#71: Three Things that got me thinking

🎯aiming low + 🎁getting to know our child + 💩sphincter bootcamp

Hello smart reader,

Here are Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation this week:

1. Living our lowest potential well

2. Parenting the child we have

3. Potty control

Before I go into them, I want to remind you that I published a Q&A with motivation researcher Ayelet Fishbach last week, and it’s rich with practical advice to help you set and reach goals that matter to you. Read it here:

#70: Why Would Anyone disclose their goals?

---

1. Back to basics

Warning: This idea is a fourth-hand summary (from mystic author Caroline Myss¹> through comedian/podcaster Jacqueline Novak² > through newsletter writer Hayley Nahman > through me > to you).

Here’s the gist: How about trying to live our lowest potential well instead of aiming for the stars?

Many people attending Myss’s workshops tell her “they want ‘great big huge’, but they can’t even function at their lowest potential,” Novak says. As Nahman writes:

“They like, can’t get out of bed, they can’t command their spirit to forgive their friend,” yet they’re fixated on reaching their highest potential. Jacqueline explains that, in her own life, she typically aims for the “the biggest, most-upstream essential thing” and works backwards from there, but wonders if instead she ought to try living her lowest potential well. “Like, literally get my shit together around, you know, my laundry³,” she says. “I’m always dismissing the small, and then I find myself absolutely crushed by mess.”

This is what this looks like in Nahman’s life:

For me aiming low means getting into a rhythm with my apartment, maintaining relationships with my friends, my family, my neighbors, going outside, trying new things, hitting my deadlines. Even my more spiritual aims are fairly mundane […]. None of them are overtly ambitious or particularly “shareable.” But they change everything.

This reminded me of the late Richard N. Bolles's take on our capital-M Mission(s) in life in his classic job-hunting manual What Color Is Your Parachute?

In the epilogue (which I only skimmed when I first got the book in 2005, because I thought it only relevant for religious readers), Bolles writes about a step-by-step, universal Mission as a necessary path towards the other Mission that is uniquely ours.

… so many times you will see people wringing their hands and saying, “I want to know what my Mission in life is,” all the while they are cutting people off on the highway, refusing to give time to people, punishing their mate for having hurt their feelings, lying about what they did. […] For these people wringing their hands, their Mission was right there, on the freeway, in the interruption, in the hurt, and at the confrontation.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

---

2. Children teach us who they are

This essay on parenting the child we have—not the one we were, or the one we’d like to have—aptly describes something both obvious and hard to grasp: that each child is a “whole and new person”. A person who may not give a flying hoot about the things we value, or even the things (we think) they are great at.

How relatable is this litany of things that the author, parenting coach Robin Einzig, wanted for her daughter over the years—like wishing she were more sociable (“For her, mind you. Not for us. For her. Or so we tell ourselves”); or urging her to share her singing talent with the rest of the world:

You should join a chorus. Or an a capella group. How about the talent show? 

You know, college admissions officers really want to see you doing some powerful volunteer work. Being on a sports team is an important way to learn to work with others. 

I’ve sure heard similar comments from adults while growing up, or uttered them myself. Maybe they weren’t addressed to a child, but to a student or mentee. Or even to ourselves: “I’m doing this [thing that bores me] because it’s great for my CV.”

There are things we can expect of [our children]. And we can work on those things. And there are things they cannot do and will not do and ways they simply “are not.” Our attempts to change them into the children we imagine or create the family “scene” that we imagine is a perfect recipe for maximum frustration and exhaustion.

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

---

3. Potty torments

We don’t have a word in French (or Spanish) for “potty training”⁴ (or “sleep training” for that matter). We call it, I guess, learning to use the toilet? That might be one of the reasons why much “potty training” advice feels fraught to me: it’s not bootcamp; it’s a learning process.

Here’s what psychologist Becky Kennedy—a.k.a. Instagram parenting rising star Dr Becky—wrote in her 23 June newsletter, titled “We Are Raising Humans, Not Training Animals”⁵:

The potty process is one of the first times kids learn whether they are in charge of their own bodies. […]

If our approach is based on control and coercion, we may have short-term potty success if our kids are approval-seeking… or short-term disaster if our kids are strong-minded. But either way, we’ve kind of missed the point of this important developmental achievement. 

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

1. My skeptic alarm bells went off after a brief look at Myss's website (where she describes her interest “in the nature of grace, the consciousness of the soul and the mystical phenomenon of healing that transcends reason”). But I find her “lowest potential” comment compelling, and you, smart reader, understand that this mention does not amount to an endorsement of her work.

2. I found that podcast hard to follow! I guess unscripted banter is not my format.

3. Living my lowest potential well would certainly include handling clothes well—abolishing that laundry basket limbo; generous hand-me-downs culled and sorted by size and season; clothes getting the thread-and-needle care they need instead of feeding a growing mending pile.

4. It’s not like francophones are super laissez-faire about toddler poop! We have a specific word to describe a toddler who stopped using nappies: “clean”. (As in: “if your 3-year-old isn't clean she cannot enrol in preschool.”)

5. I couldn’t find back issues of the newsletter online. To receive the next ones, subscribe here.