Less stress and more ease

You pour your heart and soul into a vision, and you're ready to execute, but you encounter obstacle after obstacle.

Your middle schooler tries their best, but they don't get what they'd planned on.

You waited until the perfect day to tackle that DIY project, but obstacles kept arising. Then you started to feel bad because you weren't tackling your to-do list.

By mid-October, I had a plan to fully embrace my much-needed time off. But that didn't go according to plan. Then, when it came time to sit down and work, that didn't go according to plan either. 

This has been my life lately, and so many families I know. These experiences happen to every human on the planet.

So, here's a simple personal story and a reminder of what worked for me when this happened. (Hint: I remembered to focus on being more than doing).

For the last week, I've been in semi-sloth mode. I've been grinding between running my summer camp, producing this podcast, to creating, selling, and facilitating my first online course. So this week of rest has been a long time coming...But it's been uncomfortable.

How often do you identify with DOING something vs being? Not doing anything or checking any work-related tasks off my to-do list has been a psychological experiment that has not gone according to plan.

For the last few months, I've been texting friends memes of me as The Dude from "The Big Lebowski" (robe/White Russian, totally chill, you know the one rihgt?) and calling it, "me come mid-October." I've been anticipating this chill, relaxed "dude time" and my plan was to fully embrace it. But it's been looking a litter different than I expected.

Day 1 I was full-on Dude. Only replace the White Russian with tea, coffee, and bubbly water. My robe was on as was endless amounts of Discovery Channel and Schitt's Creek.

Day 2...meh. Harder to enjoy. I was so much sloth that I felt like I needed to do something. Try and counteract the chill-ness I had just sunk into. My week of dude-ing was getting increasingly harder to maintain.

Fast forward to now and my to-do list is piled high: podcast production, errands, strategy, and vision work. But I've hit a number of walls. The first wall is that I can't focus. I get easily distracted by my dog, then my hunger, then a text, then, then, then...

So, today I decided I'd do a meditation to help me focus and hopefully create more insight. Only then I was interrupted by a call from my kid's school: my son Miles had thrown up and needed to be picked up stat. I raced to get him, leaving all of my tasks incomplete. I hadn't produced anything or packed for my trip (oh yeah, I'm supposed to fly to visit my mom the next day). Soon my day was swept up with picking up both kids and taking COVID test for the whole family (all negative, phew).

I began to release any expectations I had about what things would get done or when I would get them done. But because I had lost any hope of maintaining my expectations around my to-do list I started to feel my mind ease a little. I noticed nature on the way home and I thought of the Lao Tzu quote, " Nature never hurried and yet everything is accomplished."

I could feel my anxiety dissipate as I sat outside and allowed myself to just be.

And, boom! There was the insight I had been trying to cultivate all day long.

Parents, I bet you can relate to this story. The world we're living in requires us to live on the balanced edge of anxiety or flow. And often the gray area in between.

So often we try and control the outcomes of our days when sometimes the best thing we can DO is just BE. In today's episode, I talk about what happens when things don't go according to plan and how you can work with it. This is a good one to listen to with your kiddo because middle school is full of unexpected outcomes.

Like what you hear? Keep listening to the Elevated Adolescence Podcast