Category: March 2018

Years ago, when I was first learning to coach, I was taught a coaching technique using metaphors. Metaphors help people remember and internalize complicated concepts.

For example, a client of mine wanted to slow down and relax when she was on the phone making business calls. Part of relaxing for her had to do with letting go of the outcome and letting things happen naturally. So we talked about what could remind her and help make her feel that way. She decided that a melting ice cube was slow and inevitable and comforting (it was summertime). She literally put a plate of ice cubes on her desk before making her calls.

I was taught to have my clients come up with their own metaphors. But some of my clients really struggled with that. So I sometimes would suggest random metaphors to them, and see if they resonated with any of them. (Deep roots of a tree. A race car. A thunderstorm.) I wrote metaphors on cards to use when I was coaching.

After awhile I started playing with the cards with Laura, who was a teenager living with me at the time. Pretty soon she was helping me write them. After I married John, he enjoyed the phrase cards too, and has contributed a lot of good ones over the years.

We now have a personal deck of about 250 of them. A lot of the metaphors wouldn’t make much sense to anyone else. They are inside jokes about things that happened to us. (A puppy with a hairbrush caught in her tail) Some of them are serious (Just because things are getting worse, does not mean you are making wrong choices) Some of them are funny things someone once said, (I love you more than chocolate cake) Most of them can be taken in different ways, which is why metaphors are so useful. For example, does “watering a lake” mean undertaking a useless and ineffective endeavor, or does it mean taking a pee in the wilderness? And what does that mean to you?

We play with the deck by asking a question and pulling a card, and trying to relate the card to the question somehow.

For example, let’s imagine I asked the question, “Should I buy another rental?” And then I draw a card that says, “I wasn’t growing my hair out, I just quit cutting it.” At first glance, what does buying a rental have to do with personal hygiene? But then I got to thinking about how I never actually intended to be a landlord, any more than I intended to grow long hair when I got lazy and quit cutting it.

How did I get into the rental business to start with? I honestly can’t remember why I rented my house in Olympia instead of selling it when I moved. This would have been about 1998. I wonder if I subconsciously knew that the relationship I was in at the time was iffy and I wanted to keep my house just in case? (That relationship lasted about 3 years.)

Then when I moved to California the time before last, in 2002 or so, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy in California with the meager proceeds of a 80-year-old, 850 square foot house in Olympia, and I didn’t know if I was going to stay in California, and it was already rented by that time anyway, so I just left it rented. Then the second time I moved to California the housing market had crashed and John and I totally couldn’t sell the house we bought together when we got married or John’s original house either (bla…bla…bla) you already know (or don’t care) about the details.

My point is, we sort of just stumbled into being landlords. Even the 3 rentals we bought last year in Albuquerque were really just an attempt to avoid a huge tax bill from the first one we bought in California (which we had never intended to be a rental. We had bought it to live in it – except then I totally hated it, so we bought a different one, but it was too soon to sell the first one without losing money on it, so we just rented it for awhile…) So no, I don’t actually want more rentals – or do I?

I’ve basically had rentals off and on (mostly on) for an entire 20 years now, so I’m thinking I can’t claim to dislike owning rentals (either that or I’m doing a very bad job of living the life I want to live!)

Anyway, I was talking about metaphors. Recently Laura showed me some really cool photos she’s using for screensavers at work, to help her remember the things we all need to remember at work – like patience! She has different photos for different concepts, and they cycle on her computer to help her remember.

So today, I had a great idea. I think it would be really cool to make metaphor picture cards like our phrase cards. I could have a deck of photos, and the game would be the same, ask a question and draw a photo and try to relate the photo to the question.

For example, let’s say I ask myself, “Do I want the promotion at work?” Then I draw a card, Since I don’t have a deck of photos built yet, to be random, I’m going to now post the absolute most recent picture I happen to have taken…

Oh, ouch. My first thought is “fenced in.” A tall, New Mexican style latilla fence. Will I feel fenced in with this job? Do I already feel fenced in with this job?

