Shelagh Meagher's Blog, page 9

Break it Down for Success

Adventures, especially complicated ones, can look like big hairy gorillas when we consider them as a whole. Just the thought of trying to tackle the thing is exhausting. We know the gorilla will win the match. It’s too big, it has too many limbs, it’s slippery, it’s smelly, and it’s fierce.

However, when we break the adventure down into its component pieces, each one on its own feels much more doable. They start to look like small monkeys. We can handle those.

Keep on swimming…

Successful adventurers tend to ask themselves: Which steps can I already do? Are there any I could start on right away? Every step they take to put their adventure into action gives them confidence for the steps that are harder. And the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other creates positive, forward momentum that helps carry them through the hiccups along the way.

Like Dory said so wisely in Finding Nemo: keep on swimming, keep on swimming - and you’ll find your adventure getting closer every day.

Regret Sucks

“Regret for things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Sydney J. Harris

While it’s a no-brainer that positive emotions can be harnessed to useful ends, it’s not quite as obvious that fear can also be our friend. A lot of women tell me that they did something scary or different because they felt the bigger risk lay in not doing it. They were more afraid of what they’d miss and the regret they’d feel if they didn’t get their gumption up and make their adventure happen.

Make a better future than this.

Opportunities do fly away if they aren’t seized. They can be fiendishly hard to recapture. Are you going to let yours get away?

If you’re feeling scaredy-cat about an opportunity, try a little forward projection. Ten years from now, or twenty, or thirty, or when you’re on your deathbed, how are you going to feel about NOT having done this thing? Projecting the status quo into the endless future can present a pretty scary picture.

Now try imagining the same you, musing about the wonderful thing you did when you got over your fear, reluctance, feelings of I-don’t-deserve-this, or whatever else is holding you back. That scene feels WAY better, doesn’t it? It’s filled with joy and pride and a sense of how expanded the adventure made you.

Regret sucks. Don’t let it get you.

Are YOU on Your Priority List?

Further to Time-Gaining Training, another trick Gretchen offers is the importance of scheduling adventure planning, just as you would any other priority in your day. She uses this tactic to make time for happiness activities, but it works for adventures just as well. And they make you happy, too!

There’s got to be more to life than this…

Dreaming of an adventure in Patagonia? Make sure you schedule even 10 minutes a day to researching and organizing it. Dying to learn the trumpet? Schedule that weekly lesson if you want it to happen. (And maybe start saving for a sound-proof room). Determined to try stand-up comedy? Book that low-risk improv class.

Scheduling is a dreaming girl’s best friend. As Gretchen says, if it isn’t scheduled, it doesn’t happen.

She’s very practical. And adventuresome.

So what are you gonna put on your priority list?

Sharing Your Daring

Two great additions to this site: Stories, where we post the tales of adventure that women have shared with us, and Sharing Your Daring, where you get to post your own.

The Practical Woman’s Guide is the result of story-sharing. The Guide has been developed (almost ready for publishing!) through analyzing the common approaches and tactics successful adventurers use. It thrives on stories – of all kinds.

Book shops are awash with tales of high-end adventure from people who are out there ‘living their dream’, having turned their lives upside-down to do so. Kudos to them – but that’s not what this space is about. The Guide simply seeks to make it possible for women to do things they’ve always wanted to do but haven’t yet dared. I believe that daring takes many forms and they are all part of creating a rich and rewarding life for ourselves.

We get more real than Mad Men.

What kinds of adventures are we talking about?

Yes, travel adventures are in there. And moving to a different country. Changing careers in mid-life. Learning to paint. Changing hair colour. Going without eye make-up. Taking improv classes. Learning to sing.

All are adventures. All require daring-do, while recognizing the obligations and expectations of our regular lives that we don’t actually want to blast to smithereens. We just want to expand our possibilities.

You can be practical and adventuresome! So read what’s been posted so far, and please share your own daring.

Time-Gaining Training

Time often feels like this.

How many days go by without you making any headway on something you’d really love to be doing? This post’s odd title is an attempt to put into action a wonderful trick from Gretchen Rubin for finding time to do the things we want to be able to do. Like organizing an adventure, for example.

