Exercises for Grit: When Are You at Your Best?

Last week I did not write a blog post. You may ask why not, and I would tell you if I remembered. Something came up. Or went down. Something got in the way, directionally speaking. Or, perhaps I was just too tired. As I recall, the first part of the week was taken up with back to school shopping. There was rain involved. The rain led to me leaving the car’s lights on while in the mall, and returning to discover the battery had died. Again. I must have the last car without automatic lights in the entire United States. 

Fortunately, because I have been meditating regularly, or perhaps just because I’m more chill in my 50s, I did not get into a snit. I simply called AAA, and the 10th grader and I repaired to the Happy Cappuccino to wait. I will admit to feeling some dismay, and to having some level of willpower sapped by the previous hour spent pawing through racks of teenagers’ clothing, as evidenced by the gigantic chocolate chocolate chip muffin I devoured with the daughter. 

Because of the meditation, let us note, I was aware of what I was doing. Id est: comforting myself with food. Which worked. Success!

Today started out as one of those days, too. You know the days. You have your plan, and then the dog’s eye is oozing. Now you know your plan to write your blog post is going to go out the proverbial window because you have to take the dog to the vet. This story has a happy ending, though, so buckle up. Now, since this was the dog’s oozing eye and not my child’s, I went ahead to the gym. 

I know, I'm a mean dog mommy. The dog was acting just fine, people. If he had not been, this would have been a different story. 

When I got back, I checked the eye. Still oozing. But there was a little, half-inch long small, thin, twig-like thing on the dog’s face, under his eye. Near the ooze. So I removed the twigish thing and washed the area with a little water and applied a smidge of antibiotic ointment. Then I let a few hours pass and worked on my writing. Hours later, no ooze! And so I have a blog post for you this week.

Milo wants to get grit, too.

Now, over the weekend, I had the house to myself — PARTY! The husband was visiting his mother for her birthday, and the 10th grader was away for an orchestra retreat and needed to be picked up at a particular time on Sunday. Anyway, Friday night, I had my friend and neighbor E over. And we got to talking. She was feeling a bit down and directionless, as I mentioned. I, being a pill, started talking about Getting Grit, by Caroline Adams Miller (CAM).

So the subtitle of Getting Grit is “The Evidence-Based Approach to Cultivating Passion, Perseverance, and Purpose.” I went down one of those rabbit holes called philosophic introspection about the term “evidence-based approach,” but let’s not go there. It’s the three P’s I’m getting at. Perseverance, Passion, and Purpose. CAM’s definition of grit contains all three.

Perseverance we can all understand. Grit and its synonyms imply perseverance. Hanging on. But CAM doesn’t want us to hang on just for the sake of hanging on. Sometimes, in fact, we might need to quit. There are negative types of grit, she says. Among them are Stubborn Grit, the kind of grit that gets you up Mount Everest even if you’re not that well-prepared and costs the lives of Sherpas, and Faux Grit, claiming to have grit when actually you cheat, for having which she calls out Lance Armstrong (drugs and lies) and Donald Trump (lies and lies).

But we’re interested in authentic grit, and Authentic Grit has those three P’s. So, in the pursuit of grit, it’s important, says CAM, to identify and develop them. She has some writing exercises to help identify passions and purpose. I being a writer, and also a self-improvement junkie, read them over. The first is to write about when you are at your best. As in, describe “a time when all of your top five strengths were used in a transformational moment or a time in your life when you were ‘at your best.’” 

Gulp. 

Readers, I read this instruction and went blank. Totally. Even though I had taken not one, not two, but three VIA quizzes to determine my top strengths. I just had no idea. Have I EVER used my top strengths all together in a transformational moment? 

Fortunately--or actually, as you will see, unfortunately-- I did have an opportunity to use some strengths recently. I wasn’t going to write about this, but then the other night, as I said, I was hanging out with my friend and neighbor, E, having some prosecco. And she was sounding a little down and blah about life and so I was telling her about these exercises to develop purpose and passion and I described the one I just described for you. And you know what? E had the exact same reaction to that prompt that I did. Or at least in essence. I think her exact reaction was to flop backwards on the couch and say, “My god. I have NO idea.” 

