Wanzology

In Between

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. How ya doing? What's going on? It is another episode. Wait, is it Wednesday? Yes, it is. Which means this is another episode of WANZOLOGY! I hope that today, even if it's not Wednesday, is bringing you good things and that you are wide open to receive those good things. Oh, my goodness. We are in the thick of the holiday season. The week before Christmas. Yikes. I have made my list, checked it more than twice, and hopefully I'll be able to get my shopping done.

Anyway, on with the show. The topic for this week is what I call IN BETWEEN. Now, I'm pretty sure that you, like myself, has had to do mental course corrections, sometimes. Meaning, you misjudge yourself, and because of that misjudgment, you act on what you thought was right, and it turned out to be wrong. You go back and see how you made your mistake, where you made your mistake and what to do next. Well, after you make that choice of what to do next, have you ever had to sit and wait for the results? Have you ever had to wait to see if your course correction, your reframing actually does the trick and puts you on a path that you'd rather be on instead of the one that you just left. I call this being IN BETWEEN.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been really, really, really, I've been really down. Life has been really hard. Realizations that I have come to after discovering and evaluating myself for attachment theory. I'm an anxious avoidant and I get that, I understand what an anxious avoidant is, but now I'm at the point where, okay, I'm supposed to, if I want to course correct, I'm supposed to do some things. I've started doing some of those things and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting. When you deal with things having to do with your personality, or if you try to make improvements, it's almost New Year's, so this is very relevant, everybody makes New Year's resolutions, right? Sort of what I'm talking about is creating a new habit to improve the efforts that you put in gaining all this knowledge, you pick a path and you take some action and you wait to see, am I going the right way? Is this going to work? Could it work? And if it doesn't work, then what? Now you got to start a process all over again of reevaluating how you got to where you are, right? So now that I've gotten all this knowledge and understand what I'd like to change, I'm waiting, having made a few changes, to see if there are results. I'm in between the problem and the solution. I think I have the solution, but I'm not sure. So, I really shouldn't call it a solution. It's a possible solution, but I'm not sure whether I have taken the right action to solve the right problem. It is possible to apply solutions to the wrong problem and think that you're doing the right thing, only to find out later that those solutions didn't really work. And then you go back, “Oh, I should have zigged here and zagged there. It probably would have turned out better.” See, that's the reevaluation part.

So yeah, I'm in between And if you've ever really spent a lot of time in between, I’d really like to know how you feel about it. I'd really like to know how I'm supposed to feel about it. And I guess not knowing is, in a way, scary. I'm not really sure what things are supposed to be like right now. I'm not sure how my heart is supposed to feel. I'm not very sure how my brain is supposed to feel. How my mental stability is supposed to feel, I'm just kind of here. And I don't mind being here, I’d rather be here than ‘there’. Because when I was ‘there’, I made a bunch of assumptions and every single one of them was wrong. Which I wouldn't have too much of a problem with except, I thought they were right. I was justifying a position based on inaccurate information. So, when I was given the correct information and discovered that I was wrong, well that kind of changed the tenor of my perception to I made a very, very horrible mistake knowing that it's going to cost me and it sure did, which put me in the hole where I've been for the last couple of weeks.

So now I've done the postmortem on what I did and decided what I needed, which is the information that has been gathered about my specific attachment style and now I'm starting to do other things. One of the things that I'm starting to do is I'm taking another crack at journaling. Everything that I've listened to and read said journaling is a good practice to help you gauge progress. Just like going to the gym. Some people are very, very good at being right on top of their discipline train, right? I go to the gym, and I work out for this amount of time, and then I go home. Then the next day, it's like, I'm going to the gym because I'm going to work out this amount of time. Me? Not so much. I've never been really good at that. And so, recognizing that I am not very good at that, I'm trying to put a little more emphasis on getting better, not being completely and totally successful, but just getting better. And what does that mean? Well, I have in mind, I'm supposed to journal. The last two days, I have really honestly been too busy and haven't done it. So today, when I woke up this morning, I wanted to wait until the end of this day, including making this podcast episode to include it in my journal entry. The suspense in my head has already started. What's going to happen between now and when I'm ready to go to bed, when I would normally journal, that's going to distract me from journaling? And being aware that that's a possibility. I'm not saying it's gonna happen. I'm saying it's a possibility. I'm accounting for a possible outcome avenue. But you know, my mind is weird I won't even be thinking about that if I get distracted by something else. It's in my phone. I've put a note next to my nightstand. We'll see how it works out. But boy, it sure seems like I'm going to very, very extreme lengths. Which, I've been told, and have read, you have to be hyper vigilant when you're starting to institute a new habit and I'm trying to get better at forgiving myself for not just diving in and being successful the last couple of days.

