The speaker discusses their personal journey of self-discovery and finding their true identity after a difficult divorce. They struggled with knowing who they were outside of their role as a parent and at work. Through therapy and reading Shonda Rhimes' book, "Year of Yes," they realized the importance of saying yes to new experiences and stepping out of their comfort zone. They learned that by embracing change and taking risks, they could truly feel alive and discover their fullest self. The speaker encourages others to do the same and not let fear hold them back from living a fulfilling life.
Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Jack podcast with me, your host, the podcast where we focus on holistic personal and professional success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today we're talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart and very personal, and the fact that it's very personal has made it surprisingly difficult to record.
Usually, I start an episode of the pod, and I just record. I do one take, and what I get is what I get. But I've had to delete a couple of times because I'm stuttering so hard. So I'm going to give it another bash, and hopefully I get it right this time. This week's installment is called Say Yes, but in the same breath, also say no. So it's called Say Yes, Also Say No, and I'm going to explain why.
At the end of 2021, a lot of people had a personal crisis in 2020. I wasn't one of them. I had a crisis in 2021. In 2021, I was at the tail end of a difficult divorce. I was divorced. I was figuring out life post-divorce. It wasn't so much the divorce itself, but the realization that outside of parenting and doing really well at work, I had lost all sense of who I was. In fact, I wondered at some point whether I ever even truly knew who I was.
Maybe I did, but somewhere along the line, I completely forgot. And maybe it didn't matter. Maybe the person I was was simply dead. It was a question of finding out whether there was someone new somewhere inside me, outside of service to others. I started to ask myself hard questions about identity, hard questions about who I was, hard questions about what I even liked. And I'm sad to say, for the most part, I didn't know the answer.
I was going to therapy, but I really didn't know how to deal with it. People love to throw around words like, go find yourself and sit still and God rises from within. And he does. But it's another thing entirely to recognize yourself and to know exactly where your edges are. I remember realizing that I didn't know. He put me in a situation where I had to sort something out for someone else. I could do so with the greatest of ease.
That's why I was able to excel at work, even during this difficult time. But once the issue became about me, once it became personal to me, and especially if it had nothing to do with my children, just me, I struggled so much because the truth was I had lost sight of the things that made me, me. So what was to be done? I remember asking my therapist what I now call my ground zero question. I'd already been going to therapy for a little while, but I remember saying, and this question I asked before the divorce was final, before I had even made the decision, but I must have been heading there.
I remember saying, I don't remember how to make a decision about myself that is not in response to something that he has done or something that someone else has done. I think at some point I would go out with my friends, but I didn't exercise any sort of agency. It was simply I went out because this friend said so. I went out because that friend said so. In my personal life, I was exercising zero agency, and I didn't know how to be any other way.
I knew enough to register that something wasn't right. I knew enough to think, this can't be what my life is supposed to look like. But I didn't know enough to then take it to the next level, to take that question to the next level, to then say to myself, if not this, then what? I continued to read. I continued to talk to people. I continued to do things. I just had this niggling feeling in the back of my head that things weren't what they were supposed to be.
This is why I love books. I say this all the time. I love books because they expose you to things that you would otherwise not encounter. They answer questions that you didn't even know you were answering. But most of all, they tell you that you're not alone, that you're not the only person to have ever experienced an existential crisis, or to have wanted to laugh about this thing, or to have wanted to grow in that particular direction.
And you are not the first person to hack your way through this path. Somebody else has already gone, and they've made a map for you. And that's what the Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes was for me in this area. You see, if you've stayed with me, I've been on the Internet creating in one form or the other for 10 to 12 years. This is the longest I've ever stayed in a single spot, and I'm hoping I stick around for the podcast for at least a year.
So those who have stayed with me on my nomadic move from blog to blog over the past 10 to 12 years know that I take stock every year. Every year I ask myself, what am I doing with this year? What is my theme going to be? I used to do New Year's resolutions, and I realized I couldn't keep up with a list of things to do, but what I could keep up with was a theme. So I said, give me a theme, and I know what I am doing that year.
And whatever needs to be done just aligns with the theme. It's a lot easier than saying I'm going to, I don't know, gain 10 kgs, eat 10 pizzas, or I don't know, run away to Paris. It's a lot easier to follow a general theme than it is to follow a checklist. So at the end of 2021, having read Shonda Rhimes' Year of Yes, I decided I would make 2022 my year of yes. Shonda Rhimes blew my mind.
