Sometimes what looks like regression is actually integration.
I haven’t sent a newsletter since early June.
It would be easy to beat myself up for falling down on the weekly habit that took me years to build. To feel like I'm failing my community or wonder why I can't get it all together. After all, punishing ourselves is after all the path to improvement. Isn't that what many of us have been taught? But is that really the best path? And is this even a failure?
It reminds me of something I used to tell my students when I was teaching the forward kayak stroke.
After decades as a kayak instructor, there was a pattern I knew quite well. I'd teach someone one part of the forward stroke, and they'd practice until it started to feel natural. Then I would introduce the next element, and suddenly the part they had just learned would get worse.
They weren’t going backward. Their brain and body were figuring out how to hold both things at once.
This year, I’ve been integrating a lot: moving to a new home (my second relocation in the past two years), very big changes with my ADHD medication, developing new ways of working with my time, while literally writing the manual for my brain (I've been posting a lot about that on social media), and showing up far more consistently on Instagram, Youtube and other platforms.
As those new pieces came in, this newsletter, something I had previously developed a hard won level of comfort and even sense of pride in, well, it temporarily fell away.
I could easily call that a failure. And maybe you would too if something similar happened to you. But the truth is, it’s closer to what happened to my students in the kayak. The whole system was reorganizing around something much more complex.
Ask yourself, where might you be judging yourself for getting worse at something when you’re actually learning to hold more?
In Connection,
Gregg
