what your habits say about you

Dear Reader,

A man I work with told me recently that he's never been much of a planner. Then, a few minutes later, he walked me through his morning. The coffee maker starts at the same time every day. He sits in the same chair, reads the news in the same order, and empties the dishwasher before he lets himself do anything else. When I pointed out what he'd just described, he laughed. He'd never thought of any of it as planning. It was just what he did.

Last week we noticed the versions of ourselves that show up in different rooms. Habits are a different kind of clue. They follow us from room to room without asking who's there. Whatever role we happen to be playing, we still check the phone the same way, still take the same route home, still put off the same conversation. Our roles adjust to whoever's in front of us. Our habits don't bother.

What I've come to appreciate about habits is how much they remember. Every habit began as a choice that worked, and over time the choosing faded while the doing remained. So your habits hold a record of what you've needed and what you've been practicing without meaning to practice it. Read together, they say something about you, and it doesn't always match the story you tell. The man in my office calls himself unstructured while living one of the most ordered mornings I've heard described. 

Your habits have been telling your story all along. This week, try listening.

Yours in the journey,

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the roles we play

Dear Reader,

A client's phone rang in the middle of a session once. She glanced at the screen, apologized, and said she needed to take it, just for a second, it was work. And for about thirty seconds, a different person sat across from me. Her voice lifted, her sentences turned quick and bright, and her whole posture reorganized itself around whoever was on the other end. When she hung up she set the phone down, exhaled, and came back. She caught me noticing and laughed. That's my work self, she said, the way you might introduce a colleague.

Most of us carry a small cast like that. There's a version of us that shows up at the office, and another one appears, without ever being summoned, the moment an old friend calls. We don't usually decide to make the switch. We change our posture crossing a doorway before we've said a single word, and the whole thing happens so smoothly that we almost never see it from the inside.

The word performing can make this sound like an accusation, and that's worth resisting. Learning to meet each room on its terms is a skill, one we picked up so early that we can't remember practicing it. Each one is made of real material. It's just that we've been running the whole repertoire for so long, so automatically, that we rarely pause to notice how many there are, or how different they've become from one another.

So that's the invitation this week, and it asks nothing more than attention. The next time the phone rings, or you walk from your car into somewhere that expects something of you, see if you can catch the switch as it happens. The small shift in your voice, the settling into a familiar shape. You don't have to judge it or change it. Later in the year, we'll get curious about where these versions came from. For now, it's enough to start noticing the cast.

Yours in the journey,

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what’s on the surface

Dear Reader,

When I meet with someone for the first time, I sometimes ask them to walk me through an ordinary Tuesday. What time they wake, what they reach for when they wake up, how the morning shapes up, or where the day tends to thin out or go sideways. These questions usually surprise people. They arrived ready to talk about the big things, and here I am asking about breakfast. But an ordinary day carries more information than almost anything else a person can tell me. The surface of a life is dense with evidence.

Most of us assume that self-understanding has to begin somewhere deep, that whatever is worth knowing about ourselves must be buried and hard to reach. So we skip the obvious. We treat the visible parts of our lives as background, too plain to hold any meaning. But the surface is where honest examination starts, because it's the one layer we can see without effort.

The visible facts of your life are available to anyone who cares to look, and you may be the person least likely to look at them. Familiarity is its own kind of camouflage. Consider what your calendar actually holds, the route you drive without quite deciding to, and the subjects you return to when nothing requires you to say anything at all.

This is where a year of examination begins, at the surface, with what anyone could see. So this week, try describing one of your ordinary days as if you were telling a kind stranger. Notice what you'd include and what you'd leave out. You don't need to draw conclusions yet. The noticing is the work, and interpretation can wait.

Living intentionally means letting yourself see what has been in plain sight all along, and trusting that what you find there is worth your attention.

Yours in the journey,

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the archeology of self

Dear Reader,

There's a moment I've learned to watch for in my work. Someone is describing a pattern they've had for years, a way they always seem to respond, and partway through the sentence they slow down. They hear themselves. Then they ask, almost surprised: why do I do that?

I love that question, because it's so honest. Most of us can rattle off our coffee order and the things that reliably annoy us. But ask where any of it came from, why the sight of dishes in the sink can undo a whole evening, and we go quiet. We've been with ourselves our entire lives, and there's still a lot in here we've never gotten a good look at.

Last week we mentioned that this year we'd be staying with one thread instead of changing subjects every Thursday. This is it. We're calling the year of the archaeology of self, and we mean the name pretty literally. When something gets buried, it doesn't go away. It just ends up underneath the newer things. The way we react, the rules we follow without knowing they're rules, so much of it was laid down a long time ago, and it's still down there, quietly shaping the surface.

So the surface is where we'll begin. The parts of our lives that anyone could see. From there, the questions will work their way down on their own, a little further each week 

For now, there's nothing to do. Maybe just try what my client did. Sometime this week, catch yourself mid-pattern, doing the thing you always do, and ask, gently, why do I do that? You don't need an answer. This year, we'll have plenty of time to look.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

three years

Dear Reader,

I still remember the conversation I had with Caralyne the morning after the first issue went out. We were standing in the kitchen, her coffee still brewing, and I asked her if she thought anyone had actually opened it. We didn't know if six people would read it or sixty, and for the first few months I checked the numbers more than I'd like to admit. 

What I didn't expect was how much the writing itself would change me. Three years of sitting down on the same day each week, sometimes with something clear to say and sometimes with nothing, taught me more about discipline than almost anything else I've tried to build a habit around. There's a version of this newsletter from year one that reads like a brochure for a better life, all action steps and tidy resolutions. I can see now that we were still learning how to trust a reader with quiet instead of instruction. Somewhere in year two we stopped telling you what to do and started just telling you what we'd noticed. That shift mattered more than any single issue we've written.

There were stretches, more than I'd admit to most people, where I wondered if we should let this go and put that energy somewhere else. The writing isn't always easy to find time for (ironic right?), and it's hard to know if a Thursday email is landing anywhere or just adding to a pile. What kept us going was the messages we got from you. Someone telling us a line from an issue followed them into a hard conversation they'd been avoiding. Someone forwarding an old one to a friend going through something we'd written about months before. Those notes came at the moments we needed them most, and they're the real reason there's a year four at all.

Starting next week, we're trying something we haven't done before. Instead of moving from topic to topic, we're going to follow one thread for the whole year, going further into it than a single issue ever lets us. This means less ground covered and more depth in the ground we're standing on. We don't know yet exactly where it leads. We rarely do.

If you've got someone in your life who might want a few quiet minutes in their inbox on a Thursday, this would be a good week to pass it along. No pressure, just an open door.

And if your weekend includes a flag, a grill, or a kid falling asleep before the fireworks start, we hope it's a good one. Happy Fourth.

Here's to year four,

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