You’re listening to episode 115 of The Maisie Hill Experience. Today I’m talking to you about balance, when to go for it versus when to rest. It’s going to be a juicy one. Let’s get into it.

If you want to do things differently but need some help making it happen then tune in for your weekly dose of coaching from me, Maisie Hill, Master Life Coach and author of Period Power. Welcome to The Maisie Hill Experience.

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening. How are you all doing? Today I’m diving into a topic that’s been sitting on my original list of ideas for the podcast patiently waiting for me to pick it up. So, it’s all about balance today. I’ve got some strong opinions about it, some really helpful concepts to share with you and I’m talking about this now because spring is around the corner here in the UK. And in my membership The Flow Collective we’re going to be spending the spring season from the end of March through till June focusing on rapid growth.

I have planned a very exciting programme of coaching calls based on the idea of what it takes to be successful. And I use that word cautiously because it can bring to mind – I don’t know, fame and just has this certain kind of imagery that’s often on social media and that’s cool if that’s what you want. I’ve got some clients in the membership who are focused on creating results in their lives that are about them being in public facing roles where they are known, sought out and paid for their expertise and amazing personality. So it’s all good if that’s what you’re after.

But when I talk about being successful I’m talking about accomplishing a desired result or meeting a goal of some kind, whatever that happens to look like for you. And I’ve said before here plenty of times, but I’ll say it again, my clients set all kinds of goals and it’s my favourite thing to coach on. So I’m fired up and excited to coach the hell out of you all over the coming months.

And on that note I want to invite you to a masterclass that I’m going to be teaching on March 17th called How to Achieve Any Goal. I’m going to be sharing all my best teachings on setting and achieving goals. I was writing my notes for it a few days ago and it’s going to be my most powerful webinar to date. I already know. And if you’ve been to any of my trainings, my workshops, masterclasses before you already know that I deliver. I just love to give them. I have a lot of fun doing it.

If you’re already on my email list then you’ll receive your invitation to come. You do need to sign up for it though. You can also use the link in the show notes for the podcast or my Instagram profile or you can just head to maisiehill.com and head to the events tab and you can sign up there. Now, because we’re going to be focusing on success and rapid growth and everything that’s involved in that, I want to do my best to set you up for success now.

So the next few episodes are going to focus on the topics that I see impacting or holding back my clients the most when it comes to being successful and goals. And my client, Zoe, actually asked about this particular topic. Every few months I ask my clients in the membership what they’d like me to talk about on the podcast and they all chime in, it’s very helpful, very useful.

And, Zoe originally asked me to talk about balance and how to know when to go for it versus when to rest but several other members, loads of you in actual fact, have all asked subsequent questions that have contributed in various ways to this episode, so shout to all of you and thank you.

Before we dive in let’s just take a moment to think about why you want balance. So if you’re listening to this thinking, yeah, I’d like some balance in my life, what is it about balance that is appealing to you? And also, what do you mean by balance? So just answer those questions for yourself, what is it about balance that’s appealing to you at the moment and what do you mean by balance? Now, you know I love a good definition and there are a few definitions of balance. I’m going to mention a couple of them.

The first is a situation in which different elements are equal. I personally think this notion of balance is a load of nonsense, does it even exist? Just think about it, if you look around in nature where do you see perfect balance? Where are things the same all the time? And even if you have a set of scales, and we’re being really scientific here, are they ever truly equal? If you have a really accurate sense of scales down to the decimal point are they ever really equal?

And I know it’s like semantics but I think it’s useful to examine this idea because we talk about balance all the time and just throw it around as a word. What are we even talking about? And is it actually useful? And I get why feeling balanced is something that you might want to work towards.

And a lot of the time the people who are saying that they want this are the ones who are working long hours. They’re feeling stressed or stretched in some way whether that’s through their paid employment and/or unpaid work, caring for others, parenting, chores, all of these things. But I think what they’re really saying is they want to work less hours and to have more support and more sleep and more time for themselves.

And the second definition I’ve got for you is an even distribution of weight, enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady as opposed to being unbalanced and falling over. I actually prefer this definition for what we’re talking about because typically the people who are wanting more balance feel like they’re struggling to stay upright and keep going.

