The last six months have been quite the whirlwind for me. And its got me thinking again about intention and resilience practice.
In the middle of April, I stared down my calendar with mixed feelings. I was basically booked straight out through September with additional prospects still hanging out there - a both exciting and terrifying prospect. A colleague asked how many jobs or open projects I was working on at that moment and her question finally spurred me to pause and actually count. The number was 10-15 depending on how I counted. Yeah.
Needless to say, that number and my looming schedule gave me a bit of pause. How was I going to do this? I was literally maxing out the days and hours one can do things. I would not only need to manage the schedule and deliver the quality of work needed, I would need to manage my own resilience to make all of that happen. And in that moment, I made a plan and some commitments.
First, I decided that regardless of the myriad of jobs or details or urgent work or pending problems banging at my door, I would show up to each job and be present while I was doing it. I did not want my colleagues and clients to feel the weight of my commitments. I wanted them to feel that I was not rushed and fully focused on the work we were doing together. That was my intention. I knew I would fail at times, and I did, but that intention guided how I approached the months to come.
The second commitment I made was to carve out those moments to nurture and recharge myself and then guarding them closely. There are only so many hours in a day and those times were few and precious. So when they happened, I also committed to engaging in them fully, shelving the to-do list, and not entertaining the guilt or urgency of work that always tries to steal our renewal.
And with those commitments, I stepped from April into May and woke up six months later in
October having covered more ground and successfully accomplished more good work than I thought possible. And, yes, I was so very tired, but I had managed to maintain enough fire to make it work. I wasn’t completely empty. I still had some juice leftover.
I’ve fallen and picked myself up again many times over the past six months. On a meta level, it was a solid experiment for someone working on resilience. And it was a test and testing ground for how to realize all this resilience talk in a season of too much busy. I’m still unpacking lessons from it.
And you? How are testing and applying your resilience practice? Don’t worry when it’s hard or you fall - it is a practice and a process. Resilience is a long game play.