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One thought that immediately reduced my anxiety
Lately, when I’ve been anxious or stressed, here’s something I’ve been saying to myself:
Is anything actually wrong, outside of the swirling thoughts in my head?
And then I will empirically and freshly answer the question, by looking around me.
Does that sound weird? Confusing? I’ll give a personal example: The last time I did this, a week ago, I was sitting in my living room, totally spun out and anxious about something.
And then:
I looked at the blue-grey Ikea couch I was sitting on.
That was fine.
I looked around my living room, over to my table.
Nothing wrong with that – my husband was nearby. My kids were asleep in their cribs. The house was quiet.
I wiggled my toes.
Nothing wrong there.
Arms and legs were fine, too.
Huh, I thought to myself. In this particular moment, on this particular Ikea couch, in my particular house… nothing is actually wrong.
Huh. Nothing is wrong right here and right now.
And just like that…anxiety went from a 10 to a 6.5.
Not gone, but definitely…quieter.
…
Of course, I am not the first person in the universe to have this revelation (see also: the Buddha). But remembering to ask the question, and empirically looking for the answer, have helped me to calm the swirling waves of emotion + worry quite a bit lately.
I wonder if this reminder might help you, too.
…
As always, I’m rooting for you in the week ahead. You’ve got this.
Katie
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One thing that helps me manage my anxiety
I’ve been experiencing an uneasy feeling in my body.
Recently, I was anxious about a new step I was taking in my business.
Quite anxious.
As I was exploring my anxiety, I noticed that I also had the thought: Because I’m anxious, something *must* be wrong.
My clients know that one of my favorite things is identifying thought errors — subtle errors in reasoning in the brain. And it became clear to me: “Because I’m anxious, something must be wrong” was a thought error.
My brain had simply made a mistake. It wasn't true that because I was anxious, something had to be wrong.
Actually, I could be anxious, but nothing could be wrong.
Which was exactly true in this particular moment: nothing was wrong at all. Rather, my anxiety was actually simply telling me that I was at my developmental edge — doing something new, and, yes, a bit risky.
I played with a new thought, instead: I can be anxious, and nothing can be wrong.
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Here’s some advice that might help reduce your anxiety:
Have you ever heard the advice, in the self-development world, to just re-interpret anxiety as “excitement”? You aren’t anxious, you’re just buzzing with excitement!
I have often felt annoyed with this advice. No, I would think to myself, I’m actually anxious.
But this new thought actually did feel believable:
I can be anxious, and nothing can be wrong, I told myself.
I can be anxious, and it just means that I’m at my developmental edge.
So, I have been reminding myself a lot lately: I can be anxious, and nothing can be wrong. I’m just at my developmental edge.
And then taking a big breath, continuing to feel anxious, and moving forward.
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As always, I’m rooting for you in the week ahead. You’ve got this.
Katie
p.s. Most of us have thought errors so subtle, and so personalized, that it can be hard (or impossible) to spot them on our own. That’s where working with a coach can be life-changing: just shifting a few key thoughts can completely change your experience of your own life. If you’d like to work with me, learn more here.
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How to feel sad in a useful way
One of my clients had been feeling “bad” for a long time.
This client was a C-suite executive at a major regional organization, and a highly competent professional.
But he was also completely overwhelmed at work, and exhausted all day. He had so much anxiety in his body, that he’d stopped feeling his body at all. He spent all day in his (very smart) head.
This client was desperate to feel better — understandably!
And yet, one of the first things I told him was: “You need to focus on processing your feelings.”
He balked at this. “I feel all the time!” he told me. “If I come home from work and my wife’s not there, all I do is feel anxious. All of my thoughts and worries and anxieties come rushing back in.”
And that was exactly what I feared.
One thing that I have observed — which I think is not said often enough — is that we can “feel bad” frequently — but without actually processing that emotion.
You will know that you are actually processing your emotion when you feel some amount of relief afterwards. There is an experience of metabolizing the feeling — allowing it to flow through you, and become something different.
You might not feel joyful and sparkly afterwards – but you will feel a sense that the intensity is at least somewhat less than before (and, typically, significantly less).