So when you find yourself saying that you need more balance in your life or that your life is unbalanced, how does that feel? Because depending on the context and how you feel when you think that specific thought it may be helpful or unhelpful to continue to entertain that thought. So for some it could be a wakeup call that alerts you to things needing to change. For others it could feel very doom and gloom and just lead to rumination and in actual fact more imbalance.

And in the same way someone could be experiencing arguably a great deal of stress and telling themselves or other people, “My life is balanced.” Now, first of all, when your stress responses are activated and your brain is prioritising survival you’re more prone to defensiveness. So if you’ve ever had this experience, I certainly have, of feeling stressed and overwhelmed and then a loved one or colleague points out that maybe it would be a good idea if you took a break.

I’ve had this happen and sure enough that defensiveness kicks in and I get annoyed at them for suggesting that because they clearly just can’t see how important something is and that a break is impossible. And maybe when someone suggests that we make it mean they have thoughts about us of some kind. When actually they can see things very clearly, often more clearly than we can but in this situation we’re seeing them as a threat. And so in the past and occasionally still now I might defend myself against someone’s very loving, kind and thoughtful suggestion.

But secondly, you always want to check in on how a thought feels to you. Does it feel true? Does it feel honest? Does your body feel tight or tense when you think about it? And when I imagine myself experiencing a high level of stress and saying, “My life is balanced”, that feels tight. That’s how I know I’m lying to myself. There’s this sense of trying to convince myself and trying to convince others as well.

I recently did a podcast about thought audits and upgrades where I spoke about this. So you can reference that episode alongside this one too. But here’s the thing, personally I don’t actually want balance. It doesn’t appeal to me at all, it really doesn’t. I’d rather emphasise certain aspects of my life at certain times whether we’re talking about a 24 hour cycle.

There’s a time where I want to emphasise my work or emphasise resting or having fun or whatever it is, spending time with my loved ones. And that can be a 24 hour cycle, it can be a week, a month, a season of the year, a whole menstrual cycle or a season with the menstrual cycle. It can be an entire year. You might think, well, this year for me is about this and it will have a particular emphasis. So that to me is more useful than this idea of striving for balance.

And although there have been times in my life where I’ve been quite desperate for balance I would say, I no longer set balance as a goal because it doesn’t feel helpful. It has this tightness to it and a need to control things in order to feel okay. Which makes a lot of sense given how the people who tend to have this urge to be more balanced are usually stressed and sleep deprived and wanting to control things. Ask me how I know.

But I don’t think it’s a helpful thing to aim for or at least not as helpful as what I’m going to suggest as an alternative which is that instead of balance and this kind of perfect set point that then needs to be controlled and kept. What if instead of that you have a dynamic zone that you operate in most of the time. It’s not a fixed point of balance. It’s a zone that you exist in where you feel resilient and able to respond to things that are going on but it’s not things are kept the same all the time and you’re not the same all the time within it.

And then when you do experience high stress levels and overwhelm and burnout, exhaustion that’s when you’re on the edges of that zone and beyond it. And there will be times when you are outside of that zone, that’s just being human. Sometimes it will just happen and other times it will actually be intentional. You will intentionally choose to go for it even though you’re already tired. So when I was a birth doula and I would often be at births for 24/48, sometimes 72 hours. I was intentionally choosing to deprive myself of sleep and to keep going even though I was exhausted/

Also when I went out partying because that happened too, I intentionally chose to deprive myself of sleep and a lot of the time to experience hangovers as well. Again, just part of being human and tonight I’m probably intentionally going to choose to stay up later so that I can watch the latest episode of The Last Of Us. But if you’ve been pushing it for a while and for a while can mean days, weeks, decades then adjusting to doing less isn’t always that easy even if it’s completely necessary and is something that you want.

Because if your baseline level of stress has been high and you’ve just got used to operating from that place where things feel urgent and you’ve just gotta get through the day and then you can deal with the next most urgent thing tomorrow. So on the one hand you can recognise that’s unsustainable, it’s not particularly helpful or enjoyable at all. But on the other it’s also more familiar and known to you and you’ve just kind of acclimatised to that. That’s kind of what your new baseline is.

And if your survival brain is running the show which it will be when this is what’s going on. Then we’ve got to actively support those stress responses so that you can move out of survival mode. And similarly if you’ve been burnt out or exhausted, I know many of you recognise that, resonates with you. Then when you’re recovering you’ll probably experience what I just call the fear, the fear of going back to that.

