Sara Sweat, MA | Founder, Monarch
You’re scrolling through your phone when you see an art class that looks interesting. Beginner watercolor. Supplies included. There’s a picture of women sitting around a table painting flowers, and for a second you can imagine being one of them.
You save it and keep scrolling.
There’s a Pilates studio opening nearby. You pause. Maybe? But, your fingers keep searching. A group of female entrepreneurs are getting together at the coffee shop near your house. An online course is launching about the thing you’ve been wanting to learn for years. You open a few tabs. Check a few schedules. Read some reviews.
Watercolor sounds nice, but you can’t draw. Pilates might be good, but don’t you need special socks? The coffee group meets on a morning when you technically have time, except that’s the morning you usually catch up on everything you didn’t get done the week before.
Then someone needs something, and you put your phone down. You have now spent your entire available window of time researching things you could have done with your available window of time.
At least the watercolor ladies look happy. Good for them.
Last week, we talked about how hard it can be to answer a simple question: What do you want? This week, we’re going to begin to find out.
Because you can spend a very long time considering what you might enjoy without ever giving yourself the experience of enjoying anything. And I know a lot of very smart, very capable people who are doing exactly that. Including me.
You Needed More Chances
Maybe you grew up in a home where keeping everybody together occupied most of your attention. Maybe there wasn’t money for trying things, or time, or a grown-up who could take you. Maybe you were good at something early, and everyone decided that was your thing before you had much opportunity to consider anything else.
Maybe your family had very clear ideas about what was practical, appropriate, or worth doing. And, you learned to choose accordingly.
Or maybe you had interests once. Then you spent twenty years building a career, raising children, caring for parents, and keeping a household running. Now when someone asks what you do for fun, you have to reach back to a version of yourself who owned a Walkman.
You don’t need a dramatic backstory to have had too few opportunities to develop and trust your preferences. Sometimes you’ve simply spent a very long time making room for everything except figuring out what you like.
We learn best through experiences. Because the body knows in movement what it cannot know at rest. We learn by trying, noticing, choosing, and choosing again. Over time we develop preferences; keeping the parts of our experiences we enjoy and making adjustments to the parts we don’t.
But, you must give yourself the opportunity to have some of those experiences in order to figure out what you like. And when life is as busy as it is for most of us today, it can feel much safer to scroll and daydream about the experience than to actually have it.
You Have Prepared Enough
I worked with a client who wanted to launch a business. She knew what kind of business she wanted and had already done some work for a few clients on the side. She researched. Read books. Listened to podcasts. Prayed and meditated about what she hoped to build.
She was putting real effort into getting ready. But she couldn’t quite make the leap into doing enough of the work to build a business that could support her.
In our coaching, we made a plan with clear next steps and accountability for taking them. We also made room for her to come back and process what happened when she actually took those steps.
She started by making videos about her topic and sharing them with her existing network. Starting conversations. Beginning to build community around the work she wanted to do.
Giving herself the experience of doing the work gave her something another book couldn’t provide: real insight into what she wanted. As we worked through her experiences; the uncertainty, the questions, and whatever else came up, she learned that her vision for her business needed to change.
The parts she thought she’d love, she dreaded and the parts she thought would be burdensome were actually fun. So, she pivoted and built around what she enjoyed aligning her new venture to her new understanding of herself.
You may recognize your own version of this. Maybe the brand new art supplies you got online are still in their original packaging. Or, you finished one course, only to enroll in another. You just keep gathering knowledge and waiting for the confidence you need to put it into place.
Preparation has a lot going for it. You can do it from your couch. Nobody sees your first clumsy attempts or has an opinion about whether you were any good.
And if you’ve spent years trying to be enough, be right, or be perfect, an experience with an uncertain outcome asks you to step outside some very familiar protection.
So we start by making that step small.
First, Find Yourself On The Calendar
Before you start comparing classes, look at your actual week. Where could you have a little time that belongs to you?
If your calendar looks anything like mine, you aren’t actually represented on it very much. The family obligations, children’s appointments, and work schedules that vie for attention fill your days. Finding an hour for your own wants and needs can require more coordination than the activity itself.
But if there isn’t any room in your days for something that supports you, that’s the first thing we have to fix. Your calendar can’t just be a record of everyone else’s existence. You need to exist in your world, too.
Arrange for a standing Wednesday-night babysitter. Block that small pocket after school drop-off before your day really starts. Trade a little time with someone else so you cover them and they cover you. Start with what is possible in your real life.
The other people in your life will sense the shift and have feelings about it. That’s ok. They may need time to adjust. But, that adjustment doesn’t automatically mean you’ve made a mistake.
First, we have to establish that your time matters and you deserve some. Then, we can decide what to do with it.
Pick The Easiest Door
Once you’ve found a pocket of time, look for something that fits inside it. What you’re searching for here isn’t the perfect experience, it’s the easiest. The one with the least amount of friction.
It should be affordable, close by, and with the shortest time commitment or prep required. We have a tendency to do the exact opposite.
