The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 383 - Reframing Tonsilitis

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Pete.

Pete: Astute listeners to this show might have recognized in the last, oh, I don't know, three months, there's been a handful of episodes where my voice has sounded all over the place.

Jen: Not great.

Pete: Not great, including right now. And that is because I've had a series of bouts of tonsillitis. And I now am at the stage, as an adult, that I have to get my tonsils removed.

Jen: Oh gosh.

Pete: Giving me two weeks of not being able to do a whole lot. And I am looking to you for inspiration and reframing, and I hope that you can help me reframe this two weeks so that I can get the most out of it and make it an opportunity rather than a burden.

Jen: Let's do it. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Pete, can we start with the reframe of you get to eat as much ice cream as you want?

Pete: I love that that's still like the myth, because I think it is a bit of a myth.

Jen: Oh no.

Pete: I think it's something...what my ENT, my ear, nose, and throat doctor told me is that it's a bit of a fable that they tell children to make it feel okay that, you know, you have to have surgery. I mean, they do recommend cold foods. So, ice cream is a cold food. But I don't think jacking yourself up on sugar is scientifically proven to help with the recovery.

Jen: Okay. So does this mean you can't talk for two weeks?

Pete: It does. So I mean, the surgery is sort of not the point, but I think it's the example we can use to look at this conversation through. Essentially, I have an event in my life that is annoying. That is inconvenient. That means I can't speak. I can't work. I can't essentially do a whole lot of things that I normally do, for two weeks. And as an adult who likes doing things and speaking, I mean, I get paid to use my voice and I like to use my voice, it's inconvenient. It's annoying. And it's taking me a little bit of effort to go, "Where is the gift in this? Where is the opportunity in this? How might you use these two weeks to do something fun, do something quirky, do something extraordinary, do something useful?" And I thought, "Who better to help me with that than Jen Waldman?"

Jen: Immediately, I'm scratching down three mindset tools that I use, that I think might be helpful for you.

Pete: I love it. This is going to be like a personal coaching session. Strap in, listeners.

Jen: It might be. And I feel like somebody out there has to have written a book on like a silent retreat or something, and maybe that would be fun for you to design for yourself. But in any case, the first thing that comes to mind is, and we've done an episode on this once upon a time, the Internal Google Translator, where you take words you hear yourself saying, and then you translate them into a different language. So the Internal Google Translator translates from negative to positive, or from exclusive to inclusive, or from negative to affirmative. So as an example, if you hear yourself saying, "I can't speak," and you run that through the Google Translator, it becomes, "I can...", what?

Pete: "Listen."

Jen: Okay, great. "I can't work," becomes, "I can..."

Pete: "Read."

Jen: Ooh, okay. So you could keep going with this, right?

Pete: This is fun. I like this.

Jen: And it sort of like opens up where the possibilities are and the opportunities are that you might have missed if you were trying to see what you couldn't do. And instead, you are looking at what you could do.

Pete: I mean, I like this already. I like this already, because I have found it's easy to get caught in the, "Woe is me," of it all. And this is, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, this is such a minor inconvenience. But it is interesting and funny how many people, including the ENT, that are like, "Yeah, it's going to be a rough two weeks." There's literally not one person that has tried to sugarcoat this for me, to be like, "Oh, it won't be too bad. You'll be fine." Literally everyone is like, "Yeah, it's going to suck." So, it's easy to get stuck in that. So I like the Internal Google Translator, to go, "What's the translated version of this? What's the positive version of this? What's the other thing you can do instead of the thing that you can't do?" That's good.

Jen: I once heard a linguist talking about this, and he used the words "exclusive language" versus "inclusive language". And that just really resonates with me, that words like "can't" are excluding things.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And words like "can" are including things. It just really struck me. I hadn't thought about it in that way before.

Pete: Yeah. Also, just thinking about that, "I can't talk. I can listen." I'm just like imagining an introvert out there, listening to this and going, "Oh, what a dream to not be able to speak. What a gift. You should be so lucky."

