2007-11-12
Take It!
It's finally cooling off, for real now.
Even this weekend, the temperature outside was in the upper 80s but today, from my cubicle, I can see on Yahoo that it is a completely agreeable 69 degrees.
This means it will be very cool at night.
This would be great expect that for the last, oh I dunno, 7 months or so, I've been sleeping with a fan on in my room.
I can't fall asleep without it.
I can't get out of bed when it's cold.
I was running 45 minutes later than usual and walking in this morning at the same time as my boss.
In response to the fish-eye, I said, "My cat wouldn't let me out of bed this morning. You know how they are and they have SUCH a hard time falling back asleep that I just... I was trapped."
Luckily, it wasn't a major problem.
Oh but major, problem, there is.
It's not like I'm the World's Greatest Faller Asleeper anyway so I'm totally not psyched to throw a wrench into what has become my Comfort Noise for sleeping.
I think I'm going to have to move the fan to my hallway or something, just so I can hear it.
This was a much more interesting and funny essay when I wrote it in my head at 1:30 in the morning, taking my chips and going home on my hopes of falling asleep without my fan.
I got a lecture last week, on Thursday evening, which was interestingly on the heels of a day spent seminaring about success at work and then going to hear Janet Evans speak about success.
I'm sitting in this seminar at work, thinking of myself as a pretty shitty employee and then through the whole thing, it's all, "Who won one of those awards?"
My hand raised.
"And we have an example - this email about Sarah."
A rave, from a major client.
The lecture went like this:
I was telling someone about one of the things Janet Evans said, which is to trust your coaches. Apparently, in her second Olympics, she didn't listen to her coach tell her that her major competition has a very fast finish and that if she wasn't prepared for that, she would be touched out.
She was.
So I was saying that I learned to trust my coach.
And my former coach said, "You need to trust yourself. Your coach wouldn't put you in if she didn't think you could do it. You're great. Trust that your coach thinks you're great."
Huh.
So I thought about this stuff all weekend, about trusting myself and about visualizing myself doing the things I want to be doing.
I focused this on roller derby because I've been going through this thing of really kind of hating skating.
I haven't been hating derby, per se but I've not enjoyed being on skates and having to do falling drills and feeling an achy back and messy feet.
I wasn't even close to quitting but I wasn't seeing myself being any good at it.
So I took to heart what my former coach said and I paired it with what Janet Evans was saying and I looked at it from the perspective of not only being a good employee but of being a frigging example of a great employee.
And I was amazing last night.
I've never skated that confidently or aggressively. It took me awhile to commit to it, the entire first period, actually but the second I changed my mind is the second that I started having take-out after take-out.
It was instant.
I believed I could do the things I have learned and I believed that all the work I'd put into this was for a reason and I blocked the shit out of blocking.
It was a powerful lesson and I'm thinking about carrying it over into other areas of life, for example, if maybe I stop thinking of myself as a fat Spinster, I will stop being a... fat Spinster.
I'm not particularly dumpy of strange-looking on the outside so why I consider myself to be nothing special on the inside is sort of beyond me.
What I see does not match up with what the world is telling me.
When I DO change my thinking to match what the world is telling me, "your coach trusts you because you're good at what you do" then I become what I want to be.
I'm not being as eloquent as usual here but maybe because I'm still in the midst of it and in a couple of days, I'll stop rubbing my eyes in wonder and it'll be a more innate feeling.
But yeah.... I put the work in - to be good at my job, to be good at derby, to look good and so as soon as I believe that I am those things is the minute that I authentically am what I say I want to be, or what other people see in me when they see past my general lack of confidence.
So my goal for the short-term is to just start taking compliments.
I used to be really good at this and along the way, I had a boyfriend (no not that one) who told me that I was really arrogant.
I think it just hit me at the right time and I internalized it, weirdly.
Because a compliment is just that.
there's no need to justify a compliment when you KNOW that you have done the work to earn it.
"You rocked that jam!"
My old response would have been, "Well, it was just because so-and-so wasn't in it. I mean I took out that girl but she's not all that steady tonight."
My response will be to smile and say, "Thanks! It means a lot to hear you say that. You also _______ (fill in the blank on something really great)"
arizonasarah at 12:12 p.m.