Nothing Changes Until You Do: A Guide to Self-Compassion and Getting Out of Your Own Way (18 page)

Theo stopped me in the middle of my rant and proceeded to call me out. “Mike,” he said, “this ‘story’ you have about things being hard for you isn’t really true. It seems to me that lots of things come pretty easy, you just make them hard by saying they are. What if you started actually owning that certain things come easy to you?”

As I heard him say this, I had a mixture of emotions and reactions. First of all, I felt grateful—I love having people in my life who are willing to call me out, even if my ego gets a little bent out of shape in the process. Second of all, I felt defensive and noticed that I wanted to justify myself against his challenge. Third of all, I felt a sense of fear and resistance to the idea of things coming easy to me.

As I thought about this more, I realized that my resistance to things being easy ran pretty deep, as I think it does for many people. Here are some of the main reasons I’d created and beliefs I’d held up to that point in my life to justify not allowing things to come easy:

• Easy means lazy.
  
• If things come easy to me, other people will get jealous, won’t like me, and/or won’t respect me.
  
• It doesn’t really mean much if it comes easy.
  
• It’s not fair for things to come easy to me—especially with so many people having such a hard time these days.
  
• I actually get off on struggling and suffering. I’m quite familiar with it and I’ve used it as motivation to change and “succeed” for much of my life.
  
• My ability to work hard, overcome adversity, and rise above challenges are all things my ego uses to feel superior to others.
  
• If I admit that something is easy for me, it will seem arrogant and then people will root for me to fail.
  

Maybe you can relate to some of these?

Getting in touch with some of these beliefs was painful and liberating at the same time. However, it did help me realize how ridiculous some of them were and how much of my energy I’d been giving away to them in the process.

It’s almost like I was walking around worried that someone was going to say to me, “Mike, you have it so easy,” and I was preparing my defensive responses: “Oh yeah, well let me tell you how hard I work, how challenging things are for me, and how much stuff I’ve had to overcome along the way.” What’s up with this? It’s like I was preparing for a fight that didn’t even exist. Do you ever do that?

While working hard and overcoming challenges aren’t inherently bad, resisting ease and being attached to struggle causes us such a great deal of stress. And, in many cases, it’s totally self-induced and unnecessary. As we also know from experience, what we focus on tends to manifest itself in our lives. Therefore, if we expect things to be hard, they more likely will be. And, on the flip side, if we expect them to be easy, that becomes more likely as well.

In the past few years since Theo and I had that conversation, I have been consciously expanding my capacity for things to be easier. Ironically, this isn’t always easy for me, but I’m much more comfortable allowing things to go smoothly, and I continue to put my attention in this direction. Writing this book, in fact, has been much easier than I expected it to be and much easier than my two previous experiences of writing books. I caught myself a number of times thinking,
Wait a minute, this is too easy; it doesn’t really count unless it’s hard and I suffer.
As soon as I caught myself thinking this, I laughed at myself, noticed my tendency to make things hard unnecessarily, and challenged myself in a kind and loving way to allow it to be easy.

What if we simply allowed things to be easier in our lives? What if we started to speak about and own the aspects of our lives that are actually easy for us and even expected things to get easier? Easy doesn’t mean lazy, that we aren’t willing to work in a passionate way, or that we expect a free ride—it means that we’re willing to have things work out. We trust that all is well and allow life to flow in a positive way.

Our desire and ability to embrace ease isn’t selfish, arrogant, or unrealistic—it’s profoundly optimistic (in an authentic way) and can actually enhance our ability to impact others. The more energy and attention we place on surviving, getting by, or even “striving” for success, the less available we are to make a difference for other people. Although it may seem counterintuitive to us, having things be easy is one of the best ways we can show up for those around us—both by our example and with our freed-up positive energy.

As Richard Bach famously wrote, “Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.” What if we stopped arguing on behalf of how “hard” things are, and started allowing our lives to be filled with peace and ease? While the idea of things being easy may not be, ironically, the easiest thing for you to embrace, I challenge you—as I continue to challenge myself—to take this on in your life and become more comfortable with it … maybe it’ll be easier than you think!

CHAPTER 33

Accept Yourself

I had the honor of first meeting author Dr. Robert Holden when we both spoke at an event together last year. Robert is someone whom I’ve admired for quite some time. It was wonderful to get a chance to meet him in person and hear him speak live. In his talk, he said something that touched me: “There’s no amount of self-improvement that can make up for a lack of self-acceptance.”

This statement really resonated, and as I started to think about it more, I realized that so much of my life and my work is focused on self-improvement. And while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve ourselves, too often we go about it erroneously, thinking that if we “achieve” the “improvement” we’re after, we’ll then feel good about ourselves. As Robert pointed out in his talk (and as most of us have experienced in our lives many times), it doesn’t work this way.

We live in a culture that’s obsessed with self-improvement. We turn on the TV, look at magazines, take classes, read books, listen to others, and surf the Web, and constantly get told that if we just fixed ourselves a bit, we’d be better off. How often do you find yourself thinking something like,
If I just (lost a little weight, made a little more money, improved my health, had more inspiring work, lived in a nicer place, fixed some of my flaws, improved my relationships), then I’d be happy
? Even though I know better, this type of thinking shows up inside my own head more often than I’d like.

I was on the road a few years ago in Washington, DC, and had lunch with my friend Sharon, whom I really admire—her passion, authenticity, and presence are infectious. She’s dedicated her life to serving others and has had a very successful career in the nonprofit world. I’m grateful to know her and for her wisdom and perspective. When we got together that day for lunch, she said, “Mike, I’ve noticed something, especially in the past few years. Now that I’m in my fifties, I’m much more at peace with myself than ever before.”

