thoughtwork – Emily Downward

Clean Getaway

January 29, 2014emilydownward

I wrote last week about signs that it’s time to quit your job. However, I strongly believe and encourage my clients to get clean about their job before leaving, if possible. What do I mean by clean? Cleaning up your thoughts, taking responsibility for your part of the relationship, and making peace with it all.

[Caveat: I’m talking in generalizations. Obviously, there are some instances and environments when you need to get out NOW. Take care of yourself and do what is best for you.]

1. Cleaning up your thoughts

I believe our thoughts have incredible power. They also influence our feelings, so if you are feeling something you don’t enjoy (like sadness, frustration, fear or anger), examining your thoughts is critical to help you identify WHY you are feeling that emotion. By identifying your thoughts about the job you want to leave and examining them to understand the story you are telling yourself about the circumstance, you can more objectively make decisions that are based on what’s best for you, and not just making choices because of the story your brain is concocting.

When I work with my clients, I help them identify the thoughts that are causing them pain. There are several resources that can help you with your thoughts; one of my favorites is Byron Katie.

2. Taking responsibility

Another lesson from Byron Katie is the concept of business, as in, “Who’s business are you in?” Katie classifies three kinds of business: your business, other people’s business, and God’s business. Your business includes how you think and feel about things. Other people’s business is how they think and feel, including how they think and feel about you. You have no control over that, which you may know if you’ve ever had an experience where you did everything “right” and they still didn’t like you. Finally, God’s business encompasses natural disasters, weather and other big things we have no control over.

When you stay focused on your business, life gets a lot more simple. By taking responsibility for how you feel, you take back your power and also let others off the hook of making you happy.

3. Making peace

Peace is two-fold: it’s best to leave a job in a professional manner (think about the Golden Rule), and keep your mind focused on the positive. That may sound counter-intuitive…after all, you’re leaving the job. But by focusing on the positive – what you learned (either skills, or learned about yourself), the people you connected with, the experience you gained – helps your brain continue to look for what’s positive in your life. Our brains are naturally wired to look for the negative, to keep us out of danger, so shifting your brain to focus on the positive takes diligence and practice. It has immense benefits, as I recently wrote about. Recognize that this job, for the length of time you were in it, played some role for you. If nothing else, it helped you get to the place where you are now.

Leaving a job cleanly not only makes for a smoother transition for you and the company, it also puts you in a better position to begin something new without dragging the old habits, negative thoughts and patterns with you.

Making It Easy

June 19, 2013emilydownward

We all have things to do that we don’t necessarily enjoy. Some of us have A LOT of things in our life we don’t enjoy. Some of us look around and have so much in our life that is making us unhappy, we wonder how we got to this place. It seems like we’re stuck. We trudge through, suffer through, telling ourselves that life is tough but we will persevere, or maybe that “this is my lot in life” and wonder when it’s going to get easier, when it will be our turn.

I’ve experienced this, both in my professional and personal life. I felt completely stuck, not knowing which direction to go in next when it seemed everything was not going right. Even though I’m now in a job I love, working with people I adore and have a fantastic flexible schedule, those thoughts still come up sometimes. “Why is this so difficult?” I ask myself.

Now, when I hear myself saying something is “difficult,” it’s my cue that I am most likely making things more difficult than they actually are and it’s time to start investigating my thoughts. Our thoughts cause our feelings, which influence our actions. Cleaning up the thoughts goes right to the source of the problem and enables me to take action from a much better place.

To clean up my thoughts, I use Byron Katie’s The Work. (I highly recommend you check out her free resources online.) And after doing that, I ask myself instead, “How can I make this easier?”

Spilling Blueberries

September 21, 2011emilydownward

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.