Forging Resilience

27 Vix Anderton: "I’ve spent 40 years being a perfectionist, it’ll take more than 4 min to undo".

• Aaron Hill • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Vix Anderton, a former intelligence officer turned coach, understands the feeling all too well. On our latest episode, she takes us on a personal journey, from the disciplined world of the Royal Air Force to confronting burnout head-on in the international development sector.

A discussion about the damaging effects of "pernicious not enoughness" and how Vix's military precision and her passion for community and self-knowledge became the backbone of her coaching philosophy. As we unpack the conversation with Vix, we tread the fine line between ambition and self-destruction that perfectionism often draws.

Join us for an episode that not only addresses the challenges of perfectionism and burnout but also offers a compassionate lens through which to view our collective journey towards wholeness.

And if you're looking to connect with Vix for more wisdom, her unique online presence is just a click away.

https://vixanderton.com/

https://www.instagram.com/vix_anderton

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vix-anderton/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Forging Resilience. Exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership, join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. Today, on Forging Resilience, we're joined by Vix. Vix Anderton, who served with the Royal Air Force for 10 years and before entering the international development sector, and now she is a coach for perfectionism and productivity and chronic overthinkers. Vix, welcome Welcome to Forging Resilience.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me, for having me here.

Speaker 1:

No problems. Our paths crossed through a mutual contact and your work was in of instant interest to me. Around the subjects of perfectionism, um, it relates very deeply and I guess we'll get on to that in a minute. But just give us a snapshot of your background and and what led you to to coaching yeah, oh well, I think you've covered most of that in a nutshell already.

Speaker 2:

So, after graduating university, I joined the Royal Air Force. I was an intelligence officer for 10 years, through the noughts and the early 2010s. I left for a whole bunch of reasons, but, uh, but essentially it was like I think there might be something else for me to be doing out in the world. Um found myself in the international development sector and um dropped myself into, uh, burnout, um, after I don't know, maybe two and a half three years, like it didn't. It didn't take very long, and so my, my kind of path into coaching was, uh, the, yeah, the kind of nauseatingly archetypal wounded healer kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

Um, and especially the work that I do now with with perfectionism, very much came from my wake-up call that, oh, this might have been the thing for me all along, and this sense of pernicious pernicious, not enoughness that somehow worked for me in the military, or at least was manageable enough in the military. And then, without the, without that support, without my peer group, I don't know something changed when I left and, yeah, I worked myself into the ground. So a lot of this for me was I had a mantra back then, which was what would it be like to have a life that I didn't need, a holiday from? It's kind of where this all started.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, love it. And now I live in the beautiful tropical holiday island of Bali, holiday from it's kind of where this all, where this all started. Yeah, yeah, love it.

Speaker 2:

Well, now I live in the beautiful tropical holiday island of barley, so maybe something in that came true good for you.

Speaker 1:

Well, what took you? Or what, what, what initiated your interest in joining? Joining the forces?

Speaker 2:

um, my father was in the air force, so I grew up in an air force family. Um, I swore blind that I, you know, went to university and I was like, yep, never doing that again. That sounds like a terrible idea and, um, and I really missed it. I really missed the, the sense of community and belonging, like even as a dependent. Uh, when I went to university I remember going to a ball and just this, the transactional nature of the relationships. It felt so different to some of the, the air force balls that I had been to as a, you know, a teenager. Um, so I joined, uh, joined the otc at manchester, so played around the army for about a year or two years and we were getting all like the career talks. I was like that's not joining the army. I've got more sense than that. Um, but you know I was exploring, you know I explored, um, well, I mean especially like 20 years ago, the army as a woman was not a particularly attractive place to be, um.

Speaker 2:

I so explored the foreign office, um, and looked at kind of private banking and finance. I did an internship in the city and hated it and, um, the thing that, the thing that made how to make the decision was going to, uh, the selection center at cranwell and feeling a sense of belonging that I hadn't felt for for three years at that point it was like oh, like these are, these are my people, um, so yeah, that was the kind of the.

Speaker 2:

It was a total accident. I had never any plan to do it, um, but I found myself in a place where, um, I, I belonged, and while I wasn't particularly good at officer training, I was a really good intelligence officer so what makes a good intelligence officer then, in your opinion?

