How to break down: a word from the pupae

When it came time to share this week’s What’s On Your Mind episode, I had a complicated reaction. The episode was recorded a little while ago, following what I thought was my personal low.

I had just emerged slowly from the pupae when that episode was filmed. Unfortunately, rather than emerging as a transformed butterfly, I was still a soft, fragile, cobbled-together little caterpillar... and I promptly threw that poor wee mate into more of the same.

I was still broken.

With renewed fervour and misplaced confidence, I took on more pressure and work than ever, until I really crashed. That was almost 6 weeks ago, and last week I took a deep breath and started to talk about it publicly, with this LinkedIn post.

Ironically, this has all taken place just as my second book You Don’t Need An MBA: Leadership Lessons that Cut Through the Crap goes to print, where I outline a path out of the overwhelm and into a more strategic approach to life, work and leadership. The universe, eh? Why not add a crisis of credibility, to pair nicely with the crisis itself.

Seven things I've learned about breaking down

I’m not an expert on breaking down, but I do know a fair amount about change and what it takes to make it happen. Many of the principles are the same, and while I continue drafting an article on this topic, it seems quite fitting to share some unfinished thoughts from inside the pupae with you all in the interim:

1. Breaking down is a process, not an event. You know when you have a baby and they say “it took 9 months to put the weight on, it’ll take 9 months to take it off.”? Personal change is like that too. You can make big gains quickly, but sustainable change requires breaking the habits of a lifetime and replacing them with new ones. It took time to get here, it’ll take time to get out.

2. You can’t just stop a speeding freight train – When we decide to make a big change in our life, we often want to throw away the old in favour of the new. Unfortunately, for people with real responsibilities and embedded ways of doing things, change doesn't work that way. The trick is to leverage what we're already good at and point it in another direction. For my recovery, that's sometimes meant planning and scheduling, in a similar way to a a work day – blocking out time for nature, rest, movies, naps, connection with friends and books. Dead space saw me going on work or renovation binges by accident because nature abhors a vacuum and you can’t flip from ‘overachiever’ to ‘total chiller’ just like that.

3. There’s a lot of project management involved – Like all change, implementation isn’t straightforward. Despite that, I was genuinely taken aback at how much admin went into managing the implementation of my own loss of sanity. I had to organise kids, clients, a medical team, checkups, refunds... It took a full day of emails and calls at the outset just to make it happen. Admin, eh. It’ll find you everywhere.

4. It’s not linear – You will go in and out of the mush. Some days will be amazing, which will feel strange when you know you’re mid-breakdown. Some days will be dark and despairing, which will feel hopeless when you’ve been trying so hard. Both of those extremes are true, but neither of them are the truth. Like all change, we should ignore the daily fluctuations and keep an eye on the trend and patterns – if there are habits being broken, and the overall movement is positive, keep moving.

5. Asking for help isn’t easy – especially when you’ve never learned how.

6. Not getting help the first time is even harder – just because you ask for it, doesn’t mean you'll always get it! I’ve been knocked back by friends and struggled to get access to the right health support and none of that is because people are no good, or I’m no good – it just is. People are people, and they're all battling their own stuff. We can't take lack of buy-in or support personally, whether we're changing our lives or our teams.

7. Sharing the process is frowned upon – Unless you’ve already come through the other side. When I published this article on mistakes, I had a ton of private messages and calls from people saying they totally agreed, had been making a bunch of mistakes, but didn’t feel safe admitting that in a public forum or with their team in case their competence was called into question. I've felt the same pressure, initially keeping my personal status hidden from many friends and using the term "health emergency" to explain the cancellation of my obligations which is both entirely true, and feels like a shady copout.

8. You can’t do it alone – Well, maybe you can. But you shouldn’t. The caterpillar might be doing his own thing and emerging as a solitary butterfly, but being in the mush on your own is not the answer.

9. Your purpose and values matter more than ever – They’re the only things that stay certain when everything else seems up for question. I have no idea what the shape of my life, business and days will look like as I emerge from this, but I do know a few things:

   • I’m here to contribute to the lives of others

   • My voice is a powerful way to do that

   • I value integrity and authenticity, and if I don’t share my process, I’m not living in accordance with those things.

I stumbled across an Anais Nin quote recently that's reinforced that for me:

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

So, that's what I'll keep busy doing while I work out which way is up.

Change is a funny old thing - it both always exists, and therefore sort of doesn't. Don't panic, team. We're all banging around in the dark, trying not to f**k things up too badly.

Stay sane. And if you can’t, stay alive.