A new beginning…
So much has changed for me recently that it felt time to do a little update.
At the end of 2021, I officially closed the doors of my coaching business. After over 6 years working with some incredible clients, it was time to craft a new definition of what success meant for me. It came not long after I took a long sabbatical to press pause, to cut out all the noise and listen to that quiet inner voice in the space in-between, to find some clarity. The global pandemic has shifted a lot of our perspectives on work and life. We've seen loss and pain and gratitude and opened up to what's truly important for us.
So I left behind the trade-offs I was making, the BS rules I was following, the juggling and the hustling. My priorities shifted in such a seismic way, none of it mattered anymore. I sort of semi-retired inside my head.
I also acknowledged and accepted earlier this year that at 49 I’m menopausal and the symptoms have been escalating steadily since the beginning of our first lockdown in 2020.
This is a new journey for me and one that I never really understood until I fell slap-bang in the middle of it, but I’m determined to share what I'm going through in the hope that it helps you in some way.
If you’re feeling out of kilter, a bit lost and like your body and/or brain are out of alignment, you’re not alone!
When I stripped everything back, I waited to see what remained. Writing, creating, sharing - those things have always been there. They’re just part of who I am. So there are some new things happening over here that I'm feeling my way into, including some news about my book that I’ll be sharing with you when I’m able to. What's interesting to me is how differently I'm approaching new ideas and goals now. The old me (pre-menopause and pre-Covid) would have dived in head first, full of energy and excitement and just figured it out as I went along, blasting through challenges as they came up. How I loved it!!
Acknowledging that approach isn't right for me now has been hard. Now I'm training myself to slow down and consider my priorities, my boundaries and my energy.
Transitioning to a new life stage doesn't mean we can't have goals or do amazing things. But for me it means #gentleachieving - not taking on too much, slowing down, releasing unhelpful self-expectations, being kind to myself and a LOT of journaling to understand my thoughts and emotions.
Journaling brings me back to me.
If I'm away from the page for too long everything starts to get bottled up and I know I need to come back and let it all out again. It's a fantastic way of unravelling our thoughts and understanding how they affect our actions and ultimately our results. (If you’d like to you can read more about thought awareness in chapter four of The Happiness Habits Transformation “Awareness - why our thoughts matter more than we think.”)
Last weekend I joined a fabulous journaling session with Juliette from Pen Therapy (@pentherapy on Instagram). In this session, we focussed on the theme of failure - a really emotive topic for me.
I realised that leaving behind the coaching business I’d built up for over six years felt like failing. My identity and self-worth were so tied into my working life that I couldn’t see myself as separate from it. When it stopped, even though that was 100% the right decision, I lost who I actually was for a while.
I also felt that I'd let my clients down, even though they were all incredibly understanding and supportive - I'm so thankful to have worked with such amazing people!
And I recognised the amount of guilt I’d carried around for not being able to do ALL the things like I used to, which mixed uneasily with the relief I felt after realigning my priorities so I didn’t have to. It’s so fascinating to me how we can make a decision in our hearts, but our thoughts still resist it.
I think as women entrepreneurs we sometimes carry a badge of honour for our ability to multitask and play a number of different roles both in our work and our life.
When for whatever reason we lose that ability or it becomes more challenging, it can hit hard. Competing priorities, lack of quality sleep, energy dips, brain fog, overwhelm - they can all play their part in making us feel less-than.
What I’ve learned is that when we feel like our best isn’t good enough, we can remind ourselves we don’t need to justify our existence by constantly ‘doing’ - we’re enough just as we are.
If some of the balls need to drop along the way, let them.
Wherever we are on our journey, we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be and life’s just too flippin’ short to care what other people (or in my base, my inner perfectionist) might think of that - and frankly, people think a lot less about us than we imagine anyway.
I strongly believe we need to be kinder to ourselves - me included - release ourselves from the pressure of unrealistic expectations and perfectionism. That’s really what #gentleachieving is all about. I’d love to know if any of this resonates with you and where you are on your journey.
