SMARTY.

At the root of most anxiety is the unknown. I’m feeling a lot of this lately.

What if… ?

Then what?

And why?

Our ability to cope with what is not yet known ends up defining so much of who we are, how we behave, the decisions we make, and how we impact those around us.

Chronic worriers tend to operate with fear – and (think they) can control it through intense relationships to time, scheduling, details or even schadenfreude.

Other types think in terms of the worst-case scenario. A nagging pain becomes a terminal disease, a bad month turns into a prediction of a bad year, an unreturned call appears like an omen of disinterest/failure/rejection.

But low-grade anxiety is something that operates at a different frequency, is easier to mask, and is universal. It often feels like a shadow lurking nearby. We keep it at bay with plenty of distractions – staying busy being at the top of the list, followed by addictions across a wide spectrum, from alcohol to sex, shopping, exercise, parenting or health. Anything that creates an environment where the shadow can remain nameless qualifies. This is how much we avoid the realm of the unknown.

Technology lets us know a lot about the future – from impending weather to DNA – and allows us to mitigate what we can. But we still can’t predict the majority of things that would really matter, beyond right now. That’s a fragile feeling.

This blog was written three years ago. All of my writings are inspired by the observations I have at any given time. I don’t know what it was that inspired this post, at that time – but I don’t think it matters. Why? Because uncertainty is nothing new – it’s just that it has an illusory quality, so it can appear that way. We are always living with terms we don’t know, timelines we can’t see and weaknesses that have yet to be revealed. The illusion is that we have control. But, in moments like this, we get a clearer picture of what we can (and should) control, and most definitely what we can’t.

So maybe the real measure of success is our ability to expand our capacity for uncertainty, and through that exercise, be more comfortable in the unknowable.

Considering the state of the world, I’m not sure we have a choice.

It’s the rhythm of a thing.

In our speech, it’s the way our voice modulates, with starts and stops (intentionally or not), that allows us to deliver a thought in a way that emphasizes some aspects – but not others. In music, it’s the sequence of notes or chords that draw it out, break it up – or build crescendo within a song. In writing, it’s the way sentences are organized and punctuated so that the reader has the opportunity to imbibe the message with the pacing that the writer intended. 

Just as a movie score sets the mood for a scene, cadence informs meaning. It isn’t the story, song or sentence – it’s what shapes how we feel it. Cadence helps us perceive enthusiasm, certainty, desire, interest, intimacy, hope, intent. It establishes the ‘beat.’ 

As a writer, my thoughts don’t appear in my mind with cadence, but they land on the page with it. And because adjusting these beats in a script or copy can be the difference between good and great – it’s something I evaluate in every message. 

 “Yes…we can!” 

is different from 

“Yes, we can” 

Which is different than 

“Y e s s s s s s. We can.”

But I’ve been thinking – does cadence also exist between people? And if so, might slight tweaks in the cadence of relationships have analogous effects? Think of the real spaces (distance in miles) – and the emotional spaces – (distance in feelings, values, views) between every person you consider close.  Just as we can feel near to someone (even a virtual stranger) who is actually far away, it’s possible to feel distant from someone (a friend, spouse or relative) sitting right next to us. 

When beats are in sync, relationships feel naturally aligned.

When they aren’t, even the most basic of interactions are clumsy.

Sometimes, when I’m working on a messaging project, I’ll merely add a period and one word, and the entire sentiment of a sentence or tagline shifts. The client usually cocks her head and asks – what’s the big difference? My answer is that while it may look very small, there’s now space in between what is read…and… what is felt. In other words, that beat gives us space to feel. 

This is why cadence reveals so much.

From a marketing view, people don’t take action to buy, do or subscribe to anything without first having a feeling. Think of your own attention – once someone has it – and imagine it like a magnet near a piece of iron; there’s a tension point before the magnet snaps into the surface – the pull before contact is made. It’s there in that space, from when there was no pull, to finding the pull – where you now have a beat. 

Leaving the world of messaging (and physics), returning to the one of interpersonal connection, if I can adjust a beat in the way words flow, might I also be able to observe it in the way I flow – and check the pulse of connection… using this metaphor? 

Relationships hold a thousand coordinates – from past rights and wrongs, to present reassurances and disappointments. These are what inform the space – they nurture closeness or magnify distance.

This – however profound, flawed or enduring it may be – is the space between us.

If we think of these spaces as melodic, it can create an almost rhythmic interpretation of our feelings, history and state of the union. Once heard, awareness is always an invitation to make change.

So.

How’s the beat between you and…?

Can you hear it – feel it – follow it?

Is it too distant and hard to find?

Or… so synchronized and natural, you never stopped to consider it?

Everything has a beat, once you listen.

Can it be reset? Corrected?

I’m optimistic. 

Experience tells me that a small change can make a big difference, and a sequence that might have been deleted can now be kept – if modified.

Others may not be worth saving. 

Hearing the beats – and feeling the in between spaces – is the first step in my own process.

It’s only after facing the music (as it were) that edits can work their magic.