Jen: Okay, another tool that I like is, again, a language shift that helps you look for gratitude in the moment. So when you hear yourself saying "have to", what happens if you change it to "get to"? "I have to have my tonsils out." "I get to have my tonsils out. I have access to doctors who are caring for me and making sure that future episodes of my podcast sound better."

Pete: You don't even have to say much more to feel the difference between, "I have to get my tonsils removed," to, "I get to have my tonsils removed." And again, the tonsils removed is just the example. I think this applies to so many inconveniences in one's life.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: "I have to go to work," versus, "I get to go to work." "I have to go to visit my family." "I get to go visit my family." There's so many things that we think are "have to", and there's so much agency and control and gratitude that comes back when you give yourself a "get to" as opposed to "have to".

Jen: Yeah. Isn't that interesting, how it really...listeners, is this too weird to ask you to think of your own thing right now, and literally hit pause and say out loud that "I have to" sentence versus that "I get to" sentence? It changes how your body feels.

Pete: It does. And as you said that, I'm just remembering a conversation I had with a amazing leader, a woman by the name of Lauren Hill, who is a listener of the podcast and who I've done a bunch of work with. And she told me a story, once upon a time, about using this exact reframe when thinking about her Saturday mornings with her husband and three kids. And it was from a place of, "I have to drive to sport every Saturday morning, juggling three kids' sports. So I'm like, I'm a taxi driver," was kind of the story she was telling herself. And then, she and her husband, she said they sat down and had a conversation one day, which resulted in them going to some version of like, "We get to do this. Like what if it's, I get to go and drive my kids to sport and watch them play soccer? And I get to be the driver that takes them between this sport and this sport? And how much does that change what it feels like to be a parent on a Saturday morning?"

Jen: Yeah. You know, Pete, I remember once you telling me, I think I was complaining about a delayed flight and I was traveling with Cate, and you were reminding me that if you're in the airport with your kid and your flight's delayed, it's a gift. Because that just means you get more time with your kid. I think about that every time my flight's delayed now.

Pete: Oh, that's so nice. I'm sure I read that in one of the many books I read on parenting before Ollie was born, where it's like, you've got them right where you need them. I've got you. You're stuck with me now. And that's exactly where I want you, as your mother.

Jen: Yes. I love it.

Pete: That's good. Alright, "get to" instead of "have to". Okay, okay.

Jen: Okay, here's the third one. It has more words in it, so I might need to repeat it a couple of times. I learned this one from Daniel Pink, who has written so many books, and he's incredibly wise.

Pete: Man, that guy is so good.

Jen: He's so good. So when you hear yourself saying, "I want fill-in-the-blank, but *insert circumstance*," you can change it. So, "I want to work, but I have to have my tonsils out." "I want to work, but I have to have my tonsils out." There is a finality to that. There's a, "Nothing I can do about it," feeling. So instead, he suggests that you name the want. "I want to work." You change the "but" to an "and". "And I am getting my tonsils out...," comma, instead of a period, ..."so fill-in-the-blank." "I want to work and I'm getting my tonsils out, so working is going to look like writing." Or, "I want to work and I'm getting my tonsils out, so I'll be listening to a lot of audio books to activate new thoughts."

Pete: Yeah. "So I'll be taking the opportunity to rest." "So I'll be taking the opportunity to rethink my schedule for Q1." "So I'll take the opportunity to plan Q2." Like whatever it is, there's an action, as opposed to a full stop, that comes with that.

Jen: Exactly. And I wrote a blog about this years ago, which I'll drop in the Box O' Goodies, because it's easier to understand it when you actually see the example sentences and like how the sentences are built. "I want to eat and I just got my tonsils out, so I'll eat ice cream."

