Author: Sarah K Peck

How Do You Feel Before, During, and After?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Today I want to share with you about a way to connect inwardly, with yourself. 

But first, a quick story.

I work with coaches. A lot of coaches. I’ve worked with college coaches, swim coaches, book coaches, life coaches… you name it, I like doing it. 

One of my most recent coaches has worked with me on deep, sticky, messy problems, and he consistently challenges me to level up in terms of how I grow. And how I even think about growth in the first place.

Suffice it to say, before our sessions, I start to get really anxious.

I don’t want to meet with him today.

I get a little panicky. I get frustrated. I yell (sometimes). 

“Maybe I’ll just quit coaching,” I tell my husband in a panic. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

He laughs at me. Kindly, though. Because I do this every single time.

Right before our sessions together, I start to get frustrated and nervous. I don’t always want to dig into the stuff that needs work.brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

And then we meet. And we dissect, analyze, and talk through the puzzles that are presenting themselves in my life at the moment. Sometimes I cry.brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

And afterwards? brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

Afterwards feels amazing. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

Afterwards I am so grateful, and so thankful. brings a lot of stuff up for me about how I learn, grow 

We unpack the stories, the narratives, the ideas, the messiness of mind, and we think about how it all layers together. And there’s relief, and freedom, and … joy. Joy in being human, in being alive, in being messy, in being like a playful little kid, experimenting, growing, and trying things out.

And my husband, he reminds me to remember that how I feel before is not the same as how I feel during, which is not the same as how I feel after.

When you’re feeling sticky or icky, or if you’re in a moment of decision-making, consider all of the layers of the feelings.

  • How do you feel before?
  • How do you feel during? 
  • How do you feel afterwards?

What you feel matters. It’s important to notice all of the feelings, not just some of them.

 

Send a Friend a Love Letter

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I have the bad habit of hiding and holing myself away for a while. It’s when I’m deep in writing, processing, or thinking. I get a bit estranged from the connectivity of it all.

When I emerge, I begin to remember things that I used to do, that I’ve forgotten. A quick sniff of my armpits and I realize that I should probably have showered a bit more frequently; my face is greasy with non-washing and my yoga pants have several days’ worth of food wiped across them.

And I remember that I’ve forgotten to stay in touch. I’ve forgotten to write back to friends. Email has piled up in that unforgiving way, hundreds of messages blinking at me angrily in the ether, waiting and insisting upon an urgent response.

Two weeks is a fast reply, right?

When I disappear into it all, I fail to stay in touch with my friends. Sometimes the guilt seeps in — I missed it! I should have paid more attention! — but deep down, I also know that the way into deep work is to stave off the notifications and the messages for a while.

And as a way back in, I like to write. Write to my friends, write to my family.

The worst habit I have, which I’m a bit remiss to confess here, is one in which I emerge, and then stiffly and frustratingly wonder why people aren’t reaching out to me.

Why don’t I have a new message today?

Hmph.

(As though my friends should be patiently waiting for my return and then instantly messaging me.)

Nope.

It’s on me.

And so I write.

I write my friends a letter. A note.

These are a few of the ways I like to reconnect:

> By text message

Hi! I’ve missed you. Sorry for the delays, I’ve been inside and under a writing rock lately. Let me know how you’ve been and if you want to catch up!

> By audio message

I’m still a bit wary of the actual telephone, so I love to record audio messages for my friends and drop them off.

> By postcard

Postcards cost 34 cents to mail, and about 50 cents to purchase. Isn’t that absolutely incredible? I keep a stash inside the front pocket of my kindle to write when I’m out and about, or when I’m in line, or when I’m traveling on a plane.

> By friend update

I write a monthly friend update — a personal letter of sorts. It’s a small list of people I want to keep in touch with, which goes out, not monthly, but in the months I remember to send it. (Critical distinction, eh?). I forgive myself in advance for the months I forget and pick up during the months I remember. Some quarters just aren’t that externally facing, and that’s part of the seasonality of life.

I tell them a bit about my work and my current thought process, the research projects I’m engaged in, and any struggles that are presenting themselves.

I ask them to write back. I get a dozen or so responses, and we re-engage.

> By email love letter

This is perhaps my favorite of all time. I like to ask people how to show up better for them in their lives, to learn what they like, to hear about what would be helpful for them.

When I find my people in this world, I try to keep them around. People that are on a similar wavelength of curiosity and experimentation, of kindness and depth. And one way to do this is by writing a letter of admiration and connection to them.