Speaker 2:

that's a good question. Um, I think it's an ability to synthesize and filter information and to be able to convey that to the people who need it in a way that has them listen. Um, so I had colleagues who were like much better at reconnaissance than I were. You know, they'd look at a picture of a plane and be like, oh, that's a, you know, like the real off, and I'd be like it's a plane. But I think my, my strength was I could, I could read, you know, volumes of intelligence reports and and bring it down to like what is it that my commanding officer, that my squadron needs to know? And then to be able to convey that in this relational way that had them pay attention. You know, when I spoke, when I briefed, people listened, um, and I, I think it's. I think it's that kind of. It's the mix. You need both. You need the, the facts, and the, the immersion in the information, the credibility.

Speaker 1:

But you also need to be able to connect with people and have them pay attention to what you're saying no, definitely, and it's an art and, no doubt, something you learned and practiced a lot and and developed over those, over those 10 years service and and during a very interesting period as well, we might add yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

I joined in 2005, so we were a couple of years into the war in Iraq and a couple of years away from kicking off operations in Afghanistan. Saw some really interesting times in headquarters at Qatar. There's a lot going on. Yeah, it was an interesting time to be in.

Speaker 1:

Talk to us about your burnout. What did that actually physically look like, you know, and emotionally look like for you?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so the the the day I realized that there might be something wrong. I um, my, my company was paying for all of us on the cd leadership team to have um coaching and so I had my kind of my session with my coach and, um, uh, at the end of my session she kind of looked at me and said fix, on a scale of one to ten, like how stressed would you say that you were? It's like I don't know, maybe a three or a four. And she just looked at me like I just started sprouting something out of my head like her sheer disbelief. And she's like you've just spent the best part of three hours crying. And you told me that you started the day sat on the bathroom floor at work crying, like I think there's something going on for you. So I was like, okay, she's like maybe you want to call your GP. Okay, this feels weird, but I did and I remember calling them. You know you have to call before 8 am to be able to speak to anybody. And I said what was going on? I needed to point with the GP. And they're like okay, and 20 minutes later the doctor ran me back and was asking me questions like um, what was I thinking about harming myself and I.

Speaker 2:

That was when I was, oh, oh, there's, there's something really wrong here. Um, so practically what that looked like. I'd stopped taking lunch breaks, I was working weekends. I had no concept of what enough was anymore. I was in this weird situation where all of my peers on the leadership team were 10 years older than me. All of my peers, age wise, were junior people in the company. So I'd gone from the situation in the Air Force where I had, you know, a whole cohort of you know peers within the intelligence branch, plus peers within the Royal Air Force and beyond. So, you know, and I'd get a report, you know, and I'd get rated and you know I was getting approved for you know promotion and things like that.

Speaker 2:

I knew exactly how good I was, and I was in this environment where I didn't know what good looked like anymore, and so my assumption was well, it's not enough. And so I did more, and I did more, and I did more and, yeah, I found myself crying on the bathroom floor, having panic attacks as a fairly regular occurrence the support network in when you were serving to, to highlight that there might be something worth looking at in terms of burnout and stress.

Speaker 2:

Do you think I? I? I don't. I don't think so. Um, I, I had some real challenges with the boss of mine on on a tour and it was quite well known that I was having problems and nobody did anything. Um, so I'm not convinced that burnout, um, and that kind of emotional well-being would have been particularly well cared for and spotted. But I also don't think it would have.

Speaker 2:

It wasn't a thing that I experienced as an issue while I was serving, and I think one of the stories I have around that is this idea that, a little bit like being at school, you know, you're given grades, like you know exactly what to do to get an A on an exam right, and I thrived in that. Tell me what to do, tell me I'm good at it and I will, I will be good at it. Um, where I, where I struggled I think this is probably one of the reasons why I struggled on officer training a little bit, um, and then struggled subsequently was I didn't know what. I didn't know what they wanted, I didn't know what good looked like, and one of the ways perfectionism manifests for me and a lot of my clients is this, this assumption that it's never good enough and so, without very clear external feedback, that said no, it is. And even then, like I was never quite convinced, I was like always have to do a little bit more, surely? Um, but yeah, without that and I think this is like a big challenge for those of us that choose to work for ourselves and we do more creative work there isn't that feedback.

Speaker 2:

You know, you put something out on social media, you're like did, did I not do it right did?

