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    New Tricks
    New Tricks
    New Tricks
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    New Tricks

    By April Capil

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    About this ebook

    You’ve made it through a crisis thanks to Recipe for Lemonade, and built a “new normal” with the help of Life After Lemonade, but what now? How do you cultivate the courage to leave your comfort zone after surviving disaster? In New Tricks, author April Capil lays out the blueprint for how to craft a second act post-trauma, and build the next-level life you’ve been longing for.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApril Capil
    Release dateNov 10, 2015
    ISBN9781311244468
    New Tricks
    Author

    April Capil

    April Capil is a breast cancer survivor and author. She holds a Green M.B.A. in Sustainable Enterprise and lives in Northern California.April has been a guest speaker at the First Descents Annual Gala (2010), the Life Beyond Cancer Conference (2011), the OMG Summit for Young Adult Cancer Survivors (2013, 2014), and the Conference For Young Women (2014).

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      Book preview

      New Tricks - April Capil

      New Tricks

      New Tricks

      Survivor Strategies for Your Second Act

      April Capil

      Contents

      Also by April Capil

      1. Orientation

      2. Act One

      3. The Pit of Despair

      4. Chekov’s Gun

      5. The Undiscovered Country

      6. The Second Threshold

      7. How to Build a Ladder

      8. Half-Done

      Six Tricks

      How to Keep Being Awesome

      #1: Always Be Learning

      #2: Live Within Your Means

      #3: Manage Magical Thinking

      #4: Get In The Habit

      #5: Keep Your Flywheel Going

      #6: Master The Long Game

      Take Care

      Afterword

      Additional Resources

      Also by April Capil

      Recipe for Lemonade

      Life After Lemonade

      New Tricks: Survivor Strategies for Your Second Act © 2015 by April Capil

      All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

      For more information, visit http://www.aprilcapil.com

      ISBN-13: 978-1519241771

      ISBN-10: 1519241771

      Smashwords ISBN: 9781311244468

      Title: New Tricks

      Author: April Capil

      for my father

      Who would fardels bear,

      To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

      But that the dread of something after death,

      The undiscovered country from whose bourn

      No traveler returns, puzzles the will

      And makes us rather bear those ills we have

      Than fly to others that we know not of?

      – Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

      Orientation

      In my first book, Recipe for Lemonade , I walk readers through how to make it through a crisis . Simply put, you are in crisis when you are facing disaster, and are unprepared for it. It’s not an unusual place to be; if it was, characters like Olivia Pope wouldn’t exist.

      Disaster comes from the Latin, meaning, against the stars. Disasters are things that are not supposed to happen, and because most of the time, we think we live in a world where things happen for a reason, our first response to a disaster is usually utter disbelief. We can find ourselves immobilized by cognitive dissonance, unable to comprehend our situation, let alone manage it. We ask why and look for logic to explain just how things fell apart so spectacularly.

      The truth is, we live in a world where bad things can happen for no reason, and sometimes we forget that. That is why disasters have a way of devastating and derailing us. We want to believe if we are good and kind (and even if we are assholes, as long as it’s not that often), then we will avoid and escape things like crises and disasters. Not so, friends. Disasters happen all the time, to people who don’t ask for or deserve them, and the best thing you can do to avoid being undone by one is to train yourself to roll with the punches, and get to work picking up the pieces when the dust settles.

      I found myself in crisis, post-disaster, in 2008, when the economy was falling apart, just as I was being told I had Stage Three breast cancer. In the months that followed, I lost my health, my small business, and my home. Everything in my life unraveled at the same time, and I suddenly felt like a foot soldier trapped on the ground during the bombing of Dresden.

      I made it through that crisis by doing three things: asking myself what I thought I deserved, convincing myself it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and looking for the things in my life I could be grateful for (and even happy about). I put all these lessons I learned into Recipe for Lemonade, and thought I was done, but it just when I started to feel solid again, I realized my journey was only half over.

      You see, once a person is no longer in their fear zone – that place where they are fighting for their survival and sanity on a daily basis, they start trying to get back in their comfort zone - the place where they are no longer teetering between safety and danger. In my own life, I rebuilt my career, made new friends, and got healthy, but that wasn’t enough. After being unstable and insecure about my future for so long, I still longed desperately for a place where I could not just be safe, but no longer terrified of what that future might bring.

      The process of getting back to a new normal inspired me to write my second book, Life After Lemonade, which teaches you how to rebuild following a personal Katrina. Life After Lemonade covers this period just after a crisis, where you find yourself trying to navigate from your fear zone into your comfort zone – the place where you can start to believe that everything can be okay again.

      For many people who have survived disaster, the trauma roller coaster can stop right here. You can go the rest of your life just being glad to be comfortable and safe again after being in crisis. If you’ve ever suffered from PTSD, you know that there is something to be said for an existence where you are finally able to hold it all together, and are no longer afraid every day.

      This kind of life was enough for me for a while - almost more than enough, at times. I had a nice place to live, a job that paid my bills; I fit into all my clothes again (minus part of a boob, but I could live with that). I felt as close to whole as I’d felt since before my life fell apart, and it felt so good. I wasn’t just comfortable; I was content in the knowledge that life could go on like this until… well, until it ended, frankly.

      People live for decades like this, I kept telling myself, and are perfectly content. You are not a refugee fleeing a war zone. You’re not facing metastatic cancer in your 40s. This is a comfortable life, and it can be enough, if you let it.

      In Life After Lemonade, I talk about Easy Street - the place where the struggle is not only over, but being actively resisted. Easy Street, unfortunately, is where you run the risk of phoning in your life. You get used to cruising and start avoiding anything that challenges you too much.

      The tricky thing about Easy Street is, human beings are designed to evolve, not cruise. The survival of the fittest is happening right now, in the very cells of your body. White blood cells are fighting invading bacteria, cancer cells are either refusing to die or being beaten down by your immune system. Collagen is dwindling and muscle tissues are being repaired.

      When we stop evolving, we atrophy - it’s in our nature. And whether we like it or not, fulfillment in life comes from resistance to that atrophy: a sense of purpose, the pursuit of something that tears down our muscles and allows them to rebuild themselves anew again and again. We fear destruction, but it’s the only path to resurrection. We can literally only learn and get stronger by failing; it’s how human beings increase our strength and resilience.

      When a survivor stagnates, they start to feel restless because all those muscles that got such a workout putting their life back together have been sitting idle. Not resting, not recovering, but not being used anymore. They inevitably begin to twitch, and you find yourself itching for a new challenge. Like landlocked sailors, survivors with nothing to

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