PS If you’re interested in seeing how cadence matters, here’s a piece I wrote in collaboration with the team at Sibling Rivalry that demonstrates it aptly

The story is (so often) in the telling.

I love how parallel messages appear in our lives in unforeseen ways. Often, a theme will reveal itself in one channel (work) but repeat itself in another (parenting, friendship), despite the fact that the situations have nothing to do with each other. In my own life, these recurring patterns often support and nurture the best version of myself, but what to do when others show up as acute reminders of what isn’t working?

Therapists, astrologers, doctors – virtually any professional dot-connector – look to patterns to help people make sense of their circumstances. Those of us in the self-reflective camp also gaze into our individual constellations to draw lines – to find continuity – in an effort to get a sense who we are in the eyes of others. Whether we’re aware of it or not, it’s this feedback loop that affects change and helps us live harmoniously in our relationships.

But what are we to do when the messages arrive vis-à-vis dynamics where dialogue is already charged or where old wounds fester even in new conversations? Could be between boss and employee, business partners, parents and children – in marriage. This is where it’s easy to get hung up and stuck in a cycle.

Sample dialogue from my own life:

Me (to myself): “he thinks my standards are too high – that I’m demanding.”
Me, to my key complaint collaborators, expanding on the meaning out loud: “he must not respect me, or maybe it’s all women.”

But, if I step back and look at the conversations that informed these assumptions through a more critical lens, it’s not hard to see that I have assigned meaning to whatever was said and become more attached to it with every re-telling. (Incidentally, my take was wrong.)

As a professional storyteller, I have the opportunity to look at a company’s DNA and make decisions about how the story is told, and there are always a variety of ways to go that could all be equally true. But as people, we are not brands (in our personal lives, at least). Yet our stories deepen and define our experience the more often we (re) tell them. So while a brand benefits from re-telling the same story (in different ways) on a consistent basis, people may not.

I wonder, is there a way to utilize the re-telling as an opportunity to re-pattern?
Could the words we choose to recount challenging experiences be used to create filters that somehow disrupt the same patterns from arising in the future? It would mean reframing the stories we tell ourselves in the present, in service to the promise of a future with fewer convictions – but more room to grow.

Here’s an example (if you’re still reading this bonus-length-blog) that allows me to test this hunch further, without revealing too much about the multiple (so many!)  areas of my own life where it rings true.

Over the past year, my 9-year old daughter has been reporting various situations at school (or in her life in general) that she has dubbed “soANNOYING.” After watching this word emerge a little too frequently over several months (and realizing that she’s clearly an early-adopting-pre-teen), I brought it to her attention. We talked about how it feels to be a person who is constantly “annoyed.” What does “annoyable” look like? Sound like? When framed in this way, she didn’t like the picture I painted, which allowed us to start a little game together.

The challenge? You can’t say “annoyed” or any derivative of “annoyed.”

What has replaced it? She found her way with…

“Unexpected.”
“Surprising.”
“Distracting.”
“Strong.”
“Curious.”
“Interesting.”
 “Unclear.”
“Powerful.”

Lots of vocabulary bonus points here, but more importantly, it allowed us to have a dialogue about options, specifically the choice to reframe events in the retelling of them. What could be catalogued as “bad” gets to be reorganized (with more empathy and less judgment) without sacrificing her experience.

“James used some strong words toward me in class. It bothered me.”
“She keeps tapping her foot on my chair – it’s becoming distracting.”
“Well…that comment was unexpected!”

This game has actually changed how she (and I) view discord, because in recounting the situation (the place most of us commit to our stories), we’ve forced a process that allows for better options; options that could be equally true, but don’t reinforce the worst filter of our worldview.

Of course, I love this for her young mind, but after a few weeks of hard conversations in my own life, I’ve taken to doing the same thing. By examining the first meaning I attribute (always emotional), and the vocabulary I use to retell it (to my own sympathetic audiences), it’s easy to see that almost nothing has to mean what it may first seem to mean. Just because an initial feeling conjures up highly charged feelings, it’s important to be conscious of how they can infiltrate and have power over our personal history.

This is really about how we assign meaning…and being open to reframing that assignment.

This falls partly into the ‘loving kindness for others” category (usually a good thing to give benefit of the doubt), but the most self-serving view of this is how it might shift our personal tectonic plates.

I would never minimize a feeling by replacing a traumatic experience with a veneer of happiness or “silver lining.” That’s not what I am suggesting. But what I do appreciate about this challenge is having the awareness to ask myself, in the aftermath, “could it be seen another way? Could I take some more productive lesson from the outcome? Is there a way to interpret this with less rush to categorize? Is it possible I can’t know everything from where I sit?”

We are always becoming…more …of something.

It’s easy to see this self-improvement process as an evolution that happens in front of us – an aspiration that reaches forward toward the kind of human we’d like to be more of. But I think the way we make sense of past infractions plays a big hand in who we slowly (but certainly) become. By being less right – or less certain about the story we think is at play – we get to write a different one that may re-shape pesky plot patterns we don’t much like.