To tell them the joy of being acquainted with them, and how much you’re looking forward to getting to know them, however it transpires.

And the question I want to share with the blog today, a nascent question in my journey into better-connected friendships, is a question I find poignant, raw, and mind exploding.

How can I better show up as a friend for you?

I found myself craving a friendship with two people I’d fallen in (friend) love with, and we lived far apart, each equally busy in our world of work and life pursuits. We weren’t going to happen to run into each other very often.

I wrote them an email, titled, simply:

<3

And the email said:

I have a question for you, which might seem strange, but here goes:

How can I show up as a better friend for you?

I’ve got a really strong intuition and feeling that I want to be in your life, that we will stay in touch.

So, for you: what would it look like to have amazing friend support? What makes your life better? How can we show up for you?

Especially in the age of “too busy” and tons of work, what might this look like? Text messages? Random 5 minute chats?

A thought and a question to start a conversation.

xo

How are you reaching out to your friends?

One of my practices in friendship and connection is working to pro-actively initiate more of the types of friendships I want to have in my life. I believe in the rule of 50 people, and the need for vastly better structures of community in our lives. I want my little one to have dozens of “Aunts” and “Uncles” he can turn to when his mom isn’t the right person to go to, and I want the same for myself.

I dream of being surrounded by wonderful men and women, in community, going deeper in ideas, in sharing, in storytelling, and in supporting each other.

It is my belief that telling our stories helps us heal, helps us connect, and helps us feel less alone amidst the existential loneliness of it all (we’re all just floating in space, really, right?).

And so we must reach out, to each other.

What are your favorite practices for reaching out and staying connected with friends? How do you want to show up in the lives of other people, and how do you want people to show up in your lives? Leave a note in the comments!

Sweet Discomfort

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

The edge of comfort begins to feel mighty uncomfortable. An extended stretch in yoga class, a twist that goes a bit further than you’re used to, a run that tacks on an extra mile that your body hasn’t done before.

When you stretch into your areas of growth, you reach a place of discomfort. My yoga teacher reminded me of the sweetness inside of this discomfort. It’s not painful, it’s not terrible, but it isn’t at all easy, either.

It isn’t the most pleasant place to be, because you might be breathing heavier, sweating more, struggling to balance.

You might be pushing to find the right words, or stammering on stage as you give your first-ever live talk.

Inside of the discomfort is a sweetness. It is the awareness of growth, of the creative impetus that is the desire of being human. We long for growth and change. When we stagnate or stay still for too long, we can sink into sadness, lethargy, or apathy.

But when we struggle and strive, when we reach to achieve, when we allow ourselves to go into the area of sweet discomfort,

We grow.

Get Better at Scheduling Your Time, Get Better at Email (New Classes)

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Do you ever get overwhelmed by scheduling your day, week, or month? Does email bog you down or frustrate you?

I’m teaching two new virtual seminars this November all about rethinking the way you schedule your week (November 9th) and becoming a jedi master with your email inbox (November 17th).

The seminars are 1-hour long, live, and will be recorded.

Registration is $49 per class.

Live Session 1:
Rethinking & Reinventing Your Schedule

Wed, November 9, 2016 1:00 PM Eastern
A 1-hour class plus live Q/A

About the session:

How do you think about the time in your week? How do you plan ahead, carve out time and space, and make certain activities a priority? In this one-hour webinar, I’ll walk you through a session of scheduling, planning, and re-thinking about how you organize your time. I’ll also share with you 8 key tips I use in planning my own time. If you want to rethink your week, your organization of time, and how you schedule and plan, join me. Register Now: Rethinking Your Schedule.

Live Session 2:
13 Ways to Become A Gmail Jedi Master

Thu, Nov 17, 2016 1:00 PM Eastern
A 1-hour class plus live Q/A

About the session:

Does email overwhelm your life, and you don’t know what to do about it? No one wants to be the best at emailing. We’ve got better things to do. Stop being overwhelmed by email. Start winning over your email inbox by learning these key insights and tricks that I’ve collected over the years to make email mastery work for you. And then, get back to building better things with your day and time. Register Now: Become an Email Master

How to Know When You’re Communicating Well

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Communication is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership. Often I see young leaders and CEOs (myself included) getting frustrated because they said or emailed something once, and it’s not sticking.