Her reaction made me feel better about my reaction, but also I wanted to make us feel better so I described the second exercise, which is definitely more appealing. I was going to say easier, but really, it’s not easy. It is more appealing though. And it is to write about your best possible self. You spend 20 minutes a day for three days writing about “life ten years from now as if everything has gone as well as possible.” There are lots of questions you can consider to write this answer. And of course, the point of it is not empty daydreaming. The point is not to be Walter Mitty. The point is to stimulate your imagination and rev up your sense of passion. AND THEN you have to use mental contrasting to set goals now to achieve the things you want ten years from now. You know, develop your purpose. So, all in all, not easy. Grit required. 

But anyway, we did not engage in that exercise. We had another glass of prosecco, and then E told me she was a little disappointed not to read in my blog about what happened to her a couple of weeks ago. 

As I said, I was not going to mention it, but since she brought it up, I am now. I hate for E to be disappointed, after all. 

This post is getting so long. If I were Charles Dickens, I would sign off now, with a cliffhanger that you would have to tune into next week the resolution of which to discover. (That was an awkward sentence, wasn’t it? It is grammatical, though.)

No ooze!

Anyway, what happened is that the afternoon of the eclipse, I got a phone call from my friend and neighbor E. She started out sounding fine. “I need to ask a favor of you,” she said. She said she had been stung by a wasp a few minutes ago. “And I’m kind of itchy,” she said. “And I’m starting to feel…….” At which point her voice went funny. And I said, “OHMYGODI’LLBERIGHTTHERE!” Apparently, I yelled to the soon-to-be 10th grader that E sounded weird, and I stopped by my bag, grabbed my epipen (generic brand*) and ran across the street. Her front door was open and I ran right in and found her on the kitchen floor, her daughter beside her. E was woozy and bleeding under her lip. She looked grey, except for the hives on her body. Of course my instinct was to remain as calm as humanly possible because her daughter was right there, but I was freaking out. E was conscious, and she struggled to sit up when I came in. I wasn’t sure if I should use the epipen or not, but I decided it was better to use it (was told by paramedics that was the right thing to do, FYI). In fact, I have never used it, even though I carry it because I am allergic to bee stings.

Now, for a middle-aged person to try to read the directions on a small object she is holding in her hands when her hands are shaking like egg beaters is quite the challenge, but I managed to get all of the caps and safeties and whatnot off the dang thing and then put it against her thigh, as trained by my allergist, and pressed on the proper end and heard the click as the needle extended. And then I had her daughter call 911 and give the phone to me. And then we made sure E lay back down and got an icepack for her cut and a pillow for her head and I answered the dispatcher’s questions and flagged down the ambulance and took notes for the EMTs and reassured her daughter she would be fine and helped collect her things to take to the hospital and so forth. Everything turned out fine, and now E has her own epinephrine injector. 

That was then, and now here was E on my couch, drinking prosecco with me. I could easily have not been home when she called that afternoon. I could easily not have thought to bring my epipen. However, I was and I did. Furthermore, I managed to respond with clarity appropriately in an emergency. I may have saved a life. So I have to say, it did occur to me that perhaps that disaster was a transformational moment when I was at my best, even though perhaps I would like my best not to include as much adrenaline, terror, and peril as it did. 

* When I called my doctor a couple of days later to get a new prescription for an epinephrine injector, I told the nurse that the generic had been really hard to use, and I requested the name brand Epipen. I’m pretty sure that’s what led to the insurer to cover it. I spoke up about the difficulty I had using the generic. I have the new Epipen now, and I’ve made sure the husband and the tenth grader know how to use it.

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#TBT A Parenting Fail

Ok, this is the husband's suggestion, so blame him if you don't like it. What is "this"? Why it's a Throwback Thursday (#TBT) blog post. I wrote this when the 7th grader was in 3rd grade, right at this time of year. I thought it was a fun look back.