And I did a podcast quite a while back now about burnout, it’s episode 63. So if you have been in either or both of those places there’s a period of time where you’re recalibrating from the level of stress, overwhelm, burnout that you’ve been experiencing. And the specific length of time will vary greatly but there are so many things that will support that process. I teach loads of them inside my membership. And I will be honest with you, the irony of me talking about all of this with you now is that I haven’t been getting as much sleep recently,

I had some insomnia, my period wasn’t even due which is usually when I experience insomnia, if I’m going to. I do things to counteract that, that usually works very well but that’s the place in my cycle where I get insomnia. But my period wasn’t even due. It was day seven of my cycle. However the moon was in Aries which is basically I now realise is my premenstrual phase of the lunar cycle. And when the moon is in Aries and my period is due that’s just delightful. That’s when I’ve just got to hide away from the world.

So I had this period of not much sleep and then my son has also been ill. And when he’s ill he usually comes down with a fever pretty quickly. And he used to have febrile seizures when he was younger every time he got a fever. Then he didn’t have any for a few years but he had one last year. So whenever he has a fever one of us sleeps with him. And so recently he had a fever for a couple of nights and then a weird night of sleep after that and he was hallucinating. So, there were a lot of wakeups and not great sleep.

And of course, with him being ill there’s work that I haven’t been able to do. So this is kind of perfect for this episode because I’m going to share with you how I approach things and how I decide when I’m just going to kind of ‘push through’ and when I’m going to rest. And I’ve had several things happen so far this year, we’re two months in, that are perfect examples to share with you as part of this episode.

Now, I had big plans for January and February and March of this year, I still do. February’s about to end. So, there’s one month left of quarter one. And I know that April, more specifically Aries season is typically when I like to ease off the gas and to do less and then I get back into things again. And this is a big year for me in terms of creating things. So, I currently have four big projects on the go, two of them are related to each other. So although they’re separate projects, to me they support one another.

And a lot of you ask me how I get so much done and it’s because of that way of thinking. I don’t see things as competing. I see how they all support one another and are part of the same vision. So, I’ve got these four projects, one of which I’m only technically giving feedback on but it’s still an open tab in my brain, yeah. And the other ones I’m responsible for creating. And there’s also some other stuff I need to create later on.

Anyway I had things planned out, I had a plan. I had a timeline of what I’d be focusing on and when. And there was wiggle room within that but I was intentionally stacking these projects into the first half of the year. And I always know that it’s likely that things will shift, it just happens for all of us. There are things that can’t be anticipated and that we just don’t know are going to happen but it’s kind of likely that there’ll be illness. Nelson will need some time off school. There’ll be unforeseen things happening.

And so I always have a plan but I always give myself wiggle room and flexibility not just in my calendar but in my mind which is different to kind of determination and desire to get things done. Those can all exist at the same time. So we’re getting started, we’re in January and I had carved out two weeks to focus on one of these projects. And at the start of the first week, I got ill. I cleared my schedule, and I got ill. So it was good because I had no calls or meetings of any kind. So, I didn’t have to reschedule anything.

But I was annoyed that my grand plan had been foiled. So, I just let myself feel annoyed and disappointed. I moved through it very quickly. And I mean that was just quickly followed by feeling so rotten with the flu that I just didn’t care anyway. And because that was a week of the project work I knew immediately that I needed to adjust something, either my sense of what’s possible and actively using everything that I teach you all including coaching to still do it in the timeline I had originally set. Or I needed to adjust my plans and the timeline or actually both.

And this is something that you just get better at with practice, the ability to coach yourself but also the ability to be intentional and discern what you need to do and when. And I know I’m really good at getting things done. I can achieve things in a short period of time once I have addressed any blocks in my mind through coaching myself and getting coached by my coaches. So I knew that was an option but it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do because I knew I’d be pushing myself when I was running on empty.

It also took a while for my brain to engage again because I was ill and then I was recovering from being ill which is not the same as being well. And it just felt in my mind I was going through treacle. So I knew that doing work that required me to think at a very high level and in a focused way was just off the table. I knew that it would be better to focus on eating, resting, sleeping, recovering. So, I went into self-care and maintenance mode.

