One of the first authors I officially coached was a woman who was unproductive because she kept waking up angry. (And I tell this story in WBF, which is starting today, so the beginning of that class always reminds me of this story.)
Because I’m always looking for the actual catalyst for the lack of productivity (instead of making assumptions about why it’s happening), I kept asking her questions. “What happens when you X” or “what happens when you Y” and then we would analyze the results (high Analytical/Strategic, no surprise).
And we tried everything. Everything that had worked for other people. Everything that the productivity gurus suggested. She’d already tried all the systems she could find, and she was absolutely dumbfounded that nothing was working.
But she made a very interesting comment to me that told me there was an answer somewhere. “Not every day.” So she would wake up angry, but not every day. So once we tried everything else, we started parsing through the data about what was different on those days.
The minute detail we got into was astounding. And what we discovered was, when her husband came home early enough at night to close the blinds in their bedroom, she would be more productive the next day.
It turned out, she was having a horribly tense fight with the neighbor behind her over property lines and renovations, and there were lawyers involved. When her husband closed the blinds at night, she would wake up without seeing the neighbors, but when she woke up in the morning, and she could see the neighbor’s house, it triggered a frustration that she didn’t even know she had. In fact, it hadn’t come up in all our conversations, because it stressed her out too much to talk about it, but it made her visibly angry. (I could see the anger when the topic even came up.)
She hadn’t told me about it, by the way, because she had friends shaming her about caring too much about it, so she was trying to compartmentalize the fight. (And that meant, not even bringing it up, in her mind.)
Most days, she could ignore the dispute. But it was a chore for her. And on the days when she could wake up without seeing the neighbors’ house (which, by the way, their houses backed up to each other), she could write in the morning and be just fine.
So we made a deal to just keep the blinds permanently closed and see what happened.
She wrote a book more quickly than she had ever written.
Why do I tell this story? Because too many of us have expectations about what should and shouldn’t matter to us that are primarily based in other peoples’ shaming expectations. (“It shouldn’t matter what other people think of you” and “you should be able to compartmentalize” and “it’s stupid that this bothers you so much,” which were all things she’d heard from her family members in the past. Thankfully, not from her husband, because that would have caused a whole different set of frustrations.)
And this isn’t even touching the shaming we get from the speed we write, or how we process, or whether or not we plot/plan, or what we need from our social circles. (There are so many places these expectations can attack us.)
We believe that we “should” be a way, because someone else told us we should be able to. But we’ve never been able to in the past, so why we expect ourselves to be that way is sort of mind-boggling to me. There’s no evidence to support that we should be able to do this, yet we still expect it.
Sometimes, there’s a skill set we don’t have (we’ve been talking a lot about skill chain dependencies around here for the last six or seven months, so… what’s the skill that’s missing in your dependent chain). And sometimes, the acquisition of that skill will help.
But sometimes, we need to accept that people’s emotions can impact us. Or that how people feel matters. Or that we’ll get distracted if we don’t manage our attention. Or that it doesn’t matter if we’re distracted or not. Or that we can go on social media in the morning and not be impacted. Or that we can’t. Or that we need to think in order to be productive. Or that we play video games to distract our brains so we can plot.
Whatever it is that’s knocking around, “should”ing on you, just question it for a second. What if they’re wrong? What if you are the way you are, and it’s good that you are that way?
I know this will be a suspension of reality for some of us. Just try it, though. Maybe it’s not a bad thing at all. Maybe it’s just different…
Becca