The Rules of Engagement

Good morning, Cadre. Feels like just yesterday I was in this exact spot. I think it was actually this parking spot. Two weeks ago when I did the live stream, I was here in Minnesota for a wedding. No, I'm here in Minnesota right now for a wedding. Two weeks ago, I was here for a funeral, and I did the live stream from this very parking lot on Highway 55 in front of this little storm pond situation between Highway 55. Good morning, Nikki. Good morning. To get to the root. Rachel. Good morning. I'm very glad to see you both here staring at these two.

Two weeks ago, there was one mallard. Now there's two. I'm wondering if they're related or what the situation is. But here I am again. I'm about to go to the airport. I was here for a wedding, and it is very telling to me that I was here two weeks ago for a funeral, which was a lovely funeral and a lovely service. There was tragedy here in between, and I was able to come back. And two things about this trip back to Minnesota, I come here pretty frequently, as you all can probably tell, since I'm from here, my family's here, my friends are here, or some of my friends.

A lot of them are here. I was my friend's safe person. And you do remember. Thank you, Nikki. Yeah. Well, there was a friend that I was worried about. I think I talked about him last week and, oh, I'm a little emotional on Sunday morning. I got to lay eyes on him and lay hands on him, and he is okay, and that felt good. I'm glad that the universe saw fit to have me here this weekend. The wedding was lovely. It was good to see family. This was first cousin once removed. My cousin's child got married, and it was great.

It was lovely. It was great to see my cousins, and it was a good event, and I'm glad to be here. And it's funny that all of this happened in June when our theme is balance and we're talking about balance, because a surprise trip to Minnesota was not, you know, a couple weeks ago for funeral. Death is not convenient, nor should it be, honestly, a surprise trip. I don't feel balanced. I don't feel like, oh, I've had the right amount of time between being home and being in Minnesota, and I don't feel like I've had the right amount of time between all my various projects and then my free time, whatever.

It just doesn't feel balanced. I will say this. It feels harmonized, like we talked about last week. I do feel like it harmonized. I'm not comfortable, but I can feel that the events of my life have gone together and fit together. Even though I had to adjust myself internally to make it happen, adjust my thinking, adjust my expectations. If all I needed to do was change my expectations and buy a plane ticket in a hotel and rent a car, then we're doing okay. You know, that's not a bad thing. But I can feel the harmony in that.

I can feel my life working on my behalf in that even if I feel imbalanced and out of sorts, which I do, I have to be honest, I am eager to get home and sleep in my own bed. I don't have any travel scheduled for a few weeks at this point, and I'm glad. But as I start this live stream, I think to myself, that makes a lot of sense. If you get an invitation to think about balance, it's also an invitation to think about. For me, it's an invitation to think about harmony. And it's a way to notice that it's okay to be in balance sometimes.

But harmony is what I'm after. Harmony is what I'm after. And I do have some rules of engagement that relate to that. But I really was so struck by this position in this car. The phone up here, looking. The duck is sleeping under the exact same tree he was sleeping under two weeks ago. But I can tell that there's cattails over here. And I can tell that they're bigger than they were two weeks ago. They just got the beginning of the brown part of the ca at the top. They're very slender. I think they will fatten over the summer.

They will ripen over the summer. You know, you can eat the tops of cattails. I probably learned that from My side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead. George, I'm not going to eat those cattails. I probably would not eat cattails growing by the side of a highway. But you can if you need to. So I have some rules of engagement that I was thinking about as I was thinking about balance, as I was thinking about harmony. One of them is, this is a little. I have a feeling this is going to be a little bit of tough love.

Hello. Speak. Wonder. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Very glad that you're here. I was talking about balance and harmony. No big surprise there. I have a guideline in my life that I learned from Marty Lynske and Robert Heifetz. Marty talks about it, I think, more than Robert does. They are professors at Harvard and they wrote the book Leadership on the Line together. And Marty talks about this. Every system is perfectly set up to get the results it's getting. I'm going to repeat that. Every system is perfectly set up to get the results it's getting.

