No B.S Friday: More radical responsibility – this time about relaxation.
If you think relaxation is what happens when all the jobs are done, you’re in trouble.
Now, some people do live this way.
Some people are just living vanilla lives, going along to their day job, doing the things, and coming home.
When they get home, they’re like, “Well, I have nothing left to do. I’ll just relax. Where’s the remote?”
And look, that’s ok. If that works for you, great.
But it’s only going to work for you if you’re content with the vanilla story of working for 50 years and then retiring into a modest retirement.
And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not what I dreamt of for my life. And if you’re here reading this, then I know it’s not the life you’re dreaming of either.
You’re dreaming of independent wealth. You’re dreaming of living life on your own terms. You’re dreaming of half-baked philosophy dished up in a blog every Friday. That’s why you’re here.
And if that’s what you want, then you’re going to be living a life of proactive engagement.
Your to-do list is not defined by your boss, and the time clock. You’re to-do list is defined by your ambition. It is defined by the projects and the deals you need to do to live the life you want.
Now, as you drop into this mode – of living life proactively – you begin to notice something. The to-do list never empties.
That’s still the case for me now. I have more wealth than I can poke a diamond-encrusted walking stick at, but I still have dreams and I still have ambition.
Those dreams and ambitions still fill my to-do list.
They fill it to overflowing.
And so if I waited until all the jobs were done until I could relax, I would be waiting forever and forever and forever.
What does this mean?
Well, it means that if you’re going to be proactive with life, then you have to be proactive with relaxation.
You can’t wait for life to serve you up with moments of relaxation. You have to get out there and make them happen.
You have to make relaxation a discipline.
Because we can’t be on all the time. It’s not healthy. Our minds can’t be wound up all the time.
It’s like imagine a bicep muscle. It the muscle was ‘on’ all the time – if it was tensed all the time – it would soon break down and create all sorts of problems through the rest of the body.
It’s the same story with the mind. It can’t be on all the time. It’s not designed to be on all the time. It’s designed to move through rhythms of engagement and relaxation.
So we need to have a commitment to relaxation. We need to have commitment to relaxation as a productivity practice.
And we need to turn that commitment into a discipline, and that discipline into a habit.
And like all things, chill-time is your responsibility.
JG.
Fiona May Steddy says
People do what they do because they are subconsciously wired to perform in a certain way..
I’f you’re a workaholic or have a driven personality, you just can’t stop and turn off.
You need to learn why you are the way you are and then learn how to be different. It takes a journey to change your mindset and do life differently. I teach emotional intelligence to people who want to change their lives and it’s the game changer.