Struggle's Ugly Siblings
Hey, so the blog has launched. Nice. I have had my first 10 subscribers, and I am extremely grateful for every one of them. You will always be in the first 10 club and have a special place in this blog. Has this created FOMO in anyone else? Good, subscribe now, and you can be in the first 20 club ;)
I find talking about what I am doing difficult sometimes. Putting yourself out there can be nerve-wracking. But imagine what happens to the difficulty level when someone you look up to happens to casually challenge the very premise of your blog. Well, that happened this morning :)
I love coaching. I got a taste of it in my corporate career as a bank manager. One of the banks hired coaches to train the managers to coach our staff. Sure the coaching was full of jargon, corporately mandated slogans and of course T.L.A's (Three Letter Acronyms), but it was still really great. My coach at the bank went above and beyond any other coach to really train and upskill me, sometimes channelling his inner drum teacher from whiplash. He was intense but awesome.
Since leaving the bank, I still get to coach and be coached, and it was at a coaching session this morning the whole concept of my blog was challenged. You see, my coach is awesome; not only has she been a coach for many years, but her husband is also an accredited master coach, and together they have created a whole coaching framework that is used all over the world. So when I told her about how I am writing about my relationship with struggling, she told me that they live by the belief that 'Struggling is optional.'
Great, my whole blog needs to be changed, and I had just paid for a custom URL.
She went on to talk about how most of our struggle is when we are resisting something, so it causes us to get stuck. But when we move towards understanding and acceptance, then we can choose not to struggle anymore.
This makes a lot of sense. I know there are many times in my life when I felt stuck, and it always came down to disappointment in where I was or what I was doing. I couldn't move on until I had accepted it and stopped resisting.
So is that the end of my blog? Well, no, because I had a revelation. That kind of struggle she was talking about is actually my struggle's ugly sibling.
Did you read my first ever post? I mentioned I looked up 'struggle' in the dictionary, and it is not fun. It's a depressingly negative word..... except for one surprise definition.
'Struggle - to strive to achieve or attain something in the face of difficulty or resistance.
The struggles my coach was talking about are the kind that trap you in pity, guilt, shame, depression - basically the world's worst yet surprisingly high-selling cocktail. But the kind of struggles that this blog is dedicated to are what you push against while moving forward.
That is the litmus test to work out which struggle you are dealing with. If you are struggling and feel stuck, then get help. That is a difficult situation, and you may need people to walk with you through it. But if you are struggling but still moving forward, you have come to the right place and are in good company. Did I mention I have 10 subscribers?