Rules of Engagement

Good morning, Cadre. How's everybody doing? I first, I want to say a congratulations to Cadre. The app is up for Cadre. The company is up for best startup. I believe it is. There's a link that Luke posted in the app where we can all go vote for Cadre as best new startup. And that's what I'll be doing because what a fabulous space Cadre is. What a great resource. Access to resources and access to each other in the midst of whatever's going on. The good, the bad, and the ugly. In a minute, we'll start talking about my guideline 29.

But I was thinking about these necklaces, because they do tend to get tangled in each other. But I am almost always wearing jewelry. I'm always wearing jewelry that means something or symbolizes something to me, in part because I always have a word of the year, and then I create a ring. I'm not trying to flip anyone off. I create a ring with the word on it. This one says allow, because that's my word of the year, and I'm always wearing that just to remind myself of the word of the year. And then at the end of the year when I pick a new word, there's a company on Etsy I use to make these rings for me.

Good morning, Shannon. That prints these rings for me. And I officially swapped them out on January 1st, and it's become a fun ritual of mine every year, so I'm always wearing that. But necklaces, I have a number of necklaces. What am I wearing today? This is a skull necklace. Tiny, little, teeny, tiny skull that a friend of mine gave me almost 20 years ago. And it means in my world, it means this too, shall pass. And so if you see me wearing this, usually, it's because I have to remind myself that something difficult will pass.

This is a symbol of an organization I like. And then this is my sobriety date, July 17, 1989, on this necklace. This is a lantern, which is the symbol of the place I went to college. We get a lantern in your first year. I went to a women's college called Bryn Mawr, and there's a lot of traditions, and one of them is you get a lantern. And this is a silver rendering of the lantern. Good morning, Jules. And the last one, what am I wearing as the last one? Oh, yeah, I have my. This is a relatively new one.

It's a mustard seed. I am a cultural Christian at best, but I have a deep and abiding faith, and to a lot of Christians, a mustard seed Represents, you know, the faith, you know, as small as a mustard seed is enough for God to work with, basically, is the teaching. And it's just for me to remind myself one of the allow things for my years for me to act. Allow myself to act like I believe in the higher power I believe in. So that necklace helps in your mind to act like I believe in the higher power I believe in.

And then in the morning, as part of my writing, I add the sentence and this today, this means then whatever it means for the day. So good morning, everybody. I'm so glad you're here. And I still don't have a great name because I have my rules of engagement, which are, you know, what do I use to make decisions? What do I use to make choices about how to spend my time or how to live? In my head, I also have even more guidelines I've been collecting. Gretchen Rubin calls them secrets of adulthood. I call them guidelines.

I also have an operating manual for myself that I am assembling what I know works for me personally. My guidelines are. There's probably overlap there with all of these, but guidelines isn't the final name, but it's what I'll call them today. But Anyway, guideline number 29 is move a muscle, change a feeling. Move a muscle, change a feeling. I am not talking about, like, exercise, anorexia, and I am not talking about keep yourself running so fast that you can't face anything in your life. I am talking about especially if I'm in a freeze state, especially if I'm just scrolling.

There's a place I sit downstairs after I've eaten. If I'm sitting there too long, doing whatever puzzles, reading, even if I'm just going through email, whatever it is, move a muscle, change a feeling. So that's one way that I use move a muscle change of feeling is just get up and move around. And it's often if my anxiety gets big enough, I tend to shut down, right? If it gets overwhelming enough. And I've talked a lot in here and those moments, I am not deciding between doing the most important thing on my to do list and doing the second most important thing on my to do list.

I am deciding between doing something and doing anything. And if I'm in that freeze state, often the most useful anything is to do a physical chore or task. This morning, as a matter of fact, it was putting some laundry away and making decisions and labeling some drawers so that I actually have a visual reminder. You know, this goes here, these go there. Because I make decisions If I can't see things, it's hard for me to remember that they're there. So labels help with that. But also, if I make all these decisions and I don't label them, then I'm like, is this where my sweatpants were going?

Or was this where, you know, all of the sweatpants are just the lightweight ones? You know, what is it supposed to be? And then things eventually become a mess. It's useful to have things that have a place, and for me, it's useful to label that place. So that's one way to move a muscle. Change of feeling is just often I will do dishes. I will just stand up and do dishes. Thank you, Shannon. I love this rule, too. People talk about it occasionally in recovery, which is where I heard it, but it just seems so applicable for anything.

So move a muscle, change a feeling helps me. I often dishes are my default, or finding some laundry, but I can take a walk around the block. I can go find my cats. I can. Whatever it is. Some chores around the house is often what I turn to if I can't figure out what else to do. And I don't want to just freeze in place. So that's one way of using move a muscle, change of feeling. If you get frozen like me, or you just get frozen, the way I talk about frozen is I park my brain in neutral so that I don't have to think, you know, I have to face the fear of doing the thing I'm afraid to do.

But I also don't want to face the fear of feeling bad that I'm not doing it. So I park my brain in neutral so I don't sit around feeling bad, but I also don't do the thing. And that's when I realized, okay, the choice is not between feeling bad and doing the thing. The choice is between doing nothing and doing something. And anything counts as something, you know, and so that's why the moving part of it can be helpful. It could be something at my desk, but that doesn't usually get me out of whatever it is I'm worried about.