“Really?” I said. “Why do you think that is?”

“Well,” she said, “for many years I spent a lot of time and energy trying to impress people. Constantly trying to live up to certain expectations often made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. Even with all of the success I’ve had, a sense of real peace and confidence about myself had mostly eluded me.” She continued, “However, in the past few years, I’ve just started to care a lot less about what other people think of me, and in the process have turned my attention to what I think about myself. And you know what? I like who and how I am—and don’t want to waste any more of my precious time on this planet in judgment of myself or trying to live up to other people’s standards.”

I appreciated Sharon’s self-awareness and her wisdom. Although I was not quite at the same stage or age in life, I could relate very much to what she was saying and where she was coming from. In the past few years, I’ve been focusing more on acceptance and less on improvement. One specific thing I’ve learned to accept about myself has to do with reading. I’ve never been a big reader, and for many years I carried around quite a bit of shame and embarrassment about it—like I was somehow a fraud as a writer. I also had been taught that being well-read is important, especially if you want to be smart and influential. When I finally admitted to myself, and started admitting to other people, that I don’t like to read and much prefer to listen, it was pointed out to me that I’m probably an auditory learner. Turns out, I am. If I listen to someone speak, or listen to an audio book, not only is it much easier for me to pay attention, it’s also easier for me to remember. Since realizing this, I’ve stopped judging myself for not reading and have simply chosen to get my books on audio, which I’m able to listen to on the road, while I work out, and more.

What if we gave ourselves permission to accept ourselves fully, right now? While this is a simple concept, it’s one of the many things in life that’s easier said than done. One of the biggest pieces of resistance we have regarding self-acceptance is that we erroneously think that by accepting ourselves, we may somehow be giving up, resigning ourselves to remain exactly as we are. But this isn’t true. Acceptance is acceptance—it’s about allowing things to be as they are, even if we don’t like them. It doesn’t mean you can’t still work for change.

The paradox of self-acceptance is that when we allow ourselves to accept who we are, where we are, and what’s really happening, we actually give ourselves the opportunity to make changes in our lives in a healthy way. When we obsess about and/or demand these changes
in order
to feel good about ourselves, it almost never works.

Most of the time it’s our own self-criticism, perfection demands, and impatience that are actually getting in the way of what we truly want. Imagine if we changed our approach and just accepted ourselves exactly as we are in this moment!

CHAPTER 34

Be Real and Compassionate about Money

As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, 2009 was an extremely challenging year for both Michelle and me. Among the many issues we faced that year, one of the most painful was the difficult financial situation we’d put ourselves into: we were $105,000 in debt and about $300,000 upside down on our house by the end of that year. There were a number of factors that contributed to this, some of which had to do with the economic downturn and the collapse of the housing market, but more had to do with our lack of awareness, understanding, and responsibility with our money.

I grew up without a lot of money. My parents split up when I was three; it was 1977 and my mom hadn’t worked much in the eight years since she had gotten pregnant with my sister, Lori. My dad made a decent living as a radio announcer, but with him gone, my mom was forced to take care of us, find work, and figure out how to navigate life as a single parent, which, as a Catholic girl from Rhode Island who didn’t have any family in California, wasn’t easy.

My dad, who had been pretty actively engaged in our lives the first five years after he and my mom split (we’d see him every other weekend), lost his job in late 1981 when his bipolar disorder got the best of him. We no longer saw him on a regular basis—he slipped into a very deep depression and stopped paying child support. My mom had recently started working for herself at that time as a wholesale sales rep for a few companies that made fashion accessories. She was trying to get her business off the ground so she could work for herself and have flexibility with her schedule. She was doing the best she could to raise us without much support from my dad—emotionally, practically, or financially.

One of the first and most poignant memories I have of realizing we didn’t have a lot of money is of one night during a major rainstorm in February of 1982, just after my eighth birthday. The rain had gotten so intense that the ceiling in our living room started to leak. I remember initially thinking it was fun as my mom had Lori and me run into the kitchen to get some pots and pans and put them down on the floor to catch the water. In the midst of my laughter and excitement, I looked at my mom. It didn’t seem like she was having much fun. All of a sudden, she fell to the floor and began to sob. Lori rushed over to her to comfort her, and I followed, confused by what was going on. She looked up at us through her tears and said, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” She then told us we didn’t have the money to take care of the leaky roof on our house. My mom was scared and overwhelmed, and, in that moment, so was I.

Over the next few years, and throughout most of my childhood and adolescence, money (or lack thereof) became a major source of stress, worry, and disappointment in my family. I heard the words
we can’t afford it
so often as a child that by the time I became a teenager, I mostly stopped asking for things. While my mom’s business did grow a bit, we essentially lived hand to mouth, and it was hard. We had no savings, no college funds, and no financial plan of any kind. We didn’t go on vacation, and when things around the house broke, they often weren’t fixed or replaced. I was constantly aware of what many of my friends had and what they were able to do in comparison to me.

I got into Stanford and was able to go, thanks, in part, to my success in baseball and also to the enormous financial aid package I was offered. While I wasn’t super focused on money, I definitely wanted to have a different and more abundant financial experience when I got older. I hoped one day I would be rich, and part of my motivation to make it to the major leagues was to dramatically change my financial reality. When I got drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1995 after my junior year at Stanford, I received a $35,000 signing bonus. It was the first time in my life I actually had a little money of my own. I was elated, but also scared—not sure what to do with it. After buying a car and a few other things, paying my taxes, and trying to live on the very small amount of money I was paid in the minor leagues, most of that money was gone within a year. When my playing career ended just a few years later, without having made it to the big leagues or making much money, I was forced to figure out what to do with my life and how I would make money. I had no clue about either.