Nuances are necessary.
By: Tracy Bullock
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Professional Development, Personal Growth, Coaching

The magic of the minutia.

May you have no shame if planning your days are difficult.

There is this moment when a possible client is interviewing me where we come to nudity. Nudity of the spirit, shown through operations, exhibited in words like overwhelm, chaos, fear, anxiety, stagnation, comparison, fraud fears, and burnout — which is a jazzy term that really means anger. Most of those who reach out to me are big thinkers, doers, masters of their crafts, and tragic and rare executors. Desks, virtual and otherwise, scattered with projects-a-plenty and results a few. Why is the expert always in deficit? And cash never really what it should be?

What I do as a coach, knowing that this is coming, the showing of the day-to-day uglies and avalanche of “I can’t”, and “GOD, I feel you”. I relate to the insatiable clarity of the big picture and fuzziness of the ways in-between. Well, bring it on. This learning curve is well-trodden and as universal as it gets.

Here is a lovely and very true experience of my own wrangling with HOW when the WHAT is tangible and frighteningly unreachable:

I am starting a media company.

What does that mean? It means all stars and few steps.

This media initiative is a love letter and dreamscape of a content community of words and conversations circling around personal experiences, wordsmithing, conversations, and discourse. We are to speak of and discuss books, write and tell our own fiction and non-fiction narratives, have chummy conversations, find answers and resources. Podcasts, essays, short stories, interviews, virtual experiences — all of the most wonderful and poppy things. Great, right? Oh, and add to that — it has a name and logo and here I am shuffling my feet and shivering in my shoes to get it on to step-next.

What has life taught me? Too much and not enough, but a few very valuable tools to get things in tangible action. I offer these to you as a fellow business owner and writer. These examples are not ‘by the book’ but as an info inspo footnote for tackling tactics.

1) Build a team.

I work with a most wonder human, Alyson Cunningham, to manage, support, and activate the SDYD administration, operations, and marketing flow. I don’t know what to call Alyson; I don’t know the proper term for a person who is not a business partner, but too impactful and necessary to be an adjunct or assistant. What I do grasp is that my “job” in the #SDYD universe is not maintenance, it is management.

If I want ops and find that I am supreme at ideas and ideation, critical of results and inept at the tiny parts, I could take on the challenge of the details, or I could maximize my awesomeness. Outsourcing is my default and give the value of employment to an expert, better than I.

Why? Because time is of the essence and do I want it done well or cheap and by me?

(You know the answer.)

2) Look at the calendar.

Deadlines are not a point for self-scolding; they can be more inventory-taking reminders. Whether we do or do not ‘make them’ that is less of a concern as to how or what they are based on.

For instance: I have a tendency, real flair for, setting up staunch deadlines. It is an abscess of my anxiety. Having a something to do (a/k/a on my plate) really freaks me out. One extreme approach could be to ignore what is to be done, perhaps to try to wheedle my way out of it by hiring a service or creating some argument for why the thing to be done is wrong. (It could be wrong, like the wrong thing to do, sure.) But be real, are you stepping out of a lot of rooms you first danced into? Think about it. It means a something.

Now, what I do is the reverse: I urgently do the task at hand as swiftly and efficiently as possible. It feels like a hang nail, a terrible tickle, monstrous golem growling at my ear. Even an email or unanswered texts screams at me. What’s the importance? Well fear of failure, my dear reader. A thing to do is a chance to fuck up (God knows it is certainly not a chance to be great! Ha. Are you kidding?! Impossible!) So, I do it — fast and swift and hard. A race to leave the aims behind me.

Not being distracted is my distraction.

So, what of it? What can be learned from my deadlines and what in the world would I do, what might I find, if I changed my pacing?

The flip side of this (my habit being strict, swift approaching deadlines to try and mitigate my pathology) is the setting of deadlines they tend not to meet.

In both scenarios — the question is: What can we glean from the narratives repeatedly played out in how we time match tasks, and what they say about us, to us?

Should the sand running out be set by something external to ourselves — the same inquisition applies. Are you matching, with any consistency, yourself to close or long approaching ones? And how is that working for you?

3) Look past the linear.

This is about “good”, and a lot about “bad”. “Success” and “death”. About the ends of the spectrum so railed against socially and embraced personally. “Imposter Syndrome” is a convention we use to normalize these polarities. At its origin is that there are Successful and the Pits. Master not as a legacy, but as and end game. Oh, how interesting the “IS” convention comes at time in Social History where the doors of identity push towards proud, public opening! Yet our esteem is so A or terminal B.

Again, this comes to assessing where things are at. What is the true aim — to learn, nicely and challenge too — where is that at? Be less a critic and more a surveyor.

I recommend clients take on a very noxious activity of less “time blocking” (that can come in time) but more one of field note taking. Track your activities as variable times throughout the day — mark what you are doing — dive back in and after a week (or so) look at what you find. Is what is coming down the pike what you “want” to be doing? Compare that to what is actually happening. How does that line up? Hmm.

As with any written proclamation, it sounds easy and can make the reader (and writer!) feel pretty dumb. Well, you are not — managing ourselves in our waking hours is a fucking hell of a thing to do. The ways we support our individual and community existence takes a lot of existential engagement, that by its very nature is terrible to wrangle. The only fleshy mass we can grasp is the flesh, matter, and actions we are packed in on this planet. So, get to know her, will you? Look to nuances of where and how she moves around the minutiae of your day, all more easily tracked in the freeze of the Season and caution of COVID.

Journals invite hyperbole: watching, tracking, applying ethnological tools to ourselves that can offer mean, clean intel. Excellent intel on a most odd bag of flesh just like we are!