How has your week been?
I’ve been digging out of a hole, from being both exhausted and behind on my todo list.
(Last week, I had to deep clean my house all of a sudden due to a problem and it was a lot.)
I am starting to recover and it feels like maybe I am on the other side popping out better than ever.
My trust in hope for good things coming from the universe at large
took a hit last week
but now it’s better than before.
Healing truly is not a linear process.
…
I’ve been craving talking about something.
Today I wanted to pop in to revisit some ideas I have shared previously and strike up this question:
How well do you communicate with yourself?
I think this question is so key and it has been a focus of my entire life and work.
Writing + Organizing
My life felt like a mess by the end of college, I couldn’t get over that my boss stole money from me.
When I graduated college, I felt lost on my next steps so I started writing every day.
Writing in particular was the gateway drug.
It was what helped me begin to listen to myself better.
I hadn’t even realized that we (me + me) were not communicating well.
And I’ve come to appreciate the tool of writing more and more over the years.
And organizing for me is a passion for similar reasons.
Organizing my words was a natural next step as a writer.
Originally, I got into organizing because I ended up writing every day for years,
writing in such quantities I could not find anything any more. I had so many ideas that felt like they were falling in the cracks.
What I learned after a few years of embracing organizing is that it’s really all about:
valuing your ideas and making it so you can return to them later, aka basically talking to yourself in the future.
Think about it this way:
If you are disorganized, how can you trust that you can talk to your future self?
That she will get the message?
You can’t so you might not trust her in the future to follow through on important things.
Having a good relationship with yourself is also a part of having clarity,
knowing what to do next in your life, book, business or creative practice. I believe you can do it by listening to both yourself and
what the things you are creating want you to do next.
(I talked about that recently in a recent free class I did on finding your priorities.)
It’s all about listening. Communicating.
You + you.
YALL THIS THEME IS ENDURING FOR ME
This question of how well you relate to yourself is at the crux of everything I help people do.
That includes coaching people to write for a book or business, organizing their ideas. Editing books and copywriting. Helping with marketing, productivity, business and project management.
Not to mention helping people heal from things like trauma and loss, which I always seem to do along the way of whatever I do even though I am not a therapist (I do have a masters in spiritual care though). Helping you find clarity in your life or work, listening to your intuition and what you discover through writing and organizing.
Also, I don’t talk about my love of Tarot because I know may seem random…
I used to offer intuitive readings all the time and my intuition is spot-on, if I do say so myself. (I gave out free Tarot readings to people who donated to my fundraiser to send 2 young women in Sierra Leone, Africa pay for college this spring….)
The truth is, I got good at it by learning to listen to myself. And when people tune into a good intuitive reading they start hearing their own intuition, and things that have been lurking under the surface for a while that they just couldn’t articulate / needed to confirm. Trust me, for the last 15+ years everything I’ve done is all about helping you (and me) have a good relationship with ourselves.
AND IT IS NEEDED
Women especially have SUCH a hard time with this because we are socialized to think of ourselves last. But it affects really cool dudes, too.
My learning about this
This topic of having a good relationship with ME has been an ongoing focus of mine for the last few years,
and I’ve talked about it in various ways (as you can see). Here are a just a few more:
- How it Went: My 2023 Goal to Have a Better Relationship With Myself
- 1 Thing I Learned in 2023 about life: your relationship with yourself might not be all about you.
And trying to have a better relationship with myself may never end.
It’s not over! It’s never over! It is at the heart of the things I am working on behind the scenes in my own life to this day…
RIGHT NOW.
It is still my goal of the year to focus on my relationship with myself (yes, 2024 is the second year that I am focusing on this).
And the status?
Things are going well and I am learning a lot. About what helps me thrive.
And how to help myself feel good and motivated to move towards those important things I want done.
SOCIAL MEDIA
And finally….
Part of having a good relationship with myself is noticing what makes me feel off.
In late July/ August I had to admit that all the craziness happening in the United State politically was getting me on social media a ton and thus more anxious and upset.
I worked to get the heck off –which was good…of course, lately I notice myself creeping back on at times.
It’s hard to eliminate completely because sometimes dipping a toe in is totally fine and fun. And I have so many good friends and contacts online I don’t want to lose, either. But of course…when I find myself mad about something I saw online or thinking about it at 3 AM that’s my evidence that I was playing with fire.
Anyway, this is not a new concept for me, but I need periodic reminders.
Here’s a clip of an email I sent in 2022 on the topic:
……
Are you spending a lot of time online, on your phone or social media?
Does it leave you feeling bored or off?
You might want to try this trick I used to make sure I am really filling my tank with what I really need, not just consuming crap that does not really fulfill me.
I noticed after I lost my father in 2021 that I was scrolling through social media and just feeling bad.
I had to ask myself, “Is this helping me or hurting me?” I decided to institute a new practice for a while called “microjournaling” which I heard about from a youtube video by Struthless talking about quitting social media in this video.
What I did:
For a month, every time I picked up my phone to scroll, instead I wrote a sentence about how I felt in a notes application.
I used one called Google Keep.
If you want to try it, you could do this anywhere you can keep a written or digital note, like Obsidian, Notion or Apple Notes.
What I learned:
I discovered I often picked up my phone and craved going on social media when I felt sad and just wanted a distraction. But this was problematic.
If I went on social media while sad, I could easily see something that would make me feel worse, or at the very least,
it wasn’t really going to make me feel better.
In this period of my life, distraction from my feelings wasn’t going to help me process them.
So I decided that when I feel sad, I will refrain from going on social media. I decided to take a break for about a month and removed pressure to post for my business. I just let people know I needed a break for a while.
I kept up the practice of journaling when I wanted to go on social media.
And then something changed!!
After a while, in my microjournaling I noticed I suddenly wanted to go on social media for the purpose of creating and sharing. That was new, and it seemed fun and creative, which was positive for me, rather than a negative thing. So I started experimenting with making videos and pictures to share my life in an authentic way just to connect with my people. That has felt really good.
These days I am not as rigid about microjournaling and sometimes I find myself scrolling for 20 minutes and still feeling bored—but I will notice and be like,
ok what’s going on here? What am I really wanting?
I don’t always know what I want or what I need
but stopping the scroll and doing something else usually helps me figure it out.
I’m figuring out how to balance everything along side you, but I thought I would share in case it helps you!
Next time you feel bored or off, try writing a sentence about how you feel, or asking yourself, “What am I really wanting or needing right now?”
It is okay to be with those feelings even if you don’t have all the answers quite yet.
I trust you will get closer to those answers in the end by being more connected to yourself.
…
Hope this inspires you. If you need more, look into the resources below!
Become the put together person of your dreams!
Want to get organized? Put ideas, notes, documents, + journals in order?
Make books, articles, emails, blogposts out of them? Achieve your goals faster than before?
If you are ready to put your random post its, notes, documents, articles, and ideas in one place
so you can make faster progress on your writing or business projects…
The 3 Month Fall Digital Organization Club is calling you!
