Week 2023#11: how to listen to your gut
Another emotional rollercoaster week. This time it led to action!
A jackfruit played a special role on Saturday, leading to a really nice conversation on Saturday at Balti Jaama Turg at the new Asian Gourmet stand where a huge specimen is on display current (20kg!).
What I’ve learned
Gather more input to resolve confusion caused by emotions
👆 that was last week’s insight and gathering another week of input made things pretty clear.
The “I’m in love” emotions just didn’t appear.
Even after giving it more time.
In fact, it felt almost as if I was going through the same feelings of confusion as the week before.
I found myself constantly trying to shut up my inner voice which was telling me to just end this 3-week-old relationship while it is still young.
Inner voice: “delaying the inevitable makes things harder for everybody involved”
Brain: “Things just need a bit more time to play out”
Inner voice: “you said that last week”
Brain: “but this week is a whole different week”
… repeated many times …
On Sunday I gathered all my courage and explained my feelings – care and friendship, but not love.
Instead of the hurt feelings which I expected, I was met with understanding and acceptance.
That felt great and served to show that being honest is hard, but rewarding.
And that’s exactly why you need to be honest.
Now we can continue as friends and things don’t feel off.
This is the best possible outcome in that situation.
From this experience I learned that:
if things feel off, your gut is trying to tell you something.
Listen and think about what the message might be.
Taking a step back from the immediate “not in a relationship anymore” (it doesn’t feel like a breakup, because the emotional background was different), I started thinking about how this situation developed.
Looking for how this experience was different from past experiences, I found the main difference to be:
I usually found a partner when I wasn’t actively looking for one.
This time I was.
Pretty systematically, actually.
There were a lot of assumptions I made:
I’m ready for a committed relationship,
I want a committed relationship now,
my potential partner has to be … (long list of “must-haves” and “dealbreakers”)
Now I believe that approaching romantic relationships like this just killed all the joy of discovery and didn’t give love the space it needs to grow.
Because all of these requirements made it feel like I’m having a plan and am just executing it.
And that’s not the kind of feeling that creates excitement.
Plans do have a place, namely when you know where you are right now (A) and where you want to get (B):
Then your plan is to find out how to get from (A) to (B): the green arrow in the picture below:
Regarding relationships and other topics in life (like business), I feel the situation looks more like this:
You are at (A), have no idea where you want to go and you are looking for a way (green arrow) to get to somewhere else, leading you to somewhere better/new/different.
Different arrows lead to different locations, and you don’t know what all of the available arrows are, or where they lead to.
So you need to discover: follow different arrows, to new places, move further, or backtrack to where you came from.
Eventually, you develop a map of the territory, find out what works and what doesn’t, what you like and what you don’t, and ideally also how to get back to a place you’ve visited before (though there is no guarantee for that).
To sum it all up, my guiding principle for the coming weeks shall be:
plan less, discover more
Expectations vs Reality
Almost all of the things on my wishlist came true in Week 11
The next “Decode Estonian” workshop is planned and a study group is up and running: yes! Having my expectations listed in public here actually forced me to set a date for the next workshop 😅
I’m becoming a local host for Mindvalley: no! I followed up on an email from my last application, but haven’t received a reply in a week 🤷♂️ Time to figure out the new process, I guess.
There’s a list of basics (like a bed) to order from IKEA for the house in Sweden: yes! Käti did excellent work as usual with this. The only challenge: IKEA doesn’t deliver to Nyland. There’s time until Wednesday to figure this out, or doing basic things in the house will be…difficult.
Week 12 is going to be exciting:
The house in Sweden has all the necessary basics to be rented out at a low price
I’ll manage to apply for a samordningsnummer (Swedish tax ID for non-residents, necessary for opening a bank account, etc)
The neighbors in Nyland know me by the end of my stay
What happened
Highlights of last week:
I continued with 10X and it was easy to stick with it. Having short, but intense, training sessions makes me slowly get used to actually pushing my boundaries and training to failure. Technically my next workout day would have been on Monday, but I couldn’t wait to train more, so I already went on Sunday.
After shutting down Talking To Strangers, I got my first paying client. We had a blast on Saturday and she rated the training 10/10 – she actually got really excited and confident about talking to new people in everyday life!
Eesti 200 accepted my application 🎉 I’m officially a party member now. Time to get a magenta-colored tie 👔
The “Decode Estonian” study group had a great start – people from the last workshops joined and everybody actually stuck to the commitment of analyzing one sentence this week. Quite the achievement! 🚀