Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
It’s astonishing how quickly you can abandon a good habit.
I spent the fall and winter building one small but important habit: lifting free weights for 10-15 minutes, three or four times a week. I want to be a healthy person, and I know that as I age, my risk of developing osteoporosis increases. Plus I don’t want to develop too much floppy flesh under my arms. Some moderate weight training can help prevent (or at least delay) both those developments.
Too often, when we are feeling frustrated, stuck, burned out, or unhappy, it grows out of a fundamental misalignment between our values and the way we spend our days. That’s why I spend a lot of time helping clients identify their values and then better align the ways they live and work with those values. It sounds simple, but it actually requires a lot of thought and mindfulness.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a social event (remember those?) A friend was introducing me to someone I didn’t know, and he said, “This is Melissa Walker. She is a life coach, and she helps people find jobs.”
“Well, not exactly,” I said. What followed was a conversation that provided a good opportunity to shatter some misconceptions about coaching.
I often work with clients facing major life transitions, and many of them say something along the lines of “I don’t know who I’ll be when I’m not doing this job any more.” They have gotten me thinking about a lot about identity and about how our occupation sometimes becomes completely synonymous entangled with our sense of who we are.
The first week of the year is always a busy one for me. Lots of folks decide to make some kind of shift in their lives at the start of a new year, and some of them reach out for coaching support. This year, I’ve been struck by how many of the folks who have scheduled appointments are engaged in a deep rethinking of their lives and careers. This sense that so many people want to make major shifts in the way they organize their lives and their careers is much more pronounced than in past years.
In yoga, you learn not to look too far ahead. With regular practice, you learn that some poses typically follow others in a predictable sequence. A forward fold is often the first move in a sun salutation: a halfway lift followed by a plank followed by a cobra followed by a downward dog. A series of poses that work the core often prepare the body for some kind of inversion. One of the human brain’s unique design features is its ability to recognize patterns so that we can quickly predict what is most likely to happen next. So as we practice yoga, our brains often leap ahead to predict the next pose.
Last week, my husband and I had a handyman in to take care of a few small household repairs that had accumulated. One of the tasks on the list was to repair the loose bottom step in our unfinished basement. My husband led him down the stairs, stopping halfway down to switch on the light. The handyman said, “You know, I can move that switch to the top of the stairs for you.” And he did. In less than half an hour, he had moved the light switch.
In the past few months, I’ve had several conversations with clients about quitting—quitting jobs, volunteer roles, draining relationships. Quitting is a word with many meanings. Among the definitions in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary are
· To give up employment;
· To cease normal, expected, or necessary action;
· To depart from or leave the company of;
· To admit defeat.
This month, I interviewed client Courtney Dorroll, an associate professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Religion at Wofford College. I met Courtney at a women’s leadership conference that I helped organize a few summers ago, and she had been following my newsletter for some time, so I was delighted when she reached out for coaching. Working with Courtney was a delight because she approached the entire process with a growth mindset, deep enthusiasm, and contagious energy. I particularly came to appreciate the power of her self-care approach to teaching in a pandemic year that battered students and faculty alike.
A few weeks ago, a client asked me, “What is the difference between acceptance and resignation?
We hear a lot about the importance of acceptance for people who are facing hard situations—a diagnosis, a loss, or some other painful situation that is outside their own control. But my client pinpointed something important: there can be a fine line between acceptance, a healthy response which can help us move on with our lives, and resignation, a mental state that can lead us to become psychologically stuck.
My hydrangeas are blooming beautifully. As I’ve enjoyed them, I’ve been thinking about how I should never assume that I know how the story will end.
Hydrangeas are my favorite flower, especially the big Nikko blues, and each year I look forward to hydrangea season. I love to cut big bouquets for my house.
This year, I was convinced I would have no hydrangeas.
I ask new clients to complete a series of reflective questions before we begin our work together. Some questions are about the coaching relationship: “What approaches encourage or motivate you?” Others about the client’s life: “What are you proud of?” or “What has been your biggest disappointment?” or “If you could change one thing about your life so far, what would that be and why?”
One of the most important questions I ask is “What is your most common self-limiting behavior?”
My husband and I could easily become jigsaw puzzle junkies. By that, I mean that we could easily become addicted to working them, ignoring everything else in our lives. We only allow ourselves to work two or three a year, usually on cold or rainy weekends, because once we start working on one, we work compulsively until it’s finished.
The last time we worked a puzzle, I got to think about all the things I’ve learned about life from jigsaw puzzling.
In another of my occasional interviews with clients, read about Brittany Hall, a Texas-based Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach, Cancer Exercise Specialist, and a POP Pilates instructor who turned her side gig into a full-time role in a pandemic year. Learn more about how she has adapted and thrived in the face of new challenges.
Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
If you follow me on Instagram, you know that my New Year posts have featured bare trees and shrubs. I’ve posted pictures of the fuzzy pods on bare Star Magnolias, the bare red branches of coral bark maples, the tight round buds on dogwoods, and the peeling bark on birch trees. At first glance, so much of the landscape that surrounds us in January looks lifeless, but it is really only dormant.
Scientists describe dormancy as the period in an organism’s life cycle when growth and development are temporarily stopped. Dormant plants are not producing leaves or flowers or fruit. Dormant animals have halted most or all of their physical activity. But dormant plants and animals are not dead. They are resilient and full of life.
