#667 EXPECT the Occasional Darkness

In our last +1, we talked about the fact that although the light will always shine when you flip the switch there will almost certainly be some dust and cobwebs to clean up if your life-room has been dark for a long time.

Again: It is what it is. Let’s capitalize the lessons learned and get to work compounding future gains one little incremental Optimization at a time!!

Today we’re going to talk about one more little caveat.

We need to EXPECT that the lights will go out again. (And then again. And again. And…)

The naïveté that we’ve somehow made it through all the darkness to a state of perpetual awesome such that we’ll never need to worry about the lights going out again is, perhaps, THE most pernicious “lie” we tell ourselves. (Well, that and the idea that we should have ALREADY arrived at that state of bliss—preferably years ago, right?! 😲)

I’m reminded of a recent chat I had with Barry Michels. Barry and Phil Stutz wrote The Tools and Coming Alive together.

Barry and I were chatting about the class he and Phil will be teaching with us called The Tools 101. It’ll be in the same 10 Big Ideas style that I’ve used over the years for our existing batch of 101s.

We were brainstorming the Ideas to include (of course, we’ll have the 5 primary Tools from that book, etc.) when Barry said that he DEFINITELY needed to include the fact that we need to EXPECT things will be challenging.

That the lights WILL go out.

Again and again and again.

Rather than being surprised by that fact of life and then shaming ourselves into thinking that something’s wrong with us, we’d be much wiser to sprinkle some mindful common humanity and kindness on ourselves (Self-Compassion 101 style) and then get back to work turning around the glitch.

Fact is: That’s basically the ENTIRE point of ALL our work together. To get better and better at preventing and then quickly responding to those light-glitches such that we can let the Divine en*theos light flow through us more and more consistently AND more and more brightly.

That’s Today’s +1.

Expect the lights to go out.

When they do, smile. Pull that thread through your head. Stand up nice and tall Clark Kent to Superman transformation style. And use your favorite Tool to flip it back on.

Repeat.

Forever.