11. Day 17: Why Is Working HARD Always A Success Principle?

I will let you in on a little secret.  You simply can’t hang out with the idea of success, even if fear is present, without kind of wanting to experience some version of success.  This may explain why I uncharacteristically set a timer for one hour and told myself “you can clean the drawers under the washer and drier for one hour; just go for it!”  Because I am really noticing exactly what spurs me on to success or what holds me back this month I have become aware of something again and again. One of the things that holds me back is what I might call fearing it all might be too hard.  I know, it is cliche, but there you have it.  Not just too hard but too hard without purpose or benefit.  This need for a taste of success led straight to having two tidy drawers in my laundry room in one hour.  I have been dreading this task for, I don’t know, two years and I got it done in one hour.  I avoided it for so long because I thought it was too hard.  Harder than feeling annoyed and tired for two years? I don’t think so.

I want to feel joy when I work; to feel like a kid who is swinging.

What is working hard any way and why does the thought of it annoy me?  I have a continual bone to pick with working “hard” anyway.  Why can’t we learn to work “easy” or diligently, in a fulfilled manner?  Or why can’t we think of working consistently with purpose or working with eyes or heart fully open? Why is “working hard” always lauded above most other forms or expressions of working?  I realize this is semantics to a degree, and that when most people say working hard they do mean all the other attributes of work but what I actually witness (at least in myself) is that working hard leads to overwhelm and burnout. Working hard means “doing whatever it takes” for “however long it takes” until you win, die or go home.  This has never really appealed to me.  Yet, I still feel kind of guilty that it doesn’t.

The truth is, I am learning that working hard, to me, is often accompanied by force, pressure or demand.  I have done that for sure; pressured myself to perform in order to make a deadline, please a client or get the cupcakes ready for the Kindy bake sale.  I have done it over and over in one way or another until I just couldn’t do it any more and knew I had to find another way to motivate myself.  I realized, to a great degree, I was literally motivating myself with fear.  Doing something to avoid fear or its consequences is tantamount to motivating yourself with fear.  Make the client happy or you will lose the client and fear loves to add  and “go broke and end up living on the street”.  Get the cupcakes made or you will not be a good mother and fear adds “therefore your children will be shunned, not get into a good college and end of broke and living on the street”.  So to force, cajole, hurry, demand or pressure yourself to do something to avoid feeling the fear or avoid what feels like the very real consequences of fear seems the only way.  Until I learned to extend love to my thoughts.

Why can’t work feel more like play?

Extending love to my thoughts immediately buys me a little time since I have come to be aware that my thoughts are not necessarily the truth about me.  Actually what it gives me is a little bit of eternity.  That taste of spaciousness and grace that allows me to listen to what I really want in my heart.  Do I need to pressure or force myself or could I possibly trust the leading of my own heart instead?  As it turns out, my heart rarely leads me to rack and ruin.  And weirdly that is what we are so afraid of will  happen if we ignore the pressure of living up to expectations or society and just (!) listen to our own hearts.

I realize in this month of extending love to the fear of success that what I am afraid of is not so much success but the crazed nazi drill sergeant I become when I think I have to “follow the guidelines of success.”  I don’t have to throw out the guidelines, or principles or even the word success, I just have to keep listening to my heart in the midst of WHATEVER I AM DOING and keep extending love, feeling the Holy Spirit, asking questions of my heart, expressing the love that I am and notice this is all happening.  The thought of working hard is really just code for “EXTEND LOVE NOW” and when I do that working can be oh so much more than hard.