Rules of Engagement

Hello, Cadre. Good morning. It is 11 o'clock on the East Coast, 10 o'clock in the central time zone. We're all coming together. How is everybody today? I'm doing pretty well. I'm doing pretty well. Sometimes I judge my days at this point because I have so much more latitude over my time than I did at any point during my previous career that sometimes I assess my time by how much attention I have and how much. Not efficiency, but like, am I able to engage in upward trend activities of my choosing?

That is actually how I phrase it, that's one of my goals, is that most of my time is spent in upward trend activities of my choosing. What do I mean by that? Mindlessly scrolling. Good morning, Jocelyn 1971. I'm talking about upward trend activities of my choosing. Mindless scrolling is not beyond about five or ten minutes or sometimes I think I want to go see some videos like Cadre. Right? Cadre is not mindless scrolling for me. Cadre is I really want to see people talking about things that matter to me or that will help bring my brain together in a new way.

So that's, that's one thing, but just mindless scrolling. You know, there does come a point where I say this is not how I choose to spend my time. And then I do my best to turn away from that behavior. Upward trend activities of my choosing is one way I can tell how anxious I am, is how capable am I of engaging in upper trend activities of my choosing. That's like half my definition of zest. The other half, I mean, my definition of zest is to be present and pleased. What does that mean? Upper trend activities of my choosing.

And then my goal around my anxiety is to have the mean voices, like the ruminative thinking, the panic thinking, to be less loud, less frequent and less lengthy. That's been my goal and I've done great work on that. But in the course of working on that, I realized something important. And this is a rule of engagement of mine. This is rule of Engagement 26 that I'm about to talk about when I am really anxious. Most of my life I have been scared active. It means I've got this engine of anxiety. It's just making me go, go, go and do stuff and do stuff and do stuff and do stuff.

And that was very helpful in elected life, I will tell you that much. And for many of you, I imagine you may be scared active. Right? When my life slowed down a little bit, I also discovered that that energy, I was spending it on work, which Meant I was regenerating it all the time, but I was spending it all the time. And my life when I was an elected official matched the feeling. There was always something to worry about, and especially when I was mayor. There was always some crisis. There was always something going on.

So my anxiety, how I felt inside and my reality outside of me matched. So my anxiety could just keep chugging along and I could keep being scared, active. And when my life slowed down, my anxiety and it just built up and built up so much that I slowed down, it became harder for me to do what needed doing. Now pretty quickly, about a year and a half after I left, two years after I left office, it wasn't so bad, right? I was still figuring it out, or it hadn't really come to me. But then pandemic happened, lockdown happened, and here I was in my house all day, every day.

And some that was great in one way. The people dying was horrible and continues to be horrible, let's be frank. But the not being expected to leave my house, not traveling, was really good for me for a while. I got a lot more rest. I could get some perspective, actually wrote a book proposal, but the reason I could do that, but I also got overwhelmed, right? And so I could write for half an hour a day, but then, you know, I could do two or three things a day. I was used to doing a hundred things a day, but I could do two, three, four, five things a day.

And then I was tapped out. And then I would just float. I would dissociate, basically, and dissociate by scrolling or by reading stuff that didn't demand much of me or watched a lot of tv. And I think we were all doing that. It was a very overwhelming time. But the times have not gotten less overwhelming, right? We've just gotten more active. But I would say the world has been pretty much knocking on our trauma and anxiety doors pretty steadily. At least for me, for since 2016. But maybe for other people since the pandemic.

Let me know. I would love to hear what people's experience of this is. But here's what I learned. Here's how I learned this rule of engagement. It took me a long time. I really started intentionally thinking about this freeze form of my anxiety. Gosh, almost three years ago now, I read the Body Keeps the Score like so many of us do, and I could only read it three pages at a time. And I kept throwing it at the wall and yelling at poor Bessel Van der Kolk who could not hear me. But if you know him.

Please tell him thanks for the good book. I kept thinking, why can't I do X, Y, and Z? I could tell, you know, the one thing I had to realize was that my life was organized around my fear. My life was organized around my anxiety. And that the first shift I needed to make was to organize my life around my healing. Meaning I had to create time for anything that was going to work to help heal me, even if it took time away from work I thought I should be doing work I thought I should be doing but couldn't do.

I was, like, just sitting there frozen, like a roll, you know, a character in a. In a video game, just waiting. I don't know for what. And then I would burst of action and then just stand there swaying, you know, for anybody who plays video games. So I needed to organize my life around healing, which means time for. I found a new therapist. I found bodywork, working out, time to meditate. I am in recovery, recovery meetings. I went to more of them. I still go to more of them. And it had to be okay.

