LL #43 | Getting Complete, Investing in Yourself, and Flavors of Anger
Completion as an embodied state. Invest in yourself. Look for clean Anger.
🧠 Ideas
Getting Complete ✅
As the year comes to a close, I invite you to take some time to get complete.
Completion, in this context, is less about doing and more about being. To be complete is to have an embodied knowing that all of the open tabs from your year are closed—that everything from 2022 is done, getting done, delegated, deferred, or deleted.
Ending the year by getting complete is a great complement to annual reviews and resolutions. If you’ve ever had the experience of coming up with a bunch of powerful resolutions but struggling to implement them because you still had so much shit going on from the prior year, completion is a great solution to experiment with. It creates a clean slate to kick off the new year.
If you’re interested, I encourage you to listen to this hour long tour by the Conscious Leadership group. It provides prompts and guidance for how to get complete in your personal and professional life before the year is over.
From Spending ➡️ Investing in yourself
I was drafting a longer essay on this topic, but a tweet invited me to cut to the chase:
My opinion is that investing in yourself is one of the best things you can do. My experience is that the ROI to health, wealth, and happiness is extraordinary.
I’ve found that there are two common mental blockers that stop people from investing in themselves. These both stem from the same issue: you are thinking about the decision in terms of spending rather than investing.
“It’s too expensive”
When investing, you don’t look at cost alone. You look at cost relative to ROI over a desired payback period.
When someone says “It’s too expensive” in regards to investing in themself, I hear “I am only considering cost and not the potential ROI over my desired timeframe.”
“I haven’t earned it yet.”
The feeling that one hasn’t earned the right to invest in themself often stems from a sense of selfishness and guilt. The thinking is usually, “I could use this money somewhere else in a way that helps others, so how can I justify spending it on myself?”
Once more, this indicates a spending rather than an investing mindset.
The ROI of the most common self-investments (books, coaching, courses, professional development) dwarfs the initial cost over the long run. Oftentimes the not-so-long run as well.
If you’re considering how to optimize your resources for impact, investing in yourself multiplies the impact that you can have over time.
If you notice these voices in your head, consider this: as a leader (or even just a person), you are the catalyst and lever for everything else that happens in your life.
Once again: you are the catalyst and the lever.
Over the long run, nearly everything good that happens to you will be a result of who you are and what you’re capable of in the moments that opportunities arise.
If you’ve been delaying investing in yourself for any of those reasons, try a new frame. What is the ROI? The payback period? Is it worth not the cost, but the investment?
😠 Clean versus Dirty Anger
Anger is an essential emotion. It is the emotion of boundaries and change.
Yet many of us, myself included, demonize and fear anger. We see it as a source of destruction and violence.
While this can be the case, anger has different flavors.
Dirty, or below the line, Anger is characterized by blame. Blame of self or other. It seeks to create change by correcting or punishing the one who is blamed.
Clean, or above the line, Anger is characterized by the story “This is not serving me or my people.” It requires no one to blame, simply an acknowledgement that what exists is not of service.
When you feel angry, try noticing which type of anger you’re in. If you’re below the line, is there a flavor of above the line anger there?
🐦 Tweets
On Psychological Defenses
The first line captures the essence: any thought or feeling can be used to defend against any other. I strongly recommend reading the entire thread.
The Exhaustion of Not Feeling Feelings
Add to this not facing or speaking truths.
All of that suppression and flatlining is taxing. Exhausting.
If you’re feeling a lot of fatigue, try looking for unfelts and unsaids.
…and a fun one
For all of you techies out there.
Questions❓
What are 1-3 big sources of incompletion in your life right now? What can you do, delegate, or consciously defer or delete to create completion for yourself?
What investment have you delayed making in yourself? Perform a cost versus ROI calculation and see if anything changes.
Identify an issue around which you are suppressing your anger. What wants to be changed? Can you access your clean anger—anger without blame—and notice what is no longer of service?