Migratory Dispatch No. 4: The "Everything is Practice" Method
One Way to Get Out of Your Own Way
There is a checklist derived from Stoicism that I often refer to during moments of high stress. It goes like this:
See clearly.
Act rightly.
Accept and endure the world as it is.
This list is a centering device that is useful during pressure-packed situations. Seeing clearly, the first order of business, means to organize your thinking in part by acknowledging and processing any emotions or feelings that are clouding your ability to accurately appraise a situation.
The only way to get to No. 2 on the list is to nail No. 1 first. That is easier said than done when the stakes are high. So how do you get there? Leadership Coach and author Caroline Webb is here to help:
When you're feeling stressed about something at work, it's hard to think clearly. To get your brain off the defensive, it helps to try thinking about the potential benefits of the situation. Maybe there's something you can learn from the annoyance you're currently dealing with. Maybe you're building some resilience that will serve you well in the future. Or maybe there's something funny about what's happening, that you'll be able to laugh about in the future. Shifting your attention from threats to rewards gets you re-centered and makes it a lot easier to make good choices about what to do next.
This relates to what I like to call the "everything is practice" approach. You can quickly separate feelings from facts — and thus get out of your head and on with your life — using this line of thinking.
Dispute with your partner? Opportunity to practice listening and reflect on your role in the matter.
Angry boss? Opportunity to practice discovering his or her pain points and your ability to develop solutions.
Police officer knocking on the camper van door at 2a while you are boondocking in a local park near Hershey, Pennsylvania?!? Opportunity to practice respect for authority and obedience of the law.
The reality of whatever situation you find yourself in becomes less threatening when you use everything is practice as an operating procedure. This framework transforms any uncomfortable experience into a training ground. Employing this method, you can leverage your feelings as fuel, as Steve Magness suggested in the book Do Hard Things, which enables you to move from despair to action with quickness and energy.
Once you start thinking about things in this way, you see how true it is that everything that happens in your life is an opportunity to practice something. The whole world and all of its experiences become a laboratory for your experimentation.
When you engage with this line of thinking by default, even the mundane and painful aspects of life become much more tolerable. Like having to find a new campsite in a foreign town at two in the morning.
Follow Along with Felt
Maps stand the test of time when it comes to documenting a journey. It is a natural medium through which to share the experience, as there is such a strong current of geography and place on any trip through the physical world.
To that end, Felt, a collaborative, web-based mapping platform, is being used to catalog our trip this summer. Felt democratizes map-making with an easy-to-start and easy-to-use model that seems well-suited for this type of application.
Follow along on the map here.
The Boondocking Count
One of the goals for the trip this summer is to boondock at least 50 percent of the time. We are going to be away from home for 42 days, so that means we need to boondock at least 21 nights to succeed.
The updated boondocking count through this morning:
Total nights = 24
Total nights boondocking = 16
—
67 percent boondocking