"That Cup of Tea is Fake": Five Things You Need to Hear This Week
Or, this post was originally titled "five things you might need to hear", read on to find out why I changed it
Sometimes you just have one of those weeks where the wisdom keeps being thrown at you from all directions and when that happens it’s only polite to share it. So here are five things people have said to me this week that might benefit you too.
Bring your B-Minus consistently
For all the other chronic over-workers out there, who were brought up to believe that they should always be achieving an A* in everything and that anything less was absolute failure, get ready to have your mind blown. On a call this week someone told me,
“I don’t want you to bring your A* game, bringing your B-Minus game consistently is enough”.
I know. It made me cry too.
It turns out that there is something deeply healing about someone kindly but firmly telling you that good enough is just that. You do not have to be outstanding to still have an impact, nor do you have to push yourself to extremes to make a change. It turns out that B- performance consistently (and consistency is the key here) is absolutely fine. I’m still a bit shaken from this revelation.
I hear you and I am willing to back you
As you may have read, I have a new job and one of my secret fears going into it was that I really would turn out to be as “difficult” to work with as some others had labelled me in the past. So this week, when a direction was suggested that I disagreed with, I had to screw up all my courage to explain why I wasn’t on board with it. I then shut my eyes and waited for a torrent of anger to come my way. I hadn’t realised it but that was the experience I’d so often had in jobs or relationships, that I’d accepted it as normal. Instead, I got:
“If you think that’s the right thing to do, I trust your decision”.
I cried again. It was a salient reminder that if every time you express an opinion the people around you disagree with it, well, you might be in the wrong place.
Stop using qualifiers
Next weekend I’m doing an online course which looks at how we can harness the power of our mind to help heal our bodies. As preparation for the course, I had a call with the facilitator in which we went through some of my past experiences with my health and looked at what I hoped to achieve from the course. We also looked at some of my past beliefs and where these might keep me stuck or stop me from making the most of the experience. By the end of our call I was excited for the course to begin, hopeful that it would change things for me. When she asked me how I was feeling, I told her that I felt like I’d already learned a lot from our call and that “perhaps there is a little bit of hope.”
“Have you noticed how often you qualify your feelings?”, she asked.
I hadn’t. And now I can’t stop noticing it. Every sentence out of my mouth hedges its bet. I “just” this and “might possibly” that. I don’t own what I really want because the fear that I won’t get it is more powerful than the hope that I will. So I am letting go of qualifiers. This article is probably riddled with them, so this is your permission to delete them both here and in your own life.
Get out of your own way
A friend offered to put me in touch with a possible new business contact. She’d already spoken to them about how brilliant I was and wanted to check that they were someone I’d want to work with. She said the name and I hesitated. You see, I’d already met this company about some work a few years before. We’d had a good meeting but, as the kids would say, the vibe was off and I didn’t hear from them again. Should I take the offer of a re-introduction? I didn’t know so I asked my friend and general wise-woman, Nikki Armytage-Foy, for her advice and this is what she said,
“Let go of the story you’ve made up about why it didn’t work out before. Get out of your own way and just see what happens here.”
I think we all need that sort of reminder once in a while.
That cup of tea is fake
You know those reels on Instagram where a beautiful woman leans against her huge kitchen island and sips a cup of tea while a meaningful-sounding voiceover tries to persuade you that she also knows what it means to suffer? Well, let me tell you something I only learned this week - that cup of tea is fake! There is no tea in the mug! Or if there is, it’s cold!
For some of you this is probably not a revelation but somehow, even though I worked in media for fifteen years and know exactly how Instagram works, it hadn’t really occurred to me that every one of those serene, beautifully styled moments that everyone else seems able to capture on a regular basis, is in fact fake.
People around the world are spending two hours doing their hair and make-up, picking out an outfit and perfectly positioning their ring light, so they can pretend to drink a cup of tea. And, to be clear, I am grateful that they do! It gives me something pretty to look at while I’m numbing out from the rest of my day, but somehow I hadn’t taken onboard that it was a set up. I thought it was just part of their day that they were clever enough to be able to capture and that I was failing as a creative because I kept missing the moment. But it wasn’t. And their house isn’t that tidy either, they’ve just moved the washing line out of shot.
So just in case you needed a reminder, that cup of tea is fake.
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The B minus thing 🤯 Thank you so much for that. For all of this really. These were definitely 5 things I needed to hear!
B minus and the qualifiers. I am taking that with me. Can't wait to hear about the course :)