This often requires inhabiting the feeling or sensation much more deeply and directly than you are doing now.
And something miraculous typically occurs when we do this: not only do we feel much better, we also often get useful insights about our lives: information about what we do and don’t want, or what next actions to take.
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Learning how to process emotions can take some time — it’s subtle and iterative, and something I often do with my 1:1 life coaching clients — but today, I wanted to share a few prompts to begin that process:
Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and call to mind an emotional or physical sensation you’ve been avoiding.
Notice what that feeling is like in your body. Is it a tightness in your chest? A zinging in your belly? A rock in your throat?
(If you can’t feel anything, don’t worry. Many people feel numb at first and unable to access physical sensations. But as virtually all of my clients would attest, it can be learned.)Do not try to change the feeling, push it down, or make it go away. Just let it be there, however it happens to be.
Mentally tell that feeling: You can stay as long as you’d like, and become whatever you want to become — bigger, smaller, something different.The key is then to sit with that sensation, and give it all of the space it needs. I like to imagine kindly giving the feeling an enormous, spacious room to be in, or a wide field. Sometimes it may feel like the feeling gets bigger, more intense. Sometimes new feelings will arise.
Allow each feeling to arise, becoming whatever it needs to be. Typically after several minutes of this, you will start to feel better.
When I did this with my (admittedly skeptical) client – he looked at me afterward with some surprise: I feel better, he told me.
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So many of us spend our lives feeling low-grade bad, but we avoid those feelings for obvious reasons: If we felt them more directly, we’d feel more bad, right?
And yet, the opposite is typically true: when we feel them directly, we end up feeling better, not worse. Typically, the feelings never last as long as we expect them to.
But the only way around them is through them.
And if you take one thing away from this essay let it be this:
If you’ve been feeling bad, for a long time, it might be time to point your compass directly towards the swamp of messy feelings.
You might blow your mind.
…
As always, I’m rooting for you in the week ahead. You’ve got this.
Katie
p.s. My past and current clients are probably smiling as they read this essay: few of my clients can escape working with me, without learning how to process feelings and sensations better. Almost all of them become less afraid of intense feelings and more capable of moving on from them more effectively.
If you’ve been feeling low-level (or high-level) “bad” for a long time, I’d highly recommend working with me 1:1. The first steps are here.
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That time I was convinced I was a bad mom
One of my sons has some health issues, and recently, I was telling my coach about all the things I could (and maybe should?) be doing to make sure he gets the best possible care.
She listened carefully, and then she said to me:
Katie, I hear you that there are more things you could be doing for your son.
What percent of the time are you thinking about those things? Versus what percent of the time are you thinking about all the things you are *already* doing for him and his health?
And that’s when the pin could drop.
“Uh, it’s basically 98% on things I’m not doing,” I told her.
When we hung up the call, I promptly made a list of all of the things I’ve done to support him and his health.
You know what? There were a lot of things on that list.
You know what else? After I made that list, I felt a lot less anxious.
I even thought: Hey, I’m a pretty solid mom over here.
And: Hey, maybe my son *is* getting great care.
So here’s your invitation:
Worried that you’re not good at your job? Make a list of all of the ways in which you are incredible at your job.
Worried that you’re a “bad person”? Make a list of all of the ways in which you’re actually a good person.
Worried that you’re a bad mom? Make a list of all of the ways in which you’re an awesome mom.
The point here isn’t to tell a false narrative or to excuse inexcusable behavior. It’s simply that our brains tend to tell narratives that are heavily — and falsely — weighted towards the bad things.
It’s simply to say: a more balanced narrative would be 50-50, positive and negative.
And if it’s a particularly thorny issue for you, I dare you to make a list each day for a week or two. Giving your brain evidence of an idea that it finds hard to believe — over and over and over — does actually change how you think.
In other words: doing it every day feels cheesy…but it freaking works.
…
And a final, kinda-wild observation:
When I feel like I’m actually a pretty decent worker/friend/mom, I find I have even more energy to devote to that area of my life.
Somehow feeling better about myself is also better for other people, too.
I’m here for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
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What is somatic awareness and how should you use it?
In my early twenties, in the middle of a quarter-life crisis, my brother suggested I work with a coach.
