GREAT ADAPTATIONS

(Note: This is a guest post by Lisa Hunter, as part of my introductions series. Enjoy!)

What if “balance” and “slowing down” aren’t the answers to our overwhelmed lives?

You’re having one of those days. You know, the days where you feel like you’re running on a habitrail of endless to-do’s and not enough time to do them.

Your friends and loved ones keep saying, “You need to slow down. You need to create more balance in your life.” And you agree.

Problem is, you’ve tried countless times and it just doesn’t happen. You keep thinking things like…

“If only I could just get myself to slow down”
“If only I could follow through with being more balanced”

But for some of us, it’s not that simple…

Back when I was a performing singer-songwriter in the 90’s, I was driven with an unstoppable urge to get my music and message out into the world. I had endless energy for it and I was willing to pour that energy full-force into my career. At a certain point, though, I began to burn out. I reached for self-help book after self-help book, only to find them all telling me I needed to balance or slow down.

Among many other things, I tried meditating, deep breathing, yoga, time management, setting boundaries and “being” rather than “doing”. But those approaches never seemed to stick. I’d either do them and then go right back to driven-and-impassioned mode, or I’d forget to do them altogether and then feel like I failed.

If balance and slowing down are so important, why do we keep failing miserably at them?

My belief is that we’re not failing at all. We’re just being our selves. And some of us are high-octane people. Full of ideas, full of drive, full of passion and full of the will to follow through with it. Telling a high-octane person to “slow down” would be like telling a race car going 120 mph to suddenly go 20. The shift would be abrupt. And not very natural. It’s the same for those of us who “fail” at slowing down.

We ultimately would like smooth lives where we’re not crazily running around or working all the time. Most of us ultimately would like to slow down. But trying to slow down is not the way to get there.

I teach whole classes on alternatives to slowing down for busy, stressed-out and passionately-driven entrepreneurs who feel like they’re failing at having balanced lives. So I could go on and on. But let’s get a conversation started instead:

What snags have you encountered with trying to slow down?

And what would be your creative way to get to a place of “slow down” without having to initially slow down?
That second question might first hit as a bit of a brain teaser. But let’s see what we can come up with…

Lisa Hunter

Continue the conversation with Lisa Hunter on her website, Extraordinary Women Thrive.