Rules Of Engagement

Hello cadre. Good morning. So much is going on at Casa Hoge. La Hoge. That was somebody years ago, somebody called me La Hoge. That was their nickname for me. And every once in a while I tell someone that. And every once in a while for a little while someone calls me that. And I don't know why I just called myself that. But here we are. Here we are. Hello, cadre. Ooh, I've got some doozies, rules of engagement, but inspired by what's going on in my actual own life. So I will say this, for a variety of reasons, on April 13th, I decided to do 100 swings, big swings in 100 days, 100 big swings in 100 days.

I have some projects I'm working on. and I've been playing a little too small on them. And so I really want to just play it big. So I have been reaching out to people I admire to get their advice and thinking about one or more of these projects. I've been applying for jobs and work that I would like. I've been proposing jobs and work I would like to people. These for me are big swings and One of the things I know in my life is that anxiety, anxiety attends to success and going out of my comfort zone as much as it attends to like failure, right?

And one of the things I learned in the last few years is that if that anxiety rises up too high, then I go into a functional freeze and then I just go into a freeze, like just a total freeze. But I have a couple rules of engagement that I've been following here, and I have a lot of tools to manage my anxiety. So the rules of engagement are 16 from Gretchen Rubin, choose the bigger life, number 12, put yourself out there. It's one of my rules of engagement, is just put yourself out there. And I have been putting myself out there.

I have a little notebook. This is my notebook. Here's the format of this notebook, I just found it. right? So it's X out of 100 and then you can put the date and then notes. So for every big swing, I figure between now and July 22nd, I am just writing it down and I am on big swing number 24. I will probably do number 25 and 26 today. And then I have to track them because with these big swings, you know, people respond and then I follow up. But that notebook is a great way to just Keep all my plates spinning.

What is it? How do I need to follow up with this big swing that I took? I mean, I'm having dinner with a president of a university this month just because I asked. So choose the bigger life, put yourself out there. This is great, but I want to make sure that I have the resources I need to do that and do that well. If it completely floods me and completely shuts me down, it's not worth doing those big swings because I, swings matter. The follow through matters, but matters with them, the people that I'm reaching out to.

But it also matters with me that I can stay on top of everything and not everything, but I can stay on top of what needs to be stayed on top of and not completely collapse in on myself. And rule of engagement number 26, when I am frozen, I am not choosing between the most important thing on my to-do list and the second most important thing on my to-do list. I am choosing between doing nothing and doing anything. You see what I'm saying? Like when I'm in that, this happened this weekend. On Sunday morning I wanted to, I don't know, I just wanted to go work out and do some baking.

But I ended up just reading and I love reading. I do a lot of reading, it's not a problem. But I can tell When it's like, I was noticing, I'm like, oh, it's 10 o'clock. I'm still sitting here reading. Usually I would be, I would have already worked out by now. I mean, I did sleep in a little bit. And then 11 o'clock came, it's like, oh, I'm still reading. Oh, I must be in some sort of free state. I'm gonna stay here for a while. And it was around noon that I got my day up and running and, you know, did my thing.

But It helped, right? It helped me to remember, oh, right, I am not choosing between doing the most important thing right now and doing the second most important thing because I also, John Acuff calls it stress stacking. It's like, oh, well, this needs to be done and then also this needs to be done and which is the most important and then I worry about which I need to do first and I get overwhelmed. Just do something. Move a muscle, change a feeling. Another rule of engagement. Just move a muscle, change a feeling.

I went and did my workout and the rest of the day went fine and it was good that my body got a little rest, but I knew what was going on. But I wasn't choosing between the most important thing and the second most important thing. I was choosing between doing something and doing nothing. So for me in that moment, it's better to do something. I had not chosen to take time off or to rest. It was choosing me. And when it's choosing me that hard, that long, that's a sign that I'm being overwhelmed by some anxiety.