So I was either not working and taking care of myself or the work that I was doing was just more maintenance stuff, smaller tasks in the business, coaching my clients, all the things that I just can do and I love doing. Well, I don’t necessarily love doing all the tasks in my business, but you get my point. So the kindest thing for me to do was to reconfigure my plans for quarter one and quarter two, the first half of the year, still keeping at this point at least the same projects on the table but changing the order and the timeline.

And if I’d been more seriously ill for example or if something else would have happened I would have likely taken one of them off the table. And I could still do that because, newsflash, I’m my own boss. I’m the one with the plan and the timeline. No one else is setting these things. But I do want to stick to it, not at the cost of being a mean boss to myself though. And one of our company values is that we do epic things without burning ourselves out and that includes me.

So sometimes we have to adjust the way that we go about things. Sometimes it means making changes to what the plans actually are. And if I don’t have anything that’s serious going on in my life like illness then I like to stick with the timelines even if they feel challenging because it requires me to think differently. It requires me to level up with what I think is possible and become the person who does it. And for you that could mean dropping perfectionism, being willing to take risks, put yourself out there, have your own back.

It could mean having honest conversations with yourself and with others, prioritising yourself when the world has taught you to prioritise other people’s needs and wants before yours. So, all of these things can be involved in changing how you go about doing things.

And an example of this was when I was writing my second book, Perimenopause Power during the first COVID lockdown. And that wasn’t the only thing I was doing. I was running my business. I was doing a course, I was participating in one. I had one-on-one clients as well and I had a kid at home. And if there was a time to change the plan, that was it. And I definitely considered that but I wanted to do it and I also wanted to write the book with my mental health intact.

And the situation was just so ridiculous. There were just so many things that I was doing that it actually really freed me up because basically this plan sounds absolutely ridiculous. There’s no way it’s going to work. So I may as well just give it a go because failure is already inevitable so what the hell. We’ll just give it a go. And it’s just a fun way to get your brain on board with doing something that it’s labelled as preposterous and the chance of failure is just so high that it actually frees you up to just give it a go.

And because I did that I expanded into another realm. It’s like reaching a level on a videogame that you didn’t even know was there. And it took a while to get there but once you’re there, know you can do it. You can never lose that. You don’t always have to be on that level, but you can do it, you can get there. And once you know that about yourself you’re a changed person. That doesn’t mean doing it in a way that costs you, whether we’re talking about your health, your relationships, your sanity.

And I say that really quite seriously because there was a point when I was writing Period Power where I was very concerned about my mental health. So all that to say I like to keep the timeline when it makes sense because of what becomes available to me and who I become in the process. It requires me to level up but that’s coming from already feeling great about who I am and having a high regard for myself. And at the same time I’m totally willing to change things and I’m not going to beat myself up if something takes all year instead of three months or it gets delayed by a year.

This is the difference between being committed and being attached to a plan. But because I’d been ill, so we’re back in January now, and because that period of illness and recovery was over the two weeks that I’d cleared my diary to work on this project. I knew that my plan needed to change. And I know you’ll want to know how I knew that. So I’m going to do my best to break it down for you. It was a knowing inside of me that wasn’t driven by fear or pressure. So I could have decided to just go for it, to keep everything, the timeline, the schedule all of those things the same.

But why would I do that? Genuinely that was a question I asked myself. Why would I do that? And I just couldn’t find a good reason to sell myself on doing it. Someone once emailed my team asking if I misspoke on a podcast episode when I said selling myself, and I didn’t. One day I might do an episode about this specifically but when I say sell myself or sell yourself what I’m referring to is the level of belief that we have in ourselves. For instance, I had to sell myself on the idea of writing a book. I had to sell myself on it being possible for me.

And also sell myself on why it was a great idea to do it knowing that I would need to make sacrifices in order to make it happen. I mean it was full on. And not just that but then to sell my idea to other people because you have to do that when you’re writing a book. You have to sell your idea to an agent, hi, Julia, and to the various publishers that you then meet with. And you all sell yourself on ideas all the time. You also sell yourself out of ideas all the time too, including your thoughts and ideas about what being balanced or the need for balance is.

