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Stop stealing this from your employer.

While there is something magical about working where at the end of the day you find a flattened biscuit stuck to the bottom of your slip resistant shoe, rising to the top of the fried chicken industry was never my dream.

Fried foods was a day job, or, as implied by author Jon Acuff, a fundraiser for my dream job. Acuff’s book Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job is the thirteenth book I’ve read in full in 2012. And a lot of what he wrote was a reminder of what it was like for the writer in me to work at Popeyes Chicken.

My couple years behind the fast food counter were not glamorous. I spent a lot of the end of high school smelling and looking like my job was to repeatedly plunge into a dunk tank of chicken grease. I also had to clean public toilets and clean up after people who don’t understand the trash can concept. But despite that and the scar I think I still have from the time I pulled the fries out of the fryer with haste, I would never trade what I got out of working at Popeyes.

At Popeyes, I didn’t get to do my dream (write, speak, counsel, change the world). But as Acuff points out in Quitter, I got to practice stuff I’ll have to be good at when I am livin’ the dream. Lunch and dinner rushes taught me hustle. Rude customers thickened my skin. Our menu forced me to become comfortable saying the word “breast” to strangers (which I don’t anticipate having to do much when I am the writing, speaking, counseling world changer I dream of becoming, but it’s better safe than sorry).

The point is that people who work day jobs but dream of dream jobs sometimes quit their day jobs before quitting a day job is smart. Others suffer through the day job under the assumption that it is a giant waste of time. And others – the kinds of dreamers Acuff encourages his readers to be – neither rush toward the dream nor squander the valuable experiences in the time spent “fundraising” for it at a day job. And also, Acuff is hilarious. I love him. Read his blogs. But first, read some of my favorite excerpts from the book:

On discipline:

“…discipline begets discipline. When you step up to a challenge before you, your ramped-up resources rub off on other areas of your life. You wouldn’t think eating less ‘fat’ would impact how closely you monitor your family’s financial budget, but it’s all tied together. Discipline and focus are contagious and they tend to spread their benefits all around.” -page 22

On deciding what to do with your life: 

“You don’t ask the bottomless, ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ but instead, ‘What have I done in my life that I loved doing?’ Instead of a million different options from out there, you’re suddenly left with a manageable handful of options from within your own experience. Instead of trying to hitch your star to an endless black hole of options, you hitch a ride on your rewarding past.” -page 40

On tackling perfectionism:

“90 percent perfect and shared with the world always changes more lives than 100 percent perfect and stuck in your head.” -page 62

On time management: 

“Few would boldly declare, ‘Today, watching television for two hours was one of the most important things I needed to get done.’ Yet that’s where we sometimes spend our entire evenings. The operative word in the phrase ‘enough time’ is not time. It’s enough. And the truth you should accept is that you will probably never have ‘enough’ time to pursue your dream. But every day somebody somewhere is making magic with the less-than-enough time he has. So can you, if you stop focusing on the amount of time you have and start focusing on the amount of tasks that really matter.” -pages 73-74

On stealing time from your day job to work on your dream:

“If you took your car to a mechanic and they charged you for seven hours of labor to fix it, you’d have a problem if three of those hours were spent spinning pottery. You’d be incredulous if when you complained about the bill they said, ‘We’re sorry. Pottery is our mechanic’s dream. He loved Ghost. We put a wheel and kiln behind our shop and he just really got into it the other day. He made some beautiful vases.” -page 111

“[I stopped] stealing time from work because they purchased forty hours of work, not just forty hours of my presence…” -page 111

On livin’ the dream: 

“When I finally published a book, I couldn’t wait to say, ‘I’m an author! I’m an author!’ When I had lunch with my oldest daughter at her school and she told her classmates, ‘My dad is an author,’ I was thrilled. That was a label I wanted to spoon at night and couple skate with at Roller Kingdom.”

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Click here to learn more about Quitter.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. So, if you click the links and purchase the products I recommend, I earn a little commission at no extra cost to you. And when you do, I am sincerely grateful.

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Obstacles won’t stop you if you’re committed.

For those of you who are regular readers, you know what I think of Brene Brown and her work (that they are fabulous.). So should Brown stumble upon this post, I’d like her to know that, as well as this: Had it not been for the list on Brown’s web site of books that changed her life, I might not have stumbled upon the book I finished this afternoon.

The Dance of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self, by clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner, is the tenth book I’ve read in 2012.

