When writing this, I was in a busy season of preparation as the opening (‼️) keynote at an HR conference on Breaking the Unwritten Rules: Keys to Sustainable Leadership.
While I was head down prepping, I had to let some things slide. I didn’t have the bandwidth or brain capacity to focus on anything else besides the last-minute prep and client work. Some of the internal projects the team was working on had to wait too.
And it’s ok!
I made a conscious trade-off because I knew it was temporary. Because if everything is important, then nothing is important.
Sometimes we need to cut ourselves some slack, let things go, or put them aside for a while.
The trickier question is: what are you letting go of? Temporarily shelving an internal project is one thing. Habitually shelving yourself (your health, your relationships, your sleep) is another.
I have a client who did the latter for years. It cost him his health, his happiness, and nearly cost him his marriage. In hindsight, he was able to see clearly what he couldn’t see when he was in the thick of it: he’d been abandoning himself, one small compromise at a time.
It’s two ends of the same spectrum. Conscious trade-off, or slow self-erasure.
Whether you’re in an organization or self-employed, there will always be times when work dominates. The question is, is it the exception or the norm? And if it’s not feeling balanced, what do you want to change?
