When you do what you love (and that something you love is something other people appreciate) then something unexpected happens—you get busier and busier and busier. What you once considered a passion project transforms into a burgeoning business, and you may do less of the things you love and more of the things necessary to promote your business and evolve your brand.
We all have crazy days, and we all need to balance out our hectic schedules by slowing down to do things that restore our sanity and well-being. Fortunately, there are many simple things that you can do to recuperate and rejuvenate, such as getting more organized, re-committing to your healthy diet and exercise routine, and following simple stress management techniques.
Get More Organized to Restore Order
When you get organized, your entire life changes for the better because you achieve more by doing less. Inefficiency is not only exhausting but also squanders your time and energy.
- You waste time looking for things.
- You make excuses for forgetting about appointments and missing important social engagements.
- You apologize for bills you forgot to pay by their due date—and may even need to restore discontinued services or replace lost strategic business partners or your best clients.
Interestingly enough, taking time out to reorganize yourself is itself somewhat therapeutic. It calms you down and restores a sense of balance and control. Once you’ve regrouped, you might experience a surge of renewed purpose.
Getting organized is simply all about creating systems to avoid procrastinating and accumulating clutter.
Begin by writing all the things that are slowing you down—from an outdated calendar to the documents piling up on your desk, and from the unwashed dishes filling up the kitchen sink to the unmade bed and clothes strewn throughout your bedroom. Once you’ve got your list of domestic disasters, then make schedules and set deadlines to create a clear path to success.
If you miss meals because you’re too busy in the office to drop by the corner deli for a sandwich, then consider packing your own lunch in a lunch cooler so that your fresh fruits and vegetables and yogurt always taste fresh.
If you declutter, only keep the things that you need and give everything a home. Then, figure out how to discard the things that you no longer find useful—by donating, trashing, reselling, or trashing them.
Stay on Your Healthy Diet & Exercise Plan to Revitalize
If you don’t have a healthy diet, then create one. If you started a healthy diet, then defaulted to eating junk food, figure out how to prepare your assortment of healthy meals.
Similarly, if you haven’t been exercising, then create an exercise plan. Or, if you’ve stopped exercising because you just didn’t have the time, figure out how you can streamline your exercise routine to better fit your tight schedule.
Learn Simple Stress Management Techniques to Unwind
Stress management does not have to be complex. You don’t need to sign up for an online class or make an appointment with a psychotherapist or hypnotherapist to learn how to de-stress. You can adopt a simple system to unwind. Perhaps take slow and deep breaths, or soak in a lovely warm bath while listening to soothing music, or practice mindfulness meditation, or listen to a guided imagery CD.
Cope With Success in Style to Keep Winning
Although taking time out for self-care may appear to be a sensible idea, you might feel disinclined to “waste time” on doing “unproductive” things. If you entertain this notion, you might risk bumping up against the upper limit problem.
Psychotherapist Gay Hendricks adopted the math term Upper Limit (used in the Theory of Infinite Series) to explain why people who experience incredible success find subtle ways of sabotaging everything they’ve spent years trying to achieve.
Essentially, he explains, the unconscious mind freaks out and strives to normalize things by restoring negative thoughts and dysfunctional behaviors to return a person to their long-abandoned comfort zones. By taking deliberate steps to stay calm and balanced as your success grows, you will stay conscious enough to avoid the upper limit problem.
