September has seen me throw myself into freelancing full time. Over the last 6 years
I have worked as a manager in Student Services at Swansea University whilst
keeping my private business as a coach, facilitator and trainer ticking over in the
margins. The opportunity came to leave the university via voluntary redundancy at
the end of July and it seemed the right time to pursue my business full time.
There was sadness at leaving amazing colleagues. I love managing people and
giving up that responsibility was tough and of course I still miss them, but many
remain friends. There was also relief at laying down the burden of ever-increasing
demands and a letting go of other people’s trauma. In my first weeks after leaving, I
experienced a release of renewed energy, with my mind freed of all kinds of
concerns and responsibilities that I hadn’t even noticed were there. It was evident
that I had been ‘carrying’ a lot of other people’s burdens for a very long time.
August was about reclaiming time for myself. I deliberately made sure that I put
myself first and did things that were just for me. I practiced self-care, something I am
so good at telling others to do but not so great at directing at myself. At the time, I
was listening to an audio book, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, that
speaks of time and how we try to manage it more effectively but how often the
concept of time management is just an illusion. I had learnt before that the average
life span of a human is 4000 weeks, but it was a sobering reminder of how fleeting
our lives really are. As Burkeman says, ‘we’ve been granted the mental capacities to
make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into
action’.
My newfound freedom and venture into full time freelancing gives me an opportunity
to engage in a different routine, hopefully one that allows me space to grow, to think
and to be creative. My tendency with any new job is to grow the business, whatever
it might be, to look for opportunities to expand and develop. The downside to this is
that the venture becomes too big to handle and can be overwhelming. Time for
creative thinking, slowly, almost imperceptibly, seeps away leaving me exhausted,
burnt out and looking for an escape route.
I need a new way of being. One that allows me the flexibility to have time in my life
for my own interests: to attend a daytime yoga or Pilates class, to spend time with
family and friends, to write, to walk, to play, to meditate. Another book I’ve read
recently is ‘Present over Perfect’ by Shauna Niequist. She poses an interesting
question that I have used in my journal writing. She asks, ‘if someone were to give
you a completely empty calendar and a bank account as full as you wanted, what
would you do?’ This is a really challenging question as it offers the opportunity to do
absolutely nothing but then what would your purpose be and how would you make
use of your time? What it might do is give you the flexibility and balance to pursue
those things that really feed your soul. It would increase your choices. The other
thing this book taught me was to have a ‘to be’ list as well as a ‘to do' list and to give them both equal authority.
My ‘to be' list includes
- build in more meditation into my daily routine
- be more in charge of how I spend my time
- write something every day
- create a bedtime routine that avoids scrolling through social media
- be more attune to what my body needs
- to practice yoga and meditation
- to learn new things
I soon realised that there is a danger in expecting too much from your ‘to be’ list and
that it becomes, like your ‘to do’ list something that grows and grows and gives you
another opportunity to beat yourself up about how little you are achieving. I
concluded that just having one or two items on my ‘to be’ list was sufficient for any
moment in time.
I am growing into my new way of being, understanding better who I am and what I
can offer but I need to be mindful of my pitfalls, of the overstretching, of the tendency
to fill all the gaps rather than to rest in the spaces that life allows. In the words of
Shauna Niequist, I seek ‘Space, silence, stillness, sabbath. Enough rest to be able to
taste my life again’.
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