So I’m currently selling myself on some things that I want to do in the next three years that are going to require resources and they’re going to require me to evolve in order to make them happen. So I’m currently building, I’m currently selling myself on why I want to do those things because at this stage I know that I can coach or sell myself into pretty much anything. And I’ve also got my coaches, Bev and Robyn to coach me on the stuff that I can’t do on my own. And that’s what I mean by selling myself, it’s selling myself on a particular course of action.

And that is real freedom when you can do this because I could keep everything in my life the same as it is. I could completely change it. I could get rid of my business altogether. I have no desire to. That could happen and I could sell myself on being okay with any of those options on how they’re all the best things ever even if things happen due to what could be described as things that are outside of my control. But in this example of me deciding whether I was going to go for it and stick to the timeline or adjust the plan, I couldn’t find a reason that I liked for keeping it.

So I changed what my schedule looked like and flipped the priorities of a couple of things around. So then we got into February, my brain finally came back to me, thank goodness. And I had a couple of days where I was able to do project work before half term kicked in and Nelson was off school for a week. So to be clear, at this point my energy was back. I could think at the level I needed to but I also, this is a thought, I didn’t have a lot of time. I had two working days.

So, I had to coach myself on my thoughts about not having a lot of time because I could have entertained those thoughts, it’s not enough time, I’m behind, it’s not going to happen etc, etc. But it’s such a waste of time to indulge in that way of thinking. But if you’re human like me you will have those thoughts for sure but try to catch them as soon as you can and then course correct.

I’ve got a few questions I want to start bringing into this conversation that some of my clients have asked. One of them asked, it’s such a great question, how can we practise discerning when our brain is resisting work, effort and starting because we need a break versus just the brain doing its thing and holding on to energy? So she mentioned this because I’m always pointing out to my clients that the brain wants to keep you safe and it also wants to conserve energy, that’s its job.

Literally the highlights of my working week are coaching my clients and making this podcast for you. And even though I love, love, love to do those things, right before I do them my brain always pipes up with, “Do we have to do that? Can’t we just not?” So that’s what she means by the brain doing its thing. Your brain is going to brain, it’s going to offer this up any time a little bit of effort is involved in anything which can be picking a sock up off the floor or writing a book.

It’s always going to look for the way out so that it can save energy but you have to sell yourself in that moment on why doing it is the best thing ever. Look at that sock and sell yourself on why it’s the best thing ever to just pick it up now. And that’s what my brain was doing. It was resisting the task at hand because it was going to require some effort, these two days that I had. And especially after two weeks of being off, being ill and recovering etc. It was gearing back up again.

And how you know in answer to this question, the way you know is you do it. You get started, you do the task and you see how you feel. So typically once I start my work gives me energy and I love the feeling of hard work, of my body being tired at the end of the day, knowing my brain has produced stellar work. Tiredness is often over-pathologized in terms of conversationally how we talk about it. For some it is for sure a health issue, can be very serious, one that needs attention and care.

But I also want to offer that our bodies are meant to experience tiredness. Feeling tired doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong. It just means you need to go to bed and sleep but we like to argue with that and stay up watching The Last Of Us. So my answer to this question is you just give it a go. Doing a quick bit of self-coaching beforehand can work wonders when you’re feeling that resistance. Just don’t use self-coaching as a tool for procrastination.

I find it very useful to tap into connection, why I’m doing it, who it’s for, feeling connected to all of you, helping you and just being inspired by how you’re all using my work to do amazing things. That just gets me going. And once I’ve gotten through those first few minutes, I’m off to the races. That’s different from being aware that you need a break. And of course we’re also socialised to believe that a break comes after work and after a spell of being productive. So, there’s that too.

But let me bring you back to my February. I had those two days to get work done and I tricked my brain. I said, “Okay, we’ve got two days. What would be the best way to use these two days?” And I decided to plan out a project in more detail so that it’s easier for me to do the various components involved in it. Now, an insight into my world right now. Planning is something that I’m really having to wrap my head around, I have been for some time. It’s definitely gotten a lot better but it still comes up for me because in the past I would use planning as a way to procrastinate and avoid other types of work.

So I had subconsciously labelled planning as procrastination but at this level of business and as my company grows more needs to be planned. I mean it doesn’t have to but my experience, and I think my team’s experience and my clients’ experience is that the more things are planned the better which is not something I ever thought I’d be saying because I’m pretty spontaneous. I’m very confident and I either feel prepared because that’s just how I think about myself, I can do this no problem or I’m just willing to give it a go because I trust myself.