Speaker 2:

did it just not get picked up by the arc? Who, who knows? And I, you know I prepare myself. You know I see your posts on linkedin. I'm like, oh, I was getting like loads more comments off his stuff than I am and does that mean I'm not doing enough, doesn't want me doing it right, and it's like that that story is is toxic where can you trace that story to do you think viggs?

Speaker 2:

this is a really good question and one that I'm like, I'm kind of really playing with myself at the moment, so I can tell you a version of this story that is deeply personal right, boarding school, moving around a lot as a child, um being praised a lot for, um academic success. You know, I think most people have got probably a version of that personal story. But I actually think this is, this is social conditioning. I think it's um, I think it's internalized oppression, um there's, you look at, like the characteristics of white supremacy culture. One of those is perfectionism.

Speaker 2:

Uh, there's a, an economic concept called taylorism, um, which sort of developed in the early 19th century as a way of measuring efficient output, and it's that it's the waters that we swim in, that in late stage industrial capitalism, we are constantly demanded more, do more, perform more, be better. Self-help industry has us believe that we're broken. Fix yourself, work on this, be better at this. It's like this constant and we've just deeply internalized these stories. So I think for most people there's probably, you know, a version of that story that's personal, that makes sense for them. But increasingly I'm like this is not an individual problem.

Speaker 1:

Perfectionism is a symptom of neoliberal capitalism and the structures of oppression and inequality that we we're living in I think it's really interesting what you say there and if I was to take you back slightly, what you're saying is it really resonates say I'm not good enough, doing more and more, and even when we do get that feedback, they're just saying that don't buy into it, it's never enough, it never is enough. So so from my, from my, am I understanding? Then you think this is something that is is just the human condition? It's happened to a, it happens to be aligned with how we see the world and politics and and industry and capitalism, or or do you believe it's something a bit deeper and darker and that is fed to us?

Speaker 2:

I think it's more the latter um. I don't like to pathologize it, because perfectionism to me seems like a very sensible coping strategy in the face of all of that. So there's a part of me that kind of wants to celebrate it. It's the way that I learned to keep myself safe and to belong in the world that we are, to belong in the world that we are um.

Speaker 2:

But I think the idea that it is just an individual um issue, I think is part of the problem. Like we live in this hyper individualized world that says, well, if only you were a bit better, then it would all be fine, right. And so I I think there is something about saying like it's not you, you're not broken, we, we exist in this deeply toxic culture. Like it's, it's wrecking the planet, we're overshooting all of the planetary boundaries. It's leaving us deeply disembodied and connect, disconnected from our natural states in the ecosystem, deeply disconnected from each other, from ourselves. And um, yeah, that it, that it. It might not just be you, um, but this is I'm not going to say that that you know. I think there's a kind of a cabal that is actively teaching us to be this. I think it is is the consequence of, um yeah, capitalism, and then, uh, colonialism and the the various other isms that kind of come along come along with the way that power works in our, in our world yeah, and it's a really interesting one.

Speaker 1:

I don't necessarily have a response, I'm not. I'm not going to give one on that, but but the fascinating thing for me about perfectionism and how it showed up for me and what I'm hearing with you is it's also got some really good results. So we've got some evidence as to why it works and how it's so easy to fall back in to that, to those patterns or cycles as you refer them to.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I deeply believe in the inherent intelligence of our bodies and our beings, that we don't choose coping strategies that don't work.

Speaker 2:

And this can be the really hard thing about recovering from perfectionism or divesting from perfectionism. There's a part of me that's like but that was working for me for a really long time, and so part of me that's like but, but that was working for me for a really long time, and so part of the process I think in recovery like recovering from anything is is acknowledging oh, this isn't working, like this is actually coming with a really high cost and it's coming with consequences. And whilst I don't actually even like to say that there is a healthy form of perfectionism, there are some traits that I think are correlated with perfectionism, but that I need to be able to learn to do something different. So there's a way of tackling perfectionism that is reinforcing it, which says this is the problem, and if only I can fix my perfectionism, then I will. Which says this is the problem, and if only I can fix my perfectionism, then then I will be a whole and happy person.

Speaker 1:

I'll be perfect exactly that's like.

