If you’re one of my people, you tend to operate in one of two categories. You’re either a big-huge-enormous fan of structure and use it to plan every last detail of your life, or you absolutely hate structure and run from it like you run from that person with a hacking cough who’s got the plague over there.

Let’s make peace with both of those extremes by going a little bit Harry Potter on you.

This is an episode of That’s What She Said!  Listen in below, or find all the episodes here.

Hermione Granger is a really smart, really Type-A individual who uses tools like TIME TRAVEL to take more classes. Her structure level is over the top. You cannot beat Hermione at planning, at doing homework, at reading lists, or at time-turning.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find Luna Lovegood. She’s a laidback, dreamy individual who notices patterns and creatures others miss, subscribes to beliefs others find bizarre, and whose report cards are never crucial to the plot of any J.K. Rowling story.

Both of these humans save Harry Potter’s life at some point in the series. Which is to say…

Structure and serendipity go hand in hand.

They’re both amazing characters. They both get shit done and save the lives of their friends. You’ve got both of them within you, but you’re probably so busy shit-talking the other that you haven’t yet harnessed both of their strengths.

Let’s make peace with your Luna and Hermione parts, starting right now.

If you’re more of a Luna at heart, you’ve said something like, “I’m great at starting a routine and then letting it go the first day I don’t feel like it.”

Because you’re usually not starting *a* routine. You are RENOVATING YOUR LIFE all at once.

You don’t simply stop consuming GMOs and eat a little more kale! You go on a rampage and throw out everything in your pantry that doesn’t fit your strict guidelines, replace your plastics with glass, buy a juicer, start meal planning, and commit to eating 100% organic foods for the rest of time. (I’ve done this many times, including the time I threw out the microwave to kick off a particularly healthy kick. And then purchased a new microwave a few weeks later.)

This Total Life Overhaul works for a few days. You’re doing it! Everything is changing all at once! …and then you find yourself in a cafe with amazing muffins. Sweet, sweet, not-part-of-your-new-life-plan muffins.

FUCK IT, you decide, and throw all that structure out the window in one fell swoop.

Attempts to implement structure in your life are inevitably abandoned when the 18 changes you’ve taken on simultaneously begin to unravel.

Lest you feel superior because you’re on the Hermione end of the spectrum, let’s dive into big changes in Hermione land.

You’ve got your schedule packed with activities. Meal planning happens from mid-afternoon until 5:47 p.m. on Sundays, as well as on Wednesdays at precisely 1:37 p.m., between lunch yoga and afternoon meetings.

You schedule yourself to within an inch of your life and feel stressed by most any change to your plans.

Being one minute late is a catastrophe. Client cancellations are major issues. You don’t understand why people haven’t responded to your Thanksgiving Brunch RSVP 17 weeks in advance. Christmas shopping is done by November first.

Rigidity keeps you uptight on your best days and downright mean on your worst.

…but are you more of a Luna or a Hermione?

Lunas tend to:

+ make amazing work but rarely spend energy selling it
+ have trouble communicating with their peeps consistently
+ freak out about the number of projects they find interesting (“It’s too many!”)
+ panic if they feel ‘locked in’ to a title, project, or way of being
+ spend a great deal of time daydreaming and imagining
+ find money and finances frustrating but uninteresting
+ consistently undervalue their gifts and time

Hermiones tend to:

+ find it difficult to deviate from structure
+ freak out if an assignment doesn’t have any rules
+ enjoy projects less if there’s no chance of getting a gold star
+ overschedule their days and lives
+ fear letting people down, and therefore accept lots of unwanted responsibility
+ push their own needs, particularly creative ones, to the back burner
+ crave freedom, expansion, and stillness, but have trouble finding time for it

The good news is, you’ve got both impulses built right into you!

If you identify with Luna, we’ll work toward creating structure that doesn’t suck in the coming weeks. Those who identify with Hermione will work on adding silence, stillness, and space to let your not-productive bits out to play.

Regardless of how much Luna and how much Hermione you’ve got going on right now, these questions will frame the Structure That Doesn’t Suck series:

What if we play with your schedule so that you aren’t trying to make too many changes to your life at once? And what if we can play with scheduling some — but not all — of your most important work? Further, what if we mark off free time, play time, and not-caregiving time, so that you actually have a break from all that intensity?

Which is to say: what if you commit to doing one thing at a time?

I know you can multitask with the best of them, Hermiones, and that you can daydream while doing any activity at all, Lunas. But what if you only did one thing at a time, all day long?

