What's your chapter summary?
If you read my “3 questions to ask when things suck…” newsletter from a few weeks back, you know that week sucked.
It totally sucked. And, that’s ok.
Sidenote: I don’t think we do a great job of teaching this in school. I think we hyperfocus on happiness in a way that creates this false impression that happiness is the normal/right emotion and that anything else needs to be fixed. I think there’s more value in sucky times than we realize.
Those three questions were really helpful as I processed things. But guess what? I’ve got a new question that can help in those situations.
Here it is….
What’s your chapter summary?
Here’s what happened when I asked this question.
Sometimes our biggest problem is that we’re looking at our experiences on the wrong time horizon. We get caught up in crappy days or weeks and begin to think they represent the whole experience.
We’ve been living in Singapore for almost 10 years now. Over that length of time we’ve experienced a wide range of highs and lows. But what I found as I summarized this “chapter” of my life is that I am grateful for all of it.
Even the moments that made my stomach turn…
Every moment of imposter syndrome…
The time someone threatened to sue me…
The time we lost one of our kids for a few hours down near the marina…
The time I left a student behind at the school…
The time I encouraged Leah to leave the hospital early after giving birth because I had to go support a major presentation… (actually, in retrospect I’d probably like a do-over on this one 😂)
When summarized, the challenges became key moments of growth and the good times became even better as I looked through my rose colored nostalgic glasses.
I ended up feeling emotional as I wrote down everything - the good kind of emotional.
That’s the whole point here - the question helps you see things from a different perspective. This is actually what makes questions so powerful. They force us to explore the same experiences in different ways.
It doesn’t make the challenges easier or make them go away.
But many times, we don’t need the experience to go away, we might just need to experience the experience differently.
Whether you’re in the midst of a series of green lights where life is on cruise control or you’re trying to navigate a seemingly endless stream of potholes and speed bumps - I want you to take 15 minutes right now to summarize this current chapter of your life. Maybe that chapter is a year, maybe it’s however long you’ve been at your current job or lived in a certain place. Choose a chapter length and summarize it.
Keep it simple! You saw my scribbled lines with one sentence thoughts above. Don’t overthink it.
Let me know how it goes!
Keep Asking,
Kyle