Speaker 2:

That's the issue in it in a nutshell. So there's something about recognizing okay, I'm a flawed, messy human being and this is a coping strategy that I've learned. I don't have to make it wrong and at the same time, I can also choose to extend my range and learn new coping mechanisms. I can build my capacity, my resilience, to deal with the world in a different way. That doesn't mean that perfectionism never comes up. It comes up for me in increasingly subtle ways, and if the pressures are on enough, it's not so subtle. My body defaults to like well, this, this works, let's go back to it. Um and so, for me, it's a constant, it's a, it's a practice of. You know, I spent 40 years being a perfectionist.

Speaker 2:

It's going to take more than four minutes to practice something different, for that to become my default. If I'm really lucky, then I'm kind of hoping that in 20 years my perfectionism won't be the thing for me. But who knows, maybe, maybe I'll be there and I'll be 18. Damn it.

Speaker 1:

That's the perfectionism creeping in again yeah, I, I personally think I will, but the, the, the volume or the intensity or the necessity of it has been turned right down, because for me it's how I've been, maybe partly shown, also how I've learned to see the world and, just like you said, after so many years of practicing, it's quite an art to undo, because I know you wrote a book on perfectionism. How was that, as a perfectionist, writing a book on perfectionism?

Speaker 2:

oh, I actually wrote about this in the final chapter because it it, yeah, it was really confronting in some ways, like aspects of it felt really easy and and really natural. And um, there were places where it, yeah, it got really. It got really the name, for example, got really sticky of like they said, well, there's got to, there's got to be a right answer to this, which, for me, is another kind of manifestation of perfectionism. And um, and I, you know, I did all the things you're meant to do.

Speaker 2:

I did some like for market research and I got feedback from them and I was sat with these titles and I was like I don't like any of these, like I don't want to talk about this with this title and um, and I know that the title is now enough and there was just something in my body that went it's this and I don't. I don't care whether it means less people read it, fewer people read it, I care that it feels authentic, um, and and that for me, has been a big, a big shift in my journey with perfectionism to like prioritize how it feels for me and my authenticity, my integrity in the world over what other people might think and how it's something is is validated externally.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, that was one way that it it showed up um and I guess, I guess there'd have been many little obstacles and hurdles along that way.

Speaker 1:

And what I find interesting that you you spoke about there is I coached somebody this morning, my coach, um, I coached my coach and recorded it because I want to use it as a podcast. So that brought a lot of things up within me and he, we were talking around yeah, it not being enough, not being enough, and and and something else, but that, when I personally recognized that I was a messy, faulty human being, there was such a release of energy and emotion, but also the recognition of all the other stuff that I'd forgotten about myself. That was always there, which comes back to me, I think, for authenticity is what you touched on there. So how have you started the process of processing this perfectionism and potentially the antidote, if ever there was one? Or I don't want to say countermeasure, it's too strong of a word but the attention or the amount of focus or power that you give that, what things have you done or or that you help your clients with to help them move forward?

Speaker 2:

um. So my glib answer is that the antidote to perfectionism is wholeness. Right, it's. It's a fundamental shift in that narrative that from I am not enough to I'm whole, you know, with all, all the messiness and all the rest of it. That journey is like that's not an easy overnight, you know, just flip switch and change that story. Unfortunately, for me, embodied practice has been fundamental to this Perfectionism, like lives in my head.

Speaker 1:

So what does embodied practice look like to somebody that maybe not aware of that type of work or exercise?

Speaker 2:

yeah. So one way to think about in embodiment and somatic work is um, it's, it's fundamentally working with the way that we are. So our embodiment is our, our shaping, our body language, our posture, um, and we, we learn certain ways of being. That shows up in in our, in our physical shaping and by by notice. So embodied self-awareness invites us to come into our body as I, rather than like the mindful, like objective, I look my hand, so it's experiencing the body as I, noticing the usually unconscious patterns that we have in the way that we hold ourselves and interact with the world, and through that awareness building range. So a really an obvious example would be people who tend to feel less confident, tend to there can be a pattern there of smallifying in some way. Yeah, they kind of like try to make their body a little bit smaller, like, how do I take up less space? Because I have a story that I don't deserve to take up space, right? Um, so that can be like this habitual pattern. So you can then develop embodied range by starting to practice something different, and we can do that with the mind, but we can also physically do that with the body, like even before you feel confident, you can start to put your body in a shape that takes up more space and notice how that changes your present moment perception and the choices that are available to you in the future. So embodied practice can incorporate all sorts of modalities. So dance, yoga, embodied meditation, um, for me it's been two in particular.