She somehow managed to wrap words around the things that I was feeling at that time, but could not yet articulate. My desire to feel alive and not merely exist. I had merely existed for so long that even though my body recognized it as somewhat normal, my spirit kept whispering that something wasn't right. I was living but not ever truly alive to myself. And for years, I had actually said no to everything that wasn't hard work or self-sacrifice, right? Thank you, Catholic upbringing.
I was raised Catholic, and I was sent to a Catholic boarding school all the way up to 18. I was a good Catholic girl, and I hated it. It sucked. The Catholic girl wasn't happy. She was good, and she was unhappy. She wanted to do more. She wanted to be more. She wanted to feel more. She just had no idea where more was to be found. What could she actually do to feel more alive, right? Enter Shonda.
Shonda, in her book, says, open quote, Saying no has gotten me here. Here sucks. Saying yes might be my way to someplace better. If not a way to someplace better, at the very least, a way to someplace different. And at that point, I was entirely ready for someplace different. You see, until I'd read the book, I had not realized how at home with a no I was. It was my default setting. A lot of friends had given up on inviting me to things.
I always declined in favor of work or something. My intimate friend circle had continued to invite me, but they generally accepted that I would say no. Should I start saying yes? I remember asking myself, and it was stressful. It was such a wild thought. And Shonda said specifically, say yes. There's no way to plan. There's no way to hide. There's no way to control this. Not if I'm going to say yes to everything. Yes to everything is scary.
Yes to everything takes me out of my comfort zone. Yes to everything that feels like it might be crazy. Yes to everything that feels out of character. Yes to everything that feels goofy. Yes to everything. Everything. Say yes. Yes. My God, it was scary. But there I was, understanding fully for the first time that I was entirely responsible for myself, that I could make a promise to myself, any promise, and keep it, knowing deep in my heart that it would build my character in a way I'd never experienced.
I didn't know where I wanted to go or who in me I would find along the way. What I did know was that Shonda had presented me with a path to explore myself, to explore my soul, my mind, my heart, and life in one fell swoop. For once, this yes would be about giving myself permission to shift the priority of, to shift the focus of what is a priority from what's good for me over to what makes me feel good.
What a concept. You see, no one does right and wise and safe choices better than a Catholic girl. I had done it all my life. I was an excellent Catholic girl. When I closed this book, for the first time in my life, I wanted to shout, safety be damned. I wanted to pat a tiger with my bare hand. I wanted to live wild. Of course, that desire died real quick, so let's not get carried away. I have children, and they need me.
But my untaming had actually begun. It wasn't the wild, touch-death-with-my-bare-hand sort of untaming. It was simply learning, one experience at a time, that feeling alive requires you to say yes to fetching it. And that's hard, but it's magical. It requires you to step into the darkness with lanterns looking for yourself. It requires you to push through the fear of change. Make no mistake, it's frightening. And the fear only abates as you face and accept more and more yeses.
In the end, in order to be truly alive, when life, whether in the most mundane frock or in her finest jewels, knocks on your door and says, shall we dance, the only answer you can give really is yes. The point of this whole Year of Yes project is to say yes to things that scare you, that challenge you. I change the me to you here, but the quote is straight out of Shonda's book. I couldn't agree more with Shonda when she says, if I don't poke my head out of my shell and show people who I am, or anyone will ever think I am, is my shell, I would only add that there's something particularly galvanizing about also grasping that if you don't poke your head out of your shell, all you will ever think you are is your shell.
You may never ever get to meet your fullest self in all your mess and glory in this one life that we have. And now, when you think about it that way, you realize that that is the greatest of tragedies. I'm not the same person I was before I said yes. I'm not the same person I was three years ago. The person I was four years ago would faint at the thought that this is who we would become.
But saying yes was arguably the most empowering thing I've ever done. So this is what happens when you lose yourself. You don't know what you like, what you don't like. You don't know what experiences appeal to you. What saying yes does is it gives you an opportunity to taste life's buffet. And knowing that I was only going to do it for a year made it all the more thrilling and a lot less intimidating. There was no need for me to say yes for the rest of eternity.
I knew that once I was done with this year, I would know what would happen next. So I said yes to going to Abu Dhabi. I said yes to going to Dubai. I said yes to boat cruises. I said yes to mountain climbing. I said yes to taking hikes. I said yes to traveling alone. I said yes to traveling with friends. I went to Zanzibar. I said yes to all sorts of things. I put my hand up at work when I didn't feel like it.
I went out to parties when I didn't feel like it. I left the house. I went to picnics. If someone knocked on my door with a would you like to do, I said yes. I'm just lucky I wasn't found by drug addicts. But this is what's amazing. Every little taste of life was tingly and delicious. And it showed me what is out there. I was under no duty. I am under no duty to then keep doing those things for the rest of my life.