Both Lunas and Hermiones struggle with overwhelm because both are living in the modern world.

We have more toothpaste options than our ancestors did career choices.

My email list — MY email list — contains more people than Jesus reached in the whole of his time on earth.

To be overwhelmed is the tip of the iceberg and is understating the truth by a long shot.

We’re drowning in choices, in voices, in distractions.

That’s why doing one thing at a time is important, at both the day-to-day level and the career level. You can’t make a movie and an album and a Broadway show simultaneously unless you’re 40 years into your career like Bruce Springsteen, so please don’t try.

Can you commit to doing one task at a time for the coming week?

That won’t change your whole calendar, but it will begin to beat back the overwhelm that threatens to take you under.

P.S.  Keep going! Here’s the rest of the Structure That Doesn’t Suck series:

Psst! This is episode 179 of That’s What She Said. You can listen in or keep reading to enjoy it!

I was at Trader Joe’s last week and my cashier looked STRESSED OUT. I said, “It’s busy, huh? Are people crazy today?” She glanced from side to side and then looked me up and down, as if making sure I wasn’t a Secret Shopper, before saying: “One lady yelled at me because she wanted a 15-pound turkey and hers was 14.9. I only have so much control over turkeys, lady.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve also found myself asking questions to my KK on Tap peeps like, ‘When is your cut-off deadline?’ ‘When are you done working?’ ‘Are you slowing down in December?’

…and then realized that I couldn’t keep asking these questions without coming up with better answers myself. In an effort to slow down and avoid becoming the screaming turkey lady at Trader Joe’s, the podcast is on hiatus from now through January.

Here’s how I’m clearing the energy of the past year and planning for the one ahead.

I know, I know, the shiny AF super-planners that promise you’ll be organized, fit, meditating, and rich in 30 days or less have been for sale since October, and you’re still in the thick of things and don’t have time to reflect on anything except what to buy before you see your friend’s sister-in-law’s daughter, Stephanie, who you bought a gift for that one time and now you have to do it every year.  (I suggest a Bob Ross Chia Pet.  Every year.  Done and done.)

We don’t do shame around here. There’s no rush on listening to or implementing any of this material. It applies any time of year, and it’s here for when you need it. Okay? Okay.

1. First: acknowledge everything.

This is stolen from Katherine North at Declare Dominion, and it’s just two brilliant questions that help you process a bunch of months all at once!

What are you proud of having accomplished this year? List 5 things.

Further, what did you come through? List your top 5.

We so often list our achievements as if they exist independently of what we’ve encountered, engaged with, conquered, finished, fixed, said goodbye to, or tried in any given year. But they don’t.

Asshole brain will always say you haven’t done enough and will make you think you haven’t survived much either, but those assumptions don’t hold up to even a tiny bit of inquiry.

When we acknowledge our Tiny, Annoying Progress as well as what we’ve straight-up survived, we honor the places where we’ve spent our energies wisely, and those places and circumstances that took our energies, too.

This year, I’ve survived losing beloved doggo Hermione D. Granger, adopting tiny pupper Aaron Neville Longbottom, having said 10-week-old puppy in the ICU for multiple days, sleeping 16 hours at a time for months on end because my thyroid took a hiatus from functioning, and improvising my way through paying SO MANY thousands of dollars in unexpected veterinary and medical bills.

…not to mention all the dollars I give to HBO, Amazon, and the people who make the most important things: pizza socks, unicorn bodysuits, and remote-activated bubble machines. Well, Bear bought me the last one for our kitchen, but you get the idea.

When we acknowledge the quite specific and often brutal working conditions we’ve survived, everything we’ve done this year seems AMAZING.

Plus, we’re all surviving the global rise of populism! 30% of the world’s population lives in a backsliding democracy! The 24-hour news cycle brings gloom, doom, and disasters on a daily basis!

We all get an extra 20 Achievement Points just for surviving 2018.

2. Get out your calendar.

Paper or digital, it’s fine. I can’t do a paper calendar because the feeling of being unable to cross an item off my to-do list is devastating, while dragging an incomplete task from one day to another on my Google calendar feels just fine. Thus, I use a digital calendar. You may be the opposite, or use both kinds, and I have no judgement about what’s better or worse except that having a calendar and a plan generally beats not having any sort of calendar or plan. (Related: here’s everything I know about time management.)

