28 Things You Control
Your judgment
Your next step
Your beliefs
Your smile
Your "Why"
Your words
What you eat and drink
What you say yes to
What you learn
What you ignore
What thoughts you feed
What thoughts you starve
What comes out of your mouth
What you spend money on
Who you spend time with
Who you love
Who you trust
Who gets your time
Who gets your attention
When you go to bed
When you show up
When you stay
When you leave
When you collaborate
How much sleep you get
How much you blame others
How grateful you are
How forgiving you are
I’m not suggesting you do or don’t do any of these things—I’m just saying…
You’ve got control.
Do not fool yourself into believing that you don’t.
The Jewish New Year is almost upon us. And the recurring refrain in my mind is, "Phew. We made it!" I don't know what this year cost each of you, and I'm not going to pretend I do. But I know we're here. We took some dodgy turns and weren't sure we could handle the curves. We were scared and anxious and wanted to zone out with Netflix. We fell, got back up, and lived to tell.
In the last post, we did the work of a designer. We listened, researched, budgeted, and sketched. We designed the life. But I left you with a hard truth: a design isn't a building yet. An architect can produce the most beautiful set of plans you've ever seen, and you still can't live in a drawing. At some point, she has to stop sketching and build, because endless redesign is slow and expensive.
If I had it my way, I'd call what I do life design rather than life coaching. Life coaching implies that I somehow get my clients to find the discipline, heretofore missing in their lives, to finally reach their goals. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What if becoming more knowledgeable doesn't lead to more fulfillment and success in life? How would we live differently if we believed that? Would we consume less content, read fewer books, and pay less attention to experts? That seems like the natural result of such a belief. But seriously, who would want that? And what kind of Life Coach would recommend it?
I heard Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce say five words recently that I haven't been able to put down. She's the Jamaican sprinter, the most decorated 100-meter runner in history. She was on Mel Robbins' podcast, talking about doubt, age, and the belief that your best days are behind you. And in the middle of it, she said this: "Time will honor your greatness."
When was the last time you heard yourself, or someone else, say "I don't have time for that!" in response to a request for some kind of commitment? Recently I sat with an extraordinary young woman. She's ambitious, warm, the kind of person who lights up a room, and I learned that she hasn't slept properly in about a decade. This past year she's mostly been getting her eight hours, and she still feels exhausted to the bone. She falls asleep in the middle of tasks. She fights to stay energized.
I asked my clients a question recently, and their answers have stayed with me since. Here it is: If your family inherited only your habits, not your things, not your money, which ones would be your richest gifts? It's a strange kind of estate planning. No house, no savings, no heirlooms. Just the way you move through your days, handed down. And what struck me about the answers is that not one person hesitated. They already knew.
We've arrived at the last of my three Selves, and the most fun of them all. But I have to be honest with you, the way I've tried to be honest in every one of these posts: for years, my Future Self really resented me. And she had every reason to. Here's the confession. Almost two decades ago, I was sitting with my Coach, and he asked me a question that should have been easy.
Only one of my three Selves is holding the steering wheel right now. Not the Past; she's a passenger who won't stop narrating from the back seat. Not the Future; she's the destination, beautiful and a little blurry on the horizon. The only Self with her hands actually on the wheel, at this moment, is my Present Self.
In the last post, I introduced you to my (and your) three Selves: Past, Present, and Future, and promised we'd start with the hardest one to love. So here she is. My Past Self. I told you she's a bit delusional, with the memory of a hamster for anything good and the memory of an elephant for anything I'd rather forget. That part I played for laughs.