Being flexible

How much do you expect of yourself?

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At the end of my yoga teacher training in India back in 2017

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a newsletter about being physically flexible. I use yoga a lot in my theatre practice and back in 2017, I did my teacher training. This was a big deal to me at the time. It was a significant financial investment and involved going to India for several weeks. I remembered feeling apprehensive about having that much time off work - even though it was a professional investment, it would also be a piece of personal development. Did I really deserve that time? Had I achieved enough? Would the whole theatre industry forget who I was??

Of course, when I got back from my six weeks away, most people had no idea that I’d gone. It ended up being a brilliant investment - teaching yoga with this level of professionalism and insight has improved the vibe in my rehearsal rooms enormously. But it was the scheduling flexibility that I struggled with. If I did this differently, would my ambition crash and burn around me?

I wonder if any of you can relate?

This could be specific to freelancers, but I don’t think it is. All of us are constantly fed the lie that we’re behind in some way. Behind in our careers, behind our peers, behind in the great ladder of achievements. Whether or not you subscribe to them - baby, house, marriage, etc, many of which I deliberately try to recondition myself around - these ideas are pernicious. They get under your skin.

For me, the most consistent stick I use to beat myself is my career. I feel I am always behind, always stretching towards that latest summit, never stopping to admire the view from the peak I’ve just scaled. These days, I’m really trying to enjoy those successes that come to me, to embed that feeling of being safe in success in my body. I think probably, if you don’t nothing will ever be enough.

On a more granular and quotidian level, I’m trying to embrace flexibility within my day to day. I’m lucky to be a freelancer, largely in charge of my own time, with no caring responsibilities (bar my dog who is a dream) - so I truly have the gift of experimenting with my schedule. For years, I punished myself if I wasn’t at my desk rigidly from 9am to 6pm, descried myself as unambitious if I wasn’t wringing as much as I could out of every hour. But now, I’m trying to relax and release this grip. What got me here isn’t gonna get me to the next place.

For the last year, I’ve been working with the most brilliant coach, Maisie Hill. I can’t recommend her work highly enough - she distills the most complex concepts into direct simplicity. (Check out her podcast, The Maisie Hill Experience). Something she talks about is having standards for yourself. These can be of your own behaviour, or of what you expect from your relationships. But they can also be what you expect of the day to day.

Something that Maisie said recently really struck me - this idea of having variable and flexible standards. That some days, you’ll operate on this amazingly powerful, efficient level and you’ll achieve brilliance. But you can’t expect that standard from every day. And being flexible in your standards frees up so much brain space - because you’re not punishing yourself for failing to meet these impossibly high standards. No one could maintain that consistently.

For years, for as long as I can remember really, I’ve had incredibly rigid standards. And I’ve punished myself for not meeting them. Think how much energy that wastes! This week, I’m trying out flexible standards. My fear is that the world will crash and burn around me. But I bet it won’t. Do you fancy trying out this flexibility? Or maybe you already do it? Let me know in the comments.

The tools I’m taking with me into this flexible week:

• Attunement: listening to when I’m tired or hungry and stopping then, and taking regular breaks (sounds easy, often I push through)

• Adjusting my expectations: taking things off the to do list

• Allowing double the amount of time I think a task will take: I am hopeless at this and I really want it to change!! So allowing double in my calendar so I have buffer time around things

• Creating space for regulating resources - for me that’s appropriate exercise and morning pages, which go out the window when I feel very stressed

• Engaging directly with the critical voice when it expects me to do more

Thanks for reading this edition of the J Mail. More book recommendations coming in a fortnight! You’re brilliant.

J x