and frustrated at how slow I was – or as I was saying at the time, how bad I was at it. I don’t remember where I got this reframe, but when I started thinking about each hill as the next opportunity to practice climbing, it somehow took a lot of the judgement out, and let me account for the day-to-day changes (sleep, prior workouts, stress) that impact performance.

So now, when I am overwhelmed by the number of balls in the air, or when a friend or mentee talk about all the different roles and responsibilities they are juggling, I suggest the following idea. We’ll likely continue to juggle as many things as we are currently juggling, plus more, throughout our lives and careers. Each time in slightly different circumstances, situations in our own lives, and pressures, but we have to figure out how to manage the particularities of them.

So today, these weeks ahead, are just another opportunity to practice managing this situation. Practice juggling but also practice judging which balls can drop and identifying your own signs of overload, overwhelm, need for vacation, or burnout. I believe we need to re-learn at every stage/season/phase of our lives and careers.

I find the concept of practice lowers my fear, makes me more willing to give things a shot and fail. Sometimes I refer to this as running my life as an ongoing experiment, figuring out what’s working right now and what’s not, and changing things up until they work better. Sometimes it’s making a plan A with a plan B-D for when plans fail. I expect that I’m probably going to fail in some ways and succeed in others and perhaps I’ll be able to apply both sets of lessons of the future.