I was musing about some of my current clients and their challenges with hitting their Dream Goals and “managing their time.” Read on and see what may apply to you (or watch the video)
Are you a high performer?
Are you kind of ‘go’ like all of the time?
You might call yourself ‘type A’ – you get a lot done. You’ve got a lot going on and there’s more. Maybe you have some passion projects: missions that you want to achieve, but you get a lot done and actually you secretly fear that if you were to figure out how to make time in your day to do that ‘big thing’ that you might become burned out or fear being burned out. And you probably fear that with good reason. It’s because you know how hard you’ve worked over the years to achieve the level of success you’ve got today.
And how could you possibly do it (get to your dream mission)? You say, “well, I just need better time management. I’m good, but boy, I better need better time management”. Well, I’m going to take issue with this because I actually don’t completely believe that that’s all you need.
Let me tell you a story about some people that I’ve been working with that are in that situation. They want to do these passion projects. They have successful businesses and they want to get to their next level. And I am taking that time management thinking and turning it on its head. I am going to guess about you. I’m going to guess that you and I are “one of those people”. The Achievers. Here is the advice. What you have to do is slow down to speed up. I know you’ve heard it before and you think, ‘yeah, yeah, no, no’ – so bear with me.
The fact that you need to do something different is the reason why you might be resisting the idea that you need to slow down. So if you say “yes, I want to do something different, and I am 100% committed to that, I rate as a 10/10 to go to my next level!” Well, here’s what happens – I am working with people right now, they’re in this situation and when we talk about slowing down, discerning what we really want, going deep, allowing stillness, and… it becomes very uncomfortable. And when things become uncomfortable, we start telling ourselves stories.
Stories like “this is not for me, this doesn’t work for me. I can’t meditate, I can’t sit in stillness, I just can’t. I have to keep going. It works for me. It’s always worked for me before”. And that’s what we tell ourselves. My response to this is:
- You did say you were a 10/10 in wanting something different that you haven’t been able to get to – and you probably know in the back of your mind that some version of this stillness, some version of this slowing down is actually good for you. But yet doing the thing is so jarring because you’ve been going, going, going for so long. What is uncomfortable is being in the discomfort of quiet. It’s like jumping in a bucket of cold water. It’s shocking to the system and your nervous system. Your sympathetic nervous system is saying, “no, this isn’t safe. We have got to go back to where we’re just really busy. This quietness is not okay!” – but it actually is – so know that you’re smarter than your nervous system in this case.
- Before, your monkey mind was way up here (your mind). If you just go down to here (your heart), that’s progress. What we high performers do is we expect if we are here (head) that the only piece that’s okay is if we go down here (heart). Well, that’s not true because if you just keep notching it down, eventually your sympathetic nervous system will become more tuned in with stillness. And the more stillness you then have, the more open you become to those possibilities that are literally right in front of you. Because all of our possibilities are literally right in front of us; most of the time we just don’t see them.
There’s helpers around us, there’s angels around us. My glasses, I may have told you before, were lost for a year – and they were right underneath my recliner all that time. There I was- laying on my yoga mat -and all I had to do was look over in a moment of stillness and see them. So when we’re so busy, we simply don’t see what is right in front of us. You can outsmart your sympathetic nervous system. Accept that going from 100 to 99 is progress and is just okay. It is totally okay. And know that the more you do it, the more you practice, you really and truly will find possibilities beyond your wildest dreams so that you don’t have to be under that constant pressure to do more, to perform more, to create and to produce.
Because here’s the truth.
When you have that big mission, when you allow yourself to slow down enough to feel into that big mission, what’ll happen is you will start getting motivated right off off the charts and you won’t feel burned out because you will be so filled up by that mission that it will fuel you in such a way that you won’t feel burned out.
So let me know what you think of this (comment below) and how you might try to practice
slowing down
just
a little
bit.