Now, I do a lot of work with white people around race. I. I don't think about. I mean, I think about interpersonal. Our conditioning as white people and how we are, you know, conditioned to interact with each other and with people of the global majority. But I also. That was transformational for my thinking when I realized every system is perfectly set up to get the result that it's getting. And I think about society like everything is set up to get the results we're getting right now. If we want different results, we have to set it up differently.

And that was transformational to me as a shortcut when I was thinking about the change I was doing in government work. But it's also true when we're thinking about our lives and we're thinking about. I feel imbalanced and I feel. I feel harmonized, but I do not feel balanced. My system is set up to get the results that I'm getting. And if I want a different result, if I want to feel more balance or more harmony or whatever it is, I need to set up my systems differently in my life. And thank you, Nikki.

And I see that speak wonder your corgi loves forget me nots in the woods. I love that for your corgi. And I love corgis so, so much. So someday we'll have to talk. I want a dog again someday in the future when I don't travel as much and corgis are on my list. So think about your life. I was talking to a friend the other day and a lot is going on for her and it was clear that she felt victimized by what was going on in her life. Understandably so. There were these external events coming at her that she had to handle that she didn't ask for.

Like it was just one of those periods of time where 10 of those things happened instead of one. And that happens to us sometimes. Right. And that. That I suffer a great deal. That when I worked the 12 steps in 2016 and 2017, mostly in 2016, that round, what really came through for me when I worked my fifth step, for those of you who know what I'm talking about, great. If you don't just know. I took an inventory of my life and read it out loud to my sponsor. When you do that, you see some themes.

And the theme that came through to me was that I Felt very victimized by things that had happened to me and were happening to me. If you're sharp, you can think about what was going on in my life in 2016 and what had just gone on in my life in 2015. Just Google it. Betsy Hodges, 2015. I was feeling very victimized by it. Victim stance, by nature is not a powerful stance. It's a feeling of loss of control. Things are coming at me, I can't control them, etc. Etc. What I could have agency with was how I responded to what had happened to me and how I responded to feeling victimized by it.

I didn't have to say, oh, I'm a bad person for feeling victimized by it. Knowing what happened in my young life, knowing what had just happened, it's totally understandable. I felt victimized by it. That those are lenses that I tend to put on, glasses I tend to put on when things are rough. But it's not a really fun way to live. Feeling that the world's doing you wrong all the time and you can do nothing about it. That is not a particularly fun way to live. And so this idea that every system in my life was perfectly set up to get the results it was getting, my life was perfectly set up to get a feeling of victimization.

So I needed to change how my life was set up. I got to change my mindset. I got to notice the pattern. All of a sudden, I saw it everywhere. That's part of healing and growth, is once you see it, you can't stop seeing it. But it means that I got a thousand choice, a thousand ways to make a different choice. I had a thousand ways to make a different choice because that victim stuff was in my face a thousand times a day. And I started making different choices about how I viewed things, which means my.

Which changed my behavior. Because I saw it differently, I behaved differently. And because I behaved differently, the different Jenga pieces started fitting together differently in my life. It was extraordinary. It was extraordinary. And it still comes up. It will be my. My freeze response. And then feeling victimized will probably be my natural instinct when something goes wrong, maybe for the rest of my life. But noticing it will be too, is my hope. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. Noticing it will be too.

So if you're feeling very, very imbalanced, if you're feeling unharmonious in your life, and if you're feeling like part of the reason that's true is because things that you can't control keep happening and keep happening and keep happening. I am not here to tell you that you can control the uncontrollable 100% you cannot. But what is in your purview is how you think about it, what you learn from it, what you notice about your life from it, and the actions that you take based on what you see and what you know.

And so every system is perfectly set up to get the results it's getting. If you want different results, you have to change your system and what you think is part of the system. It was a big revelation for me. It was my first year as a city council member. Was also going through a divorce. I do not recommend that combination, although it worked out for me fine. It was just hard and I was such a jerk to so many people. I think I've told this story here about how my friend came in and told me that I was making everyone take a bath in my insecurities.