Lerner tackles topics the average American is apt to avoid: anxiety, fear, and shame. As a person who studeid mental health (and as a generally anxious person), I happen to enjoy discussing (and reading about) all three.

But you don’t need to work in the field of mental health to get something out of reading The Dance of Fear. It’s part practical advice, part true stories (about Lerner [like the time a pair of her underwear she didn’t know was stuck inside her pants slipped out of her pant leg and onto the street] and about some of her clients [like the woman diagnosed with a terminal illness in her early 30s]). And it brings up lots of points I think we all ought to know, including the ones from my favorite excerpts. See below:

Preach:

“We can’t stop bad things from happening, but we can stop our relentless focus on how things were or how we want them to be, and develop a deeper appreciation for what we have now.” -page 5

On avoidance:

“When you avoid what you fear, your anxieties are apt to worsen over time. … If you fear rejection, you may indeed need to accumulate more experience being snubbed.” -page 20

“Research demonstrates that the harder phobics work to avoid the things they fear, the more their brains grow convinced that the threat is real. If you’re not phobic but merely terrified, avoidance also makes the problem worse. … you need some experience with the very activity you dread, be it dating, driving, or raising your hand in a meeting.” -page 30

Keep the following in mind when you face what makes you anxious:

“I’m never going to transcend fear, but I needn’t let it stop me. I learned that survival is a perfectly reasonable goal to set for myself the first dozen or so times I face a dreaded situation.” -page 36

On authenticity: 

“Every human life is unique, and every human life has value. We’re not meant to be anyone else but ourselves. We all face the challenge of living the life we have, not the life we imagined having, the life we wish for or the life we are quite certain we deserve. So we need to do whatever it takes to let go of anxiety-driven judgments and comparisons. Life is short, and none of us really has that kind of time.” -page 70

On the cosmic countermove:

“Warning: The universe itself may send you a countermove if you make too bold a change! For example, you buy a house and the week you move in, the dishwasher stops working and your car breaks down. You say to yourself, ‘Oh, no! It’s a message that I never should have left my old apartment!’ Well, I’m suggesting another way to look at it. It’s merely the universe saying, yes, you are making a bold and courageous change! Here’s my countermove! Prove your commitment to making this change!” -page 88

Truth:

“…what we believe is most shameful and unique about ourselves is often what is most human and universal.” -page 127

“The extent to which you hide something important about yourself or another family member is a good barometer of shame.” -page 132

“But what is courage? In a world saturated with images of action-figure bravado, we may mistakenly believe that courage is the absence of fear. Instead, it is the capacity to think, speak, and act, despite our fear and shame.” -page 196

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Click here for more information about the Dance of Fear.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. So, if you click the links and purchase the products I recommend, I earn a little commission at no extra cost to you. And when you do, I am sincerely grateful.

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“God can’t stand me” (and other lies).

One of my favorite defense mechanisms (to study) is projection.

Projection is “attributing one’s own unacknowledged feelings [or thoughts or behaviors] to others.” (1)

It’s sort of like saying “You eat too much…” to a friend (who may or may not actually be eating too much) simultaneously as you eat too much (without noticing that you are eating too much).

It protects us from the discomfort of acknowledging something negative we think, feel or do ourselves (and from the work of correcting it). We use projection unwittingly. With it, we draw attention to something negative we see (or fabricate!) in someone else — something we subconsciously recognize (and dislike) in ourselves. We do it because as long as we are pointing at it in someone else, we a) don’t have to address it in ourselves and b) can trust that no one else will notice it in us (or so we think).

It’s kind of like the time I stopped responding to an ex-boyfriend’s attempts to reach me, and in his 35th email to me in the first days after I cut off contact, he said, “You need to move on!”

Do you ever notice that we do this with God?

Like when we sin and then act like God thinks we’re bad and worthless.

The truth is that when we act like God thinks we’re bad and worthless, we are projecting how we feel about ourselves onto God. It isn’t how God feels about us after we do something we know we shouldn’t — it’s how we feel about us.

But remember:

God doesn’t love us because we are good. We are good because He loves us. And even when we aren’t worthy, we are valuable.

– – – –

1. From here.

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Inhibition.

In one of my favorite books, writer and researcher Brene Brown says this: “There are many ways in which men and women hustle for worthiness … the two that keep us the most quiet and still are hustling to be perceived as ‘cool’ and ‘in control.’ … Being ‘in control’ isn’t always about the desire to manipulate situations, but often it’s about the need to manage perception. We want to be able to control what other people think about us …”

She talks a lot about inhibition.