Why am I doing this? Aside from being a way to post more frequently, it's a fun way to see where I've been, and how I've looked at success and failure and (of course) myself over the last few years. As my book proposal sits on the desks of editors - please send positive vibes, as many as possible as frequently as possible - I have to admit that things have changed. For the better. Except for my body. But I'm supposed to look at that in a new way: being grateful for my body for being here for me, for being healthy and strong. And so I do. And so I do.

*     *     *

A Parenting Fail

While it's stimulating to discuss theories of success and failure, most of my time is wrapped up in the ongoing venture called motherhood, an endeavor whose ultimate success or failure is my biggest concern, and whose outcome depends on myriad small choices.  Like the following one.

So the 3rd grader is in a school play. Something about fish and finding your unique self.  There has been lots of drama about this play around our house, with involved daily updates about rehearsing for various parts and about when parts would be finally assigned. Each child would rank their first four choices and hand them in to the teacher. Then, one day, accompanied by lots of pouting and complaining, the update was that the 3rd grader's class had agreed to perform the play with another class, which meant each part would be doubled up.

"It's supposed to be a play about finding our own unique selves," she pointed out. "It doesn't work if there are two of everything." Well, she had a point, but two children reciting in unison would be cute, from a parent's point of view. I told my child it would be fine, meanwhile marveling at how much she seemed to care. She's not the most obviously dramatic of my two children, but she was actually in tears.

Two days later, the 3rd grader's traverse from the school bus to the front door looked like the gallows walk. Parts had been assigned. My child had been given her fourth choice, Clownfish 1.

Oh the tears. Oh the misery. So much angst. "Clownfish 1 doesn't even get to tell Swordfish his problem. All the other fish get to tell Swordfish their problem." So there I am, staring at my usually rather stoic child, in tears again, this time over her lack of lines. At least I'm assuming it's a lack of lines that is the problem. I'm also thinking, wow, how did acting get to be so important to this child? She has recently joined an after school acting class, and I guess she really likes it. Maybe she'll become a movie star and I can finally go to the Academy Awards. I hope James Franco won't be hosting by then. Maybe Tina Fey.

Anyway, it seems the trouble is the lack of lines, and that she didn't get her first or second choice part.

So here's where the parenting needs to happen. Do I say, in effect, look, not everyone can get her first or second choice, and some people don't even have a line, so buck up? That's the "Sometimes we don't get exactly what we want but we're all part of a community" lesson.

Or do I say, well, look, if you're really upset, maybe you could talk to your teacher about adding a line to your part, so Clownfish 1 can tell his problem to Swordfish, too? Advocate for yourself. Maybe that's the parenting lesson here.

Reader, I chose the latter. Immediately my child wanted me to e-mail her teacher. No, I said, you can write her a note, or write her an e-mail from my account, and we'll make sure she knows it's from you. So during the 7th grader's piano lesson, the 3rd grader wrote a note, apologizing for being upset and making her suggestion about the line. I open up my e-mail, make the subject line state who the e-mail is from, and my child types out her message and we send it.

Cue to dinner time, when the 3rd grader is relating all the iniquity of the situation to her sister and her father. There's a certain amount of sympathy, and a certain amount of tearful eye-welling.  Before dessert, I check my e-mail. The teacher has responded that she's sorry my 3rd grader is upset; that she'd had her do Clownfish 1 because she got the beats on the humor so well in all the lines. She'll be happy to talk to her about the change tomorrow.

Do I detect a certain weariness?

Lines? Plural? I go back to the table. I confirm with my child that she does, indeed, have several lines.  How did I miss this? How did my child miss this? Now I'm annoyed. And embarrassed.  Look, I tell the child, your teacher gave you a real part with lots of lines and said you're good at it. If you want to be part of a play, you have to accept you might not get the exact part you want. That's the way acting is. At least you got a part. So buck up, quit being so negative, and do your part.

I go back to the computer and send another e-mail to the teacher, subject: Sorry. I tell her I'd encouraged my child to advocate for herself. I had also told her, I assured the teacher, that her request might be denied.

I had a parenting choice, and I made the wrong one. That's what my 7th grader calls "a fail."

Why Is Success A Jalopy?

