Not a Trick; Hopefully a Treat (Pulse #454)
How to treat yourself to a thriving end of year
I typically don’t do holiday-themed posts but I figured I’d play with it this time, especially since so much of what we’re doing at PF now is playing with why and how we do things.
So let’s do a little trick or treat.
Here’s the trick: will you trick yourself into believing you can accomplish everything you have on your list by year’s end without missing out on holidays and family events and the other best parts of this time of year and without burning yourself out trying to do everything? (I’m exhausted just typing that one out.)
And the treat: how can you instead treat yourself to an end of year that’s relaxed, rejuvenating, and still feels like you accomplished what matters most?
The more we accept that our reach will always exceed our grasp, the more we can shift from “get everything done” to “do our best to get the most important things done.”
Here’s where I remind you that being a healthy human in healthy relationships is being productive.
Or, said a different way, if the only activities that count as ‘productive’ are economic activities, please consider why that’s a given for you and how much of your life it excludes.
Here are some ideas and posts that’ll help you treat yo’self.
1. Embrace that the season can be good and hard
Competing priorities and head trash (from the Air Sandwich) are especially powerful this time of the year. Between the work time vs. family time conflict, to all the feels related to gift-giving pressure and enoughness, to narratives about the year we thought would unfold and the year that did, this season can be a lot.
And that’s not to mention people who lost loved ones this time of the year, whether the loss was years ago or if it’s a first season without them. Grief is its own project and, for many people, it’s seasonal.
If you find yourself on the Struggle Bus, don’t trick yourself into thinking it’s just you — there’s a lot of us riding along with you.
2. Make peace with the way the year has gone
I think the past the past is behind us
Be real confusing if not
So much of what can add to the additional work intensity this time of the year is our desire to recover from or catch up when life shatters our plans. We try to crunch months lost earlier in the year into weeks of an already short quarter.
Trust me, I get it. It’s a daily practice to remind myself that I can’t make up for the time lost while I was sitting with COVID during the Team Habits book launch.
Tricking yourself into thinking you can make up for that time only makes your suffering worse. Carrying the weight of what we didn’t do in the past only makes today’s steps that much harder.
All we can do is step forward better today. Give yourself the clean slate of seeing today as another opportunity to practice.
3. Give yourself some space to be fallow or in-transition
If you’ve shipped something important this year — and you probably have if you give yourself credit for it — you’re might find yourself in a bit of tension.
On the one hand, there’s the impetus to keep the ball rolling while you’ve got the momentum and “I did a thing!” high. It can feel fantastic to cross one of those annual goals off the list and get a jump on the next one.
On the other hand, finishing an important project can leave a void in us. As I wrote in Start Finishing:
There’s a lot of your heart, blood, soul, and time tied up in the project, and finishing the project releases all that energy into the world. But, importantly, that energy is released from you, meaning there’s an energetic void in you where the project once lived. Living with that void can be unsettling, disorienting, uplifting, relieving, and anticlimactic all at the same time.
We need to talk about the feelings that come with that void more. For some people, there can be a bit of existential hollowness and post-accomplishment depression that comes with it.
So, if you’re raring to go into the next thing and have the mojo for that, by all means, proceed.
But if something’s not quite right at the same time that you have that LFG! energy, don’t trick yourself into thinking that you absolutely have to get into the next thing.
Give yourself the treat of some fallow and in-transition time. You know what this season is especially great for? Fallow and in-transition time.
Make space and time to transition between projects goes into a bit more of what to do if want to lean into fallow and in-transition time.
Stand tall,
Charlie
Substack Migration Updates
For the next few Pulses, I’ll be sharing updates about what we’ve done and are doing with moving Productive Flourishing to Substack. Some of the audience doesn’t care much about the changes, but there are a lot of our long-time community members who are simultaneously excited and confused about what’s going on and where to find things.
🔐 = content for paying subscribers
🆓 = content for free subscribers
Recently Built/Updated ✅
🔐 The Momentum Planners bundle and the Momentum Planner E-Course are now available
🆓 The Pulse is now running as its own section
🆓 Free Planners has been updated
🆓 Our top posts have been updated and curated on the home page
🆓 ~150 posts have been updated and reformatted for Substack
Upcoming Builds and Updates for November:
🔐 The Start Finishing Your Projects E-course will be updated and migrated
🔐 3–5 more planners and worksheets will be available in the Resource Library
🆓 The Time Blocking Challenge is being updated and migrated to be available for all subscribers
🆓 We’re curating and editing our top podcast episodes and they’ll be on the homepage so you can find them more easily
As a reminder, October’s Monthly Momentum Call was our last free Monthly Momentum Call. We have renamed them to Monthly Community Coaching Calls and going forward they’re only available for paying subscribers and Academy members. Our next Monthly Community Coaching Call is November 13, 2023 at 2:00 p.m. PT.
Moving everything over and re-building our resources to be better and easier for you to find is a considerable effort. If you’d like to support those efforts and get access to 🔐 content as it’s available, please consider upgrading your subscription today.
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