So I had a whole bunch of resources and tools I could use. Cadre, the Cadre app is a very good tool and resource to use in those moments. I'm not in extremis in any way. I don't need any sort of intervention from anybody but me and my higher power. But I'm not Cruising through the day either, right? Cadre is perfect for those moments, but one of the tools I've been using in this whole time. that has been very, very helpful for me made me realize that there was a way, my rule of engagement #2 is start from where you are, not from where you wish you were or where you think you should be.

Start from where you are. And there is a place where I hadn't realized I wasn't starting from where I was, and it was holding me back a little bit. And it went kind of like this. I started practicing just noticing that the current moment was benign. As it is right now as I'm talking to you, what's happening around me is benign. There are no immediate hazards in my environment. I am not in any danger. And I'm not saying the word safe, and I'll talk about that why in a minute. What's around me is benign.

And I've been practicing my receiving skills, which we've talked about on another one, which I should do a whole other, I should do a whole other live just about everything I'm learning about these receiving skills. It turns out it wasn't from a particular person that I heard about the concept from somebody receiving skills and then I just asked the question, what are receiving skills? And what my little computer program gave back to me was these seven and I've added a few more. But I've been practicing allowing the good thing And allowing, sometimes I just have to practice receiving the current moment.

And I'm only willing to receive the current moment if I understand that it's benign. Because the current moments of my young life were often not benign. They were often not benign when I was young. And I have sort of adapted how I approach my time based on the conclusions I drew from those young experiences. But I am 56 years old. I can reevaluate those young experiences and decide, and is the current moment benign? It really is. And then it's kind of really nice and settling that somatic softening, you know, receiving skill number four, that somatic softening, it's actually very somatic softening.

She's like, oh, the current moment is benign. Let's allow it. Let's be here for a minute. Let me receive the current moment as benign. I can tolerate that it's easily benign. I actually have to work to make my environment not benign at this point and let it come to completion right this moment. I can fully receive it. I don't. have to hold off just a little bit. Well, as I was practicing that, this combination of receiving skills and the moment is benign, I realized something. It sounds an awful lot like mindfulness and I do not respond well to the concept of mindfulness.

I have read so much about it. I mean, I'm in these spaces. I am not unaware of what mindfulness means. And I can almost hear people out there shouting for whom it works so well to just think of mindfulness and do things mindfully. And to me, every time I hear the word, it's a little bit like nails on a chalkboard. It's just a little screeching sound. It's the needle across the record, record scratch, everything stops, you know. It does not do what it's intended to do for me. And that's where I realized I had not been starting from where I was, because that's where I am with that concept of mindfulness.

Used to be that's where I was with the concept of meditation before I discovered I could do writing meditation. Now I do writing meditation. I meditate every day. It's not a problem. I do writing meditation, but the sit still and listen to my brain and all that noise, 33 years, no thank you. It just, I did my time. And what I realized is the invitation for me is to let other people start from, hey Anna, is to let other people start from where they are and not from where they think they should be or where I think they should be.

Just let other people, you know, because there are things that work for me that other people really don't like. Side note, I can't do yoga. I cannot do yoga. And I've known this for quite some time. I didn't figure out why for many years. But maybe 30 years ago I understood, yeah, it was probably 30 years ago, golly. I was playing ultimate frisbee and we were doing stretches afterwards and this woman was like, oh, I do yoga and I love yoga. And I said, I can't do yoga. Oh, you can do yoga. She was trying to insist that I do yoga.

And I was like, I I mean, the fact that I remember this conversation 30 years later kind of tells you I'm an alcoholic too because we hold on to stuff like that. But I realized later that yoga shares elements of ways adults were unkind to me as a child. That's all I'm going to say. If you want to know more, reach out to me on the app and we can have a conversation about it. But it's kind of heavy what I would have to say about it. But just trust me when I say Yoga activates more trauma. It does not relax more trauma.