Hello, Readers.
You may have noticed that I refer to success as a jalopy and wondered why. Well, please check out my explanation over here at the Huffington Post. I'll have a new post up here very soon.

Target Size, Progress, and Jeggings

Readers, I think I may have bought jeggings.

Before you condemn me for trying to dress like my daughters, let me assure you that I bought them from a store the fifteen year old would never shop in.  In fact, I’m pretty sure her gag reflex would trigger just looking at the window display. So even though they are denim, and have some stretch, and skinny legs, and a wide waistband – read “girdle” waist - I think maybe they wouldn’t actually qualify as jeggings, more as skinny jeans for the, uh, mature woman.

But I’m not entirely sure. I was trying to be a little French, and I may have gone astray. You see, I just read French Women Don’t Get Facelifts, which dispenses many hints on how to be stylish, and I’m in the middle of French Women Don’t Get Fat. In attempting to implement the secrets of those French women I may have been very hungry when I entered the store. Luckily, I have such body dysmorphia I’ll simply pull on this item of sartorial distinction and have no real idea whether I look good or bad. Those who love me will support me. As, indeed, will my jeggings.

Two steps forward, one step back. Still, that’s progress. And in comfortable shoes. That’s right. Since last I wrote, I have managed to focus on my upcoming Italian “vacation” and buy shoes. The shoes are definitely comfortable. And age appropriate. I know this because the fifteen year old wouldn’t even look at, much less try on anything in the shoe store.

Here is more progress. Despite being down in the dumps, I managed to revise my proposal. Hurrah. I’ve sent it off to a couple of trusted readers, and now I await comments.

I happened to pick up a new book on success and happiness at the library called Before Happiness, by Shawn Achor. He is, according to the book jacket, an expert on happiness, a TED talker, and world famous, though I’d never heard of him. He also has a connection to Harvard, which he mentions on almost every page of his book. He went there, he advised students there, something or other. Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. I get it.

I offer that tidbit as proof of his expertise – since so does Shawn Achor, apparently.

Anyhoo. There was an element of serendipity to the timing of my discovery of this book. In it I did come across a section that seems applicable to my current state of feeling failed. To wit, amidst the exhortations to be positive and to combat anxiety with counter-waves of positive statements and so forth, Achor talks about increasing your likelihood of success at something by increasing the size of the target at which you are aiming. The bigger the target, the easier it is to reach it.

However, if you can’t actually make your target bigger, what can you do to make it seem bigger? Achor refers to a famous experiment with golf holes that proved that golfers performed better when the hole they were putting for was surrounded by several holes smaller than it. The smaller holes made the real one seem bigger. I’ve written about this before.

I really started paying attention when Achor started talking about a related study involving the SATs. This study has shown that the fewer people in the room, the higher their SAT scores were. My first thought on reading this was, Oh, great. My child goes to an industrial strength public high school. Just the other week she took a national French exam and she said the room was so crowed her desk was jammed up against the wall. How’m I going to find her a small room to take that SAT next year?

Bridges to cross, bridges to cross.

The idea behind this SAT phenomenon, according to Shawn Achor, is that when students take the exam surrounded by billions of their competitors, they feel discouraged by the number of them, and their scores reflect that. If they have fewer obvious competitors, they are fooled into feeling less outnumbered, and that confidence helps them perform better. It's like smaller versus bigger golf holes.

How does this apply to my life, and not just to the life I’m living through my children? Thankfully, I do not have to take the SAT myself. Perish the thought.

Well, it does relate. It relates to my down-in-the-dumps-ness. I am feeling like the target for my proposal is very small. There are so many writers out there, so many proposals, that mine seems like a minnow in the ocean. A minnow looking for an agent. This sort of thinking is discouraging. It’s almost enough to make one give up and look for a real job where one could accrue a paycheck and thereby some self-respect.

But I didn’t give up, did I, Readers? No. I revised my proposal. So what I need to do is find a way to make that target look bigger. I’m not really sure what that way is. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Or if you have a good idea for a job, I’d love to hear about that, too.

