Julianne Harvey

In Books, Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

Unfinished Business

Julianne HarveyOctober 20, 2015October 19, 2015Leave a comment

I’m almost done reading Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter. She’s given me a lot to chew on in these pages, about the true nature of equality between men and women and what is required from all of us for the next great cultural wave of change to occur.

Chapter five, entitled Is Managing Money Really Harder than Managing Kids? was particularly moving for me to read. I was trying to wind down before going to sleep, but so many light bulbs were going on in my brain that I was afraid to keep reading in case I stayed awake half the night considering her ideas on how we need to place a higher value on caregiving in our society.

Slaughter writes, “The broader understanding of caregiving also includes teaching, discipline (holding the line even in the face of tears, threats, and curses), coaching, encouraging, problem solving, character building, and role modeling. Often caregiving is about reliability: simply being there when being there is important to your child, your parent, or your spouse. And it’s about support: focusing on someone else’s needs and figuring out how to meet them, whether finding a lost sock, book, or cell phone or offering a genuinely attentive ear.”

Allowing these words to sink into my brain was like applying Polysporin to an infected wound that has been festering for the last twelve years. I despise this endless need for permission to validate the specific choices I have made, along with Jason, about what’s best for our family, but clearly I still have work to do in this area.

I planned to return to work after Ava was born, for I am a feminist, dammit, and ambitious to boot. I was not going to stay home and waste my decent brain on nursery rhymes and homemade play-doh. If this sounds judgmental, that’s because it is. One of Slaughter’s recurring themes in her book is that we must all face up to our cultural stereotypes, gender biases, and faulty perceptions. I certainly possess my share.

But once Ava was born, I didn’t want to leave her to go back to my office, so Jason and I made a series of sacrifices so I could stay home. I started a successful home business selling rubber-stamping products so I could help close the gap between what Jason earned and what we needed to live on.

Fast-forward twelve years. Many things have changed but one thing hasn’t: I’m still the one at home, managing the myriad of day-to-day arrangements and catastrophes. I’m the one caregiving. How could I ever hope that anyone else will value this role unless I model what that looks like for myself?

Jason has an excellent job and he is terrific at it, but a huge part of why he is so successful is the contribution I make at home. I am here, day in and day out, working my writing and speaking around the kids’ schedules so that when Jason needs to travel for his career, he has the flexibility to do so. The competition of the workforce only succeeds if someone is taking care of the details at home.

I realized while reading Unfinished Business that I must continue to define my own contributions as valuable. I have to reframe them, and so does anyone who has built a life on those skills that Slaughter lists in the earlier quote: teaching, discipline, coaching, encouraging, problem solving, character building, role modeling, reliability and support. These things matter. Just because they don’t usually have a dollar value attached doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be sorely missed if they were gone.

This is unfinished business for me in my own personal value system. I’m grateful to Anne-Marie Slaughter for continuing this important cultural conversation with her new book.

In Books, Identity, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

No More

Julianne HarveyOctober 13, 2015October 13, 2015Leave a comment

“It often takes just a single brave person to change the trajectory of a family, or any system, for that matter.” This quote, from Brene Brown’s terrific new book Rising Strong, struck me in the heart like a well-placed arrow.

It’s brave to make huge life changes. It costs us, every single time, and has far-reaching effects for others. I’m just arriving at a point where I feel comfortable talking about the work I did three years ago with my side of the family. Before now, a lot of silent, underground healing was still happening.

I loved listening to Brene talk with Liz Gilbert on her Magic Lessons podcast about the types of stories we share. Brene said that she only shares stories when she’s worked through the shame, pain and regret. If she tells these stories before this healing has happened, it’s too much vulnerability and other people can use the story against her. Once she’s finished processing the wound, she can talk about it without feeling the same sting.

Hearing this boosted my courage because I recognized its truth in my soul before I even worked it through my mind. A single brave person can alter the trajectory of everything, by simply deciding, “No more.”

In my case, it was, “No more pretending. From this point on, I’m moving toward being real, authentic and honest. I will not ignore my feelings any longer. I am worth more than that. I deserve to pursue my own path, without constantly worrying about how other people will perceive me. From this point on, I’m looking after myself and my dependent children and refusing to caretake for other adults.”

This statement caused great unrest and upheaval in my family of origin. It did not fit with my lifetime habit of rescuing, fixing and people-pleasing. I can finally own this as a brave act of vulnerability and risk. I did it to save myself and to model a different way of being for my two kids.

It was very hard, for a long time. I felt this stand was selfish. I worried about disappointing my mom and siblings. I grappled with less-than identity concerns about my own value and worthiness – how could anyone else love me if I was on the outs with my own family? Working through these issues was agonizing, but worth it in the end, for I got to change the trajectory for myself and my kids. It’s never too late to stand up and say, “No more. It’s time to chart a new course.”

The consequences of these decisions must be weathered and borne. We can’t skip past them. Other people will hurt as a result of our choices, but this is for them to endure and feel. We might be in pain for a long time. I’ve had to learn to forgive and then love from a distance while the healing process is underway. But I have the right to change, grow and be free from old patterns. And so do you.

In Books, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

In the Game

Julianne HarveyOctober 6, 2015October 5, 2015Leave a comment

This week, I’m presenting my seminar, It’s On You: Taking Responsibility for your Choices, to 125 students in grades 6-8. It’s new material, and I’m not as familiar presenting to teens and tweens as I am to younger kids or to adults.

So it was a growing edge. We all have these, if we are challenging ourselves. I love Rob Bell’s reminder that “butterflies are good because they mean you are in the game.”

When something seems hard, that often means it’s worth doing. The reward is in the risk. You step out, unsure of the outcome, believing that when the chips are down, you will have what you need to complete the task.