Pete: Yum. Yum, yum, yum. But also, in non-tonsil related examples, this feels very important. Like, "I want to go on a holiday, but I can't because I have this many days annually, for example, or I have this many commitments that I need to stick to." And that could become, "I want to go on a holiday and I have this many days leave, so I'm going to plan a weekend away with the family or something." Like it opens the aperture of your mind to other possibilities, which I'm obsessed with. Because, you know, we've talked many times before about how we're really good at closing the aperture to like either A or B. "I either work or I don't work." We look at binaries really, really well, our human brains. And there's just so rarely only two options. It's so often the case that there's Option C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P. I mean, I could do the whole alphabet. There's a bunch of options. There's a bunch of options. So these three tools just feel so helpful for me personally, in the next few weeks. But just for people out there listening...like, I'm thinking about a speaker I saw last year. And we talked about him in one of our episodes, I'll link to it in the Box O' Goodies, a guy by the name of Kirun Goy. And he did this talk on helping leaders build out their toolkit. And one of the things I took from it...he didn't necessarily say this explicitly, but one of the things I took from it is that we all walk around with tools in our toolkit, but it's very rare that we audit the toolkit, that we actually go, "What tools do I have?" We kind of just automatically use certain tools in certain contexts, based on sort of reacting to situations. But what he was making the case for was being really intentional about the tools that we use. And to me, these are like three things that are available to anyone. They don't require you to be able to do something that you can't do. They just require a little bit of intention, a little bit of upfront thought and deliberate practice. So, thank you for the tools.

Jen: You're welcome. I want to go back to the first tool we talked about, the Internal Google Translator. Even though what I'm about to say has little, if nothing, to do with tonsillitis and how you would use it in that scenario, there's another use of the Internal Google Translator that feels like it's worth calling out. And that is when someone else is providing you feedback and they provide it in negative language, you can use your Internal Google Translator to hear it in the affirmative. As an example, I'll pull an example from my world, an actor might get a note from a director, "Don't take that cross downstage." Well, there are a million other things a person could do besides cross downstage, so you then make a choice that puts this in the affirmative. "Do stand in stillness." "Do cross upstage." "Do sit in the chair." Or let's say you get called into a meeting with a supervisor, who says, "You know, I was a little ticked off at you in the meeting today. Don't interrupt me so much." Your Internal Google Translator might hear that as, "Do let this person finish their thought completely. Take a breath, and then respond." It gives you a way to take something that's coming at you with negative language and repurpose it into something that you're able to execute.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. I love that. Like if you're in a, in another example, if someone was having a difficult conversation and they overheard it and said, "Don't talk so much in a difficult conversation," it's actually like, "Do listen more."

Jen: Exactly.

Pete: It's such an easier to activate action, I think.

Jen: Yeah. And I think it comes from how we were taught to move through the world as kids. There's a lot of reaction from adults towards kids that is in "don't" language. "Don't touch the stove." "Don't leave your wet towel on the floor." "Don't hit your brother." You know, things like that.

Pete: Oh, yeah. That sounds familiar. I feel a little called out right now.

Jen: Something I'm a little interested in, Pete, is the silence piece of this. Because I imagine that even if one was not having their tonsils removed, having to withstand silence for a designated period of time might be really illuminating. So I will give you the assignment to report back to us after the two weeks, what you learned about sitting in silence with yourself and also having to communicate with people in a way that is different from how you normally would. Like right now, I'm in my mind's eye picturing you doing charades with Tracey.

Pete: Pretty much.

Jen: Trying to ask her to bring you a glass of water. You, you know, act it out.

Pete: I will report back. And I will say, I shared this update with our mutual friend, Kirsty Stark, who we love to shout out on this podcast. And she said, "Oh, I heard recently someone sharing that when they had a recent bout of sickness, it helped them write their next book." And she said, "Maybe there's an opportunity here for you. Maybe the universe is trying to send you a signal to find your voice, to speak up, to do something with your voice." And I said, "That's amazing, Kirsty. You're so smart. And I knew you would come up with something like this. Also, it could be the universe saying, 'Shut up, Pete. Stop using your voice.'"

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.