Hi there, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]!
I feel like I forget every year how busy I am in the month of May. In Minnesota, it's the month that we've all come out of hibernation to sip drinks with friends on restaurant patios, sweep out the screened porches and if you're very lucky (with weather and ownership), clean out a cabin. It's also the month of multiple overlapping spring sports, graduations and graduation parties, end-of-year programs and concerts, prime time of a new fiscal quarter and often, the last chance to count on in-person meetings with colleagues before they decide to work remotely from that porch or cabin and embark on various vacations for the next three months.
It's BUSY, guys.
When you’re working or in the throes of busy-ness, have you ever paid attention to a tiny little voice in your head, quietly clearing its throat (ahem), trying to get your attention? Probably not. When you’re in the middle of working, it’s almost impossible, but listening to your intuition, taking time to think about the larger plan – it’s crucial. I wrote this short piece on one of my first newsletters, and it's advice I'm revisiting.
I recommend scheduling time to be alone with your thoughts. When I don’t do this, it often doesn’t happen – and it’s truly to the detriment of my work. How so? When I don’t stop and think, I don’t have time to be creative or strategic or even wonder why I'm doing something. It’s just constantly executing tactics or fulfilling requests without thinking (Send an email! Schedule a meeting! Write a social post!). There's no time to question whether what I’m doing advances a business objective or is part of a thoughtful strategy.
Same with building your personal brand. If you don’t take the time to hear your own thoughts, you might be missing something really big – like better understanding what actually gives you energy and joy, for example, and then never making a plan to invest in it. (Yeah, just that. NBD.)
You owe it to yourself to hear your own thoughts. Here’s how:
- Claim time for yourself to listen. This might be taking just 15 minutes for a walk (dogs optional). It might be blocking 20 minutes first thing in the morning on your calendar before you start reading email or scrolling Instagram or whatever you usually do. Don’t listen to a podcast or the news. Demand quiet.
- Write. Trying to establish a brand voice for your corporate brand? Write a note to your dad using that voice. Then do it again in another voice. Or make a list of places you want to visit (and why) in the next two years. Later, make a plan for how to make that happen. Write on paper if you can; it's less distracting than your phone or laptop, and research shows that writing on paper can lead to more brain activity (and Oprah says pen-and-paper thoughts can manifest them into being, and Oprah can’t be wrong).
- Do it regularly. If you’ve been in the habit of non-stop work/life stuff, you aren’t in the habit of listening to your own thoughts. Make a starting goal to do this just once a week.
If you’ve worked in a demanding environment, gone to a tough grad school program or done anything without opportunity for free thought and imagination for awhile, it will take time and practice to do this. From childhood on, we're taught to focus on work, stay on task and organize our lives around To Do lists that have nothing to do with being creative, strategic or making life more meaningful. Most of us weren't taught to make space for free thinking and imagination.
But get started now so you can perk up your ears when you most need to.
Story of the Week:
I recommend listening to this NPR story about a Girl Scout troop made up entirely of newly-arrived migrant children at a shelter in New York so that you can hear their voices (and feel both heartbreak and hope):
How this Girl Scout troop offers community to migrant children, NPR "Consider This"
(And if you're interested in content, SEO and how they relate to the URLs that are used in websites, check out the URL for that NPR story. Interesting, right?)
Thank you so much for reading, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]!
Until next time...
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