3. Add space and pleasure to your calendar first.

As you look at the next six months, play with letting space and pleasure take up blocks of time before anything else gets layered into your schedule. This is the total and complete opposite of what most people on earth do, which is why this single action is both powerful and rebellious. Instead of filling your calendar with to-do’s, work tasks, projects, and ideas, then squeezing fun into those 2 cold-ass days in February that remain, you can choose to prioritize time for pleasure in the coming year.

Pencil in vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and/or days off before you add anything else to your calendar.

Reserve time in the form of crossed-off work days even if you don’t know where you’re going on that vacation next September. Making room is enough. Also: you don’t have to go on vacation to have time off! You can choose to stay home for a few days in March, or two weeks in April, or for a long weekend in May. Since you own the business, YOU make the calendar, and YOU can take as much time as you need to remain a fully functional human.

You don’t have to ‘earn’ time off. You deserve a weekend and a slower season whether you’ve crushed, nailed, cruised through, or just barely survived this year.

The world will not cease to rotate on its axis if you’re having a good time and you don’t work on Tuesdays. Promise.

I go one step further on the pleasure route and make a Depression Calendar, which is my personal antidote to those cold winter days when I’d rather do anything but leave the house. Scouring your town for events, films, festivals, gatherings, parades, and parties costs you only a few minutes and some nominal ticket fees.  Maybe plan to do something truly unique after visiting Atlas Obscura and (searching your hometown)?

In return for this small investment of time, you’ll actually leave the house when it gets dark at 4:21 p.m. instead of sinking into the abyss of Netflix and delivery pizza for the duration of your Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Good planning can be the difference between looking out over a bleak emotional landscape and seeing a ton of things to look forward to on your winter calendar.

For me, it’s the difference between having a so-so winter and an absolutely devastating one. (If I manage to get a spectacular winter under my belt, you’ll be the first to know, and I’ll share every damn thing I’ve done in order to make that happen.)

4. Embrace the ways you actually use time.

Are you an achiever’s achiever? If yes:

You naturally fill every single moment with work if they don’t schedule offline time, down time, free time, and unstructured time.  If you’re naturally attuned to being productive at all times of the day and night, schedule your days off before you plan your work days. Place some days, like Tuesday evenings or Saturdays, entirely off limits from work-related tasks. Finally, create clear start and end times for your work on any given day.

The boundaries around your time are to keep work from spilling into every aspect of your life and taking over your every relationship, including the one you have with yourself. Don’t let ‘busy’ crowd out your interior life.

Do you hate structure and discipline more than nearly anything else on earth? If yes:

You naturally fight structure. You feel imprisoned by the discipline of knowing what we’re going to do on any given day, so we keep vague to-do lists which never come to fruition. It’s taken years for me to realize that I actually have to schedule writing time, email time, work time, marketing time, administration time, banking time, and coaching time, or they won’t happen. (Also, setting internal goals is helpful!)

Schedule your work days with clear start and end times — holding a morning call or meeting can help assure you’ll show up on any given day! — so that you actually work through your to-do list instead of getting distracted by what’s urgent or shiny or both.

As you take a look at your to-do list, break every huge task on your calendar — i.e. ‘make a new website’ or ‘get 12 new clients’ — into much much muuuuch smaller tasks. The bigger the project, the more likely you are to have tons of tasks within it.

That initial breakdown of a huge project into small tasks can be a bit stressful, but choosing to get every item onto the calendar means you’re much more likely to finish the project, publish the website, launch the project, and/or sell the event. I’ll guarantee your asshole brain calls you a ‘flake’ when all you really need is a clear calendar and specific to-do lists for any given month.

The boundaries around your time are to make sure each work item or task is a.) on the calendar and b.) actually gets done. This keeps your truest work from getting pushed to an elusive ‘someday’ that never comes. It also keeps you from wallowing in the swamp of ‘OH GOD I DUNNO WHAT TO DO NEXT’ that can cost you weeks or months or years.

When you translate Enormous-with-a-capital-E tasks into smaller ones and add ’em to your calendar, you have a realistic grasp on how long any given project will take. This causes less stress about timelines, due dates, and deadlines. Translated: you can’t write a book in two weeks while selling your screenplay and raising your babies and cooking all the meals and working out for three hours a day and fighting a chronic illness, okay? Breaking your tasks down and scheduling them allows for realistic time expectations all around.

5. De-prioritize shit that doesn’t matter, isn’t working, or sucks your energy.

Identifying energy sucks can be just as vital to your calendar as getting all the planning, organizing, and ‘to-do’ing exactly right.

If you spent eight months working on a project and it didn’t appear on your achievements list from earlier, can you find a way to ditch it, stop promoting it, or vote it off your business island for a while? Is any one product or client consuming a disproportionate amount of your attention or energy, with little reward?