Communication is often about repeating yourself. You need to explain yourself, explain it again, return to the idea at the end of the week, check in with each person’s understanding, and then do a recap later on.

Communication is like song lyrics. You need to sing it over and over again until people are humming along.

Just like a song has a chorus and phrases and repeats multiple times (and then is played again, multiple times), great communication isn’t about saying something just once.

Saying something once is very insufficient.

Sing it over and over again until people are humming along.

8 Essays on Routine, Pattern, and Habit Change (The October Monthly Round-Up)

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

October was focused on the idea of Routine: what is it, how does it show up (or not show up) in your life, and when is it useful? From re-thinking what you spend your time thinking about, to parsing out time differently, to changing up your behaviors in an experimental fashion, it was a good month to focus on the habits that get us more of what we want. Read on to see a round-up of this month’s essays.

Here is a round-up of all the posts on this topic from the last month:

  • Default to Finish: Co you let things slide, or do you finish them? There’s nothing quite as suffocating as letting an idea slowly die. How can you default to finishing behaviors?
  • Eliminate the Thinking: Is everything worth thinking about equally?
  • Change it Up: Consider your life as a series of experiments. Do you change up your patterns often enough?
  • Don’t Use The Full Hour: The clock has wreaked enough havoc on our lives. It’s time to take back control of that minute hand.
  • My Routine: A glimpse into what my present-day looks like, and where I began when thinking about this idea of “routine.”

Plus a few relevant posts from the archives:

Also! If you’re interested in routine and habits, and you haven’t registered for the live seminars I’m teaching yet, go sign up today.

I’m teaching a class on November 9th all about rethinking how you schedule the time in your day and week, and a second class on November 17th all about how to get better at gmail (and email). Readers of my blog can enjoy a discount of 40% off the ticket price with the coupon code SARAH.

Readers of my blog can enjoy a discount of 40% off the ticket price with the coupon code SARAH. The classes will be recorded and a replay link will be sent to you after the live class is finished.

November Writing Theme: Connection

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Each month I share a monthly writing prompt for you to reflect on, write about, and discuss. I’ll be writing a lot on this theme, and I invite you to join me in writing by linking your blog in the comments below or following the hashtag #mowriting on Twitter or Instagram.

Connection: What is it? What does it mean to connect?

How do you connect? How do you know when you have connected to someone or something?

What do you connect to?

What makes up a “missed connection”?

For me, I know that I want to listen more deeply to my inner compass and pay attention to what I need, moment by moment. This requires discernment, reflection, and ultimately connection to who I am and what I want.

I also want to connect more deeply to the people around me — through writing, letters, more frequent phone calls, better and more vulnerable conversations, hugs, and deepening my most cherished friendships.

Join me in reflecting on this question this month. What does it mean to connect and why is it important to do so?

I invite you to consider both the connection within yourself, as well as the outward connections to other people (or things).

Leave a note in the comments on this post with your reflections, share your pieces using the hashtag #mowriting, or send me a note with a guest post if you’d like to contribute to this month’s theme.

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PS: Join me in my next two live seminars!

Do you ever get overwhelmed by scheduling your day, week, or month? Does email bog you down or frustrate you? I’m teaching two new virtual seminars this November all about rethinking the way you schedule your week (November 9th) and becoming a jedi master with your email inbox (November 17th).

The seminars are 1-hour long, live, and will be recorded. Registration is $49 per class.

Default to Finish

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Pssst! Quick note: I’ll be teaching a live-stream class on November 9th all about how to plan your week and set up your schedule. Go register in advance for the seminar here.

Do you finish what you start?

Let’s be honest: we’re pretty terrible, as humans, at estimating time. How long something will take, how much work it will do to finish something, how much energy we’ll have later.

Me? I always over-estimate how much I’m going to want to do something later. I get swept up in the high of the moment, in my exuberance, and sign up for ALL THE CLASSES.

The difference between something that gets done and something that remains unfinished is huge.

Unfinished work feels heavy, difficult, like a burden.

We pile up unfinished projects like additional rooms in a house, never returned to, until we’ve designed a house with 187 rooms and we don’t even know where to begin again.

Finished work — although scrappy, messy, and imperfect — is released. It is put into the world of exploration, of connection, of refinement. Push publish on the draft. Release a thought into the world.

If you only have an hour left to do the work, default to finishing it.

Put a smaller timer on it.

If you only had 5 minutes left, how would you finish it?

