How to Shower
‘I’ll shower on it and get back to you.’
These words have been etched to memory for me, for well over a decade now, as they were mentioned to me during a business lunch long ago. I think the words have stuck with me as they were a surprise to hear, yet at the same time, so truthful and relatable.
Many insights and breakthroughs have come to me while in the shower. Regardless of the domain of life, be it business, health, or relationships, I am often pleasantly surprised to find answers to problems after ‘showering’ on them. Oftentimes, answers to problems I wasn’t even aware of that I had.
In a way, showering feels like a form of mindfulness, where my attention is not being pulled away from any external stimuli or distractions from screens, or even people. It is me alone, with my thoughts.
The physical repetitive routine of showering is quite mindless in fact, requiring very little mental effort. This is why my mind can focus on more interesting or important topics, without the pressure of trying to be productive.
I continue to feel a sense of awe and wonder of how the answers I am often looking for outside of me, be it from friends, therapists, books, or teachers, are more often than not already sitting within me. All I need to do is to listen for them.
And that’s often the most difficult part. Learning to listen to myself. Which requires overcoming three obstacles.
The first obstacle to listening to myself is getting distracted by the noise outside of me.
With the availability of endless content, be it from professional social media personalities, self proclaimed self help gurus, life coaches, researchers turned YouTubers, and more sources, it can feel easy to forget that we know ourselves best and know what we need.
Thinking that the perfect answer is out there, and all that I have to do is find it, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It’s pointless and can be painful.
The second obstacle to listening to myself are the many voices in my head.
They are often the voices of my parents, my partner, my sibling, my friends, or my colleagues. Trying to solve my problems through the sole lens of what those around me will think, believe, support, or accept, is a common problem I know many struggle with, as I know I have at times as well.
It takes a belief in oneself to back oneself. To accept that not everyone around me may agree with my choices. And that’s okay. It’s difficult at first but becomes easier over time.
The third obstacle to listening to myself is a fear of failure.
What if I’m wrong? Then who will I have to blame? At least if I followed some generalized best practice from a researcher, or listened to a family member, if it doesn’t work, I can point my finger out the window. And although I may still have a problem, I at least don’t have a bigger problem of feeling like I was wrong.
The reality is that if I listen to myself, I will be wrong at times. The same goes if I listen to some person with credentials or some person I have a relationship with. No one, not anyone, can know or control my life. Not even me.
Learning not only to make mistakes, but to own the mistakes I make, is the prep work I have to do to be truly open to listening to myself.
Only then, after I’ve tuned out the external noises, the internal voices and the fear of failure, can I truly start to ‘shower’ on my problems and connect with my deeper wisdom.
And that is how I learned to shower.
