Feeling 'meh'. What to do when your mojo goes missing and your sparkle has tarnished?

How Do You Feel?

Something came up on the last Leadership Session that I realise I didn’t answer at the time…

What to we do when we feel low?
How do we get our mojo back?

First off, me too!

Right now my world feels very small. I’m home, no-one is travelling, even my final-year student son is home; no parties, no (irl) connection with his friends, just ‘online’ like, seemingly, the rest of the world.

It feels like my life is shrinking and so, I can see how it’s possible to project this into meaning more than it does--that my potential and the possibilities that await me might also be shrinking.

Perhaps the world really is shrinking??

Anyone relate?

Where is My Mojo?

It’s understandable when we feel whatever our own version of this to want to change how we feel, to want to feel better, to feel alive or to recover something that feels lost and lacking.

I have a couple of observations I want to make here, in relation to what’s going on for me and maybe this will help you see something for yourself.

Is the World Really Small, or is That a Fragment of Experience?

First off, I know, fundamentally, that ‘the world’ is not small. Just because it feels that way to me, it doesn’t make it true or real.

I only need to catch a glimpse of things around me, the email in my inbox inviting me to an innovative online theatre experience, the knowledge of future trips and travel and the ability I have right now to connect with anyone, anywhere.

The world is not smaller than it was, even though it feels that way to me.

The reason it’s helpful for me to know this is that I can see the difference between how I feel in the moment, the full spectrum of possible ways to feel, and that I can choose one or ignore all of them and go beyond ‘feeling’. Even when there’s a collective narrative that ‘things are bad’, we are all living our own personal experience.

‘The world’ is still out there, obviously, and just because I am having a temporary experience of limitation, it means nothing more than I have a cloud pass across the telescope of my imagination.

I Don’t Like It, How Can I Change It?

The second piece of this, for me, is that it’s OK to feel how I feel. It’s OK to cry for a week, a year, a decade. It’s normal to experience the weight of all that heavy thought about things that haven’t happened yet, or that happened in a way we wish they didn’t.

I get that there is, what seems to me, a preference, or a conditioning, that feeling good (often with a higher, more active, energy) is somehow better than feeling low, or being reflective. But that doesn’t make it something to aim for.

And sometimes we do the opposite and make ourselves wrong for feeling good,

How can I share that things are going well when I see friends so down?

Well, compassionately, one might hope.

I’m still having fun, coaching clients on what we are seeing through the examples in our favourite reality TV show, or, co-hosting a recent light-hearted and yet also serious training session on procrastination. (oh the puns were flowing…)

I don’t believe it’s possible to change it anyway and that the feeling, just like the cloud, will pass. Why give it any more attention and energy?

I actually quite like the feeling of being ‘at home’, being closed off, enjoying time with my guys at home and not going out of the house. It doesn’t feel like imprisonment, it feels like an offer to experience something different.

So, What Do I Do, Concretely?

Because I know this feeling isn’t a reflection of the world, then I don’t need to do anything other than follow my desires and instincts.

If I want to see my buddies I can organise a time to connect, drink wine together if we want to, or have a cook-off or a shared TV experience. If I wanted artistic stimulation I can respond to that invitation for the innovative Shakespearean evening.

And… I notice I’m not doing those things. The pull, for me is more in the direction of making time to talk one to one with friends and family, to say yes to helping someone with a training session, or helping my son map out his ideas for his thesis, or sign up for a fitness programme…

There’s no right or wrong here, just that I do what I want and I don’t feel obliged to ‘make’ certain things happen. There’s a huge difference for me between listening to what feels like an authentic desire, and doing something to change the way I feel (even if the end result is the same), or to do something because I have a sense there’s a ‘should’ or a ‘need to’.

Sparkle Doesn’t Go Anywhere

We talked, on one of the recent events about resilience, about the idea that we have this natural inner sparkle, and sometimes it gets covered over, or we feel the shadow of our thoughts more heavily, but once that cloud passes we realise that the sparkle never went anywhere.

I think, if we can sit with what is, and not take it too seriously, or see it as defining, then we can find a deeper peace, and we can tap into our ability to be present with ourselves, and with others.

And, maybe, that’s what it’s all about…

With love,

Cathy