It’s been a while – a long while, it seems – since I have shared a weekly InspireByte with you all. I apologize for my absence, but I think you’ll understand why when I tell you what I’ve been doing.
So… this month, I published my first book. What if..? How to Create the Life You Want Using the Power of Possibility is already being read and shared across the USA and overseas. I’m thrilled to report that the initial feedback has been incredibly positive, and I’m LOVING the emails and notes I am receiving about how people are testing out the exercises within the book. It’s truly been heart-warming and soul-expanding! If I haven’t said it enough lately, let me reiterate it here: I LOVE WHAT I DO! I’m very blessed and grateful to be able to write and help others for a living.
That being said, I raised my own eyebrow in disbelief when I realized just how long it had been since I wrote a weekly blog. How could it be that I love writing and sharing with you, and yet I didn’t manage to get one solitary word out over the past several weeks. Or months! (Is it months? I think it almost is. Yikes!)
The answer is simple: real estate.
Emotional and mental real estate, to be exact.
You see, we each have a finite (though flexible) amount of emotional and mental real estate in our minds. We are continually moving things around, selling things off, buying new things, and moving other things to storage in order to maintain a healthy balance of emotional and mental real estate. When we get stressed, we have a tendency to move less important items off our to-do lists. This is one way of keeping our real estate in check. Instead of using up the lot line-to-lot line of our real estate, we typically keep a nice moat around our core, in order to maintain that flexibility.
This was not something I was able to do over the past couple of months with the publishing of my book. Every single day I was involved in some decision-making or trouble-shooting. I poured my heart and soul into the final product and I absolutely love it! I’m very proud of my little book, and so grateful that I get to share it with the world. I also realize that in order for me to have accomplished this, I needed to borrow on my available emotional and mental real estate.
So, for a period of time, my to-do lists changed, and I lived from edge-to-edge, with little flexibility or room for anything additional. The first week in which I chose to forgo the blog, I felt guilty and almost sad. I convinced myself that it would be “only one” week off. But then it became two, then three, and then I stopped counting. I realized somewhere between weeks two and three that this was about my emotional and mental real estate, and I gave myself permission to step away from anything that was not related to publishing, or maintaining my physical well-being. And it felt good.
It’s remarkable how your life can change when you take pause, re-assess, and allow yourself to choose something different, without guilt or judgment. As one friend said to me, very astutely, “the writing will always be there.” Indeed.
So, with that, I am sharing with you the lesson I learned from maxing out my internal real estate, and it was simply this: it’s okay.
It’s okay to feel maxed out and re-jigger your life accordingly. It’s okay to let some things slide while other things are taking precedence, and most importantly, it’s okay to not feel any guilt about it at all.
Emotional and mental real estate are very real things that require management and maintenance – how you choose to do that on a daily basis is up to you.