As a health and wellness coach, you're no stranger to the constant juggling of family, endless to-do lists, and running your own business. It's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of busyness, feeling like you're always running a million miles per hour. When a friend asks what you've been up to, you might automatically reply, “Oh, you know, just busy with family and growing my coaching practice. Everything's going great, but it's pretty crazy!” Sound familiar?
But is this automatic response merely a mask to cover up the chaos we feel swirling around inside?
You are devoted to your family and your growing coaching practice, and managing the ever-present busyness can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.
So, how do you differentiate between genuinely productive work and mere busy work? How do you ensure you invest your precious time in areas that truly enrich your life and business? How do you manage the busy in your life when it begins to feel out of control?
Choosing Calm and Ease
Why do we answer with busy? Is it for the connection? Do we not want to burden them with everything going on in our heads? I don’t know about you, but we're all busy and running around crazy. I mean, that's a really easy way to describe our lives, right?
Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I head to my journal to read past entries. Success leaves clues, and history always seems to repeat itself.
I will share this entry with you from a time when I chose to feel calm and at ease no matter the circumstance.
Journal Entry June 2, 2022:
While we all have a lot going on, I don't really feel busy. In fact, this year, I consciously chose to embrace the feeling of calm and ease.
Does calm and ease come easily all the time? No. I’ve learned that I’m the only one who can control my reactions, so I’m proactively choosing calm and ease.
Even last Sunday, when our golden doodle, boy, she can be so naughty, jumped on top of the counter at 8 PM and ate my whole loaf of gluten-free cooling banana bread with chocolate chips and walnuts. I'll tell you what: I was pretty disappointed that she did that. So instead of taking my nice hot, relaxing shower before bed, nope, not this girl. I was listening to my vet. Explain to me how to induce vomiting. Thank God for Dr. Jerry.
That was a perfect opportunity to let the crazy in, but I didn't. Nope, I didn't. Instead, I embraced calm and ease. Did it take everything in me to keep it together? Yes, yes, it did. It took every fiber of my being to embrace calm and ease and not want to go off the deep end feeling overwhelmed, but I did it anyway.
I don’t know about you but after reading this journal entry, it may be time to chose calm and ease to manage the busyness.
What drives you crazy?
So how exactly do you manage those feelings of being busy and overwhelmed when they keep popping up in your life? In spite of situations, you can't handle and are out of your control?
Here are two ways that I've created in my life to be able to help manage the busyness. First, make sure you have a great routine for scheduling your week and being okay that you'll have to let some things go. Of course, this will feel difficult, however, for right now you know that something has to give. Learn to accept not everything ought to be done by you. Basically, know that sometimes your schedule will get off and you'll have unexpected things come up that you didn't have planned or scheduled.
Oh trust me, I have done so much thought work on this. In this situation, nothing would throw me off my game more than if my schedule or the outline of my day would get off in any way, shape, or form. It drove me crazy. When the crazy happens embracing calm and ease, will not throw me off my game nearly as much.
Plan Your Week To Manage The Busy
You may be wondering, how to create a great routine for scheduling your week. The trick is to pick a day that actually works the best for you to plan out your week. You may do this Monday first thing, Friday afternoon, or over the weekend. Despite what you think, planning doesn't have to be a long-drawn-out process. Actually, I encourage you to set a time limit on how long you're gonna spend planning out your week, may I suggest up to one hour.
Basically, you can simply sit down and map it out ahead of time. When you decide ahead of time what you’ll do this is huge for not feeling so busy because you can see what you have going on and laid out ahead of time. Make sure to find a day that works the best for you, and map it out.
Points are often overlooked when you're mapping out your week. Block time to get out the door. Or maybe it's just me, that needs 10 minutes before I plan to walk out the door.
It seems I find a number of last-minute items that somehow seem important to me, during those precious moments. Instead of getting out the door, again maybe it's just me, but for some reason, I notice that the water dish is empty for the dogs or, oh, did I feed them today? Of course, look there's clothes in the washing machine that need to go on the dryer.
Hey. Maybe that's just me? Those last minutes are when I seem to find all those little things that add up.
Therefore, I always buffer in 10 minutes for, and it's specifically in my calendar, time to get out the door because I know me and for some reason, I need that time. Also, make sure you include your time to truly get ready. Not your PR of the fastest time ever that you’ve gotten ready, plan for the amount of time it will realistically take.
Be sure to work backward from your appointments so that you make sure you have adequate time in your calendar to plan for getting yourself to your appointment on time.
Big Rocks
Another big rock to plan in your calendar, big rocks are the big, important things that you wanna make sure happen during your week. A few examples may be to make sure you have time set aside for yourself. Time for whatever it is that helps fill you up leaving you a little bit calmer and at ease in your life. This may be meditation, prayer, journaling, exercise, or whatever it is that you need to do to make yourself feel calm and at ease.
