Have you ever been in the ocean and seen a wave coming?
You brace. You try to ride it. It knocks you down anyway. Water up your nose. Sand in your hair. You pop up…and there’s another one right behind it, bigger this time, and that one takes part of your bathing suit with it. You eventually crawl back to shore, beat up, gritty, asking yourself why you went in at all.
That has been my last few months.
My dad didn’t have one heart procedure. He had three. An international trip I’d planned changed and then changed again, cancellations, logistics, a new puzzle every time I opened my email. One son is graduating from college and there were complications I wanted to fix. My other son is in that stuck place where the next step won’t reveal itself and I can’t reveal it for him. Mother’s Day. My dad’s birthday. Cards I haven’t bought. Friends getting married in another country with a wardrobe and a color palette I cannot find anywhere. My husband is turning sixty. Sixty. How. My mother-in-law is turning eighty. I’m launching a workshop series for SheFirst. I have three new talks to prepare.
That is the wave.
And here’s what I do when the wave comes: I think about it. All of it. Constantly. I rehearse the trip. I rewrite the cardiology. I draft the toast for sixty before I’ve finished the toast for college. My mind doesn’t just live in this week, it has already moved into August, organizing problems that haven’t happened yet. I tell myself I’m being responsible. I tell myself this is what a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good coach does.
The truth: this is my favorite way to avoid my life. Overthinking and overdoing is the most respectable form of running I know.
My mind is comfortably uncomfortable here. It’s a runaway train, and I’m the one stoking the engine, and I’m also the one tied to the tracks.
The duck dive
If you’ve ever surfed or swam past the break, you know there’s another option.
You see the wave coming. Instead of meeting it head-on, you go under. You push down, you let it pass over the top of you, you feel the turbulence churning above and then you come up on the other side. Calm water. No water up your nose. Bathing suit intact. The wave was never the problem. Your position relative to it was.
That is what I am learning to do in life.
Not push the wave back. Not pretend it isn’t there. Not solve every item on the list before I’m allowed to breathe. Go under it. Drop below the surface of all that doing and ask the question:
What am I actually feeling that I’m trying not to feel by being this busy?
Because the list isn’t really the problem. The list will always be there. There is always another wave. The problem is that I keep trying to manage the ocean from the surface.
Underneath the cardiology rewrites is fear that I might lose my dad, and he is fine by the way (better than fine he is surfing and swimming again). Underneath the trip logistics is grief that the plans I made aren’t going to happen the way I pictured them. Underneath the wardrobe spiral for the wedding is something tender about being seen. Underneath sixty and eighty is the weight of how fast it’s all going.
Those feelings don’t need to be solved. They need to be felt.
And once you let yourself feel them, actually feel them, not analyze them, not manage them, they move through. Like the wave. They pass over the top of you, and you come up on the other side.
Try this — A duck dive for the week
The next time you feel that wave building, the list multiplying, the mind sprinting, the chest tightening — try this instead of pushing through:
Stop. Wherever you are. Hand on your chest if it helps.
Name the wave. Out loud or on paper. “Right now I am spinning about ___.”
Go under. Ask: what am I feeling underneath this thinking? Not what should I do. What am I feeling. Let the answer be one word: scared. Sad. Tired. Helpless. Overwhelmed. Lonely. Whatever is true.
Stay there for sixty seconds. That’s it. Sixty seconds of not problem-solving. Just feeling. The wave will pass over the top of you. I promise.
Come up. Then, and only then, ask what one thing actually needs you today. Not the list. One thing.
You don’t have to put your name on every problem. You don’t have to solve August in May. You don’t have to ride every wave.
You can go under.
This is the work we do inside SheFirst and The Coach Approach to Leadership, not just teaching women and leaders how to handle more, but how to stop drowning in what they’re already handling. Because high capacity is not the same as a sustainable life. The duck dive is a skill. We can build it.
Much love,
Gretchen