Fall Back, then Leap In

Thought for November: I’m challenging myself. That’s my new plan. Not that I don’t challenge myself. I mean, writing a book is a challenge. Only I haven’t been writing that book consistently enough to feel like I’m really in it, really doing it. 

This comes on the heels of last week’s post about realizing that when I feel stuck – waiting to be pronounced upon was my exact description of the situation – the system collapses, partly because I don’t challenge myself as much as I could. I’ve been thinking about The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. I’ve written about it here. I’ve been thinking that my system breakdowns are possibly due to resistance. Resistance being the enemy of art, according to Pressfield. To break down resistance, therefore, I am challenging myself.

Challenge the First: Running. Since the weather’s turning yucky, I’m taking my exercise back to the Y and I’m working out harder. Choosing a tougher workout with Kimmy. Why? Because I’m capable of running faster and I want to challenge myself to actually do it. Also - and this may be a slightly stronger motivator – a lot of research shows that intense, shorter workouts may be more effective at staving off middle age spread than longer, more leisurely ones. So I’m mixing it up. Adding a couple shorter, faster runs to my routine. I know I’m supposed to accept my body changing as I grow older. I know I’m supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to grow older. It’s just that vanity and my secret vision of myself as a 5’6” leggy ectomorph won’t let go of me. In short, I’m just not ready for my Spanx to roll down my belly when I tuck into dinner. On those rare occasions when I might want to struggle into them because I’m going “out.”  So there.

Challenge the Second: NaNoWriMo. It’s November, which means another National Novel Writing Month has come around, and I’ve decided to make use of it. No, I’m not going to write a novel. In fact, the very idea of writing a novel in a month is laughable. My novels have taken 9, 4, and 5 (that last unfinished) YEARS to write. However, since I underestimate my abilities regularly, I decided to try to crank out the verbiage this year in November, while the 260, 000 plus souls who have registered for NaNoWriMo crank out theirs. I’m going to go for 50, 000 words, too, but unofficially. I’m going to write a draft of my nonfiction book. In November. The Anne Lamott (also the Hope Perlman) way: by writing a shitty first draft, no looking back until it’s over. The month and the draft. 

I'm trying to change this:

 into one of these:

What will these challenges do for me? Well, the exercise challenge has obvious benefits. All those health benefits. I’ve always been sold on those. Indeed, I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel right if I pass a day with no exercise at all.

A hidden benefit of upping the challenge here is that I will be exercising my willpower, too. I’ll be challenging myself to run faster for longer. This will take extra willpower beyond the willpower to get out and get moving. And exercising willpower strengthens it, and strengthened willpower in one area frees up willpower in other areas, too.

Another benefit of my challenges will be (let’s hope) that I establish a new habit. Since well-known research has proved that establishing a new habit takes about twenty-one days, if I increase my word output to approximately 1600 words a day for thirty days, I may well have a great routine in place to carry me through those system breakdowns when they threaten in future. Momentum. So that the next time the system breaks down, it's less of a total collapse than a slowdown.

A final benefit of challenging myself may be that I get into the habit of doing just that. I break myself of whatever fear of failure or of success, of whatever remnant of shame or who-knows-what (maybe my sister the psychoanalyst knows what) keeps me keeping my expectations low. I know, I know, if your expectations are low, you won't be disappointed. But, frankly, that's actually just a load of hooey. You can live in a state of continual semi-disappointment that way, which may be worse than living with the aftereffects of full on disappointments. 

Now I’ve told you about my challenges, Readers, so I will have to abandon my blog and crawl into a hidey-hole if I fail to stick to them. C'mon, somebody else join the challenge, too!

Grit: True Marker of Success

I’m thinking about perseverance. Grit. Stamina. Why? Well, the husband showed me this article about Carol Dweck’s research on mindset, motivation, and success, which talks about how to praise children. The wrong kind of praise extinguishes their will to try harder. The basic idea is that praise should be specific and focused on effort, not on labeling a quality of mind. Say, “I love how hard you worked and how much you improved since last time,” not, “You’re so smart - you’re my little genius.” Now, actually, as my mother-in-law noted, psychologist and parenting expert Haim Ginott and his proteges Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish said this very thing in the 1970s and 1980s; now research has proved them right. Luckily I read Haim Ginott when my kids were little (props to the MIL), and Faber and Mazlish, so I have done everything perfectly through much perseverance and grit regarding them and they have turned into persevering little cusses, if I do say so. Not a wrong word uttered ever. Parenting 101? I wrote that curriculum.