But when there are multiple projects on the go that aren’t just, I’m not the only person involved in them, other people are too, then timelines and things become more helpful. So once I accepted that two days of planning was in fact acceptable I just got going. That was my way into it. And I did plan it all out, but I also did more than that because I reduced my expectations of myself and created space for me to have fun and be creative. And I just stopped thinking about how much time I had.

But then it was half term so Nelson was off school for a week. Then there were the sleep issues for me, him being ill so I just knew I wasn’t going to be pushing myself to get the work I wanted to do done because why would I do that to myself? Why would you do that to yourself? And I was just so grateful in that moment to past Maisie back in January when she got ill, that Maisie who changed the timeline as soon as she was ill, which is something I could do at any point, but I love that she did that for me.

Alright next question is, after having burnout about a year ago I had to learn testing for the first time in my life and I still cannot always seem to trust myself to know for sure. So I think this person is referring to testing things out as in giving things a go and seeing if it causes more fatigue or if it’s okay, if it feels doable. And the answer is you won’t know all the time. And if you are expecting that of yourself just notice that you’re holding yourself to a very high standard, that you should know and that you should be able to predict this.

And of course I do think you can build on the skill of being able to discern things and have a pretty good sense but that doesn’t mean that you’re always going to know. And just remember that there’s a difference between being in that initial phase where you’re recovering from burnout and then what comes after that where you’re increasing your capacity and your resilience.

Similarly to that someone asked, how can you build trust in yourself to find and keep the balance in your life? Okay, how does it feel to want to keep balance? Because the vibe that it gives me is graspy, chasing something that was never yours to keep. And think about doing poses that require balance in yoga or if you’re doing balancing exercises when you’re working out. Because when you try to control your balance and not wiggle and you bring in that tightness that’s when you wiggle and when you fall.

But when you can accept movement and let it be there whilst steadying your mind focusing on what’s in front of you, you remain upright because you’re in that, it’s like that zone that I was talking about earlier. Rather than it being a fixed thing that feels tight and has to be kept. And it just gets brittle. It’s not good. Instead of that, there’s that flexibility of movement within it.

And a few people have asked variations of this next question. When you’ve prepared for a busy time, you have to have the busy time and you’re unable to have a rest period afterwards. As the busy period which is extra stuff doesn’t stop the continual stuff happening in the background which all still needs to be done after your busy period. I love this question because it’s very common and a lot of the time the situation just isn’t being approached in the most helpful way.

So, let’s break it down. Here’s the situation, you’re doing something that’s busy or challenging or demanding in some way. It requires your time, attention, energy or other resources. And then going straight back to ‘normal life’. And that is the problem. You’re doing something that requires more of you in some way and then jumping straight back into everything else that you’re already doing. By the way, side note, a situation requiring more of you in some way isn’t good or bad, it just is. And you get to decide how you want to feel about it.

But I want to give you some variations of how you can handle this. The first thing is give yourself some buffer time, some downtime after the busy period, some intentional rest or play. And you could do this beforehand too. Did you know that’s also an option? And listen, I know some of you are going to be listening to this and your brain is going to be arguing with me on this one about how it’s not possible for you to rest or do something that’s enjoyable for you because of this reason and that reason. My strong recommendation is that you look to what is possible, what can you do?

We can be very black and white about this because in your mind you’re like, I need a full day off or I need a full week off work or a full hour. And if that’s not an option and we can question if that’s actually true but let’s just say it’s not then you can end up disregarding the five minutes or the hour that is available to you. And sometimes we’re just not being clear and explicit with ourselves and with others about what it is we want and need. So, you want to check in with yourself if you’re doing that too.

But this becomes even more important when you know that you are depleted because there are times as I mentioned earlier when you’ll make the intentional choice to do something to get it done even when you know you could do with a duvet day and a big bar of Tony’s chocolate. I am for sure giving myself a lighter month in April. There are things I’ll still be doing. One project is really significant but I’m not adding in anything else. I’ve said it here. I’m not adding in anything else and it’s also going to be the Easter holiday so I’ll have some time off too.

