Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
I have a theory that the strongest people are often the least likely to be present.
Because when you’ve spent so much of your life being excellent at anticipating what might go wrong – it’s really hard to turn it off. Your whole personality forms around staying ten steps ahead of the chaos.
And it stays that way – until life hands you a situation you can’t possibly manage on your own.
It’s been a decade now since my mom passed away, but in that final season of her life, I was her primary caregiver. I had all but moved into her home outside of Dallas, Texas and was managing her daily care. There was the hospice care team, cancer care team, nursing facility care team, and a host of day and night nurses who always seemed to be operating from different playbooks.
There were other family members around, but they had chosen not to be involved. So most days it was just me – working full time from a hospital room and explaining to my brother (in active addiction at the time) why I was not going to “give him some of mom’s morphine” to treat his mysteriously omnipresent stomach ache.
I was in a relationship – which could have been tremendous support. But, after years of our unhealthy on again, off again dance I wasn’t even surprised that he refused to come be with me while my mom was dying.
Did I mention my mom was dying? I did, right? Just checking.
Anyway, it was a lot. More than a lot. It was one of those times in life where every day seemed to ask more of me than I had to give. Where I went to bed crying every night and then just got up and did it all again because I had to. Because no one else was going to and I couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything less than my best.
And, my best…was pretty freaking great.
The Curse of Competence
I built my entire life around being highly competent. Early on I learned how to anticipate risk, see around corners, and prevent the bad stuff from blowing up in my face. I planned everything. I orchestrated it all. I was the sole composer and conductor of my entire world. And, in a lot of the ways that mattered…it had worked.
But this season didn’t care how competent I was. Every day something changed that I could never have seen coming.
Mom’s pain would spike every few days so we had to adjust her meds to keep it managed. She’d be having a good day so I’d let myself go eat lunch and her oxygen would tank while I was out. My conference call would get moved to exactly the time when her oncologist was rounding so I’d miss the chance to ask the 27 new questions that had cropped up since last we met.
Life changed too fast. It demanded too much. It kept rearranging itself before I had time to finish the last version of the plan. And so I had to do something I had not spent much of my life practicing at that point.
I had to be present and trust.
I had to be here. Not in tomorrow. Not three steps ahead. Not inhabiting the story I was trying to write about how this should go.
Present.
The present moment is a strange place to live if your nervous system has been trained for survival.
When you’ve lived through enough hard things, control starts to feel like wisdom. Control can be a very useful skill when life is chaotic. It helps you prepare. It helps you protect people. It helps you feel less at the mercy of whatever is coming next.
But control has a shadow side.
The more convinced you are that you can stay ahead of everything, the more you start living outside the present moment. You’re not meeting life anymore. You’re trying to outmaneuver it.
What we think control gives us is certainty. And, certainty is so comfortable. But, in our search for comfort – we miss the truth.
It’s not our planning, but our presence that keeps us safe.
The present moment is the only place where life actually exists. It’s where the information you need to navigate arrives. It’s where the next right move becomes visible and the thing you thought you needed five minutes ago turns out not to be the thing you need at all.
That season taught me one thing for sure. In life, you will not have the information you need until the exact moment you need it. Anything that makes you feel differently is a comforting lie.
To handle the care for my mom, I was trying to think ten moves ahead and life would be like, “Cute plan, Sara. Up is now down. And right is now wrong. And, your shirt’s on backwards. Have fun figuring that out.”
I would build a plan and then her health would shift. I would try to prepare emotionally for the next day and the support I was relying on would bail. Over and over again, I was being taught the same lesson.
You cannot force certainty. You can only co-create.
Co-Creating Your Life
Compared to pretending to control your life, co-creating it feels like a big, old, steaming, pile of poo.
It’s absolutely terrifying at first. To concede your whole identity. To let go of being the one who knows, anticipates, and handles things…is so unbelievably hard. I never would have done it – if I hadn’t been robbed of the choice.
But here’s what I wish I knew then – what I want you to know now – without things having to get as bad as they did for me.
Co-creation, as scary as it may seem – is the path to the freedom you’d been searching for all along.
The freedom from having all the answers. From being the person who gets everything done. From having no support and feeling abandoned by the very people you’re working so hard to protect.
Co-creation give you freedom from standing outside your life in order to manage it.
Because that’s the reality of high control living. It keeps you busy and feeling like you’ve got it under control, but it keeps you one step removed from it all. It says: stay vigilant. Stay useful. Stay ahead. Stay ready for the bad thing. Stay ready for the next thing. Stay on high alert.
Co-creation requests something altogether different from control.
It beckons. Come here and be. Participate. Respond. Allow. Trust. Be in relationship with what is unfolding instead of trying to dominate it.