Yet also I know that there is a quaint gravel trail along this fence, that leads to a really neat old Spanish style neighborhood (if you turn right. If you turn left, it’s sort of industrial-run-down). You can almost, but not quite see that trail on the left edge of the picture. Does that mean that I shouldn’t concentrate on the “fenced in” aspect of my job, and instead I should focus more on the trail along side it and where that trail is going?

See how cool that is?

Now your turn. Ask a question about your life, and I’ll post the second-most-recent picture I’ve taken lately.

Ready?

Do you have a question?

Don’t peek until you do.

Ok, here’s the photo…

Ok, this is a good one. There’s a lot of directions you can take this. The first, obvious one, is the transition from winter to spring. Is there a transition in your question? How do you feel about that transition?

Another aspect of this photo is the planning and faith involved. Someone planted bulbs – someone stuck ugly, shriveled little roots into the dirt many months (or years) ago and those bulbs have been blooming and multiplying ever since. How does planning ahead, or faith relate to your question?

There’s also a sense of knowing the future – sort of. I know those are flowering bulbs. I’m not quite sure what type, or what color they will be. But I know they will be beautiful.

There’s also a combination of “natural” and “constructed” in this photo. That’s a real rock, real snow, real flower bulbs. But it’s not a fully natural scene. Someone set the stone there and planted the bulbs in front of it. How does the combination of natural and designed relate to your question?

Also that rock is sheltering those bulbs from the harsh dry weather in the desert, holding the scant moisture in the soil around it. If your question has something to do with a goal or dream or something you are trying to grow or develop in your life, have you supplied a rock to shelter your goals from the harsh environment?

So wow, that was a great one.

You think that photo was rigged. No, truly. Here’s why those happen to be the most recent two photos I’ve taken this week. I talked to Darren and mentioned that I wasn’t making friends at work because I was working too hard. He said, “Aren’t you going for walks on your breaks?” He regularly walks with his coworkers. So I took that on as a goal, and I’ve asked a couple different coworkers to walk with me this week. These photos are just two I randomly shot within a block or so of where I work, while out walking, because we had a bit of snow this week and I thought it was pretty.

So if you’re thinking, fine, but what if the photo had been my grocery list? (Yeah, I do that). Well, a grocery list is a great metaphor! Think of how important food is! We can’t live without it. Yet we all constantly obsess about how much and what kind of food we are eating, and whether it is healthy and whether we are eating too much and gaining weight. A grocery list is a poignant thing. It’s about our hopes for ourselves and our families. It’s about one of the most basic endeavors in life – to find good food to eat. So even if the picture had been a grocery list, you can still figure out how to relate that to whatever your question was.

It’s a very good game! And I’m totally going to make picture cards to augment our phrase cards.

Both of my kids, independently of each other, sent me this link. https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ It had been sent to Laura by a friend of hers, and to Darren by a mutual acquaintance who is a life coach, and who also has Asperger’s Syndrome. I assume it’s also going around on social media, although that’s not where my kids got it. It was sent to them for a reason of course – it’s relevant to our family’s health issues.

It’s about the constant strategizing required for those who have a chronic condition but still want to live a “normal” life.  Because energy is limited, it has to be spent wisely. This author was in a restaurant when she was explaining this concept to her friend, so she used a bundle of spoons to illustrate the limited amount of energy she had every day. Each activity takes away spoons, so she has to constantly strategize and limit herself so as to not to run out of spoons before the day ends. Now her ideas are called “spoon theory,” where spoons are a metaphor for how much we can do in a day before we run out of ability.

The author has lupus, and I’m very lucky that I don’t have that. I’m lucky I usually have plenty of energy. But in my family we have two issues that do cost “spoons” to deal with in life. We have Asperger’s syndrome, which is inherently very stressful and makes life quite challenging, and we also have a sensory integration issues, which is common with Asperger’s Syndrome. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_disorder)

Sensory processing is complicated, and not well understood. I have a mild version of two common forms of it: sensory over-responsivity, and sensori-motor discrimination issues. These are both very common in Aspgerger’s syndrome.

