The power of the story you’re telling yourself

I listened to Laura Vanderkam‘s I know how she does it a few months ago and I mostly loved it.

There were a few things that I completely disagreed with, but we’ll get to those in another post 😉

For now, I want to talk about the best thing about this book.

She talks quite a bit about how for everything in life, there are two ways to look at it (this we know) but often the narrative we use is what determines how we feel about a situation.

For example, she talks about an outing her family went on.

During this outing, there were all the usual pleasantries (the Instagrammable moments :)) and then one child screamed in the car for about an hour or two on the way home, another child vomited, and so on.

What would you think about this day?

To be honest, the vomiting and screaming would stick in my mind.

She challenges the reader to think about both the instagrammable moments and the vomiting moments.

It’s what Glennon from Momastery calls brutiful. Life is both beautiful and brutal.

It’s the fact that two realities can exist alongside one another, and both be true.

This title reminds me of the things we say to ourselves

Back to the book:

It’s a book about “successful” women in “big jobs” and how they do it “all”.

Some women have a month or a week of HECTIC and say “I can’t do this work/ parenting thing” and leave the workplace because that feeling of recency leads them to believe things are always that way. They feel that work is terrible and I can’t be a good parent if I’m working because I can’t watch the soccer matches, attend the kids’ plays, do homework, etc. So I’ll give up work.

I loved what she said that if you have more than one kid in an activity, and you can’t make Kid 1’s activity due to being at Kid 2’s one, you don’t say, “oh well, we’ll just get rid of Kid 2”. Ridiculous but this applies the same logic as the example above.

Laura shows that you can do it, just in different ways.

I love applying the power of perspective to these things. Yes, you do have to work from home if you want to dash out during the day to attend a parenting event, but how often does that happen? Maybe 6 – 8 times a year? 6 – 8 times over a whole year is completely doable.

Same with busy periods at work. If your whole work life is such that you have to work tip 10 – 11 pm every night and be in the office the whole day, I’d relook at that scenario and compare it to my values. But if it happens 4 out of 22 working days a month, that’s a % I can live with.