Here’s what she says:

Fluency heuristic : if it’s easier to say or think something, it seems more valuable. For instance, an idea that’s expressed in a rhyming phrase seems more convincing than the same idea paraphrased in a non-rhyming phrase. When I decided to spend some time every weekend crossing long-delayed, horrible items off my to-do list,  I considered calling that time my To-Do List Time, but then switched the name to Power Hour. Much more compelling.

This also works for things you actually want to be doing that somehow never make it into your day’s activities. Try giving your adventure planning a rhyme and a time (you caught that, didn’t  you?) and see if it doesn’t gain a greater priority in your life.

You could even steal Power Hour. I’m sure Gretchen wouldn’t mind.

Dream Small

If you want to be more adventuresome, dream smaller. Boo, you might be thinking, that’s not inspiring. But here’s the thing: while big dreams make exciting fantasies, they’re way harder to pull off in this juggling life we lead. Then we just end up berating ourselves for our failure to make them happen. Sure, an accomplished adventurer can ‘live their dream’. We read about it all the time. It’s thrilling stuff. But if you’re a relative beginner in the area of doing things you haven’t yet dared, or if you’re a little rusty, baby steps are your key to success.

Size does matter

Halvorson and others have established that goals that feel both challenging and achievable are far more likely to become reality. And the big bonus:

Once you’ve accomplished the smaller thing, you have new tools and confidence that help you go for the bigger thing.

If you haven’t worked out in twenty years and you suddenly decide to start going to a gym, the personal trainer isn’t going to start you off with 100 stomach crunches. You’re going to start with what you’re able to do and work up to running the marathon or entering weight lifting contests over time. It’s the same with exercising your courage muscle.

Example: Having spent decades singing Bach and the like in choirs, I fantasized about singing lead with a rock band. Not in a big, professional, be-the-opening-act-for-Lady-Gaga way. Just a bar band kinda thing – but still terrifying. Imagine trying to sing Bruce Springstein’s ‘Fire’ like you mean it when you’re a post-menopausal woman who wears cardigans, and you’ll have an idea what I’m talking about. Way outta the comfort box.

Then League of Rock offered a little, doable Sunday afternoon trial session (they put wannabes into bands so you can play at being a rock star). Not only did I not die during this small trial, it was a ton of fun. Given that success, I asked a friend if I could warble with his amateur band. At some point, we might actually face an audience. Bit by bit, my courage and my skills to do this are improving.

It’s not just my experience. I’ve seen this pattern come through in lots of the stories I’ve read from women who have done daring things. So if you want to dream big, start by dreaming small.

Free Yourself from Constipation

I was speaking awhile back with a woman who is very good at making her dreams happen. She said “Unfulfilled dreams are like little points of constipation in our lives”. How eloquent. 

But it occurred to me that this phenomenon doesn’t always make us rush to take action. Often it just leaves us feeling, well, endlessly constipated. Ugh.

Our dreams can be uplifting things to think about or they can become dead weights. They’re often fuzzy in our heads, and fuzzier yet are the details about how to make them come true. Maybe the dream feels scary and risky. All this fuzziness is what causes the constipation; we have an impression that the dream is impossible to achieve, even though we don’t have any hard evidence. We lust after it hopelessly and kick ourselves for not being able to make it happen. What an incredible waste of energy.

Being of a practical mind, this waste bugs me. What if, instead, you were to examine what it takes to make your dream a reality? Determine what it’s really made of? What it will do for you? What its actual risks and obstacles are, and how you could overcome them? Once you’d done that, you’d know one of three things:

Wow, I can do this thing and I’m going to start on it right now, OR
Wow, this thing I’ve been harbouring is actually not worth it to me, considering the price I’ll have to pay in time, money, energy or whatever, OR
This dream is great but I can’t do it right now.

The first one is what we all want to be able to say, but the second and third answers are equally liberating. They’re all answers that allow us to stop wasting energy.

If you go through this planning process and discover your position is ‘not right now’, here’s what you can do. Put your dream, with all its beautiful details, in a safe place. Pull it out again in 6 months, a year, five years – whatever makes sense – and ask is it time yet? until it is. In between those moments, ignore it. It’s not gone, it’s not dead, it’s just patiently waiting, while you spend your energies on things that are more important right now.