I guess it could be useful, I thought to myself. Maybe she’ll help me figure out what I should do for my next job.
Oh, I was in for a treat.
I learned many, many things from working with my coach (and that experience is one of the reasons I’m now a coach myself), but one of the most powerful was the power of somatic — or body-based — awareness. Up till then, I’d been a pretty smart, intellectual person, making most decisions using some kind of detailed pro-con list that I analyzed in my mind.
Somatic awareness, which basically just means being aware of the body’s feelings or sensations, totally changed my decision-making process — and is a huge part of how I now work with clients myself.
I wanted to share more about what somatic awareness is, why it’s so incredibly useful, and how you can cultivate it, so I made you a video.
Whether you’ve heard of “somatic awareness" before, or it sounds kind of hippy-dippy and weird, I think you’ll enjoy the video :)
Also! If you haven’t spent much time paying attention to your body’s physical sensations beyond, say, noticing that you feel sore after a hard workout, it can be hard to know where to begin. That’s part of why I don’t talk about this as much on my blog — it’s much easier to explain in an interactive context, like in my group and individual client work.
But this list of sensations, by Larissa Noonan, is a great place to start, if you’re working on your own — she does a great job of putting together a vocabulary of physical sensations. You might complete the sentence: I feel _____ in my ______. For example: I feel buzzy in my chest, I feel hollow in my belly, I feel prickly in my back.
Superfans may notice that I originally shared this essay back in 2018. While I’m on maternity leave, I’m sharing some of my best posts from my archives — I hope you enjoy! :)
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
What it means if you're struggling in your life
Sometimes my clients are frustrated with themselves. They’re smart and competent, and they may feel embarrassed that they’re struggling.
Sometimes it seems like I’m the only person who is breaking down like this, they tell me. It feels like I’m the only person who needs to grow.
In those situations, I tell them about Osteoblasts and Osteoclasts.
Osteoclasts and Osteoblasts are bone cells that are always present in our bodies. Osteoclasts break down bone tissue, and Osteoblasts rebuild it. Bones constantly need to be repaired and remodeled to better address the many stressors our bodies face, and you can’t rebuild without having broken down the bone tissue first.
Osteoclasts and Osteoblasts work as a continuous team:
Break down.
Repair and rebuild.
Break down.
Repair and rebuild.
What a perfect, natural process. Break down, rebuild. Again and again.
Which is to say: our bodies understand that things must break down all the time so that we can rebuild to be more efficient, more effective, and stronger.
Why not us?
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
Want to develop more peace of mind? Solitude might help
Typically, when we think of solitude, we think of being physically alone.
But I recently came upon another definition of solitude that stopped me in my tracks:
Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin define solitude as “a subjective state of mind, in which the mind, isolated from input from other minds, works through a problem on its own.” (xvii)
Let’s really think about that:
Solitude occurs when your mind is isolated from other minds.
That means that you can have mental solitude, even when you’re in a room with other people. Or you can be totally alone — but because you are checking Twitter or responding to emails or reading a book — you are still being influenced by others’ words and thoughts.
Kethledge and Erwin suggest that definition in their powerful book Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership through Solitude. (And even if you don’t think of yourself as a “leader” in a formal sense, their definition of leadership includes “leading yourself” — as in, following your own true values and judgment rather than convention or bureaucracy or what others want or expect).
Of course, they aren’t arguing that input from other minds is useless — on the contrary, it is essential to any decision-making process.
But they are arguing that there comes a point when we have enough input.
Great leaders — and the book is mostly a case study of great leaders, from Jane Goodall to Dwight Eisenhower to T.E. Lawrence — are people who seek out moments of isolation from other minds. Through the clarity, insight, and creativity those moments allow for, these leaders are able to make important decisions, discoveries, and creations.
Which leads me to the question: How often in your day are you truly “isolated from the input of other minds” for an extended period of time? What kind of thinking and decision-making is possible, in those moments?
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
How to deal with having a whole lot of emotions, from a 13th century poet
Here’s something for you, if you’ve had some feelings this week:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Rumi (translation by Coleman Barks)
It’s a big ask, to try to meet every emotion “at the door laughing and invite them in.” Who doesn’t want to slam the door on dark thoughts or depression or shame?
