first, it’s been a couple months since I posted. Partly that’s because businesses been good. Thank you to my clients. Partly it’s because home has been stressful. A quick note here. When I started my blog about 10 years ago, I promised myself that I would keep it up. I have been diligent and faithful to that intention for around a decade. However, there have been times where posting new entries has fallen a little lower in the priority queue.
The reason I mention this is that I think it’s important to be intentional. But it’s also important to be flexible when life switches it up on you. I think I’ve learned three things in this regard. The first is that it’s important to be kind to yourself and recognize that it’s okay to temporarily reprioritize. That doesn’t mean you are never going to get back to something. The second is that it’s also okay to change your priorities permanently or at the very least acknowledge realistic external forces. Thomas Jefferson once said something to the effect of, “no one axiom can be deemed wise and expedient for all times and circumstances.” Any system or structure or intention that you have in your life that really works still doesn’t guarantee that it will work forever. I have strategies that I’ve been using since my late teens. But I’ve also had to make significant changes when I was a chef and working 80 hours a week, when I stopped being a chef and started my own business, when we had a child, when we had a second child, when our kids have had psychiatric crises. Without going off on a tangent, there are some inalienable truths about how to manage life, I think. But how you apply those things can change a lot through the course of your life. My best advice is to have a plan. Have a strategy. Have a system. But always willing to re-examine those things along the way to make them better or to switch them up.
in case you haven’t realized, this has ended up with a whole entry about this topic. It’s not just a note. But I’m not going to rewrite it, as is my want. I’m just going to change the title and post what I was going to write next week on the topic of rubber ducking… Hopefully. I might disappear again.
Anyway, the third thing that I’ve realized is that it is okay to maintain an intention that you’re unable to realize for a period of time. That doesn’t mean you’re a failure or that you’re not trying. As a little background, I do almost no marketing. I have built my business through trying to keep my website at the top of searches by producing this blog which is unique content regularly. There is also strength in how many satisfied customers I have. And I’ve been getting a lot of referrals lately from doctors of previous clients. But mostly people find me on the internet. That means they find my website. From what I understand that means blogging is working. So it’s pretty important. And if I stop doing it it’s hard to say when that negative effect would happen. It could be a while. So there is always a balance when I’m really busy with clients as I have been this fall, to still try to do the vlogging as a way to ensure future clients. At least, that’s what the website people tell me.
What’s my point? My point is that blogging hasn’t gotten less important to me over the last few months. It is just that other things have been either temporarily more important or temporarily more urgent. Sometimes that doesn’t always mean I don’t have the time. It often means I don’t have the attention or the bandwidth after dealing with everything else to sit down and get my thoughts on proverbial paper.
To sum up why I wasn’t here for 2 months and how I got back here. I accurately prioritized. I didn’t beat myself up for not having the time or the focus to blog. Well at the same time I did maintain a very strong intention to get back to it as soon as I could. And that’s what puts me here today. Active decision making. Self kindness. Intentionality.
you should know the standard disclaimer by now. My bandwidth is three, two, one … Gone!