Relax

As I relayed to a friend today how I have been so tired early each evening, she smiled and reminded me that I had finally begun to relax.  After so many years of not relaxing, not quieting down, my body finally has realized it can relax and it shows that by being tired really early.  It's a bit of an odd feeling, honestly.  I don't know that I have ever really been able to relax.  I've always been a bit of a high stress person.  I've thrived on adrenaline, chaos, and pressure.  This has been true to the point where my biggest fear about leaving my job has been not having those things.

So far, that hasn't been an issue.  I enjoyed sitting down today and writing.  Just writing because that's what I felt like doing.

And somewhere in the back of my mind is the familiar feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Waiting for myself to fail because even now I have such high expectations of myself that I anticipate I will not be able to make a smooth transition.  Why?  What is this fundamental part of me that insists something must go wrong?  I don't know.

But it brings up an important point... people will rise or fall to your expectations.  Including you.  If you expect you are going to fail, you've already set yourself up for failure.  Same with those around you.  If you expect other people to fail, they will.  But if you expect yourself to succeed, you're halfway there.  And if you expect those around you to succeed, they will.

This doesn't mean that everyone is going to be great all the time, but we have to monitor ourselves.  Expecting the best in other people may not change how they act, but it will change how you respond to the way they act.  I'm not talking about excusing bad behavior.  Abuse is abuse no matter what.  But say you have someone you work with who always seems to be getting things wrong.  They drive you nuts because they never seem to get it right.  And you tell them that, or you tell other people that.  Soon enough this turns into a daily issue.  One day, though, for whatever reason, you're feeling particularly generous and when this person messes up again, you respond with, "Hey, it's okay.  We all make mistakes sometimes." The rest of the day seems to go so much more smoothly.  Was it because this person didn't screw up anymore?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  The point is, it didn't matter as much.

Let's look at this another way.  There's a jar of cookies in the kitchen.  You know it's there.  You are trying to tell yourself to save the cookies until after dinner.  You keep telling yourself, "Don't think about the cookies.  Don't think about the cookies." So what do you think about all afternoon?  The cookies.  And you're probably going to give in to the temptation of digging into the cookies.  But if every time you think about the cookies you go do something else, eventually you won't even be thinking about the cookies at all.

We want so badly not to mess up, that we tend to think of all the ways we could mess up.  We dwell on them, and eventually we do them.  But what if we take a more relaxed approach.  What if we tell ourselves, "I'm not going to mess up," and then move on to do something else.  Eventually we stop thinking about the ways we can screw up.  No one is perfect.  We still fall down, but we tend to fall less if we don't focus on the ways we could fail.

So relax a little and remember, sometimes we learn more by falling on our face and getting up than we do by doing it perfectly the first time.