What do you want to do next?
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I have been experimenting with a new approach to my days this year. Instead of coming up with a list of everything I "have" to do and then feeling stressed about it all day, I'm asking myself the question "What do I want to do next?"
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It's easy for me to get caught up in the previous commitments I have made, letting "past Eric" run my life. And yet, I can decline those commitments if I am willing to accept the consequences. For example, I have been running a monthly discussion group, and it came up on my calendar last week, and I was not feeling energized or excited to join. So I sent an apology note and bailed. And somebody else picked up the organization baton and will take over since they were finding value in the group. I felt such freedom in letting go of even one small commitment at a time when I am feeling overwhelmed.
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Of course, the challenge with asking oneself "What do I want to do next?" is that most of us have conditioning (or trauma) that drives our unconscious decision making. When I feel overwhelmed, one of my forms of escape is to play silly games on my phone or re-read a comfort book, activities where there is no ambiguity, no thought involved, no need to make sense of an uncertain situation. Instead of confronting the awesome complexity of the world, I confine myself to a limited finite domain. Sometimes I need that relief to give my nervous system and brain a chance to rest and recover. But sometimes I just do it out of habit. So how do I know what "I" want to do?
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I try to pay attention to how I'm feeling about a commitment. If I feel significant resentment or anxiety, it's likely not something "I" want to do, but something I previously committed to do that is no longer serving me (if you want more guidance on how to differentiate between what I want and what "I" want, read chapter 3 of my book, "Accept Your Parts"). Instead, I look for a sense of aliveness, a spark of energy, a sense of flow.
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Alternatively, I look for what gives me a sense of accomplishment. Playing a phone game or reading a book rarely makes me feel good afterwards. On the other hand, writing this newsletter is a commitment that I have a hard time fitting into my life right now, but I find satisfaction in sitting down and writing something every couple weeks. It is a challenge for me to find the time and space to gather my thoughts and organize them into words (I am typing this at 2am after one of my kids woke up crying) but whenever I put a piece of writing in the world that expresses my intent, I feel like I am acting as my best self. This is how I will make an impact on the world. This is me flapping my wings as the butterfly.
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So instead of looking at your commitments and feeling despair at ever getting through them, treat your to-do list as a menu. When you finish one thing, look at the menu, and ask yourself "What do I want to do next?" You can't do ten things at once, so let go of the stress of trying to getting them all done. Just do the next thing that you want to do.
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What I have noticed is that not only am I less anxious when I do one thing at a time, I'm also more productive because I'm not distracted by what's next.
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Admittedly, I have more ability to control my time since I am self employed, but on the flip side, my three young kids are more than willing to supercede any plans I have (I can't tell you how many times a kid wakes up just when I open my laptop with the intention to write). Even if you can't fully control your schedule, I think it's worth considering the exercise of focusing on your current task, rather than spreading your attention across all the things you could be doing.
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And if you want to take a break and do something fun like read escapist fiction or play a game, let yourself. I am horrified by every new action being taken by a government that does not represent me, but rather than choose to be outraged every moment, I need to take care of myself so I can keep taking action over the next few years. It's an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Connect and support, rather than complain and doomscroll.
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If you're having a hard time figuring out what to do next because you feel stressed or anxious or overwhelmed, it might help to reset your nervous system. I often guide my clients through a grounding practice in our sessions to calm down so they can decide what to do next with greater clarity, and a couple of them asked me to record it so they can listen to it whenever they want. If that would be helpful to you, you can download the 5-minute recording from https://www.toomanytrees.com/s/EricNehrlichGuidedGroundingMeditation.mp3
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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- It's now February, so most people's New Year's Resolutions have failed. If you or somebody you know is struggling to make a change in their life, check out my book, You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact. The book explains how you are preventing yourself from making the change you say you want, and guides you through the process of updating your unconscious to get out of your own way. One reader last week shared that he's been finding it so helpful that he is re-reading each of the chapters to apply the ideas to his life.
- I have a few coaching slots to fill, and I get my best clients from referrals. If you know somebody who is ready to take the next step in their leadership, please let them know they can sign up for a free coaching conversation with no obligation.
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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- Each action we take is a vote for the world we want. I want to live in a world of caring and connection, where humanity matters more than productivity and consumption. In these tumultuous days where everything feels awful, it's easy to feel lonely and isolated. While you might be powerless to affect national or global events, you can still help one person so reach out to somebody and connect.
- I felt at a loss for what to post the first week of Trump's presidency as the shock and awe of his executive orders felt overwhelming. So I signal boosted Lily Zheng's post instead, where they write "The systems we are working every day to undo and remake have endured for ten, twenty, a hundred years. ... The work happens in community. Not through social media likes and comments, but through deep conversations with those willing to act, build, resist, remake, and change the world around them. Not through passive doomscrolling, but through active work with leaders, organizations, and communities working together to sustain functional institutions, healthy norms, and robust protections for us all." Amen.
- I also want to share Lily Zheng's HBR article on What Comes After DEI. After their book DEI Deconstructed (my summary here), they developed a new framework of the outcomes we want from DEI work of fairness, access, inclusion, and representation (FAIR). The article shares principles that can be used to guide the work to create those outcomes: "Ensure that as your language, initiatives, and strategies evolve, you are grounding them in outcomes rather than intentions, debiasing systems rather than “fixing” individuals, creating broad coalitions rather than polarized cliques, and communicating the win-win value of this work rather than giving in to zero-sum narratives."
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A few quotes on staying present to our experience:
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We are not alone. To be alone is to witness pain and suffering and not feel pain and suffering. To be alone is to fear the liberation of others. To be alone is to think that the wellbeing of others could ever bring anything less than wellbeing to you.
And so I ask you today to connect. I ask you to come together to dream of what we can be, to plan for our life together. I ask you to return to what your blood and bones have always known: that you are not alone, that you are never alone.
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Boredom is when you do the dishes, run the errand you’ve been putting off, respond to the text you’ve left unread. Boredom is when you bring a book to read on the subway or make small talk with the person in front of you in line about how slow the pharmacy is. Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you just spend it on your phone. By refusing to ever let your brain rest, you are choosing to watch other people’s lives through a screen at the expense of your own.
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- Sahil Bloom's The Trap of the Extraordinary introduced me to the poem Do Not Ask Your Children to Strive by William Martin, which is a beautiful way of expressing that staying present to what you want to do is not a barrier to doing great work, but is the path towards doing something extraordinary:
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Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may be admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples, and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
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When you do the ordinary, when you do what your true childlike self wants, the extraordinary will take care of itself. Love it.
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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One of the things I continue to love doing is ski in Tahoe. This is the view from the top of Diamond Peak Ski Resort, and I feel such joy in zooming down the mountain with that view ahead of me.
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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