Nothing Changes Until You Do: A Guide to Self-Compassion and Getting Out of Your Own Way (11 page)

How many times have you gotten an intuitive hit about something—positively or negatively—and not acted on it, and then regretted it afterward? This happens all the time in both small and big ways. We see an opportunity and want to step into it, but we hesitate, stop ourselves, or talk ourselves out of it—only to wish we would have been willing to take the risk, after it’s too late. Or, we get a bad vibe about a person, situation, or project, and we don’t do or say anything about it because we’re afraid we might upset or offend someone, and then as things unfold, it ends up being a difficult or damaging situation for us and those around us. Again, in hindsight, we realize it wasn’t a surprise at all; we just didn’t trust our gut enough to speak up or do something early on. While this lack of self-trust is quite common and we don’t want to judge ourselves for it in a harsh way, it’s important for us to pay attention to it, as it can have a significant and often negative impact on our lives.

Trusting our gut is about choosing to listen to our intuition, taking risks, and letting go of always having to do things “right.” When we trust our gut, we give ourselves permission to be guided by our inner wisdom. My tenth-grade physiology teacher, Mr. Young, used to always say to us while we were taking tests, “You think
long
, you think
wrong
.” He would constantly remind us to trust our gut and go with our first answer, which was usually correct. We are often more aware, wise, and in touch with a deeper knowing than we give ourselves credit for. As we practice trusting ourselves at this level even more, our lives and everything important to us become easier, more abundant, and much more fun.

CHAPTER 17

Remember that It’s Not the Circumstances, It’s You

We took Samantha and Rosie to Disneyland for the first time a few years ago. Michelle and I hadn’t been there for a long time and being back was a wonderful experience, reminding each of us of our childhood and lots of great memories. The girls loved it and we all had a blast—it was so much fun for us to experience the magic through their eyes.

I was struck, however, by the nature of many of the conversations that I overheard (mostly from other adults) during our trip. There were three primary themes of these conversations. First, people talked about how hot it was. We were there in August and it gets pretty warm in Anaheim, California, at that time of year. Second, people talked about how long the lines were. Again, the crowds tend to be pretty big in summertime at Disneyland. And third, people talked about how expensive it was. It’s true; Disneyland is not cheap.

And this is called “the happiest place on earth”!

While none of these complaints seemed completely ridiculous to me, you would think that in the midst of a “fun” and “exciting” place like Disneyland, people would be happy. But I quickly realized that this wasn’t necessarily the case, and it brought back to mind one of my favorite Ben Franklin quotes: “Joy doesn’t exist in the world, it exists in us.”

The wisdom in Franklin’s quote seems simple on the surface, but it’s quite profound and a complete paradigm shift from how we tend to relate to the circumstances of our lives. Feeling like a victim of the things that happen to us is how we’re taught to live. It’s often encouraged by our culture, the people around us, and our own thoughts.

The circumstances of our lives, especially when they seem stressful or intense, do have an impact on us, for sure. However, all too often we give away our power—acting as though it’s a foregone conclusion that we will feel a certain way based on specific circumstances or situations (e.g., the economy, our health, the weather, our family background, and so on). But our experience of life in any given moment is much more of a reflection of what’s going on within us; it’s not simply a reaction to what’s going on around us.

A poignant and powerful example of this was Randy Pausch. Randy was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In September of 2007, he gave a lecture entitled “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams.” It was part of a tradition at Carnegie Mellon called the “Last Lecture.” The idea behind this was that as a professor, if you had one last lecture to give to your students before you died, what would you say? The “elephant in the room,” as Randy talked about in his lecture, was the fact that it wasn’t hypothetical for him because he was actually dying of pancreatic cancer and had been told that he had just months to live.

