If you are barely surviving the endless stream of end-of-the-year parties and finals in school and that general “Is it summer YET?!” feeling, you are in good company. And, as we approach summer, nothing sounds better than a jump in the pool.
Here in Denver, there is cool little swim and tennis club called Skyline.
There are picnic tables on a big grass patch where people put plastic tablecloths and host cook outs for their kid’s birthdays. It has this great, low-key tennis program where I have been learning to play the last couple of years. (If you are a tennis geek, check out more on tennis and parenting in this newsletter and part 2 in this newsletter).
Kids run around barefoot playing foosball while parents chat in the shade on the hot days. If it weren’t for the spare iphone, you would be sure you’d gone back in time to the 70's, when it was opened.
The vibe is very charmingly the movie “The Sandlot”.
I mean, this movie was EPIC, right??
But, of course, the main attraction is the pool set-up.
There are three pools.
There is the baby pool: 6 inches deep with a cute little fountain in the middle, scattered with forgotten float toys and hovering parents, trying, without success, to have a conversation with other grown-ups that lasts longer than 2 and a half sentences.
There is the medium pool where you can easily stand up in the shallow end, but you need to be on your toes in the deep end.
The last one is the big boy pool. It is where the swim team does laps in the morning practices and hosts meets with the starting blocks at one end and the flags for the back strokers at the other.This pool is the biggest, but also the deepest, as it is home to both the regular diving board and the, bragging rights of the club, the incredible high dive. (Epic.)
Let's goooooo!
It occurred to me recently, as I was working through something I was struggling with, that, if you are working on changing a behavior, it can be helpful to think of it through the lens of the pools.
The big, deep pool is the heavy, historical stuff. Stuff like, our childhoods and the years and years of history that underpin who we are and how we see the world. This is the culture we are raised in and the messages that we absorbed without ever being aware of it. This is where we dig in therapy, to understand what is at the bottom of the big pool. We hold our breath and try to touch the bottom, to make more sense of ourselves and our behavior.
The big pool is important and it is where a lot of the work happens,
but it isn’t the only pool.
Sometimes,
as my favorite Peloton instructor, Cody Rigsby, likes to say,
“It’s not that deep”.
Do you know how excited I was to find this gif? SO excited.
Many times, when we are struggling with a behavior we are trying to change, it is like we are stuck, not on the top of the high dive or trying to get to the bottom of the deep, giant pool, but paralyzed in 6 inches of water in the baby pool.
The Baby Pool is the place where our habits, as small as they are, as benign as they seem, can kick our butts and totally derail our progress.This is death by 1,000 cuts. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. And, if we aren’t aware of it, our habits will be the end of us, no matter how comfortable we are in the deep end of the big pool.
There is this saying: “If you know better, you do better.”
It's a good first step, but honestly, if it was just about “knowing better”, I would be out of a job.
Think about it.
We know we will feel better if we take a quick work break to meditate, but we stay glued to our email anyways.
We know we will never regret that early morning workout, but we stay in bed instead.
We know it doesn’t serve us to do another 30 minutes of instagram scrolling, but we stay stuck in the app regardless.
The wild thing about the baby pool is that, if you’re not paying attention, you can still drown in it. In that way, it can be even more dangerous than the high dive pool: because it doesn’t appear threatening, but it can absolutely take you down.
Get it? Smalls, like how habits are small? And baby pools are small?
What is the takeaway here that can help you today?
Habits,
as small as they seem,
are incredibly powerful when we are trying to do something differently
in our lives.
Our brains love a habit and they hate when we switch it up on them, not because of deep-seated childhood memories (although that may be a piece of the puzzle) but because our brains are wired to save energy and doing the same thing you have always done is a fantastic way to conserve cognitive horsepower.
If you want to parent in a new way, come towards your clients with a new framework, address eating or exercise struggles, procrastinate less, focus on the things that really matter, ie. do literally anything new, you are going to experience the discomfort that is inherent in doing it different.
Behavior change requires that you sit in that discomfort
without going back to the old behavior.
This is the moment where the rubber meets the road.
So, how do you operationalize this?
If there is an area of your life you are trying to change, first of all,
good for you!
Second, ask yourself this:
What part of this is hard because of the deep pool?
Approach with compassion and curiosity, and maybe a great therapist.
What part of this is hard because of the baby pool?
Start small,sit in discomfort and trust, with practice, it will get easier.
That is the beauty of habits: just as much as they can kick our butts if we aren’t aware, they can be our greatest ally when we want to make a change.
After all, the baby pool is the first step in learning how to swim.
Be aware of your “Baby Pool Stuff",
and, before you know it,
you too will be the cool dude jumping off that high dive.
