🎧 If you would prefer to read the transcript, that’s below this line. But if you are multitasking or just want to listen to my radio voice, you can press play above! (Pro tip: Listen at 1.5x to shorten to 11 minutes)
CONTEXT MATTERS
Testing testing, mic check 1, 2, 3. All right. Surprise everybody! 🎊 I'm doing my first podcast today! I just got off of recording our very first guest interview (!!!!) and I’m super excited to share with you my conversation with Sheri in two weeks. I’m going to just keep riding on these good vibes and try to have a natural and organic read-through of the topic we’re going to cover today.
I always start my newsletters with some acknowledgment of context, because it’s important.
At this time of writing, if we’re going to talk about the topic that we are going to cover today, which is struggle and progress, we have to acknowledge that there is a war going on right now in Ukraine. And I believe most of us could not and would not compare our daily struggles to the struggles of our fellow people and what they must be experiencing so viscerally at this moment. Within that greater context, everything I’m saying in this newsletter, anything I could possibly say in any forum simply does not matter when innocent lives are being threatened. Please see the links below this post on how to help if you so feel called.
Today we're going to talk about the overall theme of struggle, how it relates to progress, and how we can focus on our agency as we go through this human experience. I also have a little mental exercise or experiment to try, something I created in my free time and I'm curious to know how it lands with you. Let me know in the comments!
Let's get into it.
What have I gotten myself into?
Soooo, I picked a really tricky newsletter theme. ”To be in progress. Unfinished works. Talking about taboo topics.“ I think that if I’m going to emphasize and focus on “progress”, I actually have to talk about my process around this whole thing.
And it’s messy, y’all.
I’m still figuring out that line between the actual material and the story that I want to share, and sometimes it’s going to come through my perspective of my process. I’m hoping that that’s interesting to you all. We’ll just keep practicing! I have committed to publishing whatever I have tomorrow morning for you, so what you see is what you get. I have written and edited and recorded and transcribed and rewrote and rerecorded and unwritten things down to bullets so that this would sound more natural. I’m still reading notes and we’ll see how this goes. Hopefully, it’s a one-take wonder!
What makes certain topics ”taboo”?
I realized that if I’m going to create a space to dig into things that we don’t talk about nearly enough, I really need to try to understand why we don’t.
And I have a theory. Please comment below if you have any opposing thoughts or additional reasons as to why we don’t talk about these things.
In drafting this particular episode newsletter on struggle and progress, I quickly realized why we don’t talk about these things.
It’s because they’re a downer. Plain and simple.
It’s not fun to talk about things that are hard or things that are messy, when there isn’t some pretty, happy ending and bow tied at the end of it.
To give you a taste of some of the topics that I’m planning to cover under this season’s theme of Relationship to Self, here are a few working headlines:
Growing Pains
Why Unsubscribing is Good for You
The Dangers of Trusting and Wishing
Discipline and Discernment: Two Transformation Tools
Struggle & Progress
Just seeing the words on my notes is a bummer! You automatically tense up. I hope you’re not feeling tense right now, but you might be! Of course, you’re going to be repelled by these things because it’s just going to make you feel worse.
There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. We’re just pointing out problems and saying, “Hey, look over there. Here’s that problem that you didn’t ask for in this moment. Do you see it? Yep. No, to the left. Okay. Now feel it. Feel it deeply. Go on, deeper. Make it real!”
Nobody would volunteer to feel terrible.
And obviously, that’s not my intention.
I’m going to figure out how to talk about this.
My goal is to facilitate conversations for healing.
At least with today’s topic, I’m going to try to frame Struggle and Progress for you, to try and neutralize these concepts so that we can relax a little bit around it and take a look at them with a little bit more spaciousness, with more ease, without the associated negativity.
We’ll start with the idea of Struggle and how it leads to Progress because that’s the idea. The struggle is an essential force for forward-change. We can’t only talk about the light things. We can’t always be happy. We can strive to be, but that isn’t really the point. We want to have our full human experience. And if we try to skip parts of it and only focus on half of it or even parts of it, it’s emotional bypassing, or maybe what some people might call toxic positivity.
We have to be able to talk about the shadow and the light. In order to change any pattern that we’re not happy with, we have to ask ourselves how did we get here? Why do we tend to stay here? Acknowledge we don’t want to be here! All while keeping in mind that North Star, that there’s a better place. Where is that place and how do we get there?