Randy, a 46-year-old father of three young children, gave his heartfelt, passionate, and inspiring lecture to about 400 people at Carnegie Mellon. Given the circumstances and the power of the lecture, it had a significant impact on everyone in the room. Because some people were not able to attend, the lecture was recorded and posted online internally at the university. Someone then posted it on YouTube, and it went viral. Ten million people watched the video in those first few weeks, and Randy was then invited on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
to reprise a portion of his lecture, which is where I first heard of him. He went on to write a best-selling book called
The Last Lecture
and inspired millions of people around the world before he ultimately lost his battle with cancer in July of 2008.

Like so many others, I was deeply touched and moved by Randy, his story, his lecture, his book, and his simple but profound wisdom. Most inspiring of all was how he approached his life, even in the face of difficult circumstances. At one point in the lecture, Randy says, “It’s important to have fun; I’m dying and I’m still
choosing
to have fun.”

Randy had justifiable reasons to feel sorry for himself, to be angry and depressed, and to feel victimized by his circumstances. However, he chose to approach his life and his death in a very different and inspiring way.

Most of us have had times in our lives when things were going great on the surface or we accomplished or experienced some wonderful external success, only to feel a sense of disappointment or sadness underneath because we didn’t feel satisfied on a deeper level. And, on the other hand, many of us have had moments of incredible joy that weren’t directly connected to anything “worthy” of these feelings externally. My girls have been teaching me about this from the time each of them started walking and talking. Pay attention to young children; it’s amazing how the simple things bring them joy—like the wrapping paper or the box that a gift comes in when they’re too young to even understand the present or holiday being celebrated.

Even though we know this dynamic to be true, we still seem to get caught in the hypnotic, erroneous notion that if we just got rid of some issues, altered some circumstances, manifested some increased success, or changed some specific situations in our lives, then we’d be happy.

Author and teacher Byron Katie says, “The definition of insanity is thinking that you need something you don’t have. The mere fact that you exist right now without that which you think you need is proof that you don’t need it.”

What if we lived our lives with a deeper and more conscious awareness of the fact that we get to create our experience of life at any moment? Imagine what our lives, our careers, and our relationships would look like if we stopped blaming our experience on other people or on external circumstances. We would free up a great deal of positive energy and take back so much of our personal power.

This is about taking 100 percent responsibility for our experience of life. It doesn’t mean that we can control everything, but it does mean that we make a commitment to live life by design, not default. It’s also likely that we’ll forget, slip up, and fall back into victimhood from time to time (or often)—we’ve been trained to live in “victim consciousness,” even though it doesn’t give us what we ultimately want. When we’re conscious, willing, and courageous enough to live as the designers of our lives—we can literally transform our experience of life at any moment. Then, of course, we won’t mind the heat, long lines, and expense of Disneyland (or anywhere else we are), and instead we’ll enjoy the real magic of the experience. It really has less to do with where we are and what’s going on, and more to do with us and what’s happening internally anyway.

CHAPTER 18

Appreciate People

About ten years ago, I got an e-mail letting me know that there was a new
Chicken Soup for the Soul
book coming out called
Chicken Soup for the Single Parent’s Soul
, and they were looking for submissions. As you probably know, this series of books has been around now for many years and there are hundreds of different Chicken Soup titles, which are made up of inspirational stories written by various people, focused on specific themes.

I’m a huge fan of these books and decided to write a story for this one called “Mom Taught Me to Play Baseball.” Because my parents split up when I was three years old and my dad wasn’t around a lot, my mom, who’d been a physical education teacher in the past, was the one who taught me how to throw and catch. She went to all my T-ball games, all my Little League games, all my youth league games, most of my high school games, and even many of my games in college when I was at Stanford. Once I got drafted and started playing professional baseball, my mom even flew out to visit me and see me play in the minor leagues.

The story that I wrote was an acknowledgment of her—everything she’d done, sacrificed, and contributed to me and my baseball career. I was pretty self-conscious about the story and my writing, because at that point in my life I wasn’t doing much of it at all. It was before I’d published any of my own books and before I really even started writing articles or blog posts of any kind. Although it felt scary, I shared it with Michelle and she actually liked it.