Without a doubt, those big rocks you put in your calendar are all important things that cannot be overlooked or missed to make sure that you have time set aside for things that allow you to manage the busyness.
Letting Go to Manage The Busyness
Secondly, is by letting go of some things. Oh, it's okay. You can do it. It's really not that big of a deal. You know in your heart there are things in your life right now that are no longer serving you, but you've kept doing them and doing 'em because you've always done it.
It's okay. It's okay to let them go. I'm giving you permission right now to let those go. Please check in with yourself, check in with how you're feeling is this really something that you wanna do? What if, you reserve your valuable time for things that bring calm and ease to your life?
Certainly, let go of the things that are no longer serving you at this time in your life. This is where I personally need to check in with my feelings of calm and ease.
After all by embracing calm and ease, and I'm learning to accept that I can not load extras into my calendar, activities I know are really gonna be pushing my schedule. Going out for dinner to often or trying to put too many things in one day. I know now that I'm the type of a person if I have more than one, two max big activities I'm gonna be drained completely.
Plus he can have people come over to the house. I'm not that girl. I'm the girl that needs to limit the number of activities that she does in order to feel calm, at ease, and manage her busy feelings.
When I load all of those extra things into my schedule, well, you guessed it. I'm not gonna feel very calm. I'm gonna feel busy.
I want to be able to manage the busy feeling and embrace, calm and ease. There, I am aware by taking a step back and reviewing all the items on my calendar for the week.
That way I know if someone asked for me to do something during the week, I can go ahead and look at what I have planned out in my paper planner or on my calendar and know, Hey yeah, this, this is not gonna work.
It's gonna be opening that door back up to the feeling that I'm frantic and busy and trying to get everywhere.
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This is how I know when I’m scheduling too much
How do you know when you’re scheduling too much? Do you have a trigger that alerts you?
How do I know? When my day is getting to feel frantic and busy because I start to dream at night that I'm trying to get places. Here is what happens in my dreams, I need to get someplace and I can't get out the door to go. The reason is that I have all these things that I'm trying to gather and put into either a suitcase, a basket or a bag. I’m struggling to get everything gathered up because things are everywhere and I'm frantically trying to organize and pick them up so that we can get out the door on time.
This dream is my trigger, once it begins I know that I'm doing or trying to do too many things. It a signal that I need to take a hard look at my schedule and figure out what need to go. If letting things go is hard for you right now, I'm giving you permission to let it go.
Throw it over
Despite what you think, you do not have to do everything. You only need to do the things that keep the ship afloat. Everything else may be thrown overboard.
If you're getting asked to be the next person to run a committee, are you the best person to be running that committee? Maybe the answer is yes. At least consider what you’ll have to say no to if you say yes to a new committee. Regardless, you need to make a conscious decision if that time commitment will allow you to manage the busyness or instead of fulfilled it will leave you exhausted and busy. Should that be the case, say no. Add the committee to your Someday/Maybe list, once your calendar frees up a bit then at that time you may consider joining another board. Even though you’re making a conscious decision to say no right now. In the future, it could be a yes.
For me personally, I had to set the limit of only one board at a time.
Okay, I lie. I'm lying to you right now. I didn't set the limit. My husband told me I'm only allowed to be on one board at a time because I tend to take on too much if I'm on more than one board at a time. He is 100% correct. Since this rule was established, I’ve also set my priorities to create a decision matrix.
Know your time bank
Given these points, begin to know and understand your time bank. What is your time bank? Let’s figure it out. The simplest way to figure it out is how much time you spend sleeping. Take that number and subtract it from 24 hours. That's your time bank.
Should you sleep eight hours, that leaves you with 16 hours to manage the busy.
What you decide to do with your 16 hours every day is up to you. How many hours do you have to get to do everything that you want to get done?
You may try to justify this, but I did.
Okay. One other point regarding busyness: It is really only a thought. I know, right? Plenty of clients have tried to tell me differently, and heck, I even tried to justify to my own personal coach when she pointed out that I was merely having thoughts that I'm busy.
Yeah, in the end, it is our thoughts.
You guessed it your thoughts create the feelings that cause the actions that give you your results. You get to choose the thought of being busy. Yep, I know. Try that on for size and see how it feels. Heck, you may want to jump on my bandwagon and choose the thought of calm and ease. Once you look for all the ways your life feels calm and at ease. You’ll see how everything will begin to change in your life by simply choosing that one different thought.
Thank you, friends, so much for reading. If you're ready to have somebody in your corner, helping you choose calm and ease, I'm a little bit down the path. I'm happy to help you. Together, in six months, we can work on calm and ease in your life. The link to my private coaching is below. I appreciate you. Have a wonderful week, and I'll see you back here next week.