Cutting the chaff often makes way for more amazingness, more wonder, and more progress on your most important tasks. (Related: that time I lost 6,644 subscribers in a single day.)

I cover this in waaaay more detail in Konmari (that doesn’t suck) for business.

6. Plan to communicate with your peeps. Regularly.

You have peeps. Don’t fight me on this, you do! Even if we’re talking about your mom and that one friend who tells you to write more often, or 3 former clients, or 41 people who signed up for your email list years ago.

You. Have. Peeps.

Talking with your peeps inevitably leads to a healthier, more stable business. You don’t have to have a content calendar or editorial calendar or Pinterest-optimized images or all three in order to talk with your peeps in a casual way about what you’re working on and what’s for sale.

You do have to communicate with them regularly via a channel you control if you want to avoid finance-related stress, though!

Whether you choose to use email, snail mail, or live meetups to talk with your peeps, How to F&*&ing Communicate will help you introduce you to quick, clear, and doable methods for connecting with your fans, followers, and clients. No stringent, stressful guidelines across 83 platforms. Just simple, not-freakishly-difficult ways to talk to people regularly.

Learn more about How to F*%&ing Communicate here, or download the gift guide to see the other classes for sale!

7. Ask what wants to be born.

Often, as you make space for reflection and planning, you’ll uncover an inkling that you’d like to make a new thing — or you’ll feel like you finally have time to take action on the inklings that have been circling your brain like patient-but-annoying hummingbirds since August.

I’ve got a workshop that wants to be born, and there’s also a bigger, deeper project that wants to take shape this winter. (It’s par for the course for this to be terrifying! Of course it is. And we do it anyway.)

Establishing a series of deadlines and check-ins for yourself can help ensure that whatever your truest work is, you’re going to get it done.

Even if it’s slow going.

Even if you don’t know how it will make money.

Even if you’re sure it will fail and you’re hesitant to start.

Acknowledge and then make what’s dying to be born, okay? Do the work only you can do.

If you’re a business owner, you’ll absolutely love M-School! This podcast series helps bring your magic to the world, and you can listen to every single episode starting here. It’s free, it’s smart, and it helps you acknowledge your true nature while also selling the shit out of your work.

Finally! If you need my help bringing a project to life, revamping your business, or holding you accountable for making changes big or small, check out KK on Tap! I’d love to work with you for a whole year!

You can put down a $100 deposit and we’ll start out work together in January.

Until 2019 —

 

 

 

P.S. If you’d like to explore any part of planning your marketing year further, check out episode 88 of That’s What She Said: how to plan your next six months.

If you’ve got an idea for the coming months’ podcasts or blog posts, talk to me!  Just shoot me a message below.

Alicia Bruce is my personal photographer — meaning 99% of the shots of me that you see with pink hair involve her and a trip to Asbury Park — and I can’t freaking wait for you to meet her!

In this episode of That’s What She Said, we talk about:

⚡️her journey from being a person who had a panic attack every time she flew to a person who leads international travel trips for women
⚡️the development of a brand that used to be utterly out of alignment with her quirks to one that is so.spot.on.holy.crap.
⚡️going from a person who “hates to feel” as an empath to someone who has a full range of emotions and isn’t afraid to feel them
⚡️her experience with Steer Your Ship — both good and terrifying
⚡️business experiments that have led to new income streams (and more ? than expected)
⚡️what her partner thinks of Steer Your Ship and her time spent coaching with me
⚡️and learning to be comfortable in her own skin.

If you need any headshots or product photography, please hire the crap out of The Alicia Bruce.

Should you have any interest in coaching with me through Steer Your Ship, click here to book a free call and chat with me about whether it’s a good fit for you.

P.S. Give what you needed to get.

In the 6th installment of M-School, my magic school for entrepreneurs, we tie everything together with numbers and common sense and use calculators and projections to do practical work!  (Here are episodes one, two, three, four, and five in case you want to catch up.)

THERE IS NOTHING MAGIC ABOUT THIS PROCESS.

It’s simple, straightforward math. The magic comes in learning to let out your meows via marketing, in learning how and when to sell through the practice of moguling, and in learning to be paid for bringing your magic to light. But this? This is just math.

Odds are that you avoid this straightforward stuff like the plague, especially if you deem your numbers paltry or you’re just starting out and so you’re looking at seemingly endless rows of expenses and a big fat $0 in the income department.

