Did you just yada-yada through your own life?

A lesson about not doing life on 2X speed

Have you ever seen that great Seinfeld episode where Elaine yada-yadas through her story about a bad date she went on? Jerry tries to give advice but realizes Elaine left big important chunks out of the story by yada-yadaing through it, and hilarity ensues.

A couple of years ago, I was interviewing applicants for a fitness challenge. I got to talk to a few dozen people and pick the 3 or 4 most likely to succeed, and those folks would go on to crush it in a transformation challenge.

I spent 20-30 minutes listening for emotional buy-in, willingness to change, and good vibes (that last one is a technical term meaning someone I like to hang out with, who doesn’t suck the energy right out of the room).

While talking with a woman who was clearly a bit unplugged from her life, I asked her about her current fitness routine and diet. Her response:

“I wake up a bit later in the morning, meet a neighbor-friend, and we go downtown and yada-yada then we come back.” Her eyes were kinda drifting up into the sky and she might have been visualizing her activities, but based off of her story I definitely could not.

“I’m sorry, did you just yada-yada through your workout… or did you and your friend go to eat something and you didn’t want to share the details?” (I’ll fast forward. She was embarrassed and didn’t realize she didn’t answer my question, and yada-yada’d through the important details. She did not get to do the challenge, and she may have gone on to write comedy for a Community spin-off, but I didn’t follow up.

Her anticipation of telling a disempowering or at least boring TO HER part of her life led her to skip the specifics on how she was losing the battle of personal health. It might seem incredible to you, dear reader, that someone would mind-hole and talk around their own life in front of a health expert, but this is not at all uncommon. People get visibly uncomfortable when you ask them a question that could reveal a values conflict, and MOST of our blind spots are around these topics.

Fast forward a few years to me FINALLY picking up the book Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. When the book came out, I was all in the meditation and mindfulness space, and I looked at the title and synopsis and told myself, “I basically get the gist. Accept your unfortunate or fortunate circumstances, accept people as they are, accept yourself, yada-yada, worthy of love and all that.”

At the time, I could not have gotten the value from the book because I didn’t believe I had a shadow. I believed I WAS my shadow. I felt like my ravenous appetite for work, risk, validation, pleasing others and achievement was all that I was.

Now halfway through the book I gasp at the simplicity of the message yet the difficulty in living it.

The takeaway… The message you want to skip because you get it already, the story from 20 years ago that you don’t want to write down in your journal because you are over it, and the thing you can barely look at lives in that blindspot you created so that you don’t need to be uncomfortable reconciling the parts of you that were wounded or abandoned (and now ignored).

Is there anything you’re yada-yadaing through right now? What’s taboo for you? What are you avoiding thinking about? What are some small steps you can take today to stop avoiding, take accountability, and feel a bit better?