Hello! The date this publishes is my 43rd birthday. 43 isn’t that exciting of a number, but I’m excited by all the new things I have going on. My life has been completely reinvented over the last few years, but most of all this year. I’m building out my biomagnetism business, this Substack, my women’s retreat business, and we started a completely new homeschool program. My “job” before this year, the property management business, is still thriving too. But the difference now is I’m trying to build all of these “jobs” around the life I want rather than building the life in the pockets around the jobs.
By the time you’re reading this, I will have just gotten home from “The Way Home” women’s retreat I hosted with Katie in Isle of Palms for a group of 10 women. Without a doubt we had the most incredible time supporting them, playing, learning, relaxing, and having a private chef cook for us. It was a fabulous lead-in to my birthday, but it leaves me less than 24 hours at home before another 10-day trip.
As you read this, I’m hopefully on an airplane headed to California to visit one of my best friends. We’ll spend a few days in Sonoma wine country, and then the family and I are going to Mexico for a little fall vacation (one of the perks of homeschooling is that we can go whenever we want!).
It’s so easy for me to fall into the perfectionist, do-it-all overwhelm trap, and this is a perfect example. About a month ago I looked at my calendar, saw 3+ weeks of being gone, and said, “Okay, I need to figure out my content, write and edit all my Substack posts, photograph them, and have them scheduled, not just for while I’m gone but for for all of September. So about 8 weeks of content in 3 weeks of time.”
So all of September I was grinding away. I worked late, doing all this extra content work on top of a September full of transitions and activity. I was deep into planning the retreat and handling its logistics; we started a new homeschooling curriculum - talk about transitions; my biomagnetism business took off and I had 5 new clients show up all the same week and book recurring sessions; plus there’s my regular job as a property manager, where we had three unexpected turnovers show up all at once. My plate has been very, very full. But I am a doer. I’m a get-shit-done kind of gal, so I came up with my plan, started working on it, and spread myself really, really thin.
Then I stopped. I reflected. All of these deadlines, all of this work on Substack, is completely self-imposed. No one is telling me I have to do this. No one else is setting the cadence. I’m NOT going to get in trouble if I don’t post the perfect tip every single week I’m gone.
A couple of weeks ago I woke up and decided one of my posts would be this one: me giving myself permission not to do it all, and to actually enjoy my birthday trip and my family vacation. So this is not one of my normal posts. The people-pleasing version of me, the perfectionist version of me, the good-girl version of me needs a break. I’m giving her permission to just be enough. And a quickly jotted ramble of a message is counting as my weekly post without the hours of thinking and researching and editing and photographing that goes into most of my posts.
Happy birthday to me! This is my gift to myself, a week with no real post except a 15 minute barely edited ramble. One less post means a significant reduction of hours of thinking and researching and editing and photographing that goes into most of my posts. Don’t worry, I did pre-schedule several other articles - baby steps. This was a spur-of-the-moment “give myself a break,” and that is perfectly okay. It’s what I’m meant to do in this new stage of my life, where I’m doing this for the joy of it. I’m here to share what I know and what I’ve learned, and that doesn’t need to run on a schedule. My family, my trips and my property management job are part of my life too, and they get my time.
The old corporate version of me would have said, “The job is the job, and I get the job done.” But I’m literally making up this job, so this is what you get this week. I’m assuming I’ll get all the other weeks done. If not, you might get another rant like this, or you might see a week missed, and that’s okay. It’s actually more than okay. It’s enough. I’m enough. You’re enough. We’re all enough just as we are doing the best we can!
What’s one deadline on your plate right now that nobody but you set? I’d love to hear which one you’re letting go of this week!
Talk soon,
Kristen ❤️