Imagine being able to rewrite tomorrow before it happens?

The story in the telling – as much as the re-telling.

When it comes to needing answers, should we examine, analyze and push? Or, is there also a time to allow, observe and… take action, without concluding? In other words, might we get a better definition by allowing one to reveal itself?

Pandemics aside, when a business struggles or a disparity is uncovered; when one person in a relationship needs a concrete direction in order to move forward; or in almost any circumstance that begs for an immediate resolution – we all react differently, according to how we’re wired to recognize (and tolerate) the unresolved.

I recently did a 23andMe DNA test, after three years of letting it sit on my desk. I had resisted it for various reasons but finally gave in. It contradicted everything I had been told about my dad’s side of the family and revealed a startling absence in the lineage that had been ‘my story’. The information was so destabilizing and disorienting that my mind could only conceive one conclusion, that my paternal grandmother had misinformation, or worse, created a narrative that wasn’t true. But just days later, a friend shared that even siblings can share the same heritage and still have radically different DNA. Suddenly, my conclusion took a left turn when it was headed right; my grandmother’s account could be legitimate but not appear in saliva analysis. The answer needed time to resolve itself, and I could not have predicted its reassuring resolution.

Here’s another way this shows up.

In one of my businesses, we look at the End Of Day report as a snapshot of that day’s sales, but not as a measure of the business on the whole. We need to know what worked and what didn’t – Key Performance Indicators – but we try not to get attached to outcomes within these brief pictures. Every month we look at numbers to investigate growth, losses… idiosyncratic data points. Still, even one month doesn’t give us enough intel to have a real conversation about the health of the business. A (former) partner, however, had a different outlook on these KPI’s. He took a hyper-focus to certain numbers, which significantly impaired our ability to watch and learn. We became less effective because we felt forced to create premature answers to problems that hadn’t existed long enough to be fully known.

And…the same can be true in relationships. It’s easy to want reassurance and certainty about interpersonal opacities. If it’s gray, we want it black or white (or at least a name for that shade of gray). Do you want what I want…when I want it? Are we going in the same direction? Do you feel good /bad/indifferent about the same things I do? Forcing an answer to questions as complex as these can sometimes have the opposite effect, stifling a process that needs time and space.

Nevertheless, it’s all subjective.

I have imposed my need for answers to questions (at work, in love) because my need to know now was stronger than my ability to wait…see…revisit. I sacrificed the potential of a clearer, more informed answer because I couldn’t see that it was materializing…just more slowly than my mind was willing to accept.

What is the impact, then, when we can’t stand the process enough to let it continue?

Do some shapes form when we put down the protractor and stop trying measure them?

Answers matter. But extracting them prematurely has consequences, too. Like interrupting a flower while it’s in bloom, or reading a poem before its finished, sometimes a thing needs to be in motion… for longer… to establish a rhythm worth articulating.

It’s okay to wait and see. But only if it’s okay with you.

If you don’t do it, you can bet on what will happen.
If you do, what will happen is anyone’s guess.

Big or small, grand or granular, regret is an effective litmus test for action. It’s natural to perseverate over certain decisions, but when put through the framework of regret, the question gets clearer.

So…

If you don’t do it, you won’t have to wonder if it was silly, boring, narcissistic or mediocre, because you won’t have done it, so you won’t have to mentally review it.

If you don’t do that thing you’re wondering if you should do, you can be sure that you didn’t use the wrong word, didn’t offend anyone, didn’t waste an opportunity, didn’t choose the lesser version, didn’t take a left when you should have gone right. You won’t have to second guess yourself.

And maybe the biggest vote for not doing it is that no one can judge, criticize, analyze, ignore or overlook what you did. No one can not like it, so you don’t have to wonder what was wrong with it; or if it was likable. You can also skip the part where you wince in the aftermath of doing it, wondering if that person whose approval matters so much saw it, liked it…or cared.

In fact, forget anyone liking it. They won’t. Because it won’t be there.

But know this.

If you don’t do it, you won’t have conversations with people about that thing you did, because they won’t have seen it, and you won’t have inspired them to think about it. They won’t get to consider or turn over an idea, and then talk with you about it. You’ll have (maybe) withheld the opportunity to bring them closer to their own purpose.

You won’t get to see, touch or feel that thing either, because it’s still somewhere inside you.

And you also won’t get to see what you can do when you do something. Because you didn’t.

Not doing it is a guarantee that none of these things will happen.

But if you do it, the possibilities are limitless.

You might get an email from a stranger telling you how much what you did changed her life.
You might uncover, reveal or surprise yourself with your own potential.
You might be recognized by someone you admire, whose work inspired you to do it.
You might finally wake up in the morning in peace, because you did it, and now you’ve done it.
You might stop wondering if you missed your chance, the boat, the trend, the time. Because you won’t have.
You might produce something you had no idea was inside you, and that thing will change everything that comes next.
With one road you know.
With the other, you don’t.

One is certain.
The other uncertain.

So. Should you do it?