So that's how I was with yoga for years. And now that I know, I just don't do it. I just don't do it. It's okay. It's okay. And mindfulness the same way. I just get so activated. You know, it's like I don't, for years I was like, I don't even understand what this concept means. And probably if you've listened to me long enough, you have ideas about why I struggle to understand that are even more completely formulated than my ideas about it. But start from where I am, not from where I think I should be.

The concept of mindfulness doesn't work for me, but the concept of receiving the current moment as benign and allowing myself to be physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually present in that moment for the benign reality that is surrounding me, okay, that I can do. If you call it mindfulness, I will probably snap back into my brain, but start from where I am, not from where I think I should be. So that's been helping me a lot. with the amount of anxiety that comes up for all these big swings I'm taking, they pay off.

I was partially inspired by, there was somebody on threads who said, once a month I do these brave moments where... I just reach out for an impossible thing. I apply for a job I'm not qualified for. I reach out to someone who's wildly famous or successful in a field who has no idea who I am and just ask if I can talk to them. Once a month they have this practice. I'm just gonna do this thing, you know, this brave moment. And I thought about what would a practice of brave moment look like for me and in my current life right now I'm really trying to get more air in the room of my you know, of various aspects of my life.

So I'm taking 100 big swings in 100 days, knowing that anxiety will come up, but then also knowing that I have all these tools that I can use to walk through that anxiety. So I promised I'd talk about why when I notice the moment is benign, that there are no hazards in my environment, I don't use the word safe because I scoff at the word safe. My mind, if you tell me that I'm safe in this moment, my mind will conjure up the 15 to 20 reasons I'm maybe safe in this moment, but any second now something terrible could happen 'cause a big lesson I learned from my young life that I've carried with me that I get to reevaluate and let go of, but was that something terrible is happening and I don't know what it is.

that something terrible is happening around me and I don't know what it is. And some of that comes from growing up in an alcoholic household and not having words for what was going on. Some of it comes from terrible things were happening in my life and I was doing my best to just shove everything down the memory hole as soon as those things would happen. And that didn't work very well, but it did leave me with this feeling of something terrible is happening. and I don't know what it is. So if you tell me I'm safe, and I've been in therapeutic environments for so long, the word safe means nothing to me.

It just means someone else is deluded about the current situation. and that's very old and it's very untrue. The people who are saying I'm safe are correct. I just can't receive that word particularly well. So instead I say there are no immediate hazards around me, which is objectively true. My brain cannot argue with it. even if something were even a meteor to come in the window 10 seconds from now. Objectively speaking, right now there are no hazards in my current environment, certainly that I know about.

And I can relax and somatically soften into that reality more than anybody telling me, including myself, that I'm safe is going to do. So to recap, I'm taking 100 big swings. have this awesome notebook I found at Jenny Bick Custom Journals in Washington, DC, which is my favorite store in DC because journals and pens and paper. I'm tracking them. I have taken 25 so far. And because the anxiety's up, I'm doing a little bit more. I'm starting from where I am, not from where I think I should be, which means recognizing that the concepts of mindfulness and safety are non-starters for me, but the concepts of a benign environment at this very moment and the concept of no hazards in my environment at this very moment are starters for me, so I'm just starting from where I am, not from where I think I should be.

in the moments where I feel like I'm stuck in this functional freeze of I get to just do something rather than doing nothing, instead of trying to parse out what is the most important thing and the second most important thing. Those are all related to rules of engagement. So there, it's so funny. I think sometimes people think, Oh, that's very brave to really just open up like that. I was like, I got nothing to hide. Especially here on CADRE, I mean, I got nothing to hide. right? There are environments I'm not going to have this conversation because it wouldn't go well and it wouldn't be received well.

But it doesn't mean I wouldn't, it just means I have judgment. That's what that means. So cadre, I love being here with you, excited to be here with you. I will see you again next week. And in the meantime, take your rules of engagement and live your biggest, best possible life. That is all I want for all, I want the highest good for everyone around me.