Did you ever have a bad day that turned into a year?
Hello! Remember me? Well if there is one thing you can count on these days it is me not inundating you with blogs! Sorry for not keeping in touch. Truth be told, I haven’t had much to say.
Last year was rough. Not like ICU kind of rough. But my own personal shit storm. Just before the pandemic hit I had all sorts of big lofty goals. In January I revamped my website, created a new speaker package, hired a marketing team, connected with speaker brokers and planned to visit every province in Canada that had an event I could speak at.
Oh hello Covid.
When the first lock down first rolled out, I was okay. We got our daughter home from college and hunkered down with our little family. We ate meals together, had movie nights and filled an entire file folder with score sheets of a card game we became obsessed with (It’s called “oh hell” - warning, it is very difficult to play without copious amounts of swearing). But we were all doing good in our little bubble for the first month or so.
But then things globally got a whole lot worse and all the restrictions and closures did not look like they were going away any time soon. And then my business model completely collapsed. All events? Cancelled. Live speaking? Cancelled. Coaching? Everyone wanted to take a ‘pause’ until the world re-set. Uh-oh…
But the world did not re-set.
And so I found myself - except for a handful of clients – with A LOT of (mostly unwanted) free time on my hands. I had no idea when things were going to turn around. People in my industry were re-inventing. Shifting. Pivoting. Learning how to create online events and platforms and green screens and home studios. And I sort of half-heartedly did this. But mostly I just became more depressed. I could not seem to muster the energy to re-invent myself. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I had this wonderful little voice in my head berating me. “What’s wrong with you?” “Snap out of it!” “Use the tools”. “Look at all the books you have on re—invention? READ one!” “Are you still floundering around? Loser. Get your shit together.”
As you can imagine, this self-talk was not helpful.
And here I am one year later. I would love to say everything is awesome. The depression has lifted, my business is rocking and I am totally myself again. Um…no. But things are better and I will tell you why.
I made a list.
Now I am and always will be a list girl. Not on my phone. On a piece of paper that I can write on and check off when I am done. If it goes on my list, there is 99% chance I will do it because I just love the feeling of crossing it off. Maybe that’s weird but I go with what works.
I notice when I am feeling depressed I do not make lists. Or I if I do make a list, they have very meaningless things on them. So in order to shift I knew I had to make different lists. So I decided that I would do three things every day that had meaning in the following categories:
Soul
Biz
Personal
I knew the soul list was the most important because it was the most neglected. So I put things on it like “listen to music”, “pause”, “get outside” or “bake bread” ( Incredibly I baked over 200 loaves of sourdough last year!).
The biz list was also important because I kept waiting to “feel like working on it”. It felt like a had 100 things to do to create some momentum but it overwhelmed me so I did none of them. Finally I started listening to Mel Robbins and her lego-brick analogy to just do one thing. Even though only doing one thing seemed like it might take me until 2022 to resuscitate my business, I committed to doing it (secretly hoping this one step would lead to taking a few others). My biz list was painfully simple. But any time I did one thing, I celebrated “Attagirl! You got this!” (vs. shaming “Is that ALL you are going to do today?”).
Side bar – I have also learned a great technique for quieting the berating-ass-kicker in me. I talk to it like a dog. Of my dog mis-beaves or won’t stop barking, I use an old Cesar Milan technique and issue a sharp “shhh!”. If the behaviour still continues I add “that’s enough!”. This same technique works wonders with my inner bitch.
Last, is my personal list. This is the easiest one as I almost always feel like doing stuff on it and fool myself that my soul or business or my depression will get better just by doing them, but never the less, if I can’t seem to move on my soul or biz list, I will get some energy moving with a personal list item - “do laundry” , “vacuum”, “walk dogs” or even “put on ‘real’ clothes”. Not exactly big things, but like I said, whatever works and crossing ANYTHING off my list makes me feel good.
So that’s me.
Maybe you needed to read that not everyone has it together. Maybe you needed permission to just do one thing. Or maybe you just needed a “What to go! You got this!” for however you got through the last 365+ days.
How are YOU? I would love to know.
xo