The other thing you can do is just reduce your expectations in other areas of your work and life. So, again that notion of balance is unhelpful here because I think we’re thinking, I should be able to be doing more let’s say at work and everything else should stay exactly the same. As in you still fulfil all other responsibilities in your life to the same degree or you just keep everything exactly the same. And it’s not that everything has to go out of the window just because you’re doing more work.

But often we’ve got very high expectations of ourselves that we should be able to achieve something in this area and in all the other areas too to the same high standard. You can also get rid of the things that just aren’t important. And if your brain is telling you that they are all important, bear in mind that if you’re in a stress response of some kind then it’s likely that you are seeing things as urgent that are not urgent. This is where talking it through with someone helps, even without getting coached, just talking it over saying out loud.

You can say it to another human. You can record a voice note to yourself too. You can write it down. There are all sorts of ways of working with this. Also just get very clear on what will support you during this time. This is why in my membership we answer the same set of questions every Sunday before the week starts because we’re intentionally taking the time, literally five minutes to look at the components of the week ahead which is different for everyone and then planning around them.

And it’s really amazing to see the variety of things that the members come up with that are going to support them that week. They’re not usually things that are big and fancy. It might just be sending someone a text message and giving them a heads up or making a request in a relationship, being explicit, organising things. But in addition to all of those things do not forget to manage your mind ahead of time preferably.

How are you framing things? Because when I’m thinking about this ‘busy period’ which I don’t think is a useful description but you all know what I mean when I say it. Instead of saying, “It’s so busy, I’ve got so much to get done.” I’m just like, “Man, I’m going to unlock a whole new level.” Because then it’s fun. Then that’s what I mean, how you approach things is going to determine your experience of it and that includes how much tiredness you’ll experience.

Another common approach that I hear, I have to mention this one, I’m juggling so much or it’s just like I’m spinning plates and one of them is going to crash if I don’t keep going. And that’s the visual, that you’ve got to keep things going or something will crash. And I used to tell myself this a lot. Years ago, this was something that came up a lot for me. And I really didn’t do myself any favours by doing that because every time I told myself this story about how I had so many plates to keep spinning and that it felt like something was going to crash if I just dropped the ball for a minute.

I felt more stressed than I was. And whilst this can be a helpful realisation if it causes you to take some plates down off the poles that are spinning, if you actually stop doing so much, that’s one thing. But when I speak to someone thinking this way that’s not usually what happens. Usually they are the ones that are spinning. They’re not spinning plates, they’re just spinning themselves. And it really feels that way because you’re experiencing stress that makes everything feel urgent and it has this frantic energy to it.

And if you’re not managing your mind you will also end up with far more plates to spin. What we want to happen is that when you’re doing something, whether you’re hanging out with your mates, doing some deep work on a project, is that you’re simply doing those things. Rather than trying to do one thing and your mind is on all the other stuff that you’re not doing. So it’s like you’re literally spinning plates because you’re not being effective in accomplishing things.

And I don’t just mean that in a productive, ticking things off your list way. It also means experiencing connection with other people and all the things that nourish you and bring you joy. So, you have two choices. You can either be intentional and have fewer plates and go, “Yeah, this isn’t working. I’m going to put this down, I’m going to put this down.” Or you can manage your mind, work with your body and your stress responses, your nervous system to stop spinning plates, stop spinning yourself. I think it’s most effective when we do both.

But I love to do the latter to use thought work and awareness of my body to change my internal experience first because when I can do that I get out of my survival brain and being stressed. And I move into being goal focused and thinking creatively and having fun with it. And instantly some things will drop away because I’ll just be, “That’s not actually important, that can wait. We can change that plan.” Or I just no longer see them as a problem. So literally the same list of things can be there but they’re not spinning, they’re just there.

Okay my lovelies, told you today was going to be a whopper. I will be back next week. Make sure you sign up for my How to Achieve Any Goal masterclass, just use the link in the show notes or my Instagram profile or you can head to the event section on my website maisiehill.com. Have a fantastic week and I will catch you next time.

Hey, if you love listening to this podcast then come and check out my membership, The Flow Collective, where you get my best resources and all the coaching you need to transform your inner and outer life. Sign up to the waitlist at theflowcollective.co/join, and I’ll see you in the community.