We’re going to acknowledge these heavy things here in the Studio because that is the practice. And my job as the facilitator and creator of this space, your host, your studio mate, is to present these ideas with neutrality and openness, and wherever possible, and wherever appropriate, we’ll add in some levity.
I personally continue to deal with my sensor and critic (or my ”inner asshole1“, as one of my teachers would say), who tells me that I’m being a Debbie Downer. This is a downer and nobody wants to hear this. Nobody’s going to be excited for your next newsletter or your next podcast. And they might relate to it, but it doesn’t make them feel good, so they’re just never coming back. I’m just going to call that out. I think that as a pessimist myself as a person who is a bit of a skeptic, I’m going to have to deal with that. That’s the lens that I’m bringing to the table.
It is also what causes me to be personally invested in doing this work for myself and for you because there is shadow. It’s there, your inner asshole is there and we want to learn how to work with it (I’m not sure if I’m going to keep this part. I probably will 🤣). But anyway, I’m just going to be really mindful and honest about how we present stuff here.
And to be fair, it’s not all dark and heavy!
I am really excited about other topics that are lighter and more inspiring, like, Figureitoutability. (You will learn quickly that I like to make up phrases here. In fact, I have an idea of naming things that don’t have a name yet. Figureitoutability is a fun one.)
And one that’s going to be foundational to the work we do here is one called The Beauty In Between, which is tied to the name of this newsletter Studio Shimono.
One that is fresh and hot and I’m super excited to continue developing and researching is the topic of Polyhedron Personality and Living in Layers.
So really just trying to take an exploded view of ourselves as people and how ever-changing and dynamic we can be.
My chair is creaking. There’s no way that I can, if you can just, yeah, that’s going to happen while I’m talking. So, um, we’ll just get into it.
The Interdependency of Struggle and Progress
This is the most tongue twister statement I’ve ever made. “Brendon Burchard, the author of The Motivation Manifesto states that humanity’s story has only two perennially recurring themes.” Who wrote this sentence? I did. No, I did. Yeah, I did.
There’s a book written by Brendan Burchard called The Motivation Manifesto, and in it, he says that humanity’s story has only two perennially recurring themes: Struggle and Progress. And he goes on to point out the interdependency between the two themes that we can’t deny the Struggle because otherwise, we would also lose Progress.
Simone de Beauvoir has said, “Life has occupied both in perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself, if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.”
And lastly, Buddhism is a practice centered around acknowledging suffering as a basic fact. It’s reality as a characteristic of existence. They named three sources of suffering: from pain; from pleasure; and from the fact that, because of impermanence, humans are susceptible to pain in the next moment... AS IN ALL THE TIME.
We can’t deny the Struggle because otherwise, we would also lose Progress
So the point of all that is to accept the shadow as part of the picture, that it has a function and it has a force and it is something to work with. We depend on the creative struggle of innovation as a society. Risk-taking failing, experimenting, boldly going where no man has gone before. We need to be creative in order to evolve as a species!
But we make it out to be so hard and we treat it as something to resist.
If Struggle is an essential part of Progress, how can we make it easier to swallow the pill? Do we just sit back and let it happen? Maybe! Or where can we find our agency in how we approach these experiences.
An Experiment
This is where we get into the fun exercise that I totally made up! I’ve been experimenting with this when I’m faced with something uncomfortable, something that I didn’t ask for, something I wouldn’t have asked for, and I can’t control it at all from occurring. I think about what I do have control over and that’s how I perceive it and how I’m going to respond.
The first thing I do is try to neutralize the energy of the situation and try to see it as something that I’m here to experience.
It’s like an eye exam at the optometrist. We’re going to take two sets of frames or lenses, and we’re going to look through, the same situation from one lens. And then we’re going to look through the same situation with another.
The first thing I do is try to neutralize the energy of the situation and try to see it as something that I’m here to experience.
Let’s start with frame one. Imagine the experience of Struggle as a shape, a physical object that you can pass through. And now imagine that every emotion carries a specific frequency. We’re going to pass that emotion and its frequency through the shape. If you could choose which emotion to approach the experience with, what happens to its shape, how does it change it?
Let’s play with two emotions and see how it shapes the experience.
⓵ FRAME ONE: STRUGGLE X FEAR
When you apply the frequency of Fear, the emotional frequency of fear to the shape of Struggle, what experience might you have?