I think inhibition is about calculation.

Inhibition is only doing something if we can predict the results of doing it.

(If we can predict it, we can feel in control.)

Inhibition is not doing something if we can’t predict the results of doing it.

Which implies…

-we want to fit in
-we don’t want to deviate (and we aren’t sure if we do)
-our fears of being judged, rejected, misunderstood, criticized, stereotyped or incorrectly categorized outweigh our desires for being authentic.

Which implies…

-we care (a lot) about what other people think of us
-we are more likely to follow external guides than internal ones

Which means…

-when we most feel in control, we actually aren’t in control at all, because
-we don’t make our own decisions; other people’s (potential or actual) thoughts and feelings make our decisions for us.

We are so afraid not to fit in, or to deviate, or to be judged or rejected that we don’t notice the way our effort to avoid those things requires us to relinquish…

-our freedom
-our repose
-ourselves.

So consider this — something else Brene Brown says:

“One of the biggest surprises in this research was learning that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, and, in fact, fitting in gets in the way of belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

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Books in 2012: I’ll Quit Tomorrow

Through reading glasses* under a porch light in the backyard**, I spent a lot of last night reading I’ll Quit Tomorrow: A Practical Guide to Alcoholism Treatment. I finished the book late this morning. Assigned reading for my substance abuse counseling class, the book is designed for substance abuse counselors, originally published in 1980 and written by Vernon E. Johnson, “founder and president emeritus of the Johnson Institute in Minneapolis,” a treatment facility for alcoholics and their families.

I didn’t expect to enjoy the book, because I judged it by its cover (no offense to its designer, should by way of internet miracle, he or she stumble upon this post). But now, I am really glad that my professor assigned it. What the future holds regarding the population of people with whom I’ll work as a therapist has yet to be revealed, but should I wind up working with alcoholics or their families, some of what I got out of this book — the third book I’ve read in 2012 — will help me do it. And some of the excerpts I’ll share below might resonate with anybody who has or hasn’t been affected by alcoholism.

“The obvious question at this point is, ‘Why don’t these people see what is happening to them and quit drinking?’ … However, as one might expect, it is the wrong question. … If you drop ‘and quit drinking’ from this inquiry, then you get to the real question: ‘Why don’t they see what is happening to them?’ The answer is, they can’t. … Their defense systems continue to grow, so that they can survive in the face of their problems. The greater the pain, the higher and more rigid the defenses become; and this whole process is unconscious. Alcoholics do not know what is happening inside of themselves. Finally, they actually become victims of their own defense mechanisms. … Not only are they unaware of their highly developed defense systems, they are also unaware of the powerful feelings … buried behind them, sealed off from conscious knowledge, but explosively active. Because of this, judgment is progressively impaired–and impaired judgment, by definition, does not know it is impaired.” -pages 27-28

“Now another powerful system of defense, equally unconscious, swings into action, namely, projection. Projection [in the realm of alcoholism, anyway] is the process of unloading self-hatred onto others. Again, the alcoholic does not know what is actually happening. The more hateful alcoholics unconsciously see themselves to be, the more they will come to see themselves as surrounded by hateful people. ‘They are always trying to run my life,’ or ‘They are messing things up and making it harder for me!’ … In any case, this load of self-hatred must be dumped in order for alcoholics to survive.” -page 31

Regarding what the wife of an alcoholic husband might say:

“… she reaches the point at which she actually says, ‘I couldn’t care less what happens to him.’ Whereas, of course, all sane persons do care when the very structure of their established lives is being seriously threatened. If it were true that she did not care, it would be a mark of illness, not health. What she must learn is how not to be careless, but how to care and still cope.” -page 95

And this is true regardless of whether you are or know an alcoholic:

“To put it exactly, the goal is to help the patient learn to discern accurately what his own behavior does to the other person emotionally. It is essential to know one’s own feelings at a given moment, but in a life in relationship it is necessary to sense with equal accuracy the feelings of the other person. More particularly, it is important to recognize how one’s own behavior influences someone else’s emotional response. … It is obvious, of course, that without personal insight empathy is impossible. One must be in touch with one’s own feelings in order to have any real appreciation or understanding of another’s.” -pages 96-97

*It’s true. I have reading glasses.

**Also true. We can do that in February in Florida. 🙂