I want to hang out with other women or other couples who exemplify the traits I would want to have as a mom, as a wife, as a woman in business, and as a friend. If you want to grow in your career but all your friends are still living at home with no plans to do much with their lives, how supportive are they able to be? If your friends—the ones who advise you and offer counsel—don’t believe in marriage, how much great advice are they going to offer you for yours?
I remember one summer we were on a vacation in Hawaii, and it was during a really rough season in our marriage. I went into the vacation already feeling frustrated with Dave, and that much time together only brought it into sharper relief. I was so annoyed with him that it colored every part of that vacation. About halfway through the trip some of my best friends came to visit us, and I went to pick them up from the airport. I had been waiting for days, thinking, Great, my girls are coming, and I’m going to unload on what a terrible human this man is and they’re going to be like, yes, screw him! Plus, they’re lesbians, so I figured they’d be even more into the whole “husbands are the worst!” diatribe I had going on in my head. I had a whole plan!
Then we got into the car where I started making known all my frustrations. Bless—seriously, God bless—these women, because they immediately started speaking truth into what I would want for a marriage. They reminded me what grace looks like and that we all have hard times. They reminded me that when things are the toughest, that’s when you should most be seeking out your partner. They reminded me who it is I want to be.
Now, if I had gotten into a car with best friends who were people with a totally opposite view on what it is to have a strong and beautiful marriage, we would have gotten out of that car in a totally different headspace. They would have fanned the flames of my anger. They would have made the situation worse. It would have been so easy to do.
Are your friends pulling you up or dragging you down?
You are a combination of the five people that you hang out with most. Choose wisely.
DEVELOP GREAT HABITS
In order to get from where I was to where I wanted to be, I had to learn about habits. I had to learn to change the bad habits I had been practicing, and I had to learn how to develop the good habits I needed to get ahead. So many people think that one thing, one opportunity, is going to make them a success at everything. The reality is that success comes by doing fifty things over and over and over and over. Intensity is not as important as consistency. The thing about consistency is that you do it for a while, and it seems like nothing is happening. Nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, and then all of a sudden you’re like, Holy crap, where did that come from?!
What habits do you have right now that are going to help you get to where you want to go? Having a good life is about developing good habits. But what exactly is a habit? A habit is a series of three things:
1. A cue
2. An action
3. A reward
A cue means that something happens. It’s a trigger for you. It signals to your brain that it’s time to start the action. Then, when you take the action (totally unconsciously, by the way), you’re given some type of reward. A cue, an activity, a reward.
For instance, I spent many years as an emotional eater. When you’re an emotional eater, every single kind of emotion is a cue to eat something. If you’re sad you eat. If you’re happy you eat. If you’re anxious you should eat. If you’re mad you should eat, and then you should have Oreos. I had learned somewhere along the way that food was the only thing I had easy access to that would make me feel better. So, when I became an adult, whenever I had anxiety or fear, I would go to the kitchen at eleven o’clock at night and binge eat everything.
My cue was feeling anxious, my activity was eating, and the reward was that I felt better. For a brief period of time, I would get a high from eating all that food, and that high made me feel happy. But the problem with most terrible habits is that, as the high from your reward starts to die off, it actually triggers the cue again. So for me, I would eat an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers and half a tub of cream cheese, and it would make me so happy. Then twenty minutes would go by and I’d start thinking, You’re a piece of crap! You blew your diet. You’ve been working so hard, and you just threw it all away. You’re garbage. The negative self-talk would start, and then I’d think, Well, dang. We’re already here; let’s have dessert. And then I would eat dessert and feel really good again, but eventually circle back around.
I would trigger myself again and again and again, until I finally understood that the issue wasn’t stress; the issue was the activity I was unconsciously choosing once the stress had been cued. I couldn’t change that life was going to happen and that there would be times when I would feel scared or sad or anxious. What I could change, however, was the action I took in response to that cue.
Now, when I have anxiety, I go on a long run. I go work out. By the way, I used to hate people who are like, “If you feel stressed, go work out.” I’d think, Screw you, Pam! We’re not all made like that, okay?! Except neither is Pam. She’s just choosing a better activity to manage what she’s feeling. She’s taught herself a great habit.
The equation for change in any capacity is always very simple. For example, it’s so simple to lose weight. It is so simple to get in shape. It’s so simple to save money. It’s all very, very simple, but it’s not easy. It’s not quick. It’s not a reward that you’re going to get immediately. You usually have to choose a harder thing where the reward comes later. The problem with most things in life is that the activity you want to do—the bad habit—offers a quicker reward than the thing that’s better for you.
It’s difficult to make a change because the bad choices are much easier to access than the good ones. You’ve created a habit of bad habits. They feel more natural to you. Whatever you’re reading this book for: maybe you needed to get in shape, maybe you wanted to eat better, maybe you wanted to be more intentional with your partner, maybe you wanted to be a better mom, maybe you wanted to be calmer, maybe you wanted to battle your anxiety, or your depression, or to replace your depression with gratitude and joy. Maybe you wanted to reach for all those things. But maybe you have a year, or a decade, or a lifetime of habitually being angry, pushing people away, binge eating, abusing alcohol, ignoring your kids, being a workaholic. You have your own version; you fill in the blank. Maybe this makes you think you can’t swap out the good actions for the bad ones, but I know for a fact that if you’re breathing right now, if you’re alive, that means you can start again. You can start again over and over and over until the feeling of moving in the right direction is more natural to you than the feeling of giving up. Whatever it is that you are facing, whatever your struggle is, whatever your hill is to climb, whatever you are trying to get through, there are ways to take ownership of that thing, and you can do it as you come back one day at a time and establish consistency.
ESTABLISH A MORNING ROUTINE