Speaker 2:

So I work with a practice called authentic relating, which is a conscious communication practice. So it's both about how do I listen more deeply to people in my life, but also how do I, how do, how am I me in in connection, which, for perfectionists, can be really scary like. Brene Brown describes perfectionism as a 20-ton shield that we carry around hoping to keep us safe, but all it does is cut us off. Okay, so there's something about the practice of like. How do I learn to like, drop the shield and open up the armor and be like yeah, this is, this is me. I don't have it all figured out. So authentic relating has been a huge part of that for me, and the other one is cyclical living. So I came to that particularly through menstrual cycle awareness, which, as a woman, is a deeply kind of embodied experience. But the principles of cyclical living apply to all types of humans. We projects have a natural rhythm and cycle to them, and so for me, cyclical living has been a permission slip not to be on all the time, and again it's like a framework that helps me make sense of my experience and again like not making myself rock. So, yeah, those two practices in particular, um and I was actually talking about this today, about the, the potent, the potency that comes with me when those two practices get get mixed together um, and our ability.

Speaker 2:

Most perfectionists like to see the world black and white. It's either or. It's either good or it's bad, and there's no middle ground. I either succeeded or I failed. And because our criteria for success are so narrow, actually, we'll often quite poorly define that most perfectionists will find it very difficult to articulate what their standards are, but they're very narrow, so there are huge potential for failure. Oh, I just totally lost my train of thought with that. Either or thinking right, so yeah, so it's got this kind of black or white, and quite often we end up in the the failure part. Authentic. Relating in one way is about this polarity of like. How am I holding both my authenticity and the relationship at the same time? It it's not either or. Cyclical living is the same, like it's based on the poles of. You know, the height of summer energy and the depths of winter energy, and then these transitions. So for me that's been this incredible teaching of oh, it might be both and Right, both and right, I can be whole and complete as a human being.

Speaker 2:

And still have all of these things that I want to learn in the world and things I want to get better at, like the either or thinking would tell me well, it can't be both right. I can't want to learn new things and feel whole at this and accept myself. That's not possible. But authentic, relating and cyclical living for me, like yeah, totally both of those things are possible at the same time. I'm big enough and smart enough to to contain all of that so.

Speaker 1:

So why is it, do you think, as humans, we revert to? To not being able to see that or to struggle to hold that?

Speaker 2:

um, at a very basic level, I would say stress, okay, and I mean like stress in the nervous system, okay. So when our nervous system is activated, we tend to default to binary either, or thinking right, either this is a threat or I'm safe, like you're either friend or foe. Um, because it gives us simplicity to be able to move away from things that are dangerous. Beautiful, yeah, really beautiful, like the way our nervous system evolves is intricate and and and so deeply impressive, and we live in a world that is full of stress. Now, whether that's your iphone blinking at you or you know just these really fundamental.

Speaker 2:

Our housing isn't secure, right, most of us are, at best one health scare away from losing our homes, right, and that's that's a lot of us with a lot of privilege, a lot of people in the world who don't don't even have that. You know a lot of people who are worrying about how they feed their kids next week. Yeah, we live in this world, but for most of us a few billionaires aside like our basic needs aren't guaranteed. There's no global commons anymore and that deep level of stress and anxiety. You then throw eco-anxiety into that.

Speaker 2:

We are witnessing a genocide happening on our phones, in our hands. Like our nervous systems aren't designed, you haven't evolved to cope with that, and so we revert to this, this binary thinking. So there's something about resilience, how we, how we nurture resilience, how we expand our window of tolerance, our capacity to be with uncertainty and to be with the spaces in between the binary, the certainty. Right, it's hard being in the middle, it's hard being with the both end, because there's all this possibility, which can feel great a lot of the time, but actually possibility also feels vulnerable and uncertain and well, I don't know what, what possibility is going to come true, or if any of them are.

Speaker 2:

So, um, yeah, fundamentally, we're all stressed yeah like nearly all of the time, and in a in a deep, in a deep deep like soul level kind of kind of way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's fascinating. I'm lost in what you're saying there Cause it really triggers a lot of things within me, a bit like a slap in the face. Yeah, so so interesting.

Speaker 2:

Nobody else is going to get that reference, by the way.