And you get to kiss that constipated feeling goodbye.

Best Adventure Budget Advice

Adventure fanatics Betsy and Warren Talbot sold off everything to go live their dream, which was to travel around all over the place. For which, of course, they didn’t need all that stuff they sold (including their house). This being the Practical Woman’s Guide, I’m not really into that level of life change. Despite the extreme nature of their particular dream, however, their book on how they managed to budget for it – Dream, Save, Do – is chock full of great advice that works even for those of us who are far less radical.

Extreme but still useful for the less fanatical.

Of their various tools, my favorite is the notion of relative cost. They figured out what a day of travel would cost them, on average. Then, every time they were tempted to buy something while they were supposed to be saving for their dream, they could look at the thing and ask themselves, this thing is an afternoon in Venice, or this thing is three days in Croatia. And then, the biggie: do I want it more than that? 

Money is a slippery fish. It’s really easy to look at a pair of earrings or a new dress and think it’s not much money, especially if you’re used to earning a decent salary. But that’s exactly how money gets frittered away so there’s never enough left for the adventure. As soon as you calculate that equivalency, though, POW! You understand exactly what you’re giving up or going for.

James W. Frick famously said “Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” This is so true for adventures. The Talbots have some great tools to help you put your adventure way higher on that priority list – even if you don’t intend to give up everything you own.

How to Put the Cherry on Top

You might have noticed, in the post about mental contrasting, that the first step is imagining your dream. Easy peasy, you might be thinking, I day-dream all the time. But the reality is you could probably be making this critical step a whole lot more powerful.

The toppings make all the difference.

Most people cruise their dreams the way they surf the net. We see snippets of scenes that bring a smile to our face as we’re sitting in traffic or procrastinating in front of our household bills. But if this couch-potatoe approach is all you do to envision your goal, you’re never going to have the incentive needed to slog through the obstacles that stand between here and there. There’s a reason the hero in fairy tales doesn’t go through all those hurdles to rescue someone he feels tepid about. He has to first believe she’s worth it. He has to be fully in love.

So, here are some exercises to help you thinker harder about that thing you want to do but haven’t yet dared, so you can understand just how worthwhile it could be to go for it:

How will it make me feel

What more will it allow me to do

What will it help me achieve

Who will it help me be

What new avenues might become open to me

What new people might I meet?

And remember this: benefits rarely come in singles. They tend to be multi-packed. For instance, I want to get my driver’s license so I can drive to work becomes: I will also have freedom to escape the city on weekends, I will be able to rent a car on holiday and drive down the Amalfi coast, I could get a convertible and cruise for hot guys, I could drive my parents to their doctor visits, I could save myself time enough to do something more interesting. I could feel free and enabled and master of my own transportation destiny.

Imagine, all that from a driver’s license.

What is your adventure going to do for you?

Embrace the Dark Side

In this world of rabid positivity, who would have thought that contemplating all the stuff that could go wrong is actually a really great way to feed your dreams? And yet it appears to be exactly so. The technique is called mental contrasting and here’s the gist:

You start by envisioning your bright sparkling future. Maybe that little cafe in Rome, a glass of wine in your hand, the handsome man at the next table sending you meaningful glances…but I digress. Whatever your goal is, think about the big benefit you’re going to get from realizing it. Feeling blissful? Great. Now: envision all the obstacles presented by gross reality.

Did your lovely dream-bubble just go poof? Don’t stop there! The point of mental contrasting is to look the obstacles square in the eye so you can plan to overcome them. Studies show that looking at the dark side, even though it feels like it should be a real downer, is actually an incredibly powerful tool.

I’ve always been fond of an exercise I call ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ when I’m trying to get up the gumption to do something I’m nervous about. I’m so thrilled to discover it’s not just some weird personal perversion or a secret desire to be morose. It’s something useful. There are some caveats: the goal has to feel achievable, and you have to follow the order for it to work (dream, benefit, obstacles, planning). Then embracing the dark side does wonders for making your dream come true.

For a more thorough (and scientifically valid) explanation of this technique, try the mother of mental contrasting, Gabriele Oettingen http://bit.ly/15YF1NY or the more easily read Heidi Grant Halvorson: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/get_your_goals_back_on_track.html