I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself,

where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple

act of slowing down. Today, I want to talk to you about a concept called tender discipline,

which I've been thinking about pretty steadily for the past six months.

It's a funny phrase, tender discipline.

Not unlike hurry slowly, actually.

One of those phrases that asks you to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time,

and then somehow makes sense of the tension.

Being able to do this successfully is what the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald called

the test of a first-rate intelligence.

But I would say that it's simply the price of sanity in the

21st century, the ability to balance what's being asked of you with what you're asking of

yourself, which is no easy task. And the seed for this idea of tender discipline was actually

planted almost four years ago.

In the summer of 2014, I went to see a healer.

And I didn't know it at the time, but she would go on to have a major impact on my life.

And as we sat down together for the first time, she asked me a question that I found rather bewildering.

She said, who are you without the doing? As a deeply achievement-oriented person who loves making stuff, I found the question

difficult to process. I tried to think about it, but the question seemed to make something

short-circuit in my brain.

Every line of thought seemed to lead me right back to where I started, with my actions, the stuff I did, or the stuff I like to do.

So I tried to think of a quality, something that could stand alone.

...