Our Challenges and Struggles Always Come Back Around

It is a peculiar thing to be revisiting the struggles, musings and insights of your past self, and that is what I'm doing as I put the finishing touches on 12-Minute Method Book 2, How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up. As with How to Start When You're Stuck, the advantage of writing a book about the creative process is that you know where to turn when you're struggling.

I remember Rich Litvin, one of my coaches, talking about how he felt like growth was like spiralling up a cylinder. The cylinder has lines down it: one for relationships, one for work, one for family, one for money, and more, one for each of the strands of your personal growth. You're spiralling up it but you don't always remember that. Instead you think 'Ha! I've sorted money now. Won't have to deal with that again.'

Until, that is, you spiral back round the cylinder and come to the money line again. 'Oh no. Not you, Money. I thought we were finished forever.'

My feeling is that in my experience the thing that metaphor misses is that we can get better at handling our things, the lines down the side. For me, it's more like a cone, with the wide end at the bottom. When we're starting out it took me weeks or months to rumble with my money issues, or to wrestle my schedule into shape. It took each of my struggles a long time to work through. But it's about 10 years now since I really started to see how much we could affect our experience of life by growing, by changing our mindset, and I'm better at dealing with some things than I used to be.

In How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up is a chapter about an experience which really cemented a learning I had been thinking about for months or years. The sense that actually, all we can do is show up as us and if some other people don't like us, it's on them, as long as we've done what we can to live our values. In this article, about presenting a leadership workshop at the University of Edinburgh, I was wracked with anxiety about what clothes to wear until the voice came to me: I am what I am.

This week, three years later, I was facilitating a very similar workshop at the University of Glasgow, wearing very similar clothes, and feeling a pang of the same anxiety. But it's four years on. I'm changed. I've embodied that insight far more than I had in 2019. The anxiety was tiny in comparison. I moved through that section of the cone swiftly.

Harder to accept this week was this lesson, learned and written about in 2018: that the secret to our happiness is within us, about accepting what is actually here and seeing it as the perfect thing in any given moment. On the way back from Glasgow our train was cancelled and the replacement train was due to turn an already late arrival to London (11:30pm) into a really late arrival (1:10am). Then I realised I'd left my laptop charger on the first train. Then the second train sat in Wolverhampton for more than an hour waiting for a train manager to arrive. I got home at just after 3am, with three important calls the next day.

I didn't accept what was happening in those moments. But, looking back, I didn't do too badly. I swore loudly when I realised it might be 1:10am, but remained mostly good humoured. I looked under the seat an irrational amount of times for a cable that wasn't there, but I still managed a couple of hours of disturbed, light sleep on the train home, not kept awake by the frustration of losing the charger.

In the morning I was stressed and worried about the day ahead, with no laptop and lots of work to do. And my work requires concentration and attention - not helped by only sleeping from 3:20-6am.

I did manage to go back to bed after my daughter was at nursery. And after that, managed to move through the section of the cone about resisting what is actually here now a lot faster than I used to. I remembered that - as I'd been writing in How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up - we can choose far more about our experience of life than we normally think. I realised that, with the two hours on the train and the 90 minutes after Leah was at nursery, I actually got pretty close to the total amount of sleep I would have got if we'd got in at 11:30pm.

And when I noticed that and chose to see life that way, accepting what was actually here and trusting that it was perfect, the day opened up. My experience shifted.

I asked the 12-Minute Method Facebook group this week, what are the foundations you need?

It was a reflection on this experience: I thought my foundations were good sleep, my normal breakfast, exercise. All of which I didn't have on this occasion. Instead, the foundation for my great work is my mindset. It is all the growth I have wrestled through over the last decade. That's what enables me to navigate the cone of my growth and to do three important meetings with skill and presence, even after the world through some curve balls at me.

And that insight, I suppose, is what makes all this experience from the last few days... perfect. Ish.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!