inthedougout

In a family, failure is abound.  It going be on a big scale, of course, but most practically, it exists on a micro-scale. To a toddler, maybe you failed by pouring the cereal incorrectly (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to a 3-year-old, you light the birthday cake too soon (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe to your middle-schooler, your screen time protections backfired (yes, there is such a thing).  Maybe you ordered the wrong meal, or item, and brought your family a version less, or different, than they expected. The fact is that these circumstances have a way of accumulating throughout the day... and with those failures, so does our reaction to those events.  Are we throwing pity parties?  Or are we owning it and moving forward?  That responsive, reactive energy has a lot to do with our mental state going into the next micro battle.  The thing is ... i t doesn't always have to be fixed right away.   A delay isn't a bad thing.  E...

Let me guess - you probably spent a ton of money on Thanksgiving items, food, decorations, and so forth.  You may have even dropped a pretty coin to travel. Did the turkey burn?  Did it dry out?   Failed Thanksgiving? Keep it simple and make a new tradition.  Do something wild.  A few ideas - 1)  Thanksgiving Lasagna - you can take this in a few different ways.  You could go traditional (e.g., Italian) or a modern twist (e.g., Thanksgiving foods baked as a lasagna). 2)  McDonald's - no joke.  Just go get some burgers.  I'm usually a healthy dude, but when crisis hits, McDonald's is outstanding.  Those golden arches bring joy.  Where is the nearest McDonald's?  May as well have it handy. 3)  Peanut butter and jelly - you may think this is a joke, but it's not.  There's little more comforting to me than a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  How to make it?  Make it the way you want to make i...

A typical response to failure is to cringe, hide, or bury it.  And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with that.  Those responses are more than healthy. But what if we decided to say thank you to our failure instead of our otherwise automatic, programed response of cringing into a shell of ourselves?   There may be a case that doing the opposite could help: 'Doing the opposite' is a really effective, straightforward strategy to change your emotional state that can be difficult to put into action. This technique involves doing the opposite of whatever behaviors you normally perform due to painful or negative emotions. For this Thanksgiving, I am trying to flip the script completely.  What if we run towards the failure instead of running away from it?  What if we can find what we're thankful for instead of resisting the failure?  What if the failure is there for a reason?  What if we fail to listen to the failure? In general, this is about expandi...

  This one is about letting go and, specifically, learning how  to let go. This lesson comes courtesy of Aliza Grace - thank you .  The imagery below applies mostly to grief, but the feelings and grief and failure share a good deal of overlap.  To be clear - I am by no means equating failure and grief.  I just believe that "lower case" grief can be "grieving" a situation or scenario - often re-playing a failure of yours, over and over in your head.  "Upper case" grief is a whole other ball of wax and maybe we talk about the intersection between failed opportunities and lost loved ones (a scenario that I unfortunately have too much experience with). So what does this mean?  This imagery means something significant to me:  failure is relative to your growth and experiences.  When we allow the failure to represent a significant share of our identity, then it will seem like there is little room for anything else. However, as we grow and progress,...

Have you ever woken up with that odd tightness in your chest?  That feeling that gnaws at you, tugs at every fiber and strand of your day? That happens to all of us - frankly.  It gives us a fantastic choice: how will we cope and how will we respond? A few thoughts when that does come up: 1)  Wallow a bit, it's ok.  Those feelings are trying to tell you something, so why not listen?  It's okay to ruminate and wallow for a bit, so long as you're aware of being in those cycles. 2)  If you are not aware, then dust off the coping mechanisms.  It takes a bit of practice to know that you're in the spiral of emotions trying to take you down.  We have to be able to catch ourselves - the idea is to catch yourself as often as possible, but, of course, without judgment or attribution.  See the tension.  See the angst.  Go on - just feel it, see it, acknowledge it.  You may even feel a slight bit of relief just acknowledging that it's ther...

Working through failure is hard enough, but working through fear and failure is a difficult cocktail to tolerate.  These two things have a way of feeding into each other.  Fear breeds failure, failure breeds fear.  Stopping that cycle is critical and the good news is that stopping one likely stops both.   I am the type of person that doesn't really know who he is - sometimes I feel like a gym rat who loves heavy metal.  At other times, I enjoy tea and some lofi beats music soaking up airspace in the background.  The forces of macho and kindness don't know what to do with each other.  I am still figuring out how to push and pull those different levers.  Recently, in my journey of overcoming both fear and failure, I went back to my meditative practices.  As part of that journey, I went back to an oldie but a goodie: “All too frequently we relate like timid birds who don’t dare to leave the nest. Here we sit in a nest that’s getting pretty ...

Set the scene - you're driving your car, windows down, music blaring, and nothing but openness in front of you.  How do you feel? Great, I imagine.  Those conditions enabled you to feel freely  and genuinely you .  Unencumbered by intrusive thoughts, distractions, and hefty responsibilities, you were allowed to feel yourself.  This  is the feeling we are all after and the secret?  You can have it if you just allow it to be. 1)  We're told to be something else.   There is no world we can live in without some external forces us instructing us how to live.  On the one hand - that's good, right?  Objectively, we have sources of inspiration - should we choose to narrow our focus.  However, on the other hand, those external forces are often fake, curated, and doctored.  Those external forces us are trying to steer us to be something other than ourselves and that's a real problem. 2)  Individualism is not a bad thing.  ...