Speaker 1:

Sorry, that doesn't matter, they didn't, they didn't need to until now. So, yeah, I'm not even going to refer it, but it was, yeah. I think my coping mechanism then is to avoid. So I bury my hat, I turn off. This is a question.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to go a place where I wanted to go with you is so in terms of I, I can remember consciously stepping away from the news and media.

Speaker 1:

I think for me, several things happen in quick succession um, along the lines of brexit and just seeing and at this time I was in the security industry, so I spent a lot of time away from home um, so obviously my brain was looking for a lot of pleasure there, so it was social media and distractions and YouTube and videos, bombarded constantly with all the Brexit.

Speaker 1:

Then there was something around the independence votes here in Catalonia and all the problems that was going on there, and then there was a couple of other things as well. Yeah, then ISIS coming across the border and there's all these things, and I thought I don't need to have that in my life. I don't even to the point of I don't watch certain types of tv programs because I don't want to feel that level of fear. I want to reserve that for for something that I want, but my question to you really is vick. So so I, I know, I sense that you, you, you, you wear this pain or you feel this pain of the what's happening to the world and war, and and how do you process that from from what is happening?

Speaker 2:

it's such a, it's such a good question, um, and I do want to say I don't blame anybody for turning away like it's. It's a lot um, and I think for for a lot of people, and myself included, like there are days I just don't have the capacity. Like you know, there's stuff going on in my own life, or you know just where I'm in my menstrual cycle, for example, and like I, I just know, like I don't have the capacity for that today and um, and I really don't blame anybody like I think like self-care in this is important and there's no point in everybody flooding themselves because we're no more effective at that point. One of the principles I come back to time and time again is from trauma-informed practice, which is this idea of titration. How might I touch into this just enough for me today? Yeah, it's not my job to save the world, um, which again, actually, I think is a bit of perfectionist, thinking right that somehow it's all my responsibility. Like, what might be just enough for me to be with today?

Speaker 2:

Um, I'm really enjoying, um, the work that reconnects with joanna macy at the moment, and there's this beautiful question of um, what might be mine to do? Okay, so I don't have to fix it all, but I can, you know, I can turn towards it just enough. And then, what might be mine to do, which you know for me, like when, um, uh, the israeli campaign started, this time around in gaza, um, in october was I, I found a litter of kittens. Six day old kittens were abandoned, and so the thing that was mine to do was to rescue these little kittens and to bottle feed them, and that became my like that, if there's horror in the world, that became my thing for, uh, for several months.

Speaker 2:

Um, I also have a wonderful teacher called Rachel Blackman who, uh, I've done a lot of kind of embodied soul work with recently, and she talks about like being with bodies that are bigger than ours. So it's like I'm only a little human, like my physical body, my nervous system can only hold so much, but when I can connect to you, to those beautiful trees outside my window, there's a, there's a river, there's the sky, there's all of these bodies that are bigger than mine that might help me hold some of this. Um, yeah, so those are. Those are some of the things you know. Movement helps, um, meditation, journaling.

Speaker 2:

We've been doing a lot of grief rituals recently those have been powerful, um, they can take various forms, but essentially in a group setting, which is really rare, I think, in the western world. To be with our grief with other people is, um, simple rituals, to to speak your grief into the group. So some are done with um with a stone. So you hold a stone and you speak your grief and stones become like a pile. You know the ones, what they're called pans. You know when you balance them up.

Speaker 2:

I did one recently where we were invited to bring a bowl of water, and so when you spoke your grief, you use the water to mark tears on your face, and anybody who felt that grief as well, silently, would mark their tears. There's just something for me about turning towards my grief and my pain, not, yeah, acknowledging it, being with others and and also not staying there. So a lot of this work can often start with a gratitude, so you name it a gratitude, before turning towards the grief and then naming a a glimmer. So, uh, it's the name. Oh, dead dana talks about glimmers. It's like the opposite of triggers. So you know, even even in the midst of all of this, like what is something that's still bringing you joy? And, um, I was at one at the weekend and, uh, hector was talking about this idea that emotions come in pairs. So we're back to polarity. Emotions come in pairs so that we, we can't experience love without grief yeah, I love that loss.

