👋 I lived a cliché for a week.
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I came back from a weekend in Nashville and had a little bit of an identity crisis.
It was my first real trip away from home and my babies (Goofy-dog/Gemma-baby) since giving birth over a year ago.
In Nashville, I was me. Just me.
I wore outfits that didn’t have stains on them. I spent the extra 5-minutes styling my hair. I made grown adults laugh with jokes, real jokes, and not the babbling sounds that can make a baby laugh instantly. My brain was so clear I thought about projects that would help me get my spark back. I took a nap at 3pm and didn’t set an alarm.
I felt like a stranger when I came back to my own home in Brooklyn.
I know it sounds weird but when you go away, even for just three days, after living a year of your life where every single thing changed, you do sort of feel like you’re traveling between planets.
I came back and packed up my hair styling tools and my high heels. I told those fun projects in my brain to travel on without me. I went back to putting on a hand puppet and pretending it was bitting my nose to make Gemma laugh.
I haven’t figured out how to be mom of the year // and Jen Glantz at the same time. I’m still working on that. 🤔
🤯 I listened to a lot of podcasts this week and heard a quote in one of them that lingered within me.
Let the hardest part of your day be something that you chose.
If you want to grow your resilience, courage, strength, and tolerance for all types of complicated situations, you have to tip toe out of your comfort zone.
👋Welcome to the Monday Pick-Me-Up. I spent an entire week making sure that the hardest part of my day was something I hand-picked and followed through on. I lived this cliché and here’s what happened.
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Let the hardest part of your day be something that you chose.
I’m feeling a bit stale in my own life which isn’t something you ever want to be, for very long, at least. Because life, when measured, turns out to be remarkably shorter than any of us ever hoped for and the days we spend rolling around in our own yawns, are just a waste.
So I decided to spend the week living out a cliche that I heard on a podcast: Let the hardest part of your day be something that you chose.
Hard things will always creep into our lives. The hardest are usually the things we didn’t even seem coming but swoop in and break our hearts instantly. Those things aren’t frequent, but they really slap us around.
Most of the hard stuff we face on a weekly basis comes from other people. Our bosses, our spouses, our kids, our friends, our clients, our accountants (Hi, tax day). But if we add in some of our own hard stuff, I think it could help bring us the kinds of things that make life less blahh: resilience, courage, curiosity, and tolerance for the everyday tough situations that are just inevitable.
I didn’t plan in advance for how I was going to make my day harder than usual. I just pushed myself to do things that otherwise would give me mountains of anxiety and have me running away. Perhaps, when we want to change, we can start by doing the opposite of what we always do.
Monday: I did a cold plunge. Burrrrr
I write first-person articles for Business Insider where I “try” things. My editor reached out and said: Hey, do you have a bathtub and if yes, do you want to write an article about doing a cold plunge every day for a week?
Ummm do I want to submerge my delicate body in a freezing cold bathtub every single day for a week? No, not really. Why couldn’t she have asked me if I wanted to spend a day at the freaking spa? But starting the day having ice cubes kiss my bones seemed hard. I said yes.
Honestly, I didn’t love cold plunging. I found it to be terribly uncomfortable and the opposite of zen. BUT! It did wake me up and because it was impossible to last more than 60 seconds in the tub, it felt like I had checked off like half of my to-do list just conquering something this tough before 8am.
Tuesday: I said I’m sorry.
I’m a world-record grudge holder. It’s something I don’t love about myself but it’s who I am. Sometimes I’m a week into being upset with someone and I literally can’t remember why I’m upset but it just feels too scary to buck up and say sorry so I continue to linger in the ill will. Other times I am ready to say: Let’s move on. You’re sorry. I am sorry. But I can’t bring myself to actually do it. My jaw locks.
On Tuesday, I was in a little tizzy with someone I love. It was all so dumb but as an infmaous grudge holder, I of course had to make it larger than life. So I put a reminder on my calendar for 3pm EST that said: Say sorry.
At 2:59pm, I was face-to-face with the person, forcing the syllables out of my mouth.
Running a 5k is easier than squashing a grudge. The latter causes me to out of breath more.
Wednesday: I asked for help.
For almost a decade, I’ve been a one woman show. When it comes to my business, I do everything myself. But it’s not working anymore. It hasn’t been working for a while. Because when I first started out, I was working 80-hour weeks and ditching the nightclubs for instant coffee on the couch so I could finish writing a book. Today, I’m only really able to work 20-hours a week but have at least 80-hours worth of work. Things get pushed aside, lost in the shuffle, or just completely ignored.
I’ve been wanting. to ask for help for a while and on Wednesday, I reached out to someone I met when I was in Nashville to audit my business and content streams to tell me ways I can improve them all.
I filled out a massive document with all my numbers, struggles, and a lot of other wildly honest information and sent it over. This is what the woman who I hired said:
Thursday: I negotiated my value.
I’m facing pressure from someone to sign an agreement (keeping it vague for now) but there are some things in the agreement that aren’t so great for me. Even though there are a lot of people involved in this agreement and everyone wants it to be done with already, I decided on Thursday to push back and negotiate items in the agreement that mattered to me.
This was hard because standing up for yourself takes confidence and is always a bit risky. But as a “life is short” preacher, what alternatives do we have if we don’t live having our own backs?
Friday: I didn’t give up on a hard workout.
After taking a year off, I went back to my old workout high-intensity bootcamp class that I did almost every day for two years. I had signed up and canceled going to the class four times. I used to be able to do a million burpees back-to-back and now, if I try to do one, I just stay on my belly and crunch into the fetal position.
But I went and I didn’t give up on the 45-minute workout. Even though I could have and nobody would have known or card. But I stuck it out and it was hard.
So what did I learn from my week of living the cliche of “make your life harder than it has to be”? That good things come putting ourselves out there again. My old kickboxing instructor from when I was in the 8th grade used to say another cliche to me when I would complain my legs felt like they were going to fall off after kicking the bag for 10-minutes straight.
No pain, no gain.
No pain, no gain.
No pain…
You get the point. no gain.
⚡Instant Pick Me Ups
📚: I heard so many people hype up this book that I couldn’t wait 48 weeks for the library to have it ready for me to grab. I bought it on Audible and plan to start today.
💄: I’m 36 and I just discovered the magic of eyebrow gel. Have I been living under some kind of rock? I think so because this stuff is life changing. It makes your eyebrows perky and perfect looking. I tried three different ones and this is my top pick.
👗: We’re not quite in tank top season yet but I’m eager. I’ve been wearing solid colored tanks with fun cropped jackets. The cropped aspect helps pull the look together when you’re wearing it with jeans, leggings, or slacks. My favorite one is from OldNavy, then this Gap one, and this one is a splurge but how nice, right?
😮 Progress Report:
My friend deleted email off of her phone and it inspired me to try that out for a week. I really don’t have the type of career where I get life-changing or important, emails all day long. I’m an entrepreneur and writer. Most of the people emailing me are retailers sharing details about their 50% off sale. Even so, I obsessively refresh my email, alll day loooong. So it’s gone, as of today, for a week. Let’s see how it goes.
I guess I should update you on old subject matters that crawled around this section. I still haven’t been to physical therapy. I still haven’t lucked out or manifested a two bedroom apartment in what feels like the most expensive corner of the universe AKA Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Ughhh, tax day. Some people are jumping for joy that they are getting a heft refund. Others (this is me) are agape over how much we owed. Taxes can really suck the life out of you and i’m trying to make silly little jokes like: are tears tax deductible? My accountant didn’t find that funny especially on the busiest day of the year for him.
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