🏴☠️ "Burn the Boats," they say: The Story Behind Rolling in D🤦🏻♀️h (Part 3)
But what if they get burned down for you?
This post is a continuation of the first two in a four-part series:
The Story Behind Rolling in D🤦🏻♀️h: Divine Disaster Diaries (Part 1)
“Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control.” —Julia Cameron ✍️ June 11, 2023 What a shitshow of a week. We’re six months into 2023. I’m three weeks away from my business turning 12. Four months away from turning 40. Life and work haven’t felt this hard since 2013, a decade ago, one I dubbed in hindsight as my “apocalypse year.”
The Meeting: The Story Behind Rolling in D🤦🏻♀️h (Part 2)
I met with the new Point of Contact from my Biggest Client on a Tuesday. The whole day was noticeably gloomy, inside my body and outside of the house. A loud crack of thunder reverberated through the apartment just ten minutes before the call began, sending my anxiety peaking further.
In the introduction to my previous book, Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One (2016), I say that when it comes to making career moves, sometimes we intentionally pivot, but just as often we get pivoted.
The mantra I adopted when writing that book has been taunting me this year:
“If change is the only constant, let’s get better at it.”
No matter how much I have improved at managing my anxiety in the years since I published Pivot, the level of life complexity and responsibility in my life seemed to accelerate so much faster.
🗣️ The Boardroom of My Brain
On Thursday I recorded a Pivot podcast episode with Adrian, where he walked me through Internal Family Systems coaching, revealing some of my more vocal parts, personality aspects developed in childhood making attempts at protection.
“No bad parts,” IFS founder Dr. Richard Schwartz reminds us.
Each of us hosts a menagerie of parts: exiles (adaptive responses formed as children), managers (trying to protect those exiles from feeling that familiar shame and dread), and firefighters (who seek to numb out rather than feel anything at all).
I cried on air while processing.