Are you chronically busy?
So much to do, so little time?
When did it start for you?
For me, it started WAY BACK in high school.
I wanted to do everything.
I did all the extracurriculars, homework, chores, social life, and jobs.
I would leave my house at 6:45 am and sometimes not get home until after eleven, only to stay up and do homework until twelve or one in the morning.
I did it because it felt good.
The busyness made me feel important, included, and worthy.
Naturally, I carried this habit of busyness into adulthood, eventually leading to exhaustion and burnout.
I created a pattern of go, go, go, crash, which I thought was normal.
I remember a time in my mid-20s, before I had children when I actually wished I would break a leg so I would be forced to rest.
Can you imagine?!
I felt so little control over my time and life that I wished for a major injury!
Twenty years later, my wish came true.
I experienced a brain injury and was instructed to spend a month in bed in a dark room doing nothing.
I couldn’t fathom such a thing.
I tried it for a week, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Doing nothing brought up all my fears of unworthiness and rejection.
Who was I if I wasn’t doing?
Staying busy for all those years was self-protection.
It was a counterfeit sense of significance.
That downtime revealed that my sense of significance and worthiness depended on doing all the things for all the people.
I blamed my busyness on work, family, home, and volunteering.
So, every time I would crash, I focused on letting some of the workload go.
But I would always fill that time with more busyness, repeating the pattern.
It wasn’t my circumstances that needed to change; it was me.
I wasn’t happy.
I had conditioned my brain to live this way and needed to recondition it to live differently.
Time management is helpful but superficial.
If you want permanent change, you must go deeper.
What’s driving the way we spend our time are subconscious thoughts and beliefs about who we are and what we’re worthy of.
So many of us are living busy, unconscious lives, just going through the motions until our next crash.
It won’t stop until YOU decide you are worth so much more.
Who do you want to be?
How do you want to show up to your beautiful, precious life?
When the end of your life comes, do you want people to say, “She was the kind of person who was always busy?”
Or ….
For me, I want to be known as calm, loving, peaceful, joyful, present, and generous.
I’m proof that it’s possible to live a meaningful life of love, abundance, and contribution from a place of peace and ease.
I’ve done it not by changing my circumstances but by changing my mind.
And If I can do it, so can you.