The fastest way to the bottom
And how to change directions
In our efforts to make the best possible decisions, we are often met with mediocre options; options that we are flat out not excited about… or even dread.
I could be talking about the upcoming presidential elections, but let’s widen that to everything else we get to decide on in our lives. Let’s start with how we choose to spend our day from the moment we wake up.
Do you wait until you have to wake up to wake up? Or can you get up on your own terms?
Do you start your day focused on your to-do list? Or do you start your day focused on what’s most important to you, intrinsically?
First the to-do’s, because this is the beginning of throwing away your decisions:
Those dang to-do lists: while crossing things off might provide a dash of momentary pleasure and sense of accomplishment, it’s a trap that sets a substandard tone to your day, keeping you busy with the lowest hanging fruit in the overarching theme of your life, causing you to hope for some meaningful time late into the night when everyone finally goes to sleep… which negatively affects your circadian rhythm and feeds into your morning dread.
In case you haven’t already realized this, to-do lists don’t get any closer to disappearing each time you cross something off. Like laundry, it never ends.
To make it go away, use the prime times of your day, when your energy is best, to focus on what’s most important to YOU - not as a mother, daughter, or wife - but as a conscious individual who wants life. In doing so, your enjoyment of motherhood, relationships, and all around options will dramatically increase. Strengthen this habit by scheduling yourself into your calendar and following through. Even if you work during the prime times of your day, you can apply this to how you choose to allocate your time and the altitude you bring to your roles.
Here’s the fastest way to the BOTTOM:
Make decisions - or vote - AGAINST (instead of for) things.
i.e. against discomfort: I don’t like conflict, so I said yes.
i.e. against fear: I don’t want that candidate as president, so I have to vote for the other one.
We think we’re being responsible and nice (acronym for Not In Charge of my Experience, or Not Initiating Critical Effort). But what we’re really doing is feeding what we don’t want. And then we wonder why things don’t get better.
Here’s the quickest way UP:
Make decisions - or vote - FOR something.
By vote, I mean, vote on behalf of yourself when you choose to get up in the morning, choose what and how you want to eat, and choose how you allocate your time. Vote with your pocketbook when you decide what to buy and who to buy it from. Vote who you honestly believe in at the polls.
Know what you want and then choose what supports it. Contrary to what others may justify, this is the more responsible path.
If you don’t choose what you are for, you become everyone else’s tool.
Justification isn’t wisdom, excellence, or intelligence. It’s fear. It’s okay if you can’t go beyond fear right now; just acknowledge that you are choosing from fear, and that awareness will begin to seed a different path in the future.
When you choose what you despise less, you’ll still find yourself despising.
When you choose what you value, you’ll raise the bar on everything. Because life is whole-istic.
Have courage and choose what you value, whenever you can.
Be FOR something. Whether you believe it or not, you are contagious: your courage to be FOR things will help usher our society to the tipping point where enough people are choosing from value over fear, and that will make for a better world.
What you pay attention to grows.
You wanna tell someone they’re dumb? They’ll prove you right, even when they don’t mean to, and they’ll seem to get dumber by the day, because at the unconscious level, that’s what you’re paying attention to. Even if for a moment they surprise you with brilliance, their margin for error is narrow, and you’ll see that moment as a blip. Your perception of them remains “correct” to you because you have fed their insecurity (or bravado, the same thing), or because it won’t matter what they do; you’ll just keep seeing what you believe. What you pay attention to grows. To the contrary, the margin for error for what you might value, i.e. an Ivy League PhD, is super duper high with the benefit of doubt granted generously, their brilliance continuously being affirmed through perception.
Pay attention to what you want to see more of, and that’s what will happen:
If you don’t want your child to run, instead of saying “stop running!” say “walk.”
If you’re tempted to say, what’s wrong with you? Try letting them know what’s right in their efforts.
If you say you want peace and you justify war, you feed into war. Instead of saying, what are we supposed to do then? Turn on your creative and cognitive function and focus on coming up with peaceful options instead of leaning into the old conventions, like we have no other choice but to kill them. Listen openly to leaders who offer peaceful options. Talk to people who vote for peace.
If you say you want justice by hurting the person who hurts others, you feed into violence and get further away from justice. Accountability is something quite different from revenge, so this justification doesn’t work. Then how do you get someone to stop? Not by mimicking them, that’s for sure. Try responding to the reason they’re doing it in the first place. If you don’t know what that reason is, pause and look deeper before you react.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, this feeds the continual rise of misleaders and the crumbling of integrity. Vote FOR someone.
If you complain about not having enough, you feed scarcity. Look around at all that you have and you will realize how wealthy you truly are.
If you complain about others, you feed disconnection. Look for the best in everyone, including yourself, and you will attract true connection and Joy.
Both the good and the bad may be “reality,” but what you pay attention to GROWS.
For the first 9 years of my marriage, I didn’t want children because I was estranged from my parents with whom I never got along in childhood. I felt that the likelihood of me raising kids the way my parents did would be pretty high because that was all I knew. I would have been right had I focused on not being like my parents.
Instead, I focused, moment-to-moment, on answering the question:
What kind of parent do I want to be?
Which allows for a break in cycle.
You can do this with everything in your life:
I don’t want that in a person. → What do I want in a person?
I don’t want to eat there → Where do I want to eat?
I don’t want to do that → What do I want to do?
I hate when he does that → What would I like for him to do instead?
I dread getting up in the morning, I don’t want to get out of bed → what can I do to change that? What can I add first thing in the morning to make it better?
It’s so hard → How can I make it fun?
I don’t want to parent like that —> How do I want to parent?
It’s super easy to identify what you don’t want or like.
It’s not so easy to know what you want.
But it’s worth everything to find out what’s important to you.
You are the co-CEO of your life.
As co-CEO, you must know what you want. This is what it means to be CO-ceo. The other CO is life itself - the Universe - and all the things you can’t control.
Don’t relinquish the part you can control.
At the same time, remember there’s a partner. Know that the Universe is always conspiring in your favor, so trust their turn, give space for others, don’t manipulate. It’s a dance.
Stick with your deeper values; stop justifying yourself out of them. If you’re unsure what decision to make, try one out for size. The experience of making a wrong decision will help you get to the right one, and you will gain wisdom and strength from it.
Choosing AGAINST will put others in charge of your experiences because you’ve just reacted to something external. Choosing FOR will put you in charge because you have initiated something much more intrinsic and valuable. To choose against something is to lose yourself. To choose FOR something is to affirm you, your values, and the world around you. When you do that, the world around you will unfold in the most amazing ways.
Love, Savitree
So good. Thank you for your wisdom!