#212: Prevent an Infestation

Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Welcome back to Your Favorite You. I am still Melissa Parsons, your host, and I want to tell you about something kind of disgusting that has been happening in my life recently.

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And it gives me the heebie-jeebies and as I'm about to tell you this, I recognize that it is really not that big of deal, but I think it's so gross, and if you know me, you know that it's true.

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So we just recently, last week, had what I'm going to call a fruit fly infestation in my kitchen.

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And I want to tell you about it because, of course, as I was thinking about it, I'm like this is a pretty useful metaphor for some of the coaching that I do with my clients.

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So as infestations go, it started small. I saw maybe two fruit flies. Really easy to ignore those two, easy to tell myself it was nothing, easy to just carry on with my day.

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We are still going through the renovation at our house, so we've had, you know, the door open and closed way more than it typically is, you know, in a normal day, a normal week.

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Um, so initially I thought maybe they were just bugs that had gotten in from the doors being open. We've had, you know, more flies and that type of thing, which is fine. I've dealt with those.

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So I didn't do anything. I didn't deal with it. And a couple days later, of course, as fruit flies do, they had multiplied and the situation had become what I am going to call genuinely unbearable.

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And that's when I finally acted. And here's the question that's been sitting with me.

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How bad does something have to get before the pain of taking care of it finally outweighs the pain of just living with it? Because it wasn't that I didn't notice the two fruit flies. I did.

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I noticed them. I just decided, without really deciding on purpose, that dealing with them would cost me more than tolerating them.

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You know, chasing them around the kitchen was more painful until a couple of days later when the calculus flipped completely.

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So today I wanna talk about that threshold, the invisible line where a problem finally becomes worth solving because, of course, it's not just about bugs in a kitchen.

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I think most of us have fruit flies multiplying somewhere in our lives right now and we're telling ourselves the same story that I told myself initially. It's not that bad.

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So here's why two fruit flies are so easy to ignore. On their own in that exact moment, they genuinely didn't cost me anything.

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Swatting them, trying to find the source, doing something about it, that would have taken actual effort, actual time right now today. Ignoring them right now today costs you nothing today.

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So the math in the moment always seems to be in favor of ignoring when the problem is small.

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What the math doesn't account for in that moment is the compounding because if you've ever had fruit flies or a mouse in your house, it never stays at two fruit flies.

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It never stays at just one mouse. They are multiplying quietly every single day that you don't act whether or not you're paying attention to the multiplication that's happening.

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And because each individual day at the beginning looks basically identical to the day before it, you might never get a clear signal that says, "Oops, today's different. Today you should act." It's not until the total finally crosses some threshold, a threshold that's different for every single person, that the discomfort of the problem finally outweighs the discomfort of dealing with it and that threshold is genuinely personal.

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Nobody else gets to decide how many fruit flies is too many for you. Some people would have swatted at that very first one. That will be me in the future.

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Some people can apparently coexist with an alarming number of them before it registers as a problem worth solving.

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And let me make it clear that neither instinct is a moral failing, but I do think it's worth knowing your own number or at least knowing that you have one and that it's probably higher than it needs to be.

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Let me tell you what dealing with this actually looked like once I finally crossed my threshold when I walked in and like 20 fruit flies flew up from the kitchen, um, because I think the disproportion here is the whole point.

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So I spent multiple hours with a fly swatter, actual hours.

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If you could have been in my house during those two days when I was really dealing with it, you would have seen me just standing there with a fly swatter waiting for a fly to cross my path.

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You would have seen me taking the fly swatter and swatting it around my fruit bowl.

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You would have seen me taking it and swatting it around my plants in the kitchen, um, because, you know, if I could get one to fly up and swat it quickly, that's what I did.

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So I quickly discovered I, I initially wanted to just, like, slap them away with my hands, and I could not pluck them out of the air Mr. Miyagi style the way I imagined.

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There was no elegant, effortless precision, so it became a genuine waiting game, standing there, swatter raised, waiting for the suckers to land so that I could strike.

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I also built traps out of red wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar mixed with a little Dawn dish soap. I poured multiple vats of boiling water down my kitchen drain.

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I ran what amounted to a full science experiment in that same drain: salt, baking soda, vinegar, an honest-to-goodness volcano situation more than once. I put the drain cover on.

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I cleaned my kitchen multiple times, thoroughly, hunting for whatever source might be feeding them.

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I even took the beautiful flowers that John had brought home for me and exiled them to the garage until the whole situation was under control because I really think that they were hiding in the flowers, too.

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This amounted to an enormous amount of time, an enormous amount of effort, and some mild kitchen chaos, all of which could have been avoided almost entirely by dealing with those two fruit flies on day one.

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Two fruit flies on day one probably takes maybe ten minutes and one trap. A full infestation days later took several strategies, a banished bouquet, and a couple of literal volcanoes in my sink.