“Different people experience a wide range of difficulties when processing input coming from a variety of senses, particularly tactile (e.g., finding fabrics itchy and hard to wear while others do not), vestibular (e.g., experiencing motion sickness while riding a car) and proprioceptive (having difficulty grading the force to hold a pen in order to write).” (Wikipedia)

What happens is my brain doesn’t integrate sensory input very well. So normal amounts of sensory input are tiring for me, and too much for too long can be a miserable experience for me. That’s over-responsivity.

The sensor-motor and discrimination part of the issue relates to how my brain understands the sensory input about the attributes of the physical world around me. I don’t do a very good job with automatically gauging physical characteristics like an object’s location, size, weight, distance, direction, and the effects of friction and gravity.  This means I’m clumsy and it means it takes a lot of care (and is tiring & frustrating) for me to do very much manipulating physical objects.

For example, I recently was handed a clay bowl and it was unexpectedly heavy and my arm swung downward and I nearly dropped it. That can happen to anyone, but it happens all the time to me. This means I have to be extra careful to not drop things, spill things, or even fall over. This “being extra careful” all the time can be very tiring.

It’s also embarrassing because it can look like I’m drunk or careless or angry when I’m not. (I once accidentally fell on my puppy while disciplining her for peeing on the floor, and my family has still not forgiven me for dog abuse.) I also don’t allow the dogs in the kitchen when I’m cooking because I fall or drop things too easily. I also frequently run into corners of walls! And it’s tiring for me to do simple household tasks (now you’re thinking I’m just trying to get out of doing the dishes, LOL!) But to be sure, packing, unpacking, and moving boxes is very challenging for me, as are simple fix-it projects around the house.

I enjoy hiking because it’s physically simple, with the primary challenge being uneven terrain. The pace is slow, and there’s not much else going on, so I can process enough information fast enough to not trip very often. But skiing? Nope. Ha, ha, no way.

So back to the spoon analogy – that’s my limited spoons – how much sensory input I can take in each day, and how much physical manipulation of the world can I perform each day. I have to “spend” that wisely.

One of my favorite things to do in the world is sit outside at a cafe in the sunshine, and chat with a friend while the world goes by on the nearby sidewalk. But there’s a lot of sensory input in that situation – colors, smells, the breeze moving my hair into my face, surrounding noise, as well as chatting with my friend. That means that if I’m going to spend a 2-hour lunch with a friend, as wonderful as that is, that takes a bunch of “spoons,” and I’m going to have to somehow limit what else I do that day that requires spoons.

Or if I’m going to be in a moving vehicle, or subject to loud noises, groups of people, confusion, heat, cold, whatever, I need to understand that is going to limit my ability for the rest of the day to intake any more input.

And I can’t just tough it out and be stoic and push through, because I can’t force my brain to do something it can’t do, any more than someone with a different kind of illness can force their bodies to do something they can’t do. When you’re out of spoons, you’re dead in the water, and it doesn’t matter if you want to keep going – you can’t. So it’s a constant strategizing exercise – how much can I get away with?

Whenever someone’s limitations are unusual, it can be hard to strategize, because our culture isn’t set up for anything unusual. People hear about my migraines and think I “should do less” or work less hard. They also think I should avoid stress – and that’s true, but only in the sense of avoiding sensory input. What stresses me is not going to stress others. So when people say I should work less hard or cut down on stress, what do they actually mean?

That’s the total irony – I actually have more stress around things that are traditionally thought of as recreation and stress reducing – than I do with my job. For asperger children, the hardest part of the day is recess. For me, the hardest parts of my life are the things people typically do for fun. I don’t do well in a moving vehicle. Or a restaurant. Or watching the TV. Or even chatting for too long with a beloved friend.

Put me in a “field trip” or “outing” type of situation and it’s going to be stressful. It’s hard to be in a car all day, or on a plane very long. I cannot be talked at continually, I cannot be in stores or groups of people for very long. I haven’t been in a mall in years. I can’t watch movies in a theater at all, and even a movie at home takes a ton of spoons. I love music concerts, but those also take lots of spoons, so I have to strategize about how to minimize the spoon cost of concerts.

