Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday!
​
​tl;dr Somewhere between “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and self-indulgence (masquerading as self-care culture) is a healthy balance of challenge and respite. If you feel like you’re still learning where to strike this balance for yourself, I invite you to come along and consider some self-guiding questions.
​
​What is your starting point?
​
​On a scale from working confidently toward a well-defined goal to floundering in the busyness of day-to-day life, where do you land?
​
Do you have a clear, big, possibly intimidating goal? Even if you’re a long way from achieving it, having a well-defined goal is the first step. As the personal development space calls it, BHAGs- big, hairy, audacious goals give us a trajectory.
​
Once you have direction, then you can define the steps it takes to get there. In other words, break BHAGs into SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). If you’re here, you have actionable items to work on each day to move you closer to your overarching goal. Again, you might be a long way away from your defined “success,” but you know where you’re going and how to get there.
​
On the other end of the spectrum from BHAGs and SMART goals are languishing, aimlessness, and busyness (LAB). When you don’t have well-defined goals, life still feels busy. There will always be tasks to fill our time. But if you are getting to the end of your days, weeks, and months, and feeling like you’re not sure where the time went, having made no progress towards the life you want to live, I would say you’re still in the LAB.
​
Take a moment to be brutally honest with yourself and consider if you’re in the LAB or if you have your SMART and BHAG goals.
​
​Where are you going?
​
​Once you figure out your starting point, you can clarify where you’re going.
​
If you are in the LAB, the first step would be to define your SMART and BHAG goals. What does your ideal life look like? What kind of person do you need to become to get there? What actions does that person take daily to achieve the success they have?
​
If you already have your goals clearly laid out for you, then you can evaluate how you’re progressing. Are you happy with the rate at which you’re moving toward your goals? Do you need input from a coach or an outside perspective? Or maybe you’re in a “writer’s block” state in which you may need some inspiration from outside sources. Take an inventory and see if you need to pivot. Otherwise, stay your course.
​
​Do you need to rest?

Social media is telling everyone who will listen that they feel overwhelmed and that they need to invest more in their self-care.
​
On the contrary, I don’t think most people need more spa days or idle time. I think most people would benefit from more concentrated bouts of time spent working hard on something they care about, and way less time spent consuming (TV, social media, the news, videos, etc).
​
Life will make you feel tired. Especially today, there are so many things pulling our attention in every different direction that it makes us feel exhausted even having done nothing but exist. So do you feel tired? Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t mean you need to rest.
​
Instead, first consider if you’re doing everything you can to take care of yourself in your waking hours. Eating generally good food, staying hydrated, minimizing screen time, socializing, exercising, reading, and good sleep hygiene are all things you can do while you’re awake to make yourself feel more energized without actually resting. If you’re not doing most of those things, I would start there.
​
Then, I would get brutally honest with yourself and consider if you’re doing everything you can to work on your goals. To get an objective measure, check your calendar. How often is time in your calendar scheduled to work on your goals? If it’s not in there, it’s not a priority. You can also ask your closest friends and family what their perception is of what matters most to you. If you say you value your health, but they don’t list exercise, nutrition, or wellness as something they think of when they think of you, then you are not working on your health as you tell yourself you are.
​
I think very few people need rest, except David Goggins and a few other people I’ve met in my life. Should we schedule rest in our lives to ensure we have a good quality of life? Of course. (ie I can’t wait for my Europe trip next week!) But I don’t think most people are tired from working themselves so hard that they’re burning out.
​
​Do you need to work harder?

After reading the prior point, and hoping that you didn’t get so annoyed that you closed the newsletter entirely, you might think, well, if I don’t need to rest, then I must need to work harder. Well, not necessarily!
​
While I don’t think most people are working towards their limits, I don’t think everyone needs to work harder just for the sake of working harder either. I think most people need to reprioritize their time.
​
This goes back to the point of auditing your calendar to see where your time goes, minimizing time-consuming activities like scrolling social media or reading a ton of fiction, if those are not your goals. Most of us can just do a little better with organizing our time.
​
The instances where working harder might be the answer is if you don’t have enough volume of work to make an educated decision about how to improve. That is, if you try something once and “fail,” it’s probably because you only tried once, and you need to try dozens or hundreds more times before deciding if you need to change your technique or just increase your output.
​
If you’re not doing enough work, you may still be tired from the weight of indecision and anxiety on your brain. But it’s not from the work itself. Doing the actual work will, in this case, actually give you more energy because you’re finally moving forward.
​
​The reality of the situation.
​
​Most likely it’s not a black-and-white answer. In some areas of your life, you likely need to work harder. In other areas, you may need to take a breather. And in others, you may just need creative inspiration.
​
Get clear on where you're starting and where you want to go. Do an audit of your time to see where it can be used more thoughtfully and where you can schedule for conscious rest.
​
Scheduling time to spend with your loved ones to do an activity or just sit and be with each other, can provide much more energy than a spa day or continued consumption of nonsense on your phone or TV. But being intentional is the challenging part, so put it in your calendar and commit to it like all of the other important things in your life.
​
If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM.
​
This week, my podcast recommendation is from Science Vs. “Hank Green: What No One Tells You About the Algorithm.”
​
With that, happy unofficially official last week of summer. But thankfully in Florida it’s summer all year long!
​
Until next time,
Shannon