How to ride life to your advantage

Uncategorized Aug 01, 2020

Iā€™m not a fan of rollercoasters.  That slow crescendo to the top, that gut-out-your-mouth rapid descent, repeated several terrifying times is not how I choose to seek thrills.

My kids love them, and while Iā€™ll gladly roll down dunes getting sand in my knickers, I canā€™t do a rollercoaster.  More than happy to hold bags and catch vomit.

Yet, I know from my own experience and from people Iā€™m coaching, that many of us are experiencing that rollercoaster feeling (on a daily basis sometimes) these last few months. While this can feel stressful, itā€™s actually normal for life to feel like this.

People often think their lives are driven by emotions and thoughts, believing theyā€™re abnormal if life isnā€™t a constant even keel.

Even if we learn that we can manage emotions and thoughts in a way that doesnā€™t have us screaming in terror, rollercoaster jowls flapping in the G-force, and that a less chaotic way of lurching from drama to drama is a better way to live, life still comes in waves. It just does. Like grey roots during a global lockdown.

Yet we feel a failure if life isnā€™t a flatline. But what medical insight Iā€™ve gleaned from 11 seasons of Greyā€™s Anatomy is that a flatline represents death.

With all this talk of ā€˜new normalā€™ as lockdown is eased, we forget that the ā€˜old normalā€™ wasnā€™t actually normal at all. Weā€™re not meant to work at warp speed, so run ragged juggling work, family and home that we canā€™t draw breath. Itā€™s far more normal to have periods of advance, retreat and pause. 

The goal of living well is not that there are no ups and downs, but that we ride them to our advantage.

After an initial flurry of frantic lockdown lunacy - where I carried on my usual pace of work, took on home-schooling 3 kids, heaped on business-pivoting strategising, while absorbing the general low-level anxiety thatā€™s as virulent as the virus at the moment - without taking stock, I hit a slump. 

Thankfully, itā€™s in the slump, not the uber-uphill manic-ness that we catch our breath.

I recently had to make what felt like a stressful decision to reduce business visibility to ā€˜pivotā€™ and create something more adaptable to this changing environment that Iā€™ll launch in September. It feels stressful because of all the ā€˜shouldā€™sā€™ buzzing round my head like pesky flies. It means #Holding Firm to use this opportunity to pause, even step back, reassess, re-energise myself and come back blaringā€¦ rollercoaster jowls flapping in the G-Force (pilates notwithstanding).

Iā€™m also taking advantage to slow down in other areas of life too because I know thereā€™ll be plenty of manic times ahead. That extra morning hour in bed because thereā€™s no school can be spent in a myriad of manners. Those ā€˜shouldā€™sā€™ (journalling? yoga? prepping the slow cooker?) harass me before my eyes have even opened, but Iā€™m learning to swat them away because sometimes itā€™s ok to use that extra hour in bed to do nothing.

The rollercoaster of life can terrify us. Or we can use it to live a wide array of paces and spaces to create or curl up, be motivated or be mulling over, scream or be silent, push forward or pull back, switch on or switch off, because the key to life is not an even keel; the key to life is respecting where you are at this moment.

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