Overcoming Objections
When I read articles about this stuff, this is usually the place where I say “that‘s a nice idea, but let me tell you all the reasons it doesn’t work for me.”
I know the arguments well. The ones that say, I’ve got too many people depending on me to stop spinning the plates.
The world will fall apart if I stop holding it together.
You don’t understand – it’s all up to me – no one is coming to rescue anything.
I believe you, Monarch. I really do. I am you. And, I get it.
But, here’s the truth that’s missing from all our well worn objections. You…can’t keep living like this. There is a cost you’re not properly weighting with all the other calculations in your head.
If nothing changes and you keep doing emotional and mental gymnastics to keep it all afloat, life is going to hit you with a situation so big and hard you have no choice but to let go of your perfect preparation and illusions of control.
And, just in case you somehow you push through that slog of scenario, you get what’s behind door number two. That’s where the stress of it all, will quite simply take you out. You will run yourself so ragged that you’ll stop being able to do any of this work and everyone will just have to figure it out without you.
As someone who has been there – who has seen what happens when we become overly identified with our strength, these are not roads you want to go down.
You’ve been praised for being strong so long you’ve forgotten there’s value in anything else. But, your presence is what the world needs from you most.
You. Actually you. That’s what your loved ones, your work, your kids, and your life can’t get anywhere else.
You.
When I stopped trying to control every aspect of my mother’s care. When I let myself get some rest and actually eat a supper that didn’t come from a sack. When I stopped rewriting handwritten notes for her nurses so they’d look more aesthetically pleasing & somehow signal that I valued their effort – thereby ensuring her better support…everything got better.
I stopped trying to make insight arrive on my timeline and accepted it would come when it was needed. I didn’t treat my own health like an afterthought, but a condition of the mental and physical wellness that was required to get her good care.
When I released the people from my life who took more than they gave – I had the bandwidth required for the day I was actually in.
I didn’t become some unrecognizable, passive, woo-woo, hippie, “it’s all gonna be alright, man” person. I just stopped trying to be twelve moves ahead.
I stopped confusing control with safety. And, found some actual safety for myself – and, gratefully, for everyone else. I couldn’t save my mother’s life – but I did give her a lot of good days.
We went through old pictures, talked about her childhood, wrote letters to her college roommates, and watched some really bad TV. I learned more about her passions, her values, and her most sacred beliefs.
I bore witness to her experience. And, we shared in it together.
It wasn’t perfect. She still had pain – and so did I. I still experienced stress and felt exhausted every day. But, in no longer trying to outrun the present moment, I could live it. I could treasure it. And, those moments, those experiences, are ones I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Practical Presence
If you’re used to doing all the hard things no one else will, I want to give you a few things you can try today to shift out of survival and into your life.
- Build margin into your day. Got back to back meetings? Not anymore you don’t. End those meetings 5 minutes early and get something to eat. Struggling to get dinner on the table every night? Grab some friends and do community dinners a few times a week. When your schedule is too booked, something’s gotta give. And, it can’t always be you.
- Take care of your body like it matters. Turns out, it does. Hunger, fatigue, dehydration, and overstimulation will pull you out of the present faster than almost anything else. And, it’s also the easiest thing to fix. Eat. Drink. Move. Sleep. Repeat.
- Make clarity part of your life infrastructure. One of the first exercises I do with clients is a calendar inventory. We’ve got to know where the debits and deposits are in your life to make sure the balance is in check. Knowing what you need to power you through your week is the first step in creating it.
- When you catch yourself time traveling…come back. There is no way to stay perfectly present in your life 100% of the time, you little overachiever. There are no gold medals for this. When you notice you’re not present – take a breath. Press your big toe into the floor. Pick a color and find it five times in the room. Train yourself to return without shame and your default will start to shift.
Most importantly, building a different relationship with life requires you to stop managing every possible outcome and start trusting you can handle whatever comes. The good news here is that you have a literal lifetime of experiences that demonstrates what a freaking rockstar you really are.
Maybe you’re a generational cycle breaker – the first in your family to heal. Maybe you’re a survivor, a recovering perfectionist, or the person who got your kids out of a dangerous situation. Maybe you’ve put yourself through school, built an amazing career, or shepherded a loved one through illness or death.
You have already done more hard things than anyone has a right to expect. Let’s stop adding to the docket, ok? Let’s start co-creating what comes next.
From survival to playful.
From perfection to presence.
From bracing for life to actually living it.
If your whole life has taught you to stay ahead of the chaos, it might be time to build a life that’s finally yours. Monarch is the place where the strong ones get to stop being strong and start being alive.
If you’d like to learn more, I’ll give you thirty minutes free to talk about where you’ve been and where you want to go.
