Removing pressure/the rules

Letting go of control and the rules is hard. Especially for a perfectionist like me – my brain wants to know what’s happening at all times, hates ambiguity and not following my usual structure and rules and routines is hard AF.

The concept of winging it feels very foreign to me. Yet that’s exactly what I’ve been practicing these past 2 weeks.

The world is on fire in more ways than one right now but the war close to home really got to me (in case you’re new around here, I grew up in Germany and my family still live there).

So for the past 2 weeks I really practiced kindness with myself and worked on letting go of having to follow my (self-imposed) business rules. That looked like not posting on IG unless I have something to say, not jumping on stories unless I feel like it, no promoting things unless that feels ok. I need to point out here that I hold a lot of privilege to be able to do this – I still work full-time and my family doesn’t rely on me showing up online for my business (yet).

I’m not going to lie – it still feels weird to re-write rules (and I say that as someone who encourages you to do that!).

But who set those rules in the first place? Me. Not some weird online business rule maker person – I did.

As my therapist lovingly reminded me the other day, i’s time I follow my own advice 😆

So how do you do it then? Well you’d think it’s as easy as just not doing the thing, right? Whatever the rule says you have to do, you just don’t do it and boom, job done.

Well, if only it was THAT easy…

I mean yes, not doing the thing is the first part – but the bigger task at hand is to work on your self-talk AFTER you’re not doing the thing(s). Your brain will want to talk into the rules (i mean you made them up for a reason right?) or tell you how silly and stupid you are for not doing the thing.

So you need to get to work reminding yourself why you decided to question the rule(s) and what not doing the thing means to you in that moment. There’s a reason you weren’t sure about that rule so get curious – why is that? Dig into that.

To help illustrate this point – over the past 2 weeks, I wanted space. Space away from social media and any pressure to get business tasks done. So whenever I noticed the little voice in my head trying to tell me to go on IG or write, I reminded myself that I was taking things slow for a bit and that it’s a-ok if I have a few days away from social media.

This will obviously look different for you and the rules in question (literally hahaha) but I encourage you to give it a go! Comment below to let me know how it went!