YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT AS LAZY AS I AM

When it comes to getting up in the morning, are you as lazy as I am?

When I want to start getting up early, the challenge for me is always that I’m used to going to be later in the evening, and then when it’s time to get up, I’m tired and want to sleep in. “I’ll snooze today, and just go to bed earlier tomorrow”.

But going to bed earlier never happens, because that’s not actually the thing that creates the shift. If I want to get up early, I have to get up early and be with feeling tired.

Once that happens, I become reliable to go to bed earlier, because I’m now tired in the evening.

The nature of getting up early is emblematic of most transformation people seek to create in their lives.

One of my oldest, most familiar wounds is the story that people don’t want to come to my party, and they don’t want me to come to theirs.

This wound applies to the literal parties I’m throwing, but also anything I might be doing that would require inviting people to come and join me, and vice versa.

I’ve been working with this wound a lot lately, as I’m attempting to build and grow community, launch a new retreat, and continue to run programs and intensives that require people to travel across the world to spend time with me.

As the story goes, people don’t want me to come and join their pickleball league. People don’t want to come and join the community I’m building. People don’t want to come on the trip I’m planning, and they’re definitely not reaching out to me to see if I want to come to the one they’re planning.

Intellectually, I understand that this is a story that is made up, and isn’t true. For the most part at least.

It has to be true some of the time, because part of the abundance of the world includes that I won’t be some people’s cup of tea.

But this isn’t about intellectual understanding, because intellectual understanding is the booby prize. That kind of understanding is the thing we try to repeat in our minds to hammer home the point that we shouldn’t have to be afraid of what we’re afraid of, only to find that, actually, we’re still afraid.

As I’ve been getting coached on this, reflecting, and taking on practices to notice how it shows up, I can see the perfect pattern that I end up creating for myself.

Because of this belief, I’ve become reliable to find ways of filling my time. I’m really reliable to empower time by myself, and to find hobbies and things to do that entertain me.

Of course, because I’m so reliable to fill up my calendar, it means that when people do invite me to something, I’m either already full-up and don’t have room to say yes, or I’m exhausted from everything I’ve been up to and don’t have the energy to choose in.

And if you do that enough, people are eventually going to stop asking. Sure, they’d love for me to be there, but it’s not really a good feeling to keep getting turned down.

If I keep saying no, it’s reasonable to assume that they may draw the conclusion that I’m actually not interested in their party, and so why bother continuing to ask me?

The cycle repeats.

This is just one of the ways that I create this experience of being outside the party. There are lots of other ways that this pattern plays out, but ultimately they all lead to the same thing: a belief I’m not invited, actions taken from that belief which then create an experience that reinforces the belief.

Breaking this up is harder than distinguishing the pattern.

Breaking it up means doing things like intentionally leaving space open that I might otherwise fill, so that there’s no room to say yes, and when I do that, I might have to be with the feeling of being lonely.

Changing this dynamic requires the same thing as getting up early and feeling tired. I might have to say yes to things when I’m drained or tired, because until I do so, I’m never going to create the space in my life that would allow me to say yes from a place of being refreshed and ready.

Put more simply: If you want to feel energized and refreshed while you do the scary thing, you have to start by doing the scary thing while you feel drained and tired.

We have to start by taking the action, and then backfilling into our lives what we need to be supported in continuing to take that action.