But what the taste does, it tells you, is it tells you this is something I would like to eat more of. This is something I would never want to do again. Do I want to party every weekend? Absolutely not. Do I enjoy hanging out with strangers for an extended period of time? Or people that I hardly know? Not at all. But I did it. And it was pleasant. And it was a new taste that I never had.
I just knew that this is not something I would like to do on a regular basis. Do I love traveling to visit my friends? Yes. Do I love tasting new food? Yes, as long as it's not seafood. Don't judge me. Do I love sitting alone next to the ocean, just listening to it? I love it. Do I love poking around marketplaces and strange countries and strange places and just seeing what's what? A hundred percent. Do I love deep, meaningful conversations? Yes.
And I learned all of this by saying yes to everything and figuring out which of these tastes appeals to me the most. Which of these tastes are chia? That is what saying yes did for me. At the end of that year, I felt like I was in color. You know those ads that start out with black and white, and as the ad goes on, the scene starts to take on color, starts to fill out and slowly but surely becomes a vibrant scenery of colors? That's how my life felt as I made my way through 2022.
And what's interesting was at the beginning of the year, I was deadly afraid. Oh, I walked on fire too. I almost forgot. I walked on fire. That's something I would have said no to before. I only had a little burn, but it was a mind game, and I won. Now, when I started out at the beginning of 2022, I was very timid. I was very insecure. I had no agency. When people would say, let's do this, I would just go ahead and do it because I didn't know how to be responsible for myself.
But the more I said yes, the more I faced each fear, the more confident I became, the more sure I became of who I was, what I was capable of, and what I liked. The more I did the scariest thing I've ever done, which is just say yes, the more I became in touch with me, but also the more I became confident in who I am, in understanding that I can do hard things, in understanding that I can find my own edges.
There's nothing like traveling alone to build confidence in the self. The first time I packed so poorly I needed to buy a lot of little things. I forgot toothpaste. I forgot a toothbrush. Now, I am a traveling legend. I don't even need a list. I can put together my things. I can get to places. I can figure out what I'm going to do. There was a time I didn't even know how to pick activities by myself, and just a couple of years later, I am super confident to drop everything and get on a plane and go.
Just the other day, I traveled to two provinces in Essay and two countries in just about three or four days, and I traveled so light on both occasions, and it was just fun. The anxiety that would typically have filled me from just wandering too far from home base is just no longer there. Saying yes made me far more confident, far more sure, and it made my relationship with myself sure and steady and comfortable, and I now have the ability to say, yes, I like that.
And here's where the also say no comes in. At the end of the year, despite having had this wonderful experience, I was tired. I was tired. I was tired of saying yes to all of these things, to trying all of these things, because it meant I was super busy. But I now had something magical that I had not had before. Now I knew what I did like and what I didn't like. I knew the things that I had been saying yes to simply for the sake of it, and things that I should never have said yes to.
Now I knew what I liked and I disliked. And there, that's when Greg McKeown's essentialism came to the fore. Greg McKeown's essentialism is simply a guide to understanding who you are first, and you do that by exploring, hello, yes or yes, and thereafter figuring out what is essential to you. And one cannot happen without the other. So in order for you to be able to produce a high-value no, you must first have explored and tried things and seen things and then figured out, this is what I'll do.
Oh, I also swam with turtles. First I'm afraid of water, also I'm afraid of turtles, but no more. And I have a turtle bite on my bum. The year of yes was epic, epic. Back to business. Having said yes to all of those things, then it became a question of learning the high-value no. You cannot actually go through your entire life saying yes to everything. You at some point then need to figure out, now I know who I am.
Now I know what I like. How do I use that information to create a life that is mostly full of the yeses that I like and that is populated by the least possible number of items that I dislike? You need to learn how to use and to wield a high-quality no in response to things that are not aligned with who you are. So now you've explored. Then you come to essentialism. Essentialism, the book, is by Greg McKeown and it is subtitled, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
And this is what comes after saying yes. You see, a non-essentialist thinks, I have to do this. It's all important. How can I fit it all in? All things to all people is what a non-essentialist is. An essentialist is a person who has tasted life and worked out how to do less but do it better. Do less but do high-quality things. It's a person who says, I choose to. It's a person who says, only a few things really matter.
It's a person who says, if I say yes to this, what is the trade-off? A non-essentialist is a person who is undisciplined in their pursuit of more. They just want to consume and consume and consume and don't really know why they're consuming. They are not driven by their why. They just carry on. They react to what's most pressing. They say yes to people without thinking. They try to force execution at the last moment. Whereas the disciplined pursuit of yes pauses to discern what really matters, says no to everything except the essential, removes obstacles to make execution easy.