Facing up to that big fat $0 is the first step. Instead of trying to knock it out of the park overnight, let’s break it down into a smaller step.

What would get you 20% closer to your enough goal?  (Hint: you made an ‘enough’ number in episode three, which lives here.)  If you want to make $5,000 a month and you’re currently at $0, what would make you $1,000 a month? That’s the next step to take.

This math-ing process is about making peace with your income streams. Maybe you’ve got a product in your business, maybe you’ve got a service. Maybe you’ve got two products. The more products and services you have, the more combinations you can make to get to that enough number.

It starts with one. One income stream, one step.

You have something to offer, so you offer it.   The rest of this episode will show you how.

P.S. Stay on it. (That’s what she said.)

This is M-School installment #2!  The first one lives here.

When you begin to back off on the shoulds that you’ve been feeding on, there will be varying degrees of chaos. If you aren’t pursuing that thing and those things and you admit that you no longer care about alllll that, you’re left with a bunch of dead, spindly creatures who haunt you like crazy.

Dementors.

Whether they take the form of something simple, like creating a social media account you have no interest in populating with stuff, or something far more complex, like creating a whole business around the things people said you should do “because you’re really good at them.”

Whether they led you to the wrong relationship or simply led you to the wrong yoga class, don’t beat yourself up about the time you’ve wasted.

Simply acknowledge the shoulds that you’ve shucked off, and then notice how they swirl around angrily when you take back your freaking power. They’ll never stop coming. They’ll grow wiser and more subtle with time, as they learn that you’re on to them.

And you, magical friend, will see them coming and do your level best to keep plucking them from your life and putting them in timeout.

Other activities will rush in like the waters moving to high tide, pushing and pushing you to either revive the dead creatures or to invite more into your life. Compromise will run strong, like letting your Twitter feed post to Facebook instead of simply deleting the account. Maybe marriage counseling will take the 8th time you try, or maybe cheese will stop giving you diarrhea if you only eat it on Tuesdays.  At 7:32 p.m..

The dead shoulds — dementors — are wily and devious and desperately want you to stay linked to a half life.

It’s your job to make space. To actively cultivate rooms in your emotional interiors (closely related: internal goals) where ideas and dreams and pursuits can begin to grow, without letting the dementors of all your dead shoulds morph into similar-but-different pursuits.

Making space is the hardest part.

The dementors will immediately want to replace your thigh gap aspirations with a new *healthy* organic gluten-free sugar-free vegan diet, and your 7-figure business aspirations with a mere high six-figure income and a house in the Bahamas, and your complete lack of giving a shit about makeup with a newfound interest in moisturizer and skincare instead.

Making space means you recognize these dead, spindly creatures’ respective grips on your heart.

Making space means you can see that the vegan diet will only replace constant exercise as a means of striving for perfection, or that the peace you seek isn’t tied to money, or that your skin really is fine without a 43-minute nightly routine.

It’s your job to give yourself the time and resources for absolutely nothing to happen.

Clearing the rubble of the shoulds takes time, and it’s far more important for you to see the dementors at work than to plop new dreams into the soil and hope they take.

If you don’t make space, you can’t make peace with all the ways unicorn blood has had its way with you. You’ll simply fall victim to the dementors instead, and that will be far worse.

Making peace comes after making space.

Of course, when you make space, the dementors will get INFINITELY louder. Infinitely, like, you’ll have nightmares in which your life implodes due to your decision to stop making a product, stop offering a service, draw boundaries around your time or your business, or otherwise let space for the next thing to appear actually exist.  (Related: Space is a class for breaking up with your phone!)

You’ll have REALLY GREAT IDEAS that you would have killed for a month ago, but that are no use to you once you’ve decided to give up [that thing you used to do] forever.

Personally, my dementors have tortured me with dreams about being far, far under the ocean and watching the waves crash down while I’m in a glass house, hoping like hell that the glass holds because a crack in it means instant death. They’ve also left me stranded on the sides of roads in the dark in foreign nations, and my relationships have fallen apart in my nightmares, and I’ve felt horribly, utterly alone and have come back from the dream in tears.

It’s just the dementors, doing their best to keep me from making it to the peace beyond them.

Peace comes from sitting with the space you’ve made on car rides and between rounds of checking email, fiercely guarding the rooms where dreams are made.

One day peace will hit when you’ll realize you really don’t want 14 hours of each day to be scheduled, which is the other side of the 7-figure business, and you really can’t stand fake cheese because you miss the real thing, so why would you ever have tried that vegan diet?

