I was about halfway through my Zoom call with my mentor Brett the other morning when I heard myself say something that felt worth writing down.
He asked how I was doing.
I could tell it wasn’t the automatic version of that question. It was the real one. So I went ahead and told them the truth, which was that I wasn’t in a rut; I was just in a hole.
I feel like there’s a subtle difference that matters.
A rut sounds like something broken. Like you’ve stopped moving and things are going sideways.
A hole is different. A hole is just a thing that happens on the road. You’re walking along and then you’re not on the road anymore.
You’re standing in a hole, looking up at where you just were, wondering how long it’s gonna take to get back there.
Over the course of my lifetime I’ve been in plenty of holes and it used to take me a good six months to a year to get out of them. I’d wander around the bottom looking for handholds and trying different things until eventually stumbling onto something that worked to get myself out.
I never really had a plan. It was more just about survival and luck.
Over the years what’s changed for me isn’t that the holes disappeared, because I can promise you, there’s no version of the road that’s pothole-free. Ain’t nobody handing those out.
What changed is that now I have a ladder.
I have an actual process that I built out of enough time in the hole to know it works.
And the first thing I told Brett was that I could feel myself back on it. Not at the top. And definitely not out of the hole yet. But on the ladder. Moving.
That part used to take me months just to find my way to. Now it takes weeks. Sometimes less.
But the thing I didn’t tell Brett and that I’ve been thinking about all morning is that simply having a ladder doesn’t get you out of the hole. There’s actually a few more pieces to it and you really can’t skip any of them.
The first step might seem a little obvious but it’s just to realize that you’re in a hole to begin with. The reality is your behavior shifts long before your awareness does. What happens is you start pressing up against resistance and making little adjustments until one day you look around and you’re not where you used to be.
You got where you are gradually because that’s how holes work. They don’t just announce themselves.
The second step is making sure you even have a ladder. Most people don’t.
When they finally do realize that they’re in a hole, they don’t have anything ready so they start looking around the bottom for materials to build a ladder with, trying to improvise something to climb out with.
The thing is, that’s a long process and it’s probably how you’re going to spend the next six months if you don’t have your ladder ready.
The third step, and this is the one nobody really talks about, is actually getting on the ladder. Even after you see yourself in a hole and even after you’ve built your ladder, you can see your ladder and know it’s there and you can know exactly what you need to do.
And you can still just stand at the bottom and stare at the ladder.
I know because I’ve done that too many times. I’ve looked at the ladder and then looked at the long climb up and thought, “Man this is going to take a while. This isn’t going to be easy.”
The thing is, sometimes I just stayed there much longer than I had to because that ladder looked a lot harder to tackle than just standing there did.
To actually get on the ladder, it takes a little something else. It’s a combination of the right time and the right conversation for sure but then it’s also just mostly about getting tired enough of where you’re at that the climb starts to look like relief instead of effort.
This morning felt like one of those mornings.
Here’s the thing about self-help, and I say this as someone who reads a lot of it. It’s mostly about not falling into holes.
It teaches you to try to lengthen the time between falling into holes, how to avoid the common pitfalls and learn the different patterns, or to build the right routines.
I’m not saying all of that’s not useful because it is. But, if we’re being honest most of it silently implies that if you do the work the holes become optional. I know they don’t say it that way but that’s definitely what the message implies.
And that’s the part that makes it harder when you do fall into a hole anyway.
Because now you’ve got the rut story and the failure story on top of the hole, which makes the climb twice as long.
Holes aren’t a sign you did something wrong. They’re part of the road. The real work is learning to see them faster. Build the ladder before you need it. Get on it sooner. Shorten the climb.
I’m climbing right now.
That’s enough.
Trail marker for the week: What’s the last hole you got out of, and what actually got you on the ladder?