And yet, maybe it will give you some strength to remember that you aren’t the only one. You aren’t the only one who has emotions, coming and going like arrivals at a guest house.
There’s me, too. And everyone else reading this. And, of course, Rumi, our 13th-century mystical poet friend who really gets feelings.
You’ve got this, I’m rooting for you.
Katie
I'm an Introvert and a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Are you?
When I got to college, something seemed to be wrong with me. Suddenly, it was impossible for me to concentrate.
My three roommates studied in our room. Classmates were always working in the dorm common areas, or in the student center. Me, I couldn’t even study in most parts of the library.
The only place I could do good work was two floors down into the basement of the biggest library on campus. There, between the stacks and stacks of old books, far against the wall, were old wooden desks that must have been there since the 1960s. It was quiet and empty and no one went there.
I feel relaxed even thinking about it now.
That was the first time I noticed that I seemed to need an above-average amount of quiet and aloneness. It wasn’t the last.
I never seemed to want to go out to parties as much as other people. When I got my first job after college and spent my whole day sitting at a conference table with three or four other people, I often felt like I couldn’t get anything done. Some boyfriends in my 20s were annoyed because I needed a lot of time alone, or because sometimes when we were together, I just wanted to read or do quiet things. Why are we together if we’re just going to read? a kind but confused boyfriend once asked.
As I learned more about myself over the next decade, I realized that there were two factors that contributed to it. I was an introvert and a highly sensitive person (HSP).
Ever heard of those traits? Here are some simplified definitions:
An introvert is someone who tends to be drained when they spend time with groups of people or in larger social settings and tends to be energized when they are alone or in small social settings.
A highly sensitive person (HSP) tends to be more sensitive than the average person, to both external and internal stimuli. External stimuli could include sounds or temperatures or environments or art or music or what is going on with other people. Being more sensitive to internal stimuli means that they might feel their emotions or thoughts more strongly. Because of that increased sensitivity, they may feel drained more easily.
As you might expect, there’s a lot of overlap between introverts and HSPs. About 70% of HSPs are introverts, though extroverts can be HSPs as well.
It’s worth noting that both of these traits are value-neutral — not inherently good or bad. Depending on the person and the culture we live in, there are certain strengths of being an HSP or introvert, and certain challenges.
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Last week, I wrote about how cultivating your sensitivity can be helpful for anyone. But HSPs and introverts have some innate sensitivities, and many of them may feel like there’s something “wrong” with them.
If you take nothing else away from this essay, I hope you’ll know that nothing is wrong with being an introvert or an HSP. In fact, they can be strengths! I am a far stronger coach because I am a sensitive person, for example, and I even cultivate my sensitivity so I can notice more about my clients and how to help them.
Finally, if either of these personality traits resonates with you, I’d encourage you to look into them more. Learning about these traits helped me to understand that I wasn’t a “weak” person, but rather that these were common personality traits, and they gave me both strengths and challenges in the world.
If you’d like to explore more, here are some of my recommendations:
Introversion. Check out Susan Cain’s TED Talk, or her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Check out Dr. Elaine Aron’s online self-test, or her book The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
As always, I’m rooting for you. You’ve got this.
Katie
Why sensitivity is a strength
I want to talk about sensitivity today. You might be thinking I’d rather talk about productivity. Or success. Or how to lose weight. Or how to make everyone like you.
But let’s talk about sensitivity anyway.
When I talk about sensitivity, I literally mean a sensitivity to you inner and outer world. In the outer world, it means being more aware of other people and the world you live in. Internally, it means being able to be more finely attuned to your body sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
I’d like to make the argument that:
Our society makes it hard to be sensitive.
Cultivating your sensitivity is an extremely useful tool. Ever feel like “Yeah, my life should be pretty good, but something doesn’t feel quite right?” Sensitivity can help with that.
1. Our society makes it hard to be sensitive.
I think the pace and demands of the modern world dampen our innate sensitivity — no matter who we are. There’s no time to be sensitive! We have work to do and friends to see and kids to take care of. Then we need to do the laundry, get a workout in, take a shower, do our hair, catch up on Instagram, and watch some YouTube videos.