You see, a non-essentialist gets into trouble by taking on too much and their work suffers, feels out of control, is unsure whether the right things are getting done, feels overwhelmed and exhausted. A non-essentialist is a person who is moving one inch in a thousand directions because they're saying yes to everything. An essentialist is a person who chooses carefully in order to do great work. They do fewer things. They do them excellently. They feel in control. They get the right things done.
They experience the joy in the journey. They are present. It's important to understand that the year of yes or saying yes is a gateway to a high-quality no. This is not about suddenly waking up and deciding you're going to say no to everything. No, no, no. This is about tasting life and then figuring out what you want on your buffet. There is non-essentialism everywhere these days. It is everywhere and it is encouraged for many reasons. And I'll tell you some of the ways that we get sucked into non-essentialism.
We have too many choices, according to Greg McKeown. We've all observed the exponential increase in choices over the last decade, yet even in the midst of it and perhaps because of it, we've lost sight of the most important ones. Peter Drucker says, In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce.
It's the unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time, literally, substantially and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, we have to manage ourselves, and society is entirely unprepared for it. We are unprepared in part because for the first time, the preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it. We've lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn't. Psychologists are calling this decision fatigue. We've discussed this before on the pod.
The more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorate. And it's important to pause and reassess. Pause and check. What am I saying no to? And what am I saying yes to? And why? The second thing is a lot of social pressure. It's not just the number of choices that has increased exponentially. It's also the strength and number of outside influences on our decisions that has increased. While much has been said and written about how hyperconnected we now are and how distracting this information overload can be, the larger issue is how our connectedness has increased the strength of social pressure.
Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. I'm doing that right now. It's not just information overload. It's opinion overload. That social pressure affects what you're saying yes to and why. It affects how you are presenting in public and why. It affects how you enjoy an event and why. It affects what you lift your phone to take a picture of. There's also the idea, which is the third point, that you can have it all.
You can have it all. God, I'm so tired of you can have it all. The idea that we can have it all and do it all is not new. This myth has been peddled for so long. Virtually everyone alive is infected with it. It's sold in advertising. It's championed by corporations. It's embedded in job descriptions. It is embedded in university applications that require dozens of extracurricular activities. What is new, though, is how especially damaging this myth is today in a time when choice and expectations have increased exponentially.
Perhaps this worked well when what we could have was limited, but now that what we can have is entirely unlimited, you can have it all is overwhelming and paralyzing. It results in stressed people trying to cram yet more activities into their already overscheduled lives. It creates corporate environments that talk about work-life balance but still expect their employees to be on their smartphones all the time. It leads to staff meetings. My throat is so dry. I spent most of the day in a dusty storeroom at work looking for some old files.
It asks employees to have as many as ten top priorities with no sense of irony at all. By the way, the word priority was initially invented to speak only to one item. The minute priority becomes priorities, you have defeated the meaning of the word. When we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making tradeoffs at the margins that we would never take as an intentional strategy. But we don't realize we're doing it because we're not paying attention.
When we don't purposefully and deliberately choose where to place our focus, everything sort of happens for us and around us. And we allow other people's agendas to control our choices and what we do. I spoke about this last week when I told you about Lieutenant Onoda from Japan and how he lived decades in the forest following somebody else's agenda, fighting a war that had long since ended. Greg McKeown argues that after you've finished exploring, and this is important, you must start with exploring.
Explore and evaluate. After you've finished exploring and evaluating, eliminate. Eliminate all of the things that are non-essential. Get rid of everything that doesn't contribute to the values that you have set for yourself and for your life. And finally, execute. We live in a crisis of execution. Just look around you and pay attention to the number of people who say they're going to do things and don't actually follow through. Just pay attention to the number of people who are talking about the big dreams that they have and the money that they're going to make and are not actually doing anything.
We are overwhelmed by the quantity of options and choices that we have. And by deliberately not shutting down some of these things so that we can focus our energy in a particular direction, what happens is we move one inch in 10,000 directions instead of 10,000 inches towards the greater goal of our lives. This is just some food for thought. And I hope it invites you and encourages you to say yes and then also say no. I hope you find this useful.
I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. And if this helps at least one person out there to reassess their life and possibly make a decision that makes it a little bit of a better quality life, then my purpose is fulfilled. Have a beautiful week. If you like the podcast, please like, share, subscribe, comment, send me a DM. I appreciate every form of feedback. Please share with a friend. I appreciate you. I appreciate your time.
Thank you for listening. ♪♪♪
