LAST WEEK'S BREAKTHROUGHS

In last week’s newsletter, I asked you to identify what you’re trying to avoid when you reach for a distraction.

Gail discovered an unhelpful pattern:

“What did I reach for? Comfort work that overlaps from my previous position. What was I avoiding? Feeling incompetent.

I was promoted seven months ago from branch administrator to director of all the branches with very little training. It had been intense and exhausting learning my new role. I have also been grieving my boss leaving because we have become very close and she retired early due to health concerns. Recently the interim branch admin in my previous role quit and I am trying to fill in until we can rehire for the position. It’s so easy to slide into my old routine on the days I am there and avoid the aspects I have not been trained on for my new position.

Thank you for this prompt. I am now more aware than before of what I am doing when I go into avoidance mode and hopefully this will focus me more when I hit those hard tasks.”

Our next reader had a breakthrough:

“This hit home for me. I never realized my actions were ‘helping’ me avoid dealing with something that I need to do, which is get another job and lose some weight. I've avoided updating my resume, LinkedIn, job searching, and updating my skills. Each time the thought of doing any of those tasks hits my mind, I turn to YouTube and listen to Reddit stories or the latest gossip channels. Last week I learned about insulin, lol. I call it the rabbit hole, and I live at the bottom of it.

My breakthrough is finally realizing that what I call being productive or busy is actually what I'm doing to avoid failure and rejection.”

Finally, Faith faced what she’d been avoiding head-on, and was transformed:

“This is the first time I have ever written to you. And actually, it is the first time I have taken you up on your journaling prompt. Not for lack of inspiration, but for the very point of your message today. The outcome has been truly transformational.

It has been a few months since I have written and in all honesty, writing was one of the many things I have been avoiding. I stopped carrying my journal around from room to room and at some point I put it in a cabinet on the other side of my house, far from any room I would write in.

This morning I read your message about distractions, realized the truth of the message in my life and decided as soon as the evening rolled around, the time of night I let avoidance and distraction take over, I would take my journal out of its perfect hiding place, get a cup of tea and sit in the new chair that has finally completed the living room ambiance I have been striving for since we moved into this house two and a half years ago. To say the stars aligned is an understatement!

I won’t bore you with the details of my musings. What I will say is that when I started writing, my shoulders and body were tight and I was curled up in a ball on my chair. I must have been breathing but had no mental awareness nor physical feeling of it, and had little to no sense of my surroundings. When I finished writing, I was leaning back in my chair, legs stretched out on the ottoman, with full attention on my breath, easy and deep, fully attuned to my surroundings with an immense sense of gratitude, peacefulness, relaxation, and presence, able to observe and note the quality of each and every sound, near and far, soft and loud. I will share the last excerpt in my journal tonight: ‘I am especially thankful for this writing exercise, which has brought me around to what truly matters—full circle—rather than the downward spiral that was spinning out of control when I started writing.’

Thank you for your musings, for your insights, and for giving your readers (like me) the space and time to engage with you and each other. Even though this is the first time I took you up on your challenge, you have definitely made a difference in my life.”

As always, send your breakthroughs by simply replying to this email. Let me know if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.

Until next week,

Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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