I used to overthink everything. My mind would race ahead, attempting to cover every possible zig and zag, producing nothing but anxiety and despair. For this seminar, I decided to try putting my energy into my own confidence instead of all the eventualities that I cannot control.

I prepared, to the best of my ability, by going through the slides and recording my delivery so I could listen to it and fix the problem areas. I went for long walks and imagined myself relaxed and happy when in front of the students. I asked a few specific friends to encourage me leading up to the presentation – to cheer me on and remind me that I was up to the challenge.

Every one of these things helped to make the seminar a success. Planning, positive visualization, and organized cheerleading. When we step out in vulnerability, asking for what we need for a challenge we are facing, we can better prepare for a happy outcome.

I just read Jenny Lawson’s hilarious book, Furiously Happy, and author Neil Gaiman gives her this piece of advice when she had to record her audiobook: “Pretend you’re good at it.” I found that to be helpful on the morning of my first seminar. It’s like playing a trick; pulling the wool over people’s eyes by acting as if I was a polished, confident speaker when really my stomach was jumping up and down before I got up to speak.

My first slide in It’s On You is about cutting the tie that connects your inner sense of value with your outside performance. It feels healthy to practice this skill myself. To know that I am worthy of love and care, whether I deliver a successful seminar or fall flat on my face (or somewhere in between).

The risk is the reward. It helps us grow, to shoot for more the next time around, to bank up our trust in our abilities and skills. We simply do the very best we can, knowing that it’s better by far to have tried than to give in to our fear and back down from a challenge. It’s enough just to be in the game.

In Books, Personal Growth, Writing

How You Do Anything

Julianne HarveySeptember 29, 2015September 28, 2015Leave a comment

In last week’s RobCast, This Episode is Sugar Free, the brilliant Rob Bell quotes Dan Klein who says, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” I can’t seem to get this statement out of my brain. It’s whirring gently in there, like a washer on a spin cycle.

The little things matter in this life. It’s a cliche to say that they add up to be the big things, but it really is true. It’s not healthy to focus on the “everything” because it’s so big, and often out of our direct control. But the “anything”? This amounts to the daily choices we make, the small moments, the one-on-one interactions.

How you do anything is how you do everything. I’m trying to pull the focus of my life’s camera lens back, to tighten it on what’s in front of me at any given time. We can’t build the big structure until we learn to hammer a single nail. It’s wishful thinking to get ahead of ourselves by imagining the finished product before we complete the thousand tiny steps we need to do to get there.

How are you spending your time? Is your dreaming outpacing the work you are doing? For years, I lived this way. I felt resentful when other people succeeded at something I longed to do, but my energy went into fantasizing about the end goal instead of plugging away at the hard work of completing one task after another. What right did I have to begrudge someone who was actually putting in blood, sweat and tears, when I was only dreaming?

Of course, it’s fine to have a vision and to daydream about the big score. But doing only that focuses on the everything without actually doing the anything required to see your dream become a reality. No one succeeds without effort, failure, resilience, courage and time. These ingredients are required. Big projects have a ton of small steps, peppered with setbacks. Most of the time we just don’t get to see them.

We hold a finished book in our hands, listen to a terrific new album, or walk into a stunning building. We don’t know all of the individual days, months and years of effort that went into these things, so it can be easy to fool ourselves about the project. If the person or team got to the “everything” that you read, listen to or look at, they learned how to master each individual piece of “anything” that built up to the final product.

Every step matters. I’m paying closer attention now to my anythings because without each one, I wouldn’t ever reach my longed-for everything. Inch by inch, we grow and change and develop, and all of it counts.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Writing

Disconnect from the Outcome

Julianne HarveySeptember 22, 2015September 21, 2015Leave a comment

Disappointment sucks. Not one of us is immune to it. We want something, so we begin to hope for it, predicting an outcome not guaranteed to occur.

The longer we wait, the further our imaginations nose ahead, daring to believe that this time, our long-held desire will bear fruit. As a writer, this is the seesaw edge I live on. Submitting work, then waiting for one of two outcomes: rejection or acceptance.

The other day, I heard someone utter these wise words, “I’m trying to do my best and then disconnect from the outcome.” I’m wretchedly awful at the second half of that sentence. Trying my best is easy; accepting whatever results from that is difficult.

But I know it’s good for me to keep trying. We all have to. Value plays a sizeable role here. When I tell myself I’m a decent writer because someone else confirms that by praising what I do, advancing me in a contest or offering a contract instead of a form rejection letter, I’m sunk. My confidence recedes, my stomach drops, and I feel worthless.

The key is to hinge my worth on my own unique identity and not to anything I produce. My work is not who I am. This goes for every one of us. No matter what our culture may tell us, success at work does not equal success as a human being. We will fail and we will succeed, but these markers are outside of us. They are not levers on our identity, shifting us ever higher or lower.

It’s funny because one of my slides in my It’s On You seminar is called “Expect Failure”. Another one is “You Own Your Value”. I’m teaching these concepts to students and to adults, and receiving a beautiful opportunity to practice them in my own experience. These philosophies mean nothing if I’m not living them out myself. Example is king. I don’t listen to fancy words any more, when it’s clear that the person uttering them is not modelling the skills they espouse.

Rejection is another chance to practice disconnecting from the outcome. I cannot afford to hitch my belief in my abilities to the opinions of other people. I have to feel the sadness when rejection hits, then dust myself off and move on, creating what only I can do. Even if it’s just for myself.

We do our best, and then allow the consequences to unfold as they will. We can only control our end of the deal. Beyond that, we have to believe that when the time is right, we will see small measures of success. Until that time, we’ll keep on going, affirming to ourselves that we are not the work we do. We are worthy of love and care, whether we win or lose. If we keep walking up to the plate, one day we’ll connect with the ball as we’ve dreamed of doing.