Phew – what a week! ? And welcome back to my series: indie-author adventures, 2019… where each week I’ll be posting my adventures in indie-authoring. What works…what doesn’t… and what I learn along the way. If you’ve spent any time in the indie-author world, you have probably learned that there is no “one right way” — each of our journeys is different and unique — but I hope you’ll find some tidbits here that may be helpful as we navigate through 2019.
This Past Week
In my (and most writers) ongoing struggle to find a bit of balance between our writing and all the rest of the work or day-jobs, etc., I have decided…
I give up.
LOL. Yep, I am throwing in the towel. I cry uncle. Balance is unachievable. ??
Well… not really, but like a lot of people, I, too, sometimes fall into that trap of thinking that a “perfect” balance is possible… when, if we were being real and honest with ourselves, we’d realize that’s not really the case.
I’m like you… 40-hours of stuff that needs doing, and only 24-hours in a day. And here is something I’m learning: balance isn’t actually realistic.
I’m going to refer back to the book I’ve been raving about for weeks now, The ONE Thing. It’s about counterbalancing… NOT balancing.
So, as a little background, here’s how my past week looked:
- Running my Author’s Mojo business – keeping up with clients, constant hustle on bringing in new clients and reaching and helping more authors with free mini-tutorials, etc.
- Continuing work on an existing website project
- Trying to focus on one of my own website projects that is for indie-authors
- And oh yeah… trying to keep up with a massively aggressive publishing schedule that I’m hoping to hit this year before I get too far behind to catch up.
Not to mention all that other pesky, real-life stuff like sleeping, eating, taking care of my son and cats, and trying to keep us all alive during the polar vortex deep-freeze.
Yeah. Needless to say, I was about to pull my hair out. I felt pulled in a bunch of different directions to the point where even trying to figure out my ONE Thing seemed like a chore!
What did I do?
Well… I’ve been shouting the praises of that book from the rooftops for anyone who’ll listen… so I picked it up and flipped back through to the parts talking about balance.
And there it was… balance is not achievable. LOL
Not precisely, at least. But counterbalancing… that is not only achievable, but realistic.
Huh, seriously?
Yeah, seriously. (go read the book, and I promise at some point I *might* stop mentioning it).
See… we delude ourselves in modern society into thinking that if we carefully plan, meticulously schedule, and do a little bit of all the thousand things we need to get done in our hectic lives that it somehow leads to this utopia known as ‘BALANCE’.
But that’s a misnomer.
Because all it does is stress us out, and we don’t actually accomplish any real measurable progress on any of those 1000 things that we THINK we need to get done.
Notice how I bolded and capitalized THINK? ?
So, what’s this magical counterbalance that I speak of?
That’s part of where the ONE Thing comes in. At some point in our lives we have to face, and own up to the fact that we simply cannot do everything. We were never designed, nor meant, to do everything. And it is precisely this “everything” that is keeping us from accomplishing the great feats that we actually long for and dream about.
Figure out what your ONE Thing(s) are… and focus on those relentlessly… and let everything else go.
No… I’m not telling you to stop feeding your kids or pets, or to never do dishes again… although that latter sounds heavenly.
What I am telling you is that “balance” is not a straight line that runs down the middle of everything we want to achieve.
It’s a pulse line, where we swing from extreme focus on one thing, to extreme focus on another, counterbalancing, thing.
What are your top priorities in your life? Not what you “think” they “should” be. Not what society tells you they “ought” to be. But what are they truly?
Why would you ever waste much of your finite energy, resources, and focus on much of anything else then?
Seriously… go read the book. It does a MUCH better job of explaining it than I ever will!
What I Accomplished
- Major progress on a client’s website
- Approximately 85% done on my website project for indie-authors
- Marketing coaching
- Book formatting job
- New email marketing automation series setup
- New social media pages/groups created
- Didn’t freeze during the polar-vortex (a definite point in the “win” category! lol)
- And all that pesky real-life stuff that I am not quite ready to outsource yet
Big Takeaway
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[bctt tweet=”‘Perfect’ is an illusion. ‘Perfect Balance’ is an even bigger illusion. Let go of trying to balance it ALL, and focus instead on what really matters. ~Morigan Shaw”] |
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