Strategies for More Successful Hunting

Chapter 7

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Creating and Maintaining Living Spaces That Make Your Life Better (In Spite Of Everything) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Part of learning how to handle your business better is learning how to recognize when that dog won’t hunt.

That’s the first step, just noticing that you’re doing something that’s using up energy and time but not doing the thing you said you wanted to do.

The second step is gently but firmly taking yourself in hand and saying, aloud if necessary, “Self, I see what you’re doing there. We can do better. Let’s do something more effective.”

It can be that simple. You can just take stock and redirect.

You do not have to feel any kind of way about it. You do not have to consider yourself a disappointment. You do not have to attach some moral judgment to the fact that you needed to refocus your attention.

You can just acknowledge the need for redirection and then… redirect. You do not have any obligation to go down the rabbit hole -- and it can be one motherfucker of a deep long rabbit hole -- of spending time or energy demeaning yourself or calling yourself names or any of that silliness.

Image by Michael Provenza.

There are a couple of reasons you not only can but should let yourself bypass that whole nasty little waterslide full of dog shit and broken glass.

First of all, it’s unnecessary roughness. We all need to be able to acknowledge our failings. But there’s acknowledging your failings and then there’s being a dick to yourself just to prove that you can be mean about it. That’s a thing a person can do, I guess, but why? The world provides more than sufficient assholica for everybody. You don’t get a special prize for voluntarily scooping additional helpings of shittiness into your bowl. Nor does it provide some kind of magical protective value, as if dumping toxic waste on your own doormat somehow prevents anyone else from ever doing so. That is a particularly poisonous and self-undermining form of magical thinking.

Second, it’s a diversionary tactic. Using up your energy and focus on self-flagellation instead of using it to get stuff done is just another distraction, and it’s not even a fun one. (If you figured that out before I had the chance to tell you, you get a gold star and a cupcake.)

You can, it appears, buy gold star cupcake topper toothpick thingies.