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That's the pattern I want you to really absorb. Waiting doesn't just delay the cost of dealing with the problem, it multiplies it.

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The fix you need on day one and the fix you need by day five are not the same fix. They're not the same size or amount of effort. They're not even close.

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So where might you be doing this in your own life?

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Where are you avoiding the problem that is two fruit flies, quietly telling yourself, "If you just don't look at it, it might go away." All the while, some part of you already knows that that's not how this goes.

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So I have a client who was dating again after her divorce. Early on with a particular guy, she felt a few small niggles.

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Nothing dramatic, nothing she could point to and say, "This is clearly wrong." Just a quiet flicker of intuition here and there that something was off.

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Two fruit flies, easy to wave away, especially after a divorce, especially when you want so badly for this guy to be different.

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She didn't act on those early flickers, and then that relationship went on to become emotionally abusive and eventually escalated to threats of physical violence serious enough that she needed a restraining order.

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I tell you that not to frighten you, but because I think it's important to say plainly, sometimes the fruit flies you're ignoring aren't inconvenient. They're dangerous.

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The stakes of that particular threshold can be so much higher than dish soap and vinegar.

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I have another client, a physician, who agreed to see a few more patients to help cover for one of her partners.

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A reasonable, generous, temporary-sounding yes, except it never really got renegotiated.

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It just quietly continued and grew day after day, the exact same way the fruit flies were multiplying in my kitchen when I wasn't watching, until she was seeing roughly twice as many patients as the very partner she'd originally just been covering for.

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Nobody sat her down one day and asked her to do double her patient load.

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It just accumulated, one small addition at a time, each one too small on its own to be worth pushing back on until the total was egregious.

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I also have a client whose mom would make snide little comments about her body or her appearance. For a long time, my client just ignored these comments.

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She swatted them away mentally the way you'd wave off a single fruit fly buzzing past your ear.

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She stopped ignoring them the moment her mother started making those same kind of comments about her daughter's body.

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Her own threshold for two fruit flies was apparently higher than her threshold for watching the exact same pattern land on her child, and that's worth sitting with.

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Sometimes we'll absorb an enormous amount aimed at ourselves before we'll even allow a little of it to reach someone we love.

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So these are three completely different situations: a relationship, a career, a family dynamic, all three following kind of the same shape, something small enough to ignore, but ignored repeatedly wasn't as small anymore.

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Here's what I want to leave you with. Only you get to decide how many fruit flies is too many for you.

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I'm not here to tell you your threshold is wrong, but I am asking you to notice it, to notice the two fruit flies you've already spotted and decided these aren't worth dealing with yet.

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If I could go back, I would get that frigging swatter out the moment I saw the very first one.

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And the next time, because there's always a next time in kitchens and in life, that's exactly what I intend to do.

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Not wait for unbearable, not wait for needing to do science experiments in the sink. Just deal with it at two. So take an honest look around. Where are two fruit flies you've already noticed?

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And what would it look like to deal with them today while it still only takes a few minutes and one trap instead of waiting for the version of this that takes hours and banished flowers and volcanoes in the sink and some of our lives so much more than that?

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And if you already know what your fruit flies are, but you don't know how to actually start dealing with them, that is exactly the kind of work I do with my clients. I would love to help you.

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All right. You can reach out to me. You can email me, melissa@melissaparsonscoaching.com. You can send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram.

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If you have my cell phone number, you can text me if you need to do this work or if you want to do this kind of work. Okay. I love you all so much. Thank you for listening to Your Favorite You.

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You guys are all my favorites. I'll see you next week.

Hey - It’s still me. Since you are listening to this podcast, you very likely have followed all the rules and ticked off all the boxes but you still feel like something's missing! If you're ready to learn the skills and gain the tools you need to tiptoe into putting yourself first and treating yourself as you would your own best friend, I'm here to support you. As a general life coach for women, I provide a safe space, compassionate guidance, and practical tools to help you navigate life's challenges as you start to get to know and embrace your authentic self.

When we work together, you begin to develop a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. You learn effective communication strategies, boundary-setting techniques, and self-care practices that will help you cultivate a more loving and supportive relationship with yourself and others.

While, of course, I can't guarantee specific outcomes, as everyone's journey is brilliantly unique, what I can promise is my unwavering commitment to providing you with the skills, tools, support, and guidance you need to create lasting changes in your life. With humor and a ton of compassion, I'll be available to mentor you as you do the work to become a favorite version of yourself.

You're ready to invest in yourself and embark on this journey, so head over to melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the work with me page, and book a consultation call. We can chat about all the support I can provide you with as we work together.

I am welcoming one-on-one coaching clients at this time, and, of course, I am also going to be offering the next round of group coaching soon. 

Thanks for tuning in. Go be amazing!