I’m just going to throw some words out there as a suggestion, to paint a picture. And I don’t mean to cause you to have a reaction at all. Let’s try to take it neutrally. So. What might happen? We might end up seeing the shape of chaos, confusion, pain, spiraling, trauma, past-projecting, defiance.
And if you’re more of an aural person, you might hear a sound that sounds a bit like this:
"Oh great. Here comes another trigger. I’ve never done this new thing before, and it’s really hard and new and I don’t like. I’m resisting it because it’s not easy. I’m not good at it. What if I fail, there goes my confidence. I blame this external thing. That’s changing all of my plans and this is negatively affecting my health, my work and people. I love it’s a trap. It’s pain mass. It’s not fair."
Whew. Passing Fear through Struggle might create that type of sound. Let’s take the second frame.
⓶ FRAME TWO: STRUGGLE X LOVE
Now we’re looking at the shape of Struggle still, but alternatively, if we apply the frequency of Love to the space of Struggle, we might get a different result. I’m going to bet that we are going to get a different result!
We might see the shape of acceptance. Problem-solving. Open-mindedness. Resourcefulness. Hope. Possibility. Resilience. It already feels so much more spacious. Applying the frequency of Love to the space of Struggle might sound like this:
"Hmm. This is different. I could feel this is new. Oh yeah. This is hard. Uncomfortable, unexpected. How annoying to change plans, but I can figure out where I’m flexible. Of course, I’m not good at this yet. I’ve never done it before. I’m struggling, but I know I want this, so I’ll keep trying. Maybe somebody can help me. I wonder where I’ll be on the other side of this".
It’s a totally different experience.
⓷ FRAME THREE: PROGRESS X FEAR
We’re going to talk about the shape of Progress as another experience. This is sort of a result state. This is the thing you see in hindsight, but it is a different place than struggle. It’s progress, but it is an experience.
If we notice that there’s Progress and we send the frequency of Fear through that shape, what might we get?
We might see the shape of resistance. Judgment. Resentment. Comparison. Inadequacy. Doubt. Imposter. Syndrome. It might sound a bit like this:
"I don’t trust this reality. It’s different. Things look like they’re happening, but it could be an illusion or taken away from me. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not good enough. I’ll bet this is a trick."
⓸ FRAME FOUR: PROGRESS X LOVE
Take that same experience of Progress and have the frequency of Love running through it.
We’re simply propelled forward in our growth! We’re going to feel the shape of joy, contentment, and gratitude. It might sound like this:
"Oh, I see. This is an improvement. How cool or no, this is worse. And that’s good information to know. This is one baby step towards something I actually want. I didn’t think I could do this, but I’m doing it. Fuck. Yeah, let’s celebrate."
I’m taking a moment to reflect — in this very meta experience of struggling through creating this particular newsletter and podcast for the very first time in my life — I’m just talking to myself.
I’m going to choose the frequency of Love through Progress.
And I’m going to say… that I feel so much more confident that I can do this. I just need to be in the right headspace. I need to talk to a friend before to get my juices and thoughts flowing. I need to have bullets ready and otherwise just trust that I’m able to talk through the things that I inherently know, and I’ll be able to do it again, and I’ll be able to do it again and again and again.
That’s how I feel. That’s the experiment applied in real-time. I encourage you to try it! I’d love to hear about your experience if you do. 🤗
Just now, my daughter marched into this room, whining about my partner ”trying to control her“ (he was asking her to pick up her things). Without skipping a beat, I tested her.
"Is he controlling you to walk? Is he controlling you to look at me? Is he controlling you to step on that cushion? Is he controlling you to whine at me right now? He’s just giving you instructions. He’s presenting you with an experience and you can choose how you want to respond."
She marched out of here whining even more. I can’t tell if I’d want a mom like me, or if it would be just terribly obnoxious, probably both, but either way… 🤷🏻♀️
…something to play with.
In light,
Milan
Inspiration Board
👁 Mesmerizing tulle sculptures photographed in natural landscapes (Thomas Jackson)
👂 A Nonbinary Genderful Peptalk: a poem for those who find themselves in-between (Andrew Gibby)
👂 ANOTHER powerful pep talk on leveling up with new beliefs (Simone Seol)
I’m taking Marlee Grace’s People’s Research class and when she said ”inner asshole” I almost spit up my water.
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