Montages
On Legally Blonde, dishes and laundry, and pacing myself on the way to my goals.
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The montage above is one of my favorite scenes in cinematic history. Whenever I need some instant motivation to accomplish a task - big or small - that feels impossible, I turn on the song playing in the clip above and get moving.
Big - unexpectedly packing up the majority of my belongings solo, and flying across the country to move back in with my parents after deciding that a theater apprenticeship out west wasn't right for me.
“Small” - doing a massive load of laundry after avoiding it for weeks.
That montage somehow always gives me a huge boost of energy and triggers my sense of personal injustice.* Suddenly, the idea that I think I can’t do it, makes me want to do whatever is even more.
Aforementioned song, playing in the clip above!
*What the clip above doesn’t show is Warner telling Elle that she’s not smart enough for law school. Hence Elle Woods storming off to prove just how wrong he is. A true icon.
I’ve always wished that movie montages would display a little time box in the corner of the screen, showing us how long it took our protagonist to achieve their goal. There are usually cues like seasons changing, but I’d like an exact time period. Was it weeks? Months? Exactly how many parties did Elle miss to get her 179 LSAT Score? (Or 175 if you’re listening to the musical soundtrack.)
In real life, there are no such cinematic montages as we work towards our goals. Our storylines don’t wrap up neatly with a beginning, middle, and end in roughly ninety minutes to two hours. It can take years and years to work towards the lofty goals that movie and TV stars, and characters in books, inspire us to achieve in sped-up windows of time.
Elle Woods didn’t ace being a law student overnight. She studied long and hard. She took breaks. She got frustrated. She thought about giving up. She persisted.
She didn’t sprint. She ran a marathon and maintained her stamina.
In the past, I’ve been a very all-or-nothing girl; either I’m doing a million things at once at a made-up montage pace, or I get nothing done at all. I’m going at full speed, or I’m lying horizontal. Incorporating moderation into my life has been a goal for quite some time now.
Lately, I’ve been consciously trying to break tasks up into smaller chunks.
Some everyday examples include…
I rarely unload the dishwasher all at once anymore. I do the top and bottom racks separately. I also don’t immediately reload it. I walk away, do something else, and then come to put the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher. Then, I walk away, do something else, and come back to wash the dishes that can’t go in the dishwasher. Not always in that exact order, but you get the point.
A new one - I procrastinated taking my laundry drying rack down for days last week because I automatically associated disassembling that rack with folding all the laundry. Eventually, I took the dry clothes off the rack, tossed them in the bin with the other clothes I hadn’t folded yet, and disassembled the rack. Taking down the drying rack and folding the actual clothes can be separate tasks.
It’s easier to write about these new practices of mine than it is to keep implementing them. And actually, it’s not that easy to write about this either. Part of me is nervous that you’re reading this and thinking “God, she’s lazy. How hard is it to just do your laundry! I thought we were talking about real goals, like being a lawyer!” because that’s what my inner critic says when I’m on the couch not doing my laundry.
But a bigger part of me is thinking - a lot of you have inner critics like mine, and maybe reading this will be validating. I hope that it is.
I wish that cleaning my house could be as easy as clicking on someone’s Instagram story where it says “tap to clean.” I love watching a messy kitchen become pristine within seconds.
I wish that I could get all kinds of things done super quickly without taking breaks.
But those are unrealistic standards for me.
And anyway, that’s not actually what I wish for. What I really want is more grace - for myself, and for all of us. And I also want us to start extending more grace to each other.
Remember what I said about the personal sense of injustice earlier? That I love to do things sometimes, just because people think I can’t, or because a task seems really ambitious?
I’m not being more gentle with myself and honoring my authentic rhythm and energy, because I can’t accomplish certain tasks at a movie montage speed.
I could force myself to clean my entire house from top to bottom in a day and absolutely exhaust myself. But for what?
I’m learning to live in moderation because I no longer want to lean into that “prove myself” energy. And I’m tired of exhausting myself.