We consciously — or more often, unconsciously — sense that if we’re more sensitive, it might slow us down. We might have too many thoughts and feelings at work to be as productive as we want to be, for example. It would push us off track, and reduce our effectiveness!
This is not an unjustified fear. Being sensitive might, in fact, slow you down or push you off track sometimes. You might have more feelings and thoughts about your co-workers or the project you’re working on or the set-up of your cubicle than you had previously realized. And once you realize that you had these feelings or thoughts…you might begin to want to do something about them. This would slow you down even a bit more.
How annoying.
In our society, being called “sensitive” isn’t typically a compliment; it’s often the opposite. To be fair, I’m not saying that it’s not possible to be too sensitive. It is! But it’s also possible to be too hard-working or too generous, for example. Most traits have positive and negative possibilities.
But sensitivity is often ranked far below being “hard-working”, “friendly” or “smart,” in terms of ideal traits. And while being a hard-working, friendly, smart person is fantastic, I’ve also met many hard-working, friendly, smart people in my coaching practice who were still struggling. For many of them, increasing their ability to be sensitive was actually a secret sauce in our process.
So let’s talk about sensitivity.
2. Why increasing your sensitivity, no matter who you are, can be an extremely useful tool.
I often tell my coaching clients that we all need a compass and a steam engine. (Actually, I got this model from Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star, which I highly recommend).
Most of us, if we’re competent in the adult world, have well-developed steam engines. We know how to push through. We know how to get stuff done. And sometimes part of getting things done means turning down the volume on that voice inside of us that has thoughts and feelings and doubts and worries and observations.
Shhhhh….I’m on a deadline! Let’s just push through!
Shhhhh…I need to accomplish everything on my to-do list, so I can go home and do laundry and then catch a plane!
Having your own personal steam engine is obviously very useful. But it isn’t enough. You could imagine a train huffing and puffing and powering off in random or useless directions, right? Or maybe it’s going in a direction that “other people” said was meaningful or useful or best, but that direction isn’t right for this train.
I think you can see where I’m going with this.
It’s not good enough to have a strong, well-developed steam engine.
We all need compasses, too. It’s the compass that tells us the right direction to go in.
Have you ever held a real compass? I used to have one. If you held it in your hand, the arrow would wobble as it found its way to point north. If you moved your hand around or jostled it, it was even more wobbly.
Compasses are sensitive.
Real-life compasses take in relatively simple inputs and tell you relatively simple information. E.g., all they tell you is what direction is North.
But your metaphorical, internal compass? That thing has got to be complex. It’s not just taking in information about “where is north?” and then telling it to you. It’s telling you all kinds of subtle things about the people you interact with, environments you live in, feelings, thoughts, and body sensations you have, and then it’s telling you everything you need to know about your career, your relationships, how you spend your days, what you like and don’t like, what is meaningful to you, and more.
But to get that kind of information, you have to let a compass be what it is. And compasses are sensitive. Compasses speak in subtle voices, and many of us are out of practice at listening to them.
If you’ve lost connection with your compass, you may feel stuck or subtly frustrated with your life. You may feel like you aren’t quite going in the right direction, but you aren’t sure what direction you necessarily need to go in. Or maybe you have a sense of the direction, but you don’t know why you aren’t taking action.
Another sign of a weaker connection with a compass is that you may have unexplained feelings or do actions that don’t make sense to you. Why do I feel slightly anxious all the time? Why do I keep eating/going on the internet/buying things when I know it’s not good for me?
…
Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, yeah, I could definitely use a stronger, more sensitive compass.
One way to start to cultivate that compass is just to notice how often you are in “steam engine mode.” How often are you huffing and puffing and pushing through? If you are in “steam engine mode” 100% of the time, can you build in some space for subtle voices to come up? Journaling can help with this. So can Doing Nothing.
Or, if you feel like your compass isn’t as strong as you’d like, but you aren’t sure how to fix it, may I suggest life coaching? I work with clients around the world via video conference, and locally in Los Angeles. Feel free to reach out.
I know you’ve got this.
Katie