What If 'Taking A Step Back' Is The Most Successful Direction To Head?

Finding the wisdom in frustration.

I won’t lie. I am as embedded in our productivity, achieving culture as anyone else.

I like to succeed. I like to reach my goals. And I think most people like the same.

As an aside, I have been working hard on incorporating rest as a tool to help me unlearn this capitalist driven thinking of my value settling on what I produce. And that has felt really good.

But this week, I had an epiphany I wanted to share with you as a tool in our Joy is Justice framework. (Another aside—I am working on a visual design to explain this framework that I CANNOT wait to share with you! I think it will help all of us incorporate Joy as an act of resistance and power more easily into our lives.)

Back to my epiphany…I have put my in person clinical work on hold this summer as my son is home full time from school. But there’s still telemedicine, writing and my consulting/teaching work to attend to. Balancing it all with being a full time caregiver was getting me frankly very frustrated.

I felt like I couldn’t do my work well and at the same time, it didn’t feel fair to my son. I was only half present in any task.

It felt like I was ‘taking steps back’ in the foundation of my new clinical practice after leaving my academic position. And that was frustrating.

Until…I let go of doing too much and allowed the summer to be what it is, just a different kind of season in terms of what I can get done and maybe more time for play and rest.

See, I think language is wise. It often is passed down in our sayings in ways that house the wisdom of our elders who weren’t as afflicted by our modern culture.

So we think ‘taking steps back’ is going in the opposite way we want. It’s going backward, falling behind, losing momentum, etc.

But what if it’s the exact right direction to go if you want to…
🔙 Shift Perspective
🔙 Find Space for Creative Solutions
🔙 Reconnect to Yourself

What I mean is that I thought I was going backwards in my work but what I found, once I accepted this is the direction I have to go, is that I gained the space I needed to see other truths beyond my productivity…

💡That I get to rest, I recognize what a privilege this is. The work will be there waiting. And right now my work is caregiving.

💡 That trying to do too many things was only making me feel even more time stress. Instead, I wake up hours before my son and that is my work time. What I can get done, I do. That includes my self care and my work-work. When he gets up, my day shifts to mom time. And then both parts of the day feel more spacious.

💡 That stepping back literally let me shift my perspective and get the space I need. Maybe going backwards is sometimes what we need to move ahead with regard to growth, understanding and even our productivity.

There is always some deeper truth to the language we use and stepping back allowed me to see it. 😉

What’s a recent truth you learned in a time that felt like ‘stepping back’ or failing? I would love to hear more and if you read something that inspires you, let the other person know. The more we connect as a community, the more we learn from and with each other. Seeing failure or backward movement as information is not a way of using contrived positivity. We can acknowledge how hard it feels and similar to the tool of gratitude recasting we have talked about before, we can then find the good in us or the situation that perseveres through and with the challenge. We learn to hold the duality of both and that helps us reclaim our human-ness.