Whatever it is that seemed so alluring will suddenly, swiftly, lose its appeal entirely. Forever. And you’ll have killed another dementor for good.

My own (waking) dementors in business have included, but are not limited to:

+ Making a collective out of my business instead of keeping it a solo endeavor in order to seem more friendly,
+ creating a giant, scalable group program that will make me millions at once in order to never have to worry about money again,
+ launching programs with flare, verve, intense energy, videos, jazz hands, and copious amounts of sales pressure in order to drive numbers up,
+ hiring a team to grow the business in order to be seen as a ‘team player,’
+ keeping an expensive but secluded office outside my home in order to seem more professional,
+ and avoiding swear words and personal stories on the blog — again, in order to seem more professional.

To be clear: these dead shoulds are a far cry from the projects I’ve undertaken with wholehearted enthusiasm and then biffed on or messed up or otherwise bungled. There are plenty of those, but at least they came from the deep parts of myself that needed to try or they might have imploded.

Shoulds brought to their fullest manifestation don’t provide any deep-seated fulfillment or meaning, because they were never your dreams to begin with.

It’s only after you achieve a few that you can begin to identify their patterns, see them more clearly, and otherwise call them out as they approach your to-do list.

Dementor patterns at work:

– That seems awful, but it works for her.
– I hate [insert social media platform here], but ______ says I should.
– She seems to be really good at getting people to buy using that app/plugin/trick/technique, so I’ll use that, too.
– Nothing is working so I guess I’ll try his/her way?
– I *hate* doing this, but it’s the only way.
– He/she/they will like me if I _________, so I’ll start _______ing.

Once you’ve hunted down your dead shoulds, it’s up to you to remember.

Remember who you were before you bought into someone else’s ideas for your best life.

You know what to do. You know that time is your currency and that being scheduled for the next six months, day in and day out, physically gives you hives, so you stop trying to pack each day with unlimited productivity. You know that you’re horrible at DIY technical things, so you stop trying to do it yourself. You know that you’re not a team player, so you pursue your solo projects with renewed joy instead of trying to hire a bunch of people who don’t drive you crazy.

You stop doing it all yourself because you know you need help. You do it all yourself because actually, you love doing it and you have the time. (Both have been the case for me, at different times over the past nine years.)

You have seasons.
Your life has seasons.
Your business has seasons.

The ‘shoulds,’ dead or alive, don’t have a place in any of those seasons.

They divert your time, energy, and money to places you’d rather not go. Real life example: I’m terrified of Tokyo’s subway — like watching videos of the pusher people designed to shove more humans onto the cars makes me break out in a sweat — and so I’m not going to use my resources to go to Tokyo. I’m not giving my days or dollars or daily steps to Tokyo. Ever.

Tokyo is easy for me to deny. You’ve probably got a similar place that zero percent appeals to you even though you generally enjoy travel. The trouble is, we often end up taking our businesses to Tokyo. We trust people who have taken up the mantle of workaholism, who peek into our social media streams or inboxes periodically to say, “Hey, you can do this, too,” and we follow them to places that give us the heebie jeebies without ever stopping to say, “This doesn’t feel right,” or “I’m tired and I don’t want to go anymore,” or even, “WHY DON’T WE TAKE A FUCKING BREAK.” We let ourselves be blinded by increased dollars or followers or press or all three. We forget our reasons for being in business, then find ourselves jammed on the Tokyo subway, wondering how we’re going to survive the experience when the dude with white gloves comes over to push one more life hack down our throats.

Quick! Make a list of the dementors you’re still fighting.

If you’re having trouble, here are some fill-in-the-blanks:

I used to want to make ___________, but really I want to make ___________ and maybe even _________.

I don’t care about ______________anymore.

I spent ______________ years pursuing __________, and that’s done now.

When I feel like a failure, I beat myself up with ______________________’s success.

I’m tempted to abandon my work and take up _____________________ when my dementors come out.

You’re not allowed to beat yourself up for the dementors’ existence, or to wonder why you’ve been blind to them for so long, or to make yourself wrong for having any dementors at all.

We all have dementors. We all fight them.

Much like shame can’t survive being seen and heard, dementors can’t survive being acknowledged and called out. So call ’em out, friend.

Set a timer for 20 minutes and write about ’em, even if it makes no sense and everything that comes out is garbled junk. This is for processing, not for showing to anyone for any reason, ever.

Then rejoice!  Dementor deaths are actively making room for cool shit to follow.  Promise.

P.S. This is an episode of my podcast, That’s What She Said!  Listen in below or catch up on all the episodes here.