 

On the other hand, I’m fine with a full work load. I don’t mind houses and clients and projects and jobs. I can sit at a computer and plan web application upgrades on spreadsheets for 9 hours straight and I’m fine. I can work all day. I can write all day. I can think all day. I do very well in “boring” jobs that require analysis, accuracy and concentration.

I also do well with my clients because it’s one-on-one, over the phone, and there’s not a lot of sensory input. But even so, I can’t do more than 2 hours coaching at a time, or about 4 sessions a day. Which is why it makes sense for me to also have my other job, my sit-in-front-of-a-computer-and-quietly-think job, because I can’t coach all day long.

 

I’m lucky that I like to work, because our society is set up to reward work; both with pay and with social appreciation. I feel successful at work, even when I often feel like I’m failing a little bit in the home environment – particularly when I’m around my family.

We have had 3 people announce their resignation or retirement in the last 3 days. At that rate, we will have nobody left after 2 months.

One is retiring, one has taken a job with the county, and one has taken a job with LANL. LANL pays nearly twice what we do (I’d say 70% more). The only downside (assuming you don’t mind working for a nuclear weapons lab that is not known for prioritizing it’s environmental staff) is it’s a terrible commute up to the top of a mesa. There is a small town up there, but there is a chronic housing shortage, so you’re going to pay California prices for 1960’s style houses.

Meanwhile, I am hiring a new employee. The pay is discouragingly low, but it’s all we can offer. New Mexico is not a wealthy state and the current administration isn’t that into environmental regulation either.

https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/newmexico/jobs/2019378/environmental-scientist-and-specialist-operational-nmenv-12090?department[0]=Department%20of%20Environment&sort=PositionTitle%7CAscending&pagetype=jobOpportunitiesJobs

As soon as it closes, I will be very busy scoring applicants and arranging interviews. We have a laborious process (to try to ensure fairness), involving a lot of ranking matrices. When I applied for the management position they wanted a month-by-month detail of every job I ever did, all the way back to my first internship in (cough) 1993. I thought it was crazy, but they needed it to accurately count years of experience for ranking. It turns out I have 24 years and 7 months experience (who knew?!?). I guess I’ll have a big 25 coming up here this year.

Does the fact that I am hiring employees mean I have the manager position for sure? Not quite. I am being treated as the manager for now, but I am still officially “Acting Manager.” They are not promising me anything, and I’m still in my original staff cubicle (I can borrow a manager’s office when I need to have a confidential meeting, like a performance review with an employee). Managers get offices with a door that closes, for that sort of thing. Even if I do get the permanent position I won’t have a window though – I won’t rate high enough for one of those 🙂

I am anxious for them to finally make it official because I am double filling my original position and the manager position, and we are badly understaffed. As soon as I’m officially the manager, I can advertise and fill my original position. There are two more empty positions being transferred to my team, so in all I expect to hire 4 people in the next couple of months; two at the lower “Operational” level (such as the one currently advertising) and two at the higher “Advanced” level (such as the one I was originally hired into). That will more than double my team. At the moment there are only 3 of us!

I admit it’s beautiful – sun glittering on the snow, gracefully accenting the traditional rural scenes of old Santa Fe. I should be delighted!

I would have been delighted in November. But it’s March 28. I am NOT delighted! I am exceedingly grumpy. Now all I can think about is waterfront land in Texas (having decided I cannot afford a waterfront house anywhere, even in Texas.)

All we really need is a dock and a boathouse. Because we already have a camper van! And we have a boat, in storage in Bernalillo, New Mexico, of all the stupid things – to have a boat in a storage yard in the desert.

Yesterday I was musing that I needed some sort of theme or rallying call for my life. John and I are pulled too many ways, try to do too many things.

I often briefly (very briefly, but often) consider some sort of “save the world” theme, or working for justice or feeding the hungry, but as noble as all that sounds, I’m not there. Maybe in some other reincarnation.

I think I am going to take as my theme, for now, some of the very first advice my parents ever gave me: “Go outside and play!”