I gathered the courage to submit the story, but didn’t share it with my mom since I was still feeling quite nervous about it. After a few months, I hadn’t heard anything from the Chicken Soup folks, so I just assumed it hadn’t been selected. I figured they’d received a large number of submissions and mine simply didn’t make the cut. Not long after I had resigned myself to the fact that it wouldn’t be published, I got an e-mail saying, “Congratulations, we’d like to include your story in the book.” I was thrilled!

I immediately told Michelle, who was equally excited. Then I said to her, “I’ve got to call my mom and tell her.”

Michelle said, “Don’t call her.”

“What do you mean, ‘don’t call her’?” I asked.

She said, “What if you wait until the book comes out? You could surprise her.”

“Wow, that’s a great idea,” I said.

We decided that in addition to not telling my mom, we weren’t going to tell anyone, so we could ensure that the secret would stay safe. I sent an e-mail back to the woman at the publishing company who had contacted me, to find out when the book would come out. She got back to me and said it would be
14 months
. As excited as we were about the story, the book, and the secret, 14 months seemed like a
long
time. We weren’t sure if we could make it that whole time without letting it slip, but amazingly we did. Over a year later, the book came out and no one close to me, especially my mom, had any idea my story about her was in there.

It came out in February, right around my birthday, and I got an advance copy. We were having dinner at our house to celebrate my birthday, just a few of us—my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and niece, in addition to Michelle and me. After dinner we went to sit in the living room because they had brought some presents for me. Once we sat down, I turned to my mom and I said, “Mom, before I open up my gifts, I actually have a present for you,” and I handed her a copy of the book, which I’d wrapped.

She looked at me and at the gift with a puzzled expression. She said, “Honey, that’s really nice, but it’s your birthday. I’ll open it later.” Then she put it down. I hadn’t expected this response and now she was messing with my plan.

I picked up the book, handed it back to her, and said, “Mom, I know it’s my birthday, but do me a favor, just open it up.”

At this point, I could tell she was getting a little uncomfortable and even frustrated with me, but she obliged and opened her present. Once she saw what it was, she said, “Thanks! How nice that they did one for single parents. Okay, I’ll look through it when I get home.” Then she put the book back down and looked at me as if to say,
Can we get on with
your
presents now?

I picked it up again, handed it back to her, and said, “Mom, listen, I read this book and there’s a story in here that really reminds me of you. In fact, I put a bookmark on the page where it starts, page 294. Would you do me a favor and read the story out loud to everyone?”

Now my mom was really uncomfortable, confused, and definitely annoyed with me. Somewhat begrudgingly, she grabbed the book, opened it up, and started to read the story, having no idea what it was or why I was asking her to do so. The first line of the story read, “‘On June 1st, 1995, I was standing on the pitcher’s mound at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska, about to throw my first pitch in the College World Series.’” My mom looked up after reading that first line with a smile on her face and said, “This guy pitched in the College World Series!” totally not getting it.

Then she started to read the second line, and she stopped. She looked at me, then back at the book, then back at me again—you could tell her brain was working really hard. Then all of a sudden, her eyes got big and you could see that she finally got it—that the story was about
her
, and that I wrote it.

She dropped the book and started to cry. I reached over to pick it up off the floor. At this point I was crying, too. I handed the book back to her and said, “Hey, mom, if you don’t mind, could you read the rest of it?”

And she did. My mom read that entire story out loud to all of us. It took her a little while, and it was quite emotional for both of us. It was a big deal for me, both personally and professionally, to have that story published. I was proud of it; it felt like a pretty big accomplishment, especially at that moment in my life. But the most meaningful aspect of it by far was being able to give it to my mom and to acknowledge her in that way. When we take the time and have the courage to let the people around us know how much we value them, it’s not only a gift for them, it’s a gift for us as well. That’s how powerful it is when we express our appreciation for people—whether we do it in a big dramatic way or in a simple day-to-day way.