Only One Thing Stopped My Bucket from Overflowing This Week
Plus see the end of the article for the link to Wednesday's live mindset training session
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‘May you live in interesting times’ is supposedly a Chinese curse
Turns out it’s not Chinese at all but that doesn’t rob the phrase of its power to spark unease.
I think we’re all living through interesting times at the moment, socially, politically, ecologically and in any number of other ways. For many of us it’s personal too.
Life chez maison Fergie has been particularly interesting this year, beginning with the realisation a couple of months ago that my parents have reached the point of needing a full time carer – and the only practical option is for that carer to be me.
We’re all still adjusting but I’d say that overall, we’re doing OK. We put in an offer on a bigger house to make living together more comfortable and carried out some much needed work on my parents’ house to get it ready for sale. I’ve (mostly) done my mourning for the nomadic life I had to let go of so suddenly and have begun exploring options here in Fife that might add value and pleasure beyond the boundaries of domestic life in future.
But in the last couple of weeks a new complication has emerged that’s taken things to a whole new level of interesting and catapulted us into deep uncertainty. I’ll share more about it soon but life has suddenly got very real.
I often use the metaphor of our bucketful of tolerance.
Imagine you have a bucket that holds what you can tolerate in a day. As you make decisions, do hard things, interact with others, work, play and keep putting one foot in front of the other, your bucket fills up. As the level rises throughout the day, your energy and resilience gradually run out of juice.
Then at night, as you sleep and your unconscious mind processes the day’s experiences, the level in your bucket starts dropping again. By the time you get up in the morning, it’s back down to a manageable level and your resilience has recovered.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Where it goes wrong is when you have a lot going on and the level in your bucket doesn’t fall as much as it should overnight, so you wake each morning still in a stressed state. When this happens, the level in your bucket can build to a point where it overflows – I’m sure we all know that feeling. The repurcussions of constant overflowing are exhaustion, illness and mental and emotional burnout.
My bucket skirted close to overflowing a few times a month or two ago, and last week I felt the level racing up the sides again. But each time I managed to catch on to what was happening and did one thing that instantly decreased my stress. I mean literally within a minute.
What did I do to lower the level of stress in my bucket?
I practised acceptance
When I was training to become a therapist I realised I’d spent decades creating problems for myself by resisting reality. I carried a whole load of anger about things I thought shouldn’t be happening, or should be happening but weren’t. I thought I had to hang on to that anger because accepting the bad stuff would mean I was OK with it – and I just couldn’t do that.
Here’s a massive truth: acceptance does not mean approval.
The fact is, by refusing to accept situations I was fuelling their power to disturb me. By insisting ‘My boss mustn’t be such a bully!’ or ‘My flatmates have to do their share of the housework’, I was burning up energy by clinging to a state of righteous fury; energy I could have been using to flex and adapt to reality and find more constructive ways to deal with those situations.
It was enormously liberating (if frustrating!) when I finally realised how badly I’d been sabotaging myself and I learned how to set myself free with acceptance.
And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing recently.
I can’t change the gravity of the situation my parents and I now find ourselves in, nor how it will play out in the days ahead. What I can do is accept it, consciously surrender my desire to control it and actively choose to elevate the love, joy and compassion – because there’s plenty of that amidst the challenges.
By taking that approach, rather than insisting ‘This shouldn’t be happening’, I’ll be able to look back on this time with gratitude, rather than regret.
How have I been able to move so quickly into a state of acceptance?
I’ve done it by asking myself my three empowering questions. Actually, I do this so often that I only had to ask the first one and the rest automagically followed.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this tiny exercise has an almost miraculous ability to interrupt the silly stuff we do to ourselves and bring us back to a state of constructive self-awareness. It changes the way we think and when we do that, we change everything.
I’ve mentioned the three questions often and I’ll keep on doing so. When you feel stuck and out of emotional equilibrium, ask yourself:
1️⃣ What’s the story I’m telling myself about the situation that’s leading me to feel like this?
2️⃣ What would be a better outcome?
3️⃣ What can I think and do to make the better outcome more likely to happen?
Honestly, every single time I’ve used the 3 empowering questions in a situation where I’ve felt hopeless, helpless or stuck, I’ve come out with my mindset transformed, able to think straight, come up with ideas and take effective action. I encourage you to try this technique for yourself and teach it to your people.
Paying members, don’t forget we have our live group coaching this Wednesday
Our session this month is on the trait of high sensitivity, which is part of the genetic makeup of one in five of us. I’m hoping we’ll have a wonderful guest with us to talk about the extra spice that comes from being both highly sensitive (HSP) and a high sensation seeker (HSS) – a combination I call Sensitive Upstart.
There are free self-tests for both HSP and HSS on Dr Elaine Aron’s website. If you haven’t already done the tests yourself, they’re quick to do. I recommend you have a go before we meet on Wednesday at 8pm BST (3pm EDT, 12pm PDT). The Zoom link is in the PPS below and I’ll send you a reminder on the day. I know this is going to be a useful and fun session.
If you’re a free subscriber and would like to join these monthly mindset training sessions, it’s easy to upgrade from less than £7 a month. Just hit the button:
I’d love to hear from you if you have any comments about acceptance, or anything else you’d like to ask or share.
Until next week, enjoy being your “something more”.
x
PS - I did a TEDx talk a few years ago about being HSP – delivered when I was in a highly sensitive state during a bout of norovirus!
PPS - Here’s the Zoom link for the session: