Quote to ponder for all time
“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me” Audre Lorde
Book that inspired this week’s email
“Habits, are simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment”
As we are in January, intention setting and goal creation is at forefront of our minds. This year I invite you to also think about the daily habits or actions you need to take in order to see your intention manifest or your goal met.
Healing and energy work is a big part of my work and my life. The goal to ‘be healed’, I quickly realised, was not a great one…what does that really mean anyway? How would I know?
What actually allowed me to feel truly healed from my trauma was the daily dedication to the habits that allowed me to surrender, feel and release energy stuck in my body. So while I now know there is no static state called ‘healed’ what I also know is that by training myself to be in the habit of automatically being present with all my feelings, acknowledging and releasing them I am no longer creating or storing trauma in my body. This gives me the sensation of feeling long-term emotional stability and self-mastery…i.e. what I imagined ‘healed’ would feel like.
All this to say, the quality of our life over the long-term exists in the actions and behaviours we take on a daily basis. This book ‘Atomic Habits’ is a wonderful read for bringing awareness to our daily habits and gives a new perspective for considering how they contribute to the condition of our life.
“Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an “urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why”
and One More Thing
Finding The Elusive Balance of Masculine/Feminine
With the New Moon in Capricorn energy coursing through this week I have been thinking a lot about legacy establishment and strategising for the long term. There is a tendency for us to think that means carving out a path and then repeating the same behaviours over and over again in order to build something that lasts. It feels rigid, lacks spontaneity, and feels kind of…well…boring.
But there’s another way to think of it.
The long-term is indeed a culmination of our daily habits and actions. The arc of our life only exists as a result of the millions of tiny choices we make on a moment by moment basis.
When we think about creating structure for the long-term what we really want to focus on is establishing the behaviours we can automatise that directly correlate to the type of person we want to be and the type of life we want to live. For example, being healthy doesn’t exist as an end in itself somewhere in the future. Rather it exists in us making the choice to eat more vegetables with our meal rather than have extra cake. The easier we make all of these choices, the more automatic they become, and so we create the long-term structure for being a healthy person.
This is exactly how it works in business as well. If you want to be successful in your business over the long-term…whatever the term successful means to you…then it’s not just about signing up one client, rather it’s about asking yourself what patterns of behaviour are consistent with someone who runs a successful business.
Here are a few of tips for creating structure in your work as you start a new business…
🌟Get organised, define the areas of business that need regular attention – e.g. marketing, sales, product development, client services, financial planning
🌟Assign days of the week to give your attention to each one
🌟Commit to spending a minimum amount of time on the specific area on the allocated day – it could be as little as 10 minutes
🌟Track when you have spent the allotted time on the area and reward yourself – ticking off a list or crossing days off on a calendar are simple but can feel incredibly rewarding
The most important part…at first it might seem like this would create a rigid, inflexible, ‘boring’ lifestyle. Wrong. What it creates over time is an automatic pattern of behaviours that allows you to take care of your business with very low energy output. This leaves you more time and most importantly energy to be creative, to step away and see the bigger picture, to come up with new ideas to implement, to adapt the structure. But if you don’t have any structure to start with there is no space for you to move forward.
This is how the balance of masculine and feminine energy functions optimally in our lives. Having the right mix of masculine structure, consistency and reliability along with the space and energy to receive new ideas, to move intuitively in different directions, to dance in chaos creates the most epic blend of a life filled with the constant interplay of certainty and uncertainty. It is through this dance that the magic truly comes to life.
Use the beautiful earthy Capricorn energy to bring in the healthy masculine and let it be friends with the depths and gloriousness of your divine feminine.