rel="nofollow" href="#u432b870a-9204-533e-8cc0-5c7dc91f5ad2">Chapter 1
How did I get here?
The question nagged at me. It would pop into my head in the chaos of trying to get out the door in the morning when I was going to be late again, dammit. It made another appearance when I pulled into the parking lot, anxious about what the day would bring. The question would pop up over and over again, while under the glare of the fluorescent lights, reading the emails that signaled the day’s fire drills, wanting to slide right out of my chair into a pile under my desk. I couldn’t follow through on answering this question. I would begin to ponder it, the depressing evidence of how I had created my reality would pile up, and I knew that I had somehow, unintentionally, been the architect of my own despair. I tried to move on from it, but then this question’s best friend asked:
What do you want?
This was it. The million-dollar question. The one I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t even know where to start and, up to that point, there had been precious few times in my life when I wasn’t sure how to start and couldn’t come up with something that would get me on the path. How was it possible to not know what I wanted? Was I the only one whose internal response was the equivalent of an exasperated shrug? It made me oddly uncomfortable, as if there must have been something missing from me to not have a response to such a fundamental question.
I became obsessed with finding the answer. As I started to dig through my own mental clutter, it started to make perfect sense that what I wanted wasn’t immediately obvious. In our fast-paced world, we barely take a breath between one activity and the next. Our poor brains are inundated with constant stimulation. We are listening, reading, scrolling, participating, going, traveling, worrying, analyzing, thinking, and, well, basically just doing entirely too much shit. Worse yet, we are so used to doing entirely too much that we don’t know how not to do it. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that we have severely diminished capacity for tapping into our truest selves. We can’t hear anything above the continuous noise that we’ve come to accept as integral to our daily lives.
When this journey started, I was completely immersed in the cycle of “busy-ness.” I moved constantly. Relaxation was a foreign concept. When I wasn’t at work, I bustled around, tidying up, making dinner, getting the kids what they needed, remembering that thing I needed to do, responding to an email, watching the clock to make sure I got my workout in before midnight, fretting about how I was going to get enough sleep when I had so much left to do and was already behind on rest—an endless litany of thoughts piled up on top of one another, increasing my anxiety as the day went on. If nothing needed to be done, I would stand there and look around, trying to identify something that could use attention. WTF.
It was like an addiction, this need to “accomplish.” It made me a bit of a crazy person. My husband didn’t suffer from this affliction. I would get so mad at him for just sitting. How could he sit on that couch, chill out, and watch a show when there was so much to do, for God’s sake? Don’t get me wrong—my husband is pretty amazing. He’s truly my partner in every way, but one thing he had down that I was failing at miserably was the ability to just be. To sit and do nothing for just a little while. To shut it down, the whole messy monkey circus in my head that was in a constant poo-throwing frenzy. Honestly, I was jealous of his ability to turn it all off for a little while. I couldn’t do it.
All the mental and physical doing that I was continuously engaged in settled into my body in the form of symptoms like tightness in my chest, insomnia, and irritability. That last one, though. Everything got on my nerves. I woke up in a state of irritation and it was all downhill from there. It was actually this consistent state of irritation that served as the pivotal wake-up call for me. It was the car alarm that kept going off, until I finally reached the point where that sucker needed to be silenced. I couldn’t persist in that state. I didn’t like what it was doing to the way I related to my children. It seemed like I was always snapping at them for doing kid things, like wandering around in the morning with no sense of urgency. Didn’t they know I had a meeting to get to, for Pete’s sweet sake? Of course, I never said these things aloud, but I wasn’t proud of my impatience. It made me sad to think that my daily interactions with my kids were always rushed. We rushed out the door in the morning, rushed home to make sure dinner, homework, bath time, and bedtime all happened in a timely manner. If work needed to be done, it got squeezed in after all of that, and the only time I had for workouts was late at night. More often than not I’d be finishing up a workout at ten thirty at night, just in time to collapse into bed and start over again after six hours of sleep, if that.
How did I let my life get this way? And I wasn’t the only one. How did the collective “we,” the high achievers, get this way?
It all comes down to programming: the accumulation of the experiences that shapes our lives, that limits how we see ourselves, and that, along with continuous exposure to the expectations of the outside world, drowns out who we are at the core of our beings. The barrage of outside information invades our minds, takes up residence, and creates such a cacophony that, even though something is wrong, all we have to go on is this vague sense of unease that we cannot name or describe; we are so out of touch with who we are elementally.
There is no easy button for addressing how we came to be this way. We are like computers without the benefit of system updates to clear out the outdated crap and bugs in the system that no longer serve us. It is absolutely essential to clear the antiquated programming and to replace it with a sleek and self-efficacious operating system, one that does away with the old and busted to make way for the new hotness.
It’s overwhelming at first. How to begin? In this guide, you will be presented with a systematic approach that breaks down the process into manageable chunks that you can do a bit at a time. If there is one key thought to keep in your mind throughout what we will cover in this book, it’s this: You do not need to have the answers. Come with curiosity and compassion toward yourself, suspend judgment, and observe. Answer the questions at hand and the more complex answers will take shape and appear when it’s time, when you are capable of accepting them because of your progress on this self-development journey. It took you years and years to become how you are today. All those experiences came together to make you the high achiever you are. You will not undo it overnight, and trust me, you would miss all the fun if you could! You may be scoffing to yourself now, thinking “Yeah, right! Fun? This chick is crazy.” It’s okay that you don’t believe me yet. But the sense of empowerment and the clarity you will create if you follow the process are not only fun, but downright exhilarating. You are worthy of investing this effort in yourself. Make the decision, right here and now, that your life is worth this investment of time and energy, and remind yourself of that as often as needed. When it gets tough, recommit. We will talk much more about how to keep going when you’re losing steam a little later. For now, this first commitment to yourself is the most powerful move you can make to change your life.
Now that you’re in it to win it, it’s time to get into the external influences that have shaped the way you operate today. There are many, many sources of programming, so for the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on the following categories. Keep in mind that each of these is highly complex and loaded with lots of considerations. The list of questions for each is meant to get your self-examination juices flowing. It’s important to get your head into the right space for looking at your programming. Starting with a limited list will trigger the process, and it will naturally continue once you’ve started.
Sources of Programming
Family relationships. Consider your relationship with your parents, their marital status, how old they were when they had you, whether they had close parental or family relationships, your sibling relationships, whether you had grandparents or extended family in your life, the dynamics of