I mean, I have a bad habit of just beating the crap out of myself. You ever done that? You really persecute yourself for just being human? I'm working on that too. I'm trying to be a little more self-compassionate, which is like telling myself, “Hey, it's okay. It's all right. Do it when you do it, and then build from there.” You ever tried to quit smoking? I remember when I used to smoke, I smoked for like 33 years. I knew if I was going to quit, I would know when to quit. So I really didn't sweat it when everybody, you know, they have the national smokeout day and whatever. I was having urinary issues. Went to the doctor and got diagnosed with prostate cancer. I left that appointment, smoked one cigarette, and haven't had one since. Because boy, a cancer diagnosis will change your behavior in a heartbeat. And I've never gone back, I've never slipped. I've never chipped on that commitment. So knowing that, this new journaling thing, I like my chances, because what I just told you is an example of something that I've continued to do every day and been successful at it, which is how you get through the in between. Being in between is, it's no man's land. You're too far away from having just started and you're nowhere close to reaching the end or even a checkpoint. So if you're getting ready to make your New Year's resolutions. If you're worried about past years where it gets to be the end of January, middle of February and all of a sudden it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it and then all of a sudden by April, you can't even remember what those resolutions were, that's what happens when you get caught in between for too long, in my opinion.

So this is what mentally I'm trying to do. I have picked another facet of my personality and another habit that I've been more successful at, not perfect, the idea is not to find perfect. The idea is to find better. Remember, we're not competing against anybody else, ever. All we're doing is trying to be a little bit better than we were, and that were can be 10 minutes ago, 10 hours ago, a day ago, 10 days, whatever. If you can go back and see where you weren't as good at something as you wanted to be, the only thing that is important is to see improvement. And that improvement can be minuscule, it could be microscopic, but it's still improvement. So give yourself a break. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm giving myself a break. And that's why I wanted to talk about this today because the last two days I haven't followed through on what I committed to doing and started to do three days ago. And instead of what I would normally do, which would be, “You're a failure. You can't do this and see you've already messed up and you got to start all over again and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…”, well, and in past episodes, I've said what my father told me, “Nothing beats a try, but a fail.” It took me forever to figure out that as long as I'm trying, I have not failed and neither will you. You have to keep moving forward. Time won't let you do anything else. You think you're going back to the past, but what good is that going to do you since you can't change anything? All the changes are going to happen in the future. Remember when you couldn't tell the difference between the letter ‘D’, small ‘d’, and you were writing the little ‘d’, and the letter ‘b’ as in boy. And all it is, is putting that little circle thing on one side or the other of a stick, but if you were like me and grew up kind of dyslexic, it was challenging to know the difference and you thought you had it right until it got corrected by the teacher and it was wrong. And I had to learn, I'm thinking it's going to be D-O-G, it's a dog. It's not a ‘bog’, it's a dog. And then I'd write. Then it would be, what does a dog do? Well, a dog barks. Say the letter, and that helped me distinguish the difference. Not many of those primitive solutions that we had in early childhood education, not many of those have changed. They still work. And if it's not the specific technique like I just described, then it's how you got to said technique. Because you're older and more sophisticated now, right? Getting out of in between for me means not looking at where I'm at, or where I've been as much as it's about looking towards where I'm going, or where I'd like to be. I may be going in the wrong direction. I may mess up and not enter my journal tonight, but it won't be because I haven't tried. And it's that effort. We're all responsible for our own effort. If you find yourself in between the problem and the solution, remember you're heading for the solution.

Someone reminded me today, there's a reason that the windshield is larger than the rear-view mirror and everything in the rear-view mirror is getting smaller. So keep that in mind, especially when something happened that you didn't count on and you made a mistake. Okay, great. You acknowledge the mistake. You apologize for the mistake. Offer to make amends for the mistake. Great. Now what? Well, you don't want to make that mistake again, so you go back and how did I get here? Okay, great. I'm going to do this, this, this, and this. Hopefully it will keep me from repeating that mistake. Welcome to being in between. That's what it is. And then you go and implement one thing and check it out, and then you implement another thing and you check it out. You've done this before. What comes to mind is you've gone through a room that's completely dark and you don't know where anything is, but you have your hands out in front of you and you're walking really slowly so you don't stub your toe or trip and your hands are out so you don't really bump into anything, this is what this is like for me, but there's a little mental picture. I'm feeling my way through until I can see better. Maybe look at it that way. You try one thing and evaluate how it turned out.

In between, do yourself a very, very large favor and try really hard not to stay there. In my experience, staying in between, it's like rotten food in the garbage can. The longer you leave it in there, the more it stinks. For me, that's what it's like. Maybe your results will vary. We shall see.

Thank you so much for tuning in this week. I really do appreciate it. It's very helpful to share some of the things that I'm going through because I know I'm not the only one who's going through some thangs, and there is safety in numbers. If you get a chance, go to Instagram and look up WANZOLOGY and follow it there. Maybe start a discussion. If you're on Facebook, there's a WANZOLOGY page on Facebook as well. I'm working on getting better at checking those. Let's try to be a little easier on ourselves. I will if you will, okay?

I hope that everything goes very, very well for you. May past failures be past Not repeat themselves. Ciao for now. I'll see you next week. Pea---ce!!