That usually isn't a great response to fear, is sitting in front of another screen. So, but another, and this, I think, is the original intention, when I heard it, of move a muscle. Change of feeling was if you're sitting around feeling bad about yourself, about life, if you are sitting around worrying, if you are in fear, if you are in resentment, this is a big one for people in recovery, particularly addicts. We love to sit around nursing our resentments like A drink. And like a drink, the resentments will kill us because they will lead to a drink.

So if those things are happening, if my brain is a neighborhood I don't want to walk in alone, is an alley I don't want to enter. And most of you know, most of those thoughts are dead ends or they don't lead anywhere good, if that's what my brain is doing. Exercise is very helpful. Move a muscle, change a feeling. And that can be the walk around the block for me. I do orangetheory Fitness a few days a week, just as maintenance for my anxiety and mental state. C. for the last couple weeks. It legitimately got cold here, like below 20 for days, and I think we actually hit below 10 at some point.

Exercise, right? Move a muscle, change a feeling, even if it's just somatic exercises, you know, pat your body down, get that qi flowing. Do some yoga. People do yoga. I do not do yoga. I have reasons for that that are legitimate, that I've checked out with various mental health professionals and people in recovery, and we all agree yoga is not the thing for me. Not because it's bad, it's very good, and it's good for you, but my emotional response to it. Not, oh, I'm doing something that's releasing emotion, but it harkens back to some unusual difficulties I had as a young person.

I'm just gonna leave it there. But a lot of people love yoga, so do your yoga, running, dancing, whatever it is. You know, you can go to any women's magazine, especially in January, and they'll give you a list of exercises to take a look at. But move a muscle, change of feeling, right? It was such an important shift for me when I realized that my exercise was medicine. It wasn't cosmetics. I don't think I've ever said that before, but it was a really big shift when I realized that working out was medicine, that there's a lot of pharmaceuticals I don't have to take because I work out.

For me, it's medicine, and it's not cosmetics. I mean, it is cosmetics. I like the way my muscles grow. I like not putting on as much weight as I would put on if I weren't working out. All of that. I have my vanity, right? But it's medicine. It's medicine in the positive sense, like the kind of medicine that heals you. So move a muscle, change a feeling. That is rule it's not a rule of engagement precisely. It's whatever I'm going to call the guidelines. Number 29 on the list that I have posted over there.

Sometimes the numbers shift to. Eventually I will arrange them all so that I like the way they're arranged and I just add to them. But not at the moment. Yeah, I was thinking back to the day I created rule, like rule of engagement number two. As it turns out, I think I advertised it as number one, but it's number two, because rule number one is love what you love. Rule number two is start from where you are, not from where you wish you were. I've been using that one a lot lately because sometimes with some habits, I have to start with the smallest possible action to get myself to go.

And I feel bad. I'm like, gosh, I should be able to do more than this. It's like, well, you got to start from where you are, Betsy, and you can't start from where you wish you were or where you're pretending to be. That doesn't work. But the day I realized I had to start from where I was at, and I've talked about this story a lot. Someday I should maybe I'll post the picture on Cadre so you can all see pictures from around that time, I was significantly heavier than I am now. I was carrying a lot of weight in a bad way.

I was smoking a pack a day. I was drinking, and I was binge eating sugar and grazing sugar all the time. And I got sober. I decided to start exercising. And I went to the YMCA near where I went to college, Bryn Mawr, you know, in Pennsylvania. And I was on the treadmill, and I was like, well, I'm just gonna have to do what I can do. And I could do five minutes at zero percent incline. And I think. I don't even think it was at three miles an hour. I think it was, like, at two miles an hour. And I could do five minutes before my calves started burning so badly I had to stop.

Now, if my calves burned like that, I would. I know what to do, but that's what I could do. And I said, okay, well, I'm gonna start from here and work my way up. And that's what I mean when I say I sometimes have to ramp things back to the tiniest possible movement. There's something I'm doing in my work. I work for myself. And right now, the tiniest possible movement is just to open up a certain document every day. I don't have to do anything else. To celebrate. I don't have to do anything else to have it count for the day.

I just have to open up the document and look at it for, like, five seconds. That's it. That will be the completed task for the day. That's what I mean when I say start from where you are, not from where you wish you were. If that's as much as I can manage today, that's what I'm gonna do. That is my five minutes on the treadmill at 0% incline at two miles an hour that I started 35 years. 35. Yeah. Almost 36 years ago. 35 years ago, I start from where I am. So that's rule of engagement number two.

But that was in support of move a muscle, Change of feeling. That changed my life, hopping on that treadmill. Sorry. I went to orangetheory Fitness this morning and I just did weightlifting. It was my second class this week. I'm gonna go two more times. I've run two marathons in my life. Thousands of miles. And it all started because I was willing to take five minutes on the treadmill 35 years ago. That five. I remember it so clearly. That five minutes on the treadmill 35 years Ago is the reason I could go to Orange Theory Fitness this morning.

I've been going for 10 years to orangetheory. Yeah. That's amazing. So guideline, whatever, I'm gonna call it number 29. Thanks, Jules. Thanks for liking that thought. Number 29, move a muscle, change a feeling. See how it works for you. I'll post about it in Cadre and let me know if you try it or what your experience with it has been, because that's fun for me in the app. So have a great rest of your week, everybody. I hope that everything goes really well for you for the rest of this week.