I dream of being somewhere tropical with water and boats the first third of the year, hiking the mountains of the west the mid third of the year, and hanging out in New Mexico the final third of the year. Not wanting to pay for and upkeep 3 houses, I think the answer would be a self-driving, electric RV! Except I need a garden in that dream!

Meanwhile I am pleased that I’m finally making a little bit of progress on my other big goal, which is to see more of family, especially the young nieces and nephews. I failed to see everyone in Houston on that recent short trip because I was so sick. And I failed to get to Tucson in time to see some other nieces and nephews while they were there for the winter (This winter was sort of nuts, I will not fail next winter). But yesterday I booked tickets to visit relatives in San Diego next month, yay!

Are awesome.

Smoke coming from approximately where my house is, taken while I stood at the gas station, pumping gas. Do I stop pumping and dash home, or assume it’s fine?

I didn’t go back home, and never did figure out what the smoke was. (What? You wanted a better story than that? Sorry, this isn’t fiction.)

I guess I could try my hand at fiction:

So then! I left those damn peas on the barbecue grill! For hours & hours! That’ll show them! Except then I saw smoke! I dashed home to find my house completely burned down! BUT THE PEAS WERE STILL WHOLE!

Actually, no? You don’t want fiction after all?

People write to me, after reading my coaching website, and confess to me that they cannot afford a coach, but they ask me questions anyway, in the hope that I’ll reply. And sometimes I do, briefly. But I can never give them much, because I am stretched so thin. These questions, over the years, have become very familiar. It’s the same ones, asked in slightly different ways, year after year.

I wonder sometimes, if I could somehow answer these questions – maybe a blog on my website? These are not easy questions; they are not yes and no questions, they are not “FAQ’s About Coaching”, which I already have on my website. The FAQ’s are basics like “how much does it cost?”, and “how does it work over the phone?”

These other questions that they email me…these are the hard questions in life. “Can I be successful with Asperger’s?”, “Can I be happy?” “Why do people get mad when I least expect it?” “Will I ever have a long-term relationship?” “Why are my coworkers passing me by?” “Why won’t people listen when I talk? Is it my fault or is it theirs?” “Can you fix this?” “Can I fix this?” “Is reading self-help books really going to help anything?” “Why doesn’t anybody understand me?”

So I wonder, maybe, maybe I should write back to them, all of them at once, all of them out there – those who write to me and those who don’t bother. Maybe I should address those questions I hear over and over, those questions that don’t really have an answer.

It’s a daunting challenge. Yes, I write this blog and I enjoy it, but only about 5 of you read it, and you all know me and already have your opinions about my foibles, and I get to write whatever the heck I feel like at any given moment.

My website gets a lot of hits. It’s a lot of strangers out there. I’d feel like I would need to not say the wrong thing somehow, and those aren’t easy questions they’re asking me. Those questions don’t have “right” answers.

Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, nine days old.

Don’t buy the organic peas from Trader Joe’s. They are inedible! Apparently it matters whether or not the package says “baby peas” or not. It’s not just a marketing ploy. Don’t buy peas if they aren’t itty little baby ones. (You have to say that in a fast, high pitched voice “little itty bitty!” There you go.)

I bought these, and cooked them slightly, like I would typically cook a frozen vegetable – hardly at all.

Mistake. They were a pretty bright green, but woody and tough. Worse yet, they gave me a stomach ache!

So I put the rest in the refrigerator, and the next day I boiled them till they turned a funny green, like my grandma would have. They were still tough!

So on the the third day, I put those tough bastards in the crock pot! With a little bacon and onion and carrots and bay leaf. (Everything’s better with bacon). I turned that crock pot on and left the house.

Some long time later, those peas were still tough! Here I am trying (and mostly failing) to mash them with a potato masher. Uh, this is war.

I considered running them in my blender, but I figured that would make a colossal mess. So I just turned the crock pot back on for several more hours. Eventually the bacon was completely dissolved and the onion a bare wisp of translucence.

Here is one serving, packaged up to take to work for lunch.

The verdict? Stomach ache! The rest went down the disposal. Take that, peas!