Gardeners are very attuned to dormancy. Perennial plants respond to adverse environmental conditions like cold weather (and sometimes to drought) by going dormant. Dormancy conserves energy. The plant may look dead, but the core and roots of the plant are still living, storing energy for the future. Once conditions improve, the plant will pour that pent up energy into producing new leaves and supple young branches.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dormancy. For a long time, I’ve thought of the pandemic as an unpleasant and anxiety-producing set of restrictions. And it is indeed both of those things. It has felt like I’ve gone dormant—unable to produce much that is new.
I talk with coaching clients about reframing—about looking at some condition in life in a new way and reframing how we think about it. Reframing can free us to take healthier approaches to life’s challenges. Lately, I’ve been thinking about whether it might be helpful to reframe this practice of sheltering at home as something like a state of dormancy. Many of the things that would ordinarily consume my energy--new projects, community activities, time spent with loved ones—have been largely off-limits. It’s been helpful for me in recent weeks to think of the pandemic as a period when I’ve been able to conserve energy conserved so that when life resumes more normal rhythms, I can emerge from dormancy and pour my energy into producing my own equivalent of new leaves and flowers.
What do you think? How do you think about the state of dormancy? Is that a helpful way for you to think about this period in our collective lives?
The other day I heated a can of potato soup and cracked open a bag of oyster crackers for lunch. I bought the oyster crackers in March during one of my prepare-for-the-pandemic shopping trips, and I had forgotten that they were stuffed into the back of the pantry.
Oyster crackers are comfort food to me. My mother never bought them, but my grandmother kept them in a big glass jar within a child’s easy reach in a bottom cabinet, the same cabinet where she stored the cereal that my sister and I snacked on every time we visited her. I snacked on the oyster crackers, too. Mamaw also gave them to me when I was too sick to go to school, and I stayed with her.
As I ate my soup and munched the oyster crackers that I bought nine months ago for comfort, I thought about this strange and difficult year. For me, it’s been a year of loss—many kinds of loss.
I lost two of my dearest family members, including Mamaw. I lost a special friend who was the first person to welcome me into this neighborhood 24 years ago. A treasured former colleague died of Covid.
I lost the sense of safety and ease in moving around my community on a daily basis. I gave up travel plans. I lost opportunities to gather with family and friends, an especially painful loss at the holiday season. I lost concerts, art openings, and author readings at my local bookstore. So many of the activities that bring me joy are not safe right now.
But in the face of all this loss there has been comfort and even joy. As my husband and I have joked several times this year, fortunately we enjoy each other’s company because we’ve had to spend a lot of time together. There has been comfort and joy in that, in sharing laughter and tears. I’ve taken solace in mysteries and historical novels, in binge watching good television, and in lazy afternoons on the back porch. I’ve taken comfort and joy in Facetime and Zoom calls with friends and satisfying work with clients, in long walks and in flowers, trees, and goats, in chalk drawings on sidewalks and Christmas decorations, and in cooking and snuggling with the cat. There’s even been comfort and joy in remembering moments I shared with those lost loved ones.
While I tend to be a “glass-half-full” kind of girl, I’m not a Pollyanna. I know that all of us have endured many losses this year. There have been personal losses and collective losses. And many many people have suffered terrible hardships and losses much worse than my own.
We face many more months, maybe even a year, of pandemic uncertainty. There will be more losses, I have no doubt.
The other day, a friend posted this on Facebook:
Coronacoaster, noun: the ups and downs of a pandemic. One day you’re loving your bubble, doing work outs, baking banana bread and going for long walks and the next you’re crying, drinking gin for breakfast and missing people you don’t even like.
Nine months into this pandemic, I’m definitely on the coronacoaster. I have lots of moments of grief, anxiety, and despair. There are days when I feel the losses of this year deeply. On those days, I look for comfort by cuddling on the couch with the cat and a book. And I try to remember to look for the joy in the ordinary moments of this shelter-at-home life.
Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, writes,
Often, when a crisis hits, we are tempted to forgo joy and focus our attention only on dealing with the problem at hand. We rely on grit and tenacity to help us push through the difficulty and get to the other side.
Grit and tenacity may only carry us part of the way. Lee examines psychological research on the power of joy in hard times, and she notes, “Joy doesn’t need to stop in tough moments, and in fact, we’re usually better off if we allow a little joy into our struggle.”
I’m not giving up on comfort and joy this pandemic year because I need them more than ever.
I’d love to hear from you: what has brought you comfort and joy this year. Drop your thoughts in the comments.
Images by Jill Wellington and Manfred Richter from Pixabay
A couple of weeks ago, I was having a hard day. It was the day before the election, and national events were weighing me down. I was fretting about the hard Covid winter that we all face.
Then I walked into my den and saw the buds on my so-called Christmas cactus--it usually starts blooming late October, and some years it blooms again in spring. This plant is my reminder that life continues in spite of hard things.
If you follow me on Instagram (HeydayMelissa), you may have noticed that in recent months, I regularly post photos of things I see on my (almost) daily walks in my neighborhood. Walking has been a regular practice in my life since I was a little girl who liked to take walks around the farm in the rain. When my husband and I moved to Spartanburg, we chose our neighborhood in part because it would allow me the luxury of walking to work. The walk to the office gave me time to mentally prepare for the day, and the walk home was a tool to decompress. Since I retired from teaching, I’ve continued to make walking a pretty regular part of my routine.
