Show up. Let it be easy.
If you’ve been reading my posts this year, then the title of this particular tip will sound familiar to you. “Show up” and “let it be easy” are my two mantras for 2020. They remind me to show up for myself and in my business, and they remind me, too, to stay in flow as much as possible and to allow things to be simple, or easy.
That last part is also a bit of a prayer for me these days, as I navigate the world of tests and biopsies that are related to the adenoma growing inside my duodenum. “Let it be easy” has a whole different connotation in that context, as you might imagine. But I digress.
One of the ways I have been showing up is to be more mindful about the life I am creating.
It means being more intentional. It can be so easy to get up and just drift through the day without giving much thought to what we are doing. Get up, exercise (or not), shower (or not), get dressed, go to work, have the same coffee, same meals, same conversations, come home (or close up the work portion of your laptop, if you even remembered to open it), make dinner, watch TV, go to bed . . . Lather, rinse, repeat, and suddenly a week, or a month, or a year, has gone by and you aren’t a single step closer to the goals you really want to achieve.
No wonder time flies. It’s just like when you drive your usual route somewhere and you suddenly realize you have no recollection of anything that you saw along your way. Your mind didn’t attach importance to any of that stuff, and there you are, in a different location than you started from, without knowing quite how you got there.
Same as it ever was.
Hopefully you enjoyed that music break as much as I did, though to be honest, I’d forgotten exactly how trippy that video was.
But the Talking Heads raise fine points in that song, including that life will be “same as it ever was” if you don’t do something differently.
Turns out that showing up for yourself can be simple, but it can also be one of the hardest things you ever do. Because as women, we have become used to showing up for others all the time, and putting ourselves last.
Showing up for yourself can be taking five minutes for a gratitude practice during the day, whether it’s listing three things at bedtime or when you wake up, or something more. Showing up for yourself is taking time for meditation and for visualization: meditation is about checking in with yourself and your breath, being in the now; visualization is about checking in with the life you want to lead, and reminding yourself to take the steps to get there. It can be decluttering the clothing that makes you feel bad or speak to yourself in negative terms. It can be clearing any clutter in your home that is weighing you down and stressing you out.
Those steps don’t have to be big. They can be small. They can be taken one at a time.
If you are taking one step each day, you are doing the work to take yourself closer to the future you.
Which reminds me, if you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet, I hope you will, because my gift to you is an audio visualization that lets you see your future self and home, plus journaling pages that go along with it. And it’s free for newsletter subscribers, who also get weekly inspo in their inboxes!