I am not serious, Readers. Please. You know me. I’m nothing if not questioning of every single, eensie, tiny decision I make, as well as practically undone by every single large decision I’m forced to make. But not totally undone, because I may lack physical grit, but I have psychological grit.

Speaking of me brings up another point about perseverance and grit; namely, that teaching people is about more than just choice words, it's about modeling behavior. So how gritty am I?

A friend came to visit for a couple days, and I used her visit as an excuse to skip my morning mini-routine of yoga, and came downstairs to my comfy tea and reading chair to wait for her. While sitting there, I heard thumps coming from upstairs. At first I thought maybe my friend's son was up early and dropping books on the floor, but then I thought maybe she was doing yoga. I wondered how on earth, since the room is tiny, and when the rollaway bed is open, there is not enough room to stretch out on the floor. When my friend came downstairs, I discovered she had been the one thumping upstairs. She was indeed doing yoga in that tiny room. How? By folding up that rollaway bed. 

Would I have done that? Probably not. Possibly, she has a lot more grit than I do. Or, you know, a couple extra inches in height can make a big difference. I find folding that thing nearly impossible. Not impossible, but nearly so. Enough so that it’s a deterrent to me doing it myself. I can’t really reach across it well because my arms are too short. Because I don’t have those extra couple inches. Or maybe because my boobs are too big, adding a couple extra inches in width that render reaching across to close that thing and hook it next to impossible. Painful, even. But my friend has those extra couple inches in height, minus those extra in boobage, and therefore, I guess, was undaunted.  

I am not that gritty. At least not physically. I lack physical grit. This was brought home to me in numerous ways over the years I lived in New England and hung around with a lot of native Yanks. I’m thinking in particular of a humbling bike trip from Somerville to the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, about eleven miles, undertaken with our group of friends, subscribers to the Penny Pincher Gazette. I was going to say “subscribers all” to the Penny Pincher, but I know that’s untrue. They are thriftier than that and pass it around among them. That is how thrifty and gritty they are. Anyway, my point is, this bike trip involved hills like you’d not believe, and even though there were others as unused to arduous bike trips as I on our expedition, I was the only one whose 21 speeds proved insufficient and who had to walk her bike up one – or two, or several but who’s counting? – of those hills. 

But psychologically, I have grit and stamina. Today, I awoke to a loud boom – I offer this as an example of my psychological grit – which I attributed to a bomb for only a second, just one split second. I only wasted a split, split second of this morning on the idea of terrorism in my leafy suburb in upstate New York that is on absolutely nobody’s list of ideal places to make a violent political statement. Directly I had that thought, I knew that noise had to be related to the demolition of the burned house that has finally begun, around the u-bend of our street, five houses away. See? That’s how blasé and, well, gritty, I am. Yes, my first thought was: Bomb. Perhaps that's not the first thought my Yankee bicycling friends would have, but I had no control over it. The point is that it was only for an instant, and then I mastered the fear. Then I rationalized. That's grit. How else have I made it all these years without totally cracking? Considering my tendency to, um, panic. Sheer psychological grit. Grit that somehow links to my lack of physical grit in some kind of inverse relationship. It’s all of a piece. And by it I mean me. The ebb and flow of grit and no-grit that makes a person who she is. 

What I’m saying here, with these examples of my lack of physical grit and my questionable psychological stability, is that despite my weaknesses, my questioning, my struggles at times with motivation, I persevere. We each have our challenges - our issues, our childhoods, our illnesses, our phobias - that require grit. Sometimes the effort required might look to an outsider like just getting by. Sometimes that perseverance manifests in small wins. Sometimes perseverance manifests as big, public wins. Overall, do you keep going? Do you keep trying? I do. According to Carol Dweck, that is key to success. So – yay.