For example, when my son was small, he went to bed at 7 o’clock. I felt like the hours between his bedtime and mine were completely wasted and I wanted to find something to pour meaning back in. So, I enrolled in an online doctorate program at a prominent university.
Yep. You read that right. While I was solo parenting an infant and working a full time demanding job, I had 3 free hours a night when I couldn’t leave the house. And decided to use them to get a doctorate.
Needless to say, that blew right up in my face. One semester in, I was frustrated and exhausted. It turned out that the program I chose wasn’t all that interesting to me and his bedtime wasn’t nearly as consistent as I’d planned.
So I found myself staring down a five year educational commitment all because I’d felt it was an inefficient use of my time to just keep watching reruns of the West Wing every night.
What I actually needed to do was phone a friend after he went to sleep. Or, get a babysitter and try a pottery class. Or, host a monthly gathering of some kind at my home. Better yet – I could have tried all three. What I needed was something low stakes that allowed me to evolve my understanding of who I was and figure out what actually lit me up.
Which, as it turns out, is watching reruns of the West Wing.
Notice What Happens
It’s important that the experience we explore is low stakes and simple, because you need to just be able to show up. You’ve kept all the plates spinning for years by being an expert life prepper. You know all the details of everything before you even leave the house. You probably even check out menus online before you go out to eat, don’t you?
This experience needs to feel meaningfully different. You want the least amount of responsibility possible so you can pay attention to yourself.
Before you go, take a moment to notice how you’re doing. Are you curious? Worried about looking foolish? Already exhausted from getting everyone situated so you can leave?
Be specific with your observation. Feeling afraid that you won’t know anyone tells you something different about yourself than realizing that spending two hours with this particular group is the actual drain.
While you’re there, let yourself participate. You don’t need to hover over your own shoulder with a clipboard. But when you notice something, call it out.
Maybe your shoulders dropped. Maybe you laughed. Maybe you stopped wondering what time it was. Or maybe you spent the whole class watching the instructor’s face to see whether she thought you were doing well.
No judgement. Just notice.
Afterward, ask yourself what you enjoyed and what you didn’t. It will likely be a mixed bag.
- I liked the activity, but the group wasn’t for me. So, you conclude: I might try this with different people.
- I liked the people, but I was bored by what we were doing. So, you trust I’d enjoy seeing them somewhere else.
- I liked being praised. In other words, I’m still figuring out whether I liked the activity itself.
- I liked the first hour. The second hour felt like a hostage situation, so shorter activities might be better.
- I was terrible at it, and I wanted another turn. What would I want to try next?
- I enjoyed myself once I got there. The dread beforehand didn’t tell the whole story.
This noticing is especially useful in relationships. You might find that you enjoy a friend one-on-one but spend every group gathering trying to get a word in. Or that you feel obligated to see someone, then spend the whole visit editing yourself and leave feeling smaller.
You don’t have to decide what a friendship means because of one difficult lunch. But you do get to notice how you participate in it, how you feel, and whether the same experience keeps repeating itself.
Your reactions deserve the space to exist – even if you know what to do with them just yet.
Debits and Deposits
I talk a lot with clients about debits and deposits. We all have a limited amount of energy; physically, emotionally, relationally.
The parts of your life that ask something of you are debits. The difficult aspects of your job. The constant running around of the children. The making of dinner every night. They’re usually pretty necessary investments – but they are investments nonetheless.
A deposit is something that pours back in. The night out with your friends. The lunch date with your partner. The celebrations you look forward to with your family and the massage you booked last week. Deposits are what your debits are drawing from. So, you’ve got to have enough coming in to support what’s going out.
When you try something new, you’re not trying to decide if you’re a pickleball queen or a golf pro. You’re not choosing an identity for the rest of your life. You just want to notice if it’s pouring in or taking out.
And, leave room for things to not always appear as they seem. A great workout might look like a debit, because you leave it more tired than when you arrived. But, if having that time to challenge yourself and slowly grow your physical strength fuels you up – it’s a deposit through and through.
If that bubble bath just makes you hot and sticky and so bored you could crawl out of your skin – it’s a debit disguised as rest.
Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself
While you’re exploring what fuels you, the voices in your head will probably start judging your choices – even if no one else does. You’ll find you have a whole host of opinions about what a person like you is supposed to enjoy.
You should like the book club. They’re lovely women. Your sister would have made friends immediately. You could serve on the committee; you’re certainly capable and they definitely need the help.
Would. Could. Should. So many ways to turn someone else’s expectations into instructions for your life.
Try to just let the observation exist without arguing with it first.
Just say “I didn’t enjoy that”. You can explore why without having to prosecute yourself for having the reaction.
You can like something your family finds ridiculous. You can dislike something that you genuinely admire. You can be excellent at something you have absolutely no interest in doing.
Your competence has already volunteered you for enough jobs in your life. It doesn’t need to choose your hobbies, too.
At Monarch, we make room for this work together: trying, noticing, and building a life with enough coming in to support everything you have to give. If you’d like some company while you figure out what belongs in yours, come talk to me. Let’s figure out what you actually like.
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