About

We all have, or will, experience pain, failure, setbacks, crises, and other unpleasant and uncomfortable things. We want to make them as uncontrolled as possible.

In the television show Parenthood, the father figure Adam says to his fifteen-year-old daughter Haddie, “Do not allow pain to dictate how you will behave.” While he was trying to coax her to rise above the situation and follow through on her earlier-made plans, we do let pain lead the way in ways we don’t see all the time. It’s simply biological programming through nature and nurture, but sometimes, what’s primal is not the best path forward. And not just as teenage girls.

We do need time to process our feelings, and doing so immediately is sometimes the best time to get it done. Yet, it is good advice to stick to long-term plans in spite of immediate suffering. This father is hailed to be ten times better at fathering according to the grandfather, and this might be one of the lines that makes him so good.

While you don’t want to wish the skill of resilience on anyone, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. As human beings, we are going to have people who we love who die before us, lovers who leave us, or whom we realize we need to leave, and possessions we love that are stolen, lost, damaged, or left behind.

Inevitably, we all realize that the ability to bounce back would be really good right now. How do you get to the water-off-a-duck’s-back thing?

Finding the Best Advice

We all know people who go through life seemingly without a single smear. They are all sunny, and things always work out for them. Look closer though, and the cracks appear, fault lines reveal themselves. It’s one thing to appear like the duck, only to realize it’s paddling madly beneath the surface.

Life throws you for a loop, and then you move forward. We do so at different paces, and directions, at different times and speeds. But when it’s something we all do, surely there are better ways and worse ways, and lessons learned by others who’ve gone before us. So, in the effort to make the inevitable as painless, as quick, as reliable, as control-able as possible, this blog sets to determine those ways.

After a career in quality, that’s the essence of what I did every day – determine the best way to do something, and then make sure everyone does it that way. First, it was in relation to machines, then to assembly lines, then to management.

Embracing Inconvenient Realities

What’s simple with machines becomes complex with people. While some managers believe you can simply tell people what to do and fire them when they don’t do it, it’s not practical and sometimes, impossible.

With knowledge workers, like professionals, and even people who work from home, you will never be able to measure it precisely enough, immediately enough, or robustly enough. The work is invisible, fleeting, and impermeant. You simply need completely different ways.

With that background and understanding, I seek to apply those realities to the experience of getting knocked down and getting back up again. Whether it was generational trauma that happened before I was born, and created a certain reverberation into my life, or the life lessons of my personal experiences, it’s all about becoming more resilient in practical, timely, and lasting ways.

If we are a piece of glass, and the mere act of handling it smears it, then we are going through life with a windshield through which we can’t possibly navigate. Many of us can’t see where we are going, as we operate on values, principles and expectations created by our parents, by society, by education, all long before we had the ability to think and decide for ourselves. But slowly and surely, as we age, we start this process of separation, some of us sooner, and some of us by choice.

Accomplishing Unimaginable Dreams

The goal of this blog is to help you think and decide for yourself. When you are knocked down, sometimes, that’s the only thing you can do.

Have some food for thought that might lift you up, show you a new possibility, provide an insight into an old situation, or even compel you to muster up the energy to act.

If you are drained, overwhelmed, frustrated, numb, exhausted, stressed, down on your luck, and weary of it, I’ve been there. I’ll tell you what worked for me and what I learned about the science related to it.

More importantly, what not to do that might make things worse, but only when it’s counterintuitive – you don’t need to be told tired old slogans that don’t work.

I’ll tell you about the extreme. I’ll also tell you that I read about cold showers, and haven’t done them. I’ve read about 5am mediations, journalling, and the like, but I wake up when the sun hits my eyelids, and that time varies.

I don’t aim for perfection, I am not an overcaffeinated, hyper-stimulated, example of a superhuman. One day at a time, when we make them count, even if it’s just some of them, some of the time. You won’t find discipline, judgment or high expectations here.

I’m human, so what worked for me might be relevant for you. Where I am today would have been unimaginable to my younger self. I wish the same for you, that you too can look back and think, wow, I got here, exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.

I kept a diary as a child, one of those models with the little lock. I remember writing in it, dreamy thoughts about a boy in my class, fears about my teacher, tensions with my friends.

One day, I caught my mother reading it.

Since then, I don’t trust those flimsy little locks. Since then, I don’t trust that someone will come along and discover my innermost feelings, all laid out in ink, in my undeniable handwriting.

Pain Dictating Behavior

After that day, I stopped writing anything down. By the time I was in university, I listened to Van Halen to be able to focus hard enough on the calculus problems before me. I couldn’t imagine driving without the radio. Going for a run without a pre-planned playlist was unthinkable. I did everything I could, every time I could, to drown out the ongoing voice in my head.