That I need. I call it putting the bumpers in the gutters of my bowling lane. Like, for me to keep moving forward, I just need, you know, those bumpers. Otherwise I'll go in the gutter every time. And so for me, my bumpers are, as I said, recovery meetings, working out therapy, counseling, doing my best to get enough sleep, eating as well as I can figure out, you know, food with actual nutrition in it as much as possible, etc. I can probably do another live stream about what else goes into that.

Oh, fun. I have to have a lot of fun. I have to. Because otherwise everything else just becomes so dreary so quickly. I just go. So I have a lot of fun. My kind of fun, which I've already talked about here, but in those states, you know, there are still bad days. And this happened to me last week, a couple days last week. And the good news is, it had been a long time since this had happened because I've really been focusing on this. I had a day where I was like, I cannot do what is on my to do list.

I am too scared or too tired, too freaked out. I'm too frozen to do what's on my to do list. And in the past, I would just freeze and then feel bad about it and then just, I don't know, wait around until I had the, you know, I don't know what I thought would happen. Like somehow I'd magically feel differently, you know, one of my Rules of engagement. Move a muscle. Change of healing. I realized this is the rule of engagement. When I'm frozen, I'm not choosing between the most important thing and the second most important thing.

I'm choosing between doing anything, doing nothing. Let me say that again, when I am frozen, I am not choosing between doing the most important thing and the second most important thing. Like should I craft this email for my email list or should I be rewriting my book proposal? It's not like I'm choosing between those two things, right? What I'm choosing between is doing anything, doing nothing. And that is how I learned that on those days, you know, what's going to feel good at the end of the day?

What's going to feel better at the end of the day than having sat around on my phone or like, I don't know, online, shopped for things that at this point at least, it's stuff I usually need. Often I choose an activity that requires me to move. I'll put on an audiobook and I will tidy something, I will clean something, I will run a physical errand, I'll make do some laundry. Sometimes it's I'll, you know, rewrite a to do list or I will, you know what seems like a fun activity on my to do list? I will look at my fun list and I'll say, look, if I'm going to do nothing today or something and I might as well do something fun, right?

So I'll watch a movie that's on my list that is an upward trend activity of my choosing is a movie I've chosen and I sit there and actually watch it and pay attention to it. Mindlessly scrolling, trying to pick something that is not an upward trend activity of my choosing. Packing a lot in here today. My definition of zest, my definition of anxiety, what it means to what my goals are about. My anxiety. My goal around my anxiety is to most of my time as upward trend activities of my choosing, which if I'm doing something versus nothing, I have attained that, that goal and it feels much better at the end of the day.

And to have the voices in my head, you know, the embarrassment from when I was in 10th grade and said something, you know, felt I fell down going up the steps in 10th grade, that doesn't haunt me as much as makes me laugh. But you know, the stuff that haunts you in the middle of the night, that's less loud, less frequent and less lengthy or the, I mean, I suppose I would add to my goal is this other word that's really important to me and I'll talk about it some other time. Is pronoia this the conviction that the world is conspiring on your behalf?

It's the opposite of paranoia. That's also, you know, if I can visualize positive outcomes, I'm doing much better than just sitting around visualizing negative outcomes. The negative outcomes don't come true 99% of the time. So. But it doesn't stop me from doing that. So even if the positive outcomes don't come true 99% of the time, it's still a funner way to spend time in my brain with my thoughts is to imagine positive outcomes. It also helps sort of rip me out of the frozen, you know, scared, passive state that I sometimes get into.

So when I say yesterday, this week so far has been pretty good, what I mean is, yeah, I was able to engage in upper trend activities of my choosing. The mean voices were less loud, less frequent, and less lengthy than they used to be. But maybe a little louder and a little more frequent than the average over the last six months. Okay. Right. That's another day we'll talk about this. You know, I would try and put all of that into a laundry basket and just set it aside now as I go about my day because, oh, look, here's this entire compendium of difficulties I face.

None of them are real. I have hashed through them. They're getting boring at this point. When you. When I get bored with my stuff, that's a really good sign. That's a really good sign. So let me know, I guess, in the comments, anything that you thought, you can always reach me on Cadre. That's my thought this week. Took a while to get to the rule of engagement, but you might want to ask yourself if you are struggling, if you're procrastinating especially. I'm not. You know, Gretchen Rubin says work is the most dangerous form of procrastination.

Agreed. But it's a little bit different. It's like, look, if I'm not going to get anything done today, I might as well get something done today while I work on what's getting in the way of feeling like I can do the biggest thing, the most important thing, right. The help and support that I need to think through that. But in the meantime, and maybe the something is I need to call somebody and talk about the fact that I'm too scared to take action on this thing that's really important to me. But that's one of my rules of engagement, is to remember that There are just some days where I'm choosing between doing anything and doing nothing.

I am not choosing between the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth most important things. None of those are going to get done when I'm in that spot. But it can be a Runway back into flight. Right? And not being scared passive or scared active, to actually have a life built not on fear. That's my goal. All right, Cadre, see you next week.