“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”
Does your mind feel free? How about your heart? Are you stuck somewhere?
For the last few months, I’ve felt stuck. Not depressed but kinda depressed. Not really sure what the definition of it is. I didn’t feel that excited to wake up. My mind would race and race while sleeping, somehow my body being more tense in sleep than while awake. It seemed ironic that while working on all this emotional stuff that I still felt small, caged, almost as if this work was making things worse.
And then 2017 happened. The year started and I started to write again. I started to write what I wanted to write. I stopped obsessing over the news cycle to see what harmful thing happened and to learn about who it was I should distrust. I started to let things emanate from me, instead of absorbing all that was around me.
I think I struggled so much at the end of last year because I was trying to run a business. I don’t think the work I had done in building emotional tools was bringing me down, I think it was trying to take those tools and alter them so that they would look how other people wanted them to look. A website that people would deem beautiful. A workshop package that people would find compelling. A price that would make people excited to pay. All of these details to be changed based on what I thought other people had wanted.
And the more that I tried to tweak these tools to appeal to a target audience, the crazier I went. I would spend days thinking about the perfect price. Names? It would take me weeks and then I’d still end without a company name. This one too sappy. That one too strong. This one too obtuse. That one too fluffy. Sometimes I would just create multiple things and run with it and then create the websites and get ready to launch and then say, “Nah, nobody will like this.”
For me, business has been about doing something to satisfy the needs of others. The customer is queen. Sacrifice what I want and focus on their needs. Well, these tools had been specifically designed for what I wanted and what I needed. How to adapt them now to be what somebody else wants?
2017 gave me time to pause and ask myself, “Who is telling me that I need to do business like this?”
I couldn’t come up with a name.
These were the things that I was telling myself. Drilling into my own brain. I was a slave to the idea that I needed to do all these things for business that I didn’t want to do. 2017 broke it open for me.
I’m doing what I want to do, and believe that from there, love and joy will emanate. People will feel my heart open to actually being excited for work, instead of dreading if what I’ve done doesn’t meet their expectations.
Redemption song. Thank you, Bob.