It was critical. Mean. Judgmental. It would throw me off a good performance right before the finish line, not in the difficult moment, no, but just before one could declare a victory. New people in my life, from snowboarding to snowmobiling, from boardrooms to family rooms, would frown and say, “and you were doing so good.”

During university, I made lists. If I couldn’t focus during class because I was dreaming about “one day”, I’d pull out my notebook and itemize my daydreams. Once it was on paper, it was out of my mind, and I didn’t have to worry about trying to remember it.

Over time, those lists became both far-reaching and more specific. The bullet points became sentences, and slowly but surely, I resumed the process of cleaning the thoughts out of my head, purging the voices from my mind, and tuning into the unique thread I can identify as my own by writing it all down.

Fear Dominating Thoughts

When you write it down, you must put words to the feelings. You must tune into the sentence running through your mind, instead of drowning it out with the morning news program. When you’ve finally got it down on paper, your mind relaxes, breathes a sign of relief, and silences the alarm. It got through and you got the message. Mission accomplished.

Back in my Van Halen days, I was operating on fear, much of the time. Fear of failing my program, my father’s expectations and attached love, fear of losing my friends, or finding out they never really were, fear of physical and financial harm from anyone with whom I shared a space, the list goes on and it was long.

Today, I welcome whatever warnings, information, or whatever that my being wants me to know. I believe that the constant chatter in the mind has a value, but the repetition does not, and the large bulk of our distractions are repetitions of the same message.

I write to quiet my mind, and feel the peace that comes with being heard, even if I am the only one who does. A silent mind is a beautiful thing to have.

Education Directing Choices

During university, I operated under the principle that a career is something you have to pay the bills, so go for the one that will provide the most money for the least amount of pain, and do it as long as you can. I remember a math problem in grade two that taught me so.

The elementary school math problem presented an accountant who made so much money per hour, and a gardener that made less, and the question required answering whether or not the accountant should do her own gardening or hire the gardener to do it. It stuck with me to this day, because I couldn’t help but notice that the correct answer came from accepting a value, not a mathematical law.

I shudder to think what Trudeau’s government did with the education system, and the curriculum children were exposed to and graded on. What values were they required to adopt? I frankly don’t want to know, and not being a parent, I don’t feel like this is my fight. Let me know if you want my help, and I’m there, but without an invitation, I feel there are other fights suited for me, a childfree unmarried woman.

Back when I was a child, I wish I’d found the unique niche that would have made for a successful, fulfilling and lasting career. But even if I’d known the strategy, I didn’t know myself well enough, and certainly no one in my life knew me well enough to point me in the best direction either. I was raised to do what I was told, get good grades, and follow the system.

One day, on my way to work, my dad wished me off with, “Don’t make any waves!”

My sister, who was a front-line worker where I was an engineer, laughed and said, “She doesn’t make waves; she makes tsunamis.” I was shocked to hear her declare it, but with shame, immediately knew she was right.

Today, I make the choice to garden, contrary to that lesson I learned in grade two, to always maximize income. I make the choice to lay out my innermost feelings and hidden ambitions in full view on the internet, knowing that this is where secrets are the safest. Where tsunamis lift surfers.

Today, I make choices to optimize things other than my income, like my happiness, my health, and my home.

If I took bad advice a few decades ago, I am grateful for the freedom it provides today. The decades in between were an adventurous journey in finding my own voice, making my own choices, and living my own life.

Mistakes you make following someone else’s instructions or doing what you were told to do are the most painful and most difficult to overcome as you will spend many years justifying and denying that any mistake was made. Yet, you know.

All You Need to Know

Make mistakes, just make sure they are your own, and don’t make the mistake of doing it your own way just to do it your own way. Play in the grey, and when it’s black and white, choose where you will be standing when the music stops. Good or bad, everything comes to an end.

Endure what you must, change what you can, and always know you are smarter, stronger and more importantly, more super- sly than you think.

I used to hear Wednesdays being called “Hump Day” to reference the middle of the week. If you make it over the hump, you are closer to the weekend than the workweek. Monday, we have new resolutions and hope.

But by Wednesday morning, that vision could use a boost. With ambitions to be your Wednesday morning pick me up, you can rely on new posts every Wednesday morning at five, just in case you are up that early.

I invite debate. If you disagree me with, I’m intrigued. I will listen, and even dare I say it, sometimes change my mind. I have blind spots – point them out, please, should you see them. It’s possible there are facts I missed, history I didn’t weigh, and different conclusions I should have drawn. It’s happened before, and it could happen again.

Do, let me know, either in the comments, or privately. I look forward to hearing your opinions, perspectives, and alternatives.