As Jonathan Van Ness says, “just because you Ameri-can, doesn’t mean you Ameri-should.”
Just because I could sprint to the goal, doesn’t mean that I should. Speed isn’t everything. I’m far more interested in consistency.
Last Fall, after one of my clients accomplished an exciting goal at work, she said something to the effect of, “I’m proud of myself for achieving this, but I’m more proud of the person I was on the way to achieving it. I’m realizing that it’s less about the goal itself, and more about how I show up.
I couldn’t love this sentiment more.
I don’t want to be so busy running to reach the finish line, that I’m unaware of what’s going on both around me and inside me while I’m running. I want to be thoughtful and intentional about how I show up for every step. I want to have enough bravery and courage to stop and pivot, or even just turn around if I realize that I’m nearing a destination that doesn’t align with my values anymore. I want to remain open to becoming a different person towards the end of the journey, than I was at the start.
I hope I’m different at the end than I am at the start.
I love a story where someone gets what they want and then realizes that they don’t want it anymore. The montage gives us a glimpse into the external changes in a protagonist’s life, and how their outer world is changing. If we’re lucky, we also get a glimpse of how their inner world is likely shifting too. By the end of the journey, the character is transformed.
Elle did exactly what she set out to do. She established herself as a “serious” lawyer and won Warner back. But in the process of transforming herself, she realized that she didn’t want him anymore. And so she turned him down, in one of the most legendary scenes of all time.
Elle also realized that she could achieve her goals and stay true to her authentic self. Authenticity and change are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes becoming someone “new” is really all about unlocking new parts of yourself.
You might be wondering why I wrote about cleaning goals and life/career goals in the same essay. They both matter. The ‘admin tasks’ of adulthood, as my friends and I call them, can be just as hard - and sometimes even harder - to stay on top of as “professional” tasks.
At work, your boss will probably ask how your Q1 goals or going. (And if you’re the boss, you likely still have some kind of system that creates accountability.)
At home, you might be the CEO, associate, assistant, and office manager all wrapped into one. Whether you live alone, with roommates, or with family, it can be so much harder to stay on top of what we label as ‘easy tasks’ like laundry.
I don’t want to stop setting big goals for myself. I want to continue to dream big and then set myself up for success by breaking my goals down into increments. I want to hold myself accountable. I want to set up checkpoints while I’m running the race so that I can take a break, catch my breath, and make sure I’m still on the right track.
I also don’t want to go it alone. That’s why I’m so grateful for the support of my community, especially my coaches.
Yep, plural. I work with two of them.
Characters in movies, TV shows, and books, seldom achieve their goals alone. The main character always has support on the way to success. The friendly classmate who helped Elle when she couldn’t reach a book in the library. The sorority sisters who helped her keep track of time while taking practice tests before the LSAT. The friends who celebrated her victory with her, and showed up to her trial when she defended Brooke Wyndham.
One of my favorite pieces of advice is to stay far away from people who try to convince you that they know everything.
My second favorite piece of advice is to ask for help. No one does it alone.
The last person I ever want to take advice or guidance from is the person who tries to convince me that they’ve figured everything out by themselves. We’re all. imperfect, and we all need support, and we’re wired for connection, as Brené Brown taught us.
We need cheerers. And people doing the hard things and people cheering for the people doing the hard things. I wish everybody had cheerers. I wish teachers had people outside their classrooms with signs and like, ER nurses.
-Glennon Doyle, We Can Do Hard Things Episode 45
For what it’s worth, I’m totally cheering you on.
Also, I really only used the race metaphor so I could get the whole marathon vs. sprint point across. This isn’t a race. Your only competition is you!
(On any given day, I might roll my eyes so hard at that last sentence. It’s true, and yet I’m so steeped in comparison sometimes, that sentences like that make me cringe. But I’m determined to work on comparing myself to others, so I’ll leave the sentence there and try not to cringe too much.)
If you need some support on your journey, I’m always here. I love popping into your inbox every Wednesday.
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