dirty pain

Goals, Achievement and Failure

emilydownward
triathlon finish
Finishing my 6th triathlon, and beating my personal best time. Achieving your goals feels great, but what about when you don’t achieve them?

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
~ Zig Ziglar

Do you set goals for yourself? Do you write them down or just know them in your mind or in your heart? Studies have shown it’s actually beneficial to write them down, and while I do that for my professional goals, I definitely have some that are just so intrinsically bound to who I believe I am that they are always within me.

It’s my birthday week, and it’s a big one. A decade milestone. I have mixed feelings about this, but it’s coming, whether I like it or not. So in true coach-y form, I’ve been delving into my feelings and the thoughts behind them.

On the one hand, I am happy to celebrate. First of all, I think it’s always fun to have a day to celebrate YOU just for being you. I always make it a point of telling the people I love and care about how much they mean to me on their birthdays. I like the idea of a celebration just because. Not because of any accomplishment or achievement, just for being alive. And while I’m not THAT old yet, I have outlived some of my friends. Thinking of their too-short lives makes me grateful for each of my years.

BUT…then there’s the other thoughts. The not-so-excited-to-be-FORTY thoughts. As a coach who trained in a class of amazing coaches, I’ve been self-coaching and been a practice client for my colleagues on many of these thoughts. These thoughts are dirty pain — as opposed to clean pain like grief, dirty pain is the thoughts about it that you have like “it’s my fault he left” or “I will never find another job/partner/friend like him again.” Dirty pain thoughts are nasty, and definitely painful, but they can be dismantled.

The biggest resistance I have about turning FORTY (it’s big…it deserves all caps) is that I haven’t achieved some of my personal goals that I thought I would have by now. I could explain this in two ways: 1) it’s out of my control, there are circumstances and others involved and there’s nothing I can do about it, or…2) I have made choices, for good reasons, that have led me to this point, and even though it’s not where I want to be, I honor and value the choices I have made. The first explanation puts me in the role of the victim or the martyr, and that doesn’t feel good to me. The second explanation puts me back in the driver’s seat of my own life, and I like that more. While I have yet to reach my desired destination, I do feel good about the journey.

If you have goals for yourself, and you don’t meet them (for whatever reasons), I invite you to explore what you’re telling yourself about not achieving the goal. You get to craft the story in your head, so make it a good one! Use goals as motivators to keep striving towards, but don’t use the goals as sticks to beat yourself up with.

Spilling Blueberries

emilydownward

I’m having “one of those weeks.” You know, the kind where everything seems to be not working smoothly, where even the simplest things are challenging, where you want to just throw your hands up and give up. And I’ve spilled blueberries TWICE. The thing about spilling blueberries is, they roll away in every direction!

The first time was at the grocery store. [Embarrassing!] I was picking items out of my cart to put on the belt — this was in the express-only-10-items lane, the one where people don’t want to wait long — and one of the last items I picked up was my pint of blueberries. Only I picked it up from the top, causing the lid to stay in my hand while the bottom fell open. Blueberries hit the floor and ROLLED. Ugh. I could see the disappointment and frustration on the cashier’s face. And a little girl passed by with her dad and said, “UH OH!” I apologized profusely and tried to help another employee clean them up. And, I ran for another pint, because I really did want those blueberries!

This morning, as I was making my breakfast, I did the same damn thing! Only this time, it was in my kitchen. Those round blueberries seemed to spring from their confinement, mocking me as they rolled under kitchen cabinets and the refrigerator. I yelled a few obscenities and picked them up, rinsing them again, because I still really want them.

I realize the blueberries are just a symbol — it’s not about the blueberries. That’s just a “wake up call” for me to turn inwards and deal with my stressful thoughts. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches there are two kinds of emotional pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is felt when we lose something or someone, grief and a feeling of loss. Dirty pain is related to all the thoughts we have about the loss. For example, when I went through my divorce, I had to grieve the loss of the relationship and companionship, the loss of the dream of what I had hoped for the marriage (clean pain), but I also had thoughts of “what if I never marry again?” or “what if no one ever loves me again?” (dirty pain). Clean pain must be felt — we need to cry, yell, hit a pillow…I found boxing to be very effective. Or, as one of the master coaches I admire so much, Abigail Steidley says, you can throw a tantrum. Dirty pain needs to be disbelieved. And for that, there’s thoughtwork. I’m ever so grateful to Martha Beck for her writings and teachings on how to dissolve these pesky thoughts that cause me dirty pain but don’t serve me. One of my favorite methods for dissolving is using Byron Katie’s Work. Questioning these thoughts sets me free, and I can see that I am more than my thoughts.

And if you need a visual of an adult throwing a tantrum, click over to YouTube for this great video of Matthew Perry in The Whole Nine Yards.