So many of my blog posts on this site are the product of a timer and a few minutes. I often set 6-minute, 8-minute, and other short burst intervals to write as quickly as possible.

Do it now or not at all.

This applies to signing up for online courses, too. Here’s a rubric I use and love, that might work for you.

You’re hesitating about signing up to do a new program or a course. (For me, it was Krista Tippett’s course on The Art of Conversation that really called to me.) Did I have time to take it?

If I have time today to take the course, at least an hour of it, then I have time to do it. If I can carve out time to do it now, then I know I have enough wiggle room in my schedule to make it happen.

However.

If I do not have time to do it now — in this moment, in this hour, in this day — then I am already too full and too busy to give it attention. (One way, however, to get around this is to delete something from your life to make space for the new thing. Everything is a tradeoff.)

That’s a rubric for deciding that helps me.

Do it now or not at all.

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How many things are unfinished in your life right now? Leave a note in the comments with your best tips for finishing your work.

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On Wednesday, November 9th I’ll be teaching a live-stream class all about how to rethink and restructure your week. Join me!

Eliminate the Thinking

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

One of my goals is to find a way to minimize the amount of thinking I have to do about any particular subject. My brain is really addicted to thinking. It’s one of its favorite things to do.

But there’s a certain amount of useless thinking that happens about things that don’t need as much brain time on them. For example, thinking every single day about when I’m going to exercise and what type of exercise I’m going to do takes away brain space from thinking about other things.

If I wake up in the morning and I avoid a workout, then I’ve just added that to-do into the docket of things for my brain to ruminate about:

I ask myself at 11am: will you workout now? Okay, there’s a class at 12-noon. But wait — you have a call at 1pm. So later? Yeah, maybe 3pm? Oh, but I just ate. So let’s go at 5pm? Oof, yeah, I’m tired. Damnit. I missed today. Maybe tomorrow.

There are things worth spending brain energy on and things not worth spending brain energy on.

Thinking every day (every day!) about when I’m going to work out is not something that I want to dedicate time to.

All it does it take away brain space from thinking about other things. I want—I crave—this time to go deep into writing. To work on the next chapter of my book. To carve away the mental clutter and focus on work that matters.

And if that is what I truly want, then I need to ruthlessly eliminate all of these other, unnecessary, periods of thinking.

So for workouts, as an example, I have a very boring schedule that I stick to (which I’ll write about another time). It’s dreadfully boring for my vata-type, eager-to-think, overworking mind. There’s no excitement in planning and dreaming and scheming about fancy workouts, and this is by design. I need to reel in my analytical mind and give it different puzzles to focus on.

The schedule is what will let me actually succeed.

When I don’t schedule my workouts, I only end up exercising 2-3 times per week.

When I stick to the schedule, I end up going 3-6 times per week. There’s a very clear advantage to the boring routine.

The criteria for the schedule has to be:

  • So easy I don’t have to think about it
  • Incredibly simple to remember
  • Harder to not do than to do
  • Start as small as possible
  • Ideally linked to some behavior or habit I already do.

With exercise, here’s what this looks like as an example:

I drop my kid off at daycare every day. Same time, same place, gotta do it. (Make it linked to an existing behavior).

So I put my sneakers and pants on, and every day after I drop him off, I exercise. (Wednesdays are my break day: I do this weekdays Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.)

It’s easier to get to the park and exercise when I’m already in my clothes and I’ve already left the house. (Make it so easy I don’t have to think about it.)

I do it every day. (Harder to not do than to do.)

When I first started that schedule, I only did it for 15 minutes each time.(Start as small as possible.)

Don’t think, just do.

When I think about exercising, all I’m doing is thinking about exercising.

When I set up a habit and a routine that’s simple enough to do the same way every time, I spend more time exercising than thinking.

Eliminate the thinking wherever you can.

How might this apply to other areas of your life? Leave a note in the comments below.

Change It Up

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

If you’re not getting the results you want, try something new.

If the way you’re currently working isn’t getting the results you want, you either need to stay the course a little bit longer (see: The Dip, or “Follow One Course Until Successful”), or you need to try a new way of working.

If the exercise routine isn’t getting you the results that you want, you might need a new exercise routine.

If your pattern of writing isn’t giving you the results you want, you might need to try new systems.

If working alone isn’t getting you to your highest self, perhaps working alongside other people or starting a mastermind accountability group would change things.

Change it up when it’s not working.

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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? Leave a note in the comments below, or write a post about your own routine.

This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here or get the monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.