Speaker 2:

You know we can't. We don't experience courage without fear, like they come in pairs. And back to this idea of wholeness. For me, this is what it means. To be human is to be able to be with the fullness of my experience, and that includes the grief as well as the joy.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's brilliant. I love that and it's fascinating to hear you speak. And it's something that there's a deep desire within myself is to, if I can, if I can, give my kids two percent of the knowledge or the tools that I've been exposed to or learned now in my 40s to them, then it's two more. I I've spoken about this before balanced little humans in the world who potentially might do that for someone. So, yeah, I stand behind my hiding from all of that's projected, because for me, it comes back to me. It comes back to me, so I don't need to be informed. The perfectionist in me would have said you need to know to be able to hold a discussion, whereas now I choose to say, well, I don't feel I do, and if I, if I can which is fascinating because this is what it comes down to move, speak and express, and that's what I'm teaching two more people. And then my, my, my dream is that they, they, they do the same in their own way, shape and form, which seems so sometimes.

Speaker 2:

So I don't know, not, not pathetic's not the word, that's the one that came out to me, but it's not, it seems so, so little yeah, we're back to this question like what is enough, like what is what is mine to do in the face of this and um, and I really don't want to oversimplify things, but it does strike me that, um, nervous systems with more capacity, like the more my nervous system can hold discomfort and pain and and stay, to stay in that place where I'm resourced and creative and, most importantly, connected. Like that might not fix all of the world's problems, but it's.

Speaker 1:

It's a really good foundation yeah, it's not a bad start yeah, um so.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, there are days where, like for me, like when I'm tritrating, like that is absolutely enough, right, and then there are days where I feel more resourced and like, oh no, I that there is more, that there is more there is for me to do in the world, um, but I'm really increasingly leaning away from this idea that somehow and this is, you know, this is my responsibility that I have to fix fix the world that.

Speaker 2:

I have to make an impact that I have to do something big. No, this could be like really small, like might be. I don't know whether it's enough. I don't know what enough looks like. I was just going to say what is enough, but it might at I don't know what enough looks like I was just going to say what is enough, but it might, at the same time, it might be, that might be enough. I might allow myself the possibility that that could be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, what's coming to me is what the guy who I coached this morning, his words I've written them down as they came to me is that there's nothing to fix and that's reflected back onto me. That's like there's nothing to fix and that's reflected back onto me Like that's what you were alluding to earlier there's nothing to fix. This is okay. This is okay.

Speaker 2:

I say this in all my workshops, you know, because there's this tendency, as people are sharing, to like, want to fix and caretake and like how do I make somebody's experience better? I'm like that's play with presence. Like nobody here is broken, despite what the self-help industry tells us. None of us are broken. We're doing our best in what I would consider like really broken systems, but we're not broken, we don't need fixing. And you know, I was teaching this morning, teaching authentic relating, and there was some discomfort, some conflict that kind of arose between a couple of participants and like, like that gets to be here too, like I'm not, I'm not scared of that as a facilitator or as less and less as a person, um, because like it doesn't need fixing. There's, there's wisdom in that too. There's wisdom in the resistance and the nose, and I don't I don't have to be perfect is what it kind of comes back to um like I, the the messiness is.

Speaker 1:

Messiness is part of it yeah, yeah, it's the way we, we, the way we learn to see it, the way we learn to frame it. I guess, is what? What comes to me, then, because I've loved this conversation is there anything else that you would want to add, or you would want to put in there, or that we could talk about?

Speaker 2:

that would make it valuable for you, oh, oh I don't know, I I can like talk about this stuff for hours if you let me. Um, I don't, I don't. There's nothing that like particularly comes to mind and it it's interesting at some effect that there's like I can, I can sense the little perfectionist part in there somewhere that's like, oh, oh, is there something more like, oh, maybe did I miss anything. Oh, I better make sure I get the most value out of this. Why all of that kind of voice kicks in and then I'm like what if? What if? What if this was exactly what if this was enough?

Speaker 1:

It is, I know it is, and so I thank you for your time and your insights and conversation, and I'll put the notes, the links in this conversation. But where can people find a little bit more about you and the work you do, vix?

Speaker 2:

I'm pretty easily Google-able. There aren't a lot of Vix Andertons in the world, so my website is vixandertoncom, or I'm on Instagram with that handle. Linkedin is the places I hang out most.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant. Thanks very much for today. I really appreciate it, Vicks. It meant a lot.

Speaker 2:

You're really welcome. Thanks, Eric.