That's a good friend. Part of that healing process after I realized what was going on, part of the healing process was the realization because my mother would always say to me, you can't help how you feel, but you can't help what you do about how you feel. And that's when I realized my thoughts were a behavior. I can actually choose what thought goes through my head. I can't choose how I feel about that thought, but I can choose the thought. And actually that can that for me, that changed everything.

Once I realized, oh, I don't have to think the anxious thought. I don't have to accept every invitation my brain gives me to anxiety, to stress, to resentment, to judgment. I don't have to accept every invitation my brain gives me. It's understandable my brain's set up to do that given my life history. Every system is perfectly set up to get the results it's getting, including my brain. But I don't have to accept the invitation. So. And you're welcome. Speak wonder. I'm glad this this conversation is helpful for what's coming up later and I'm glad it's helping you too, Nikki.

Thank you for that feedback in the comments. Once I realized that my thoughts were also behavior and I couldn't help how I felt, but I could help up what I was thinking. I really started working on what thoughts were going through my head, which is part of the reason I have this huge list of rules of engagement and guidelines, because those are things I would rather think and I would rather have orient me than the things my brain is just throwing at me all the time. I'm a very anxious person. I have a lot of anxiety.

You do not have to accept what your brain invites you to do, Nikki. You really do not. So that's a little bit of tough love, right? Every system is perfectly set up. But it's a hope. It's a hope. There's hope embedded in that to get the results that it's getting. There's hope in that because you can. The parts of that system that you have agency over, you can make decisions about, you can change your actions and change your behavior to create more harmony, to create more balance, to create more peace, to create more love, to create more fun, to create more acceptance, to create more connection.

All of that is possible. By changing your inputs, you will change your outputs. The outputs will change. If you change the inputs that you have control over. They may not change to exactly where you want them to go, but they will be different than the ones you're getting now. If you put different stuff in, you'll get different stuff out. But there are a thousand ways to get it right. That is my rule of engagement number 27. There are a thousand ways to get it right. I think I'm going to move it up to the top 10 someday.

I'm really. I'm going to reorder these, but right now it's number 27. There are a thousand ways to get it right, your life included. There's not one way you were supposed to live your life and you're doing it wrong. There's a thousand ways to get it right and you're just doing one of them. Yeah, there are other ways to get it right, and you could have done those, but you didn't. You did your way. There are a thousand ways to get it right, and this is one of them. I promise you, you're not living your life wrong.

There wasn't some. There isn't some rule book or guidebook or plan or whatever it is. So I'm getting emotional because I really want people. I just want you to. I want me to understand this. And because I understand this, I want to. I want. I. If I could give you this gift, I would give it to you. There's not some one way you are supposed to be living your life. There's a thousand ways to get it right, and you're just pursuing one of those thousand ways. And if more harmony and more balance is one of the thousand ways for you change your inputs to get different outputs, you can do that.

It may be in a big way, it may be in a small way. It doesn't all have to be Eat, Pray, Love. It's one of the I love Eat, Pray, Love, and I love Elizabeth Gilbert. But one of the reasons I love Gretchen Rubin so much is because she was like, I'm not going to go to India or, you know, I'm not going to go to Italy and whatever. But there's gotta be a way to make my life better a little bit day by day. And that's why she wrote the Happiness Project. I love them both because I have made huge changes in my life and I have made little changes in my life and they've all mattered.

There are a thousand ways to get it right. You're pursuing one of them. Every system is perfectly set up to get the results it's getting. Change the input, you'll get a different output. That's my message for you this week as I sit here with the beautiful liminal space. The mallard duck is now up and he's preening a little bit and he's poking at the water a little bit. Have a great week, Cadre. I look forward to seeing you in July. We're going to talk about freedom, which I'm excited about, but I've loved exploring balance with you.

I love being on this journey with you. Let me know what you think. We'll see. I'll see you in the app and until then, have a great week. Know there's a thousand ways to get it right. It.