Is There Cosmo in Your Biz?
How to dissolve your dissatisfaction habit
Extraordinary Women Dilemma:
Sometimes you get so excited about something in your business that it's all you want to think about, but you feel bad because it hogs a significant amount of your time and attention away from other things in your life. Yet, when you have personal time, you still feel bad, because now you feel guilty or anxious that you're not spending time on your business. It goes back and forth like this and it seems like you never get to just feel okay about where you are.What There Is For You To Know:
The big important thing to notice in this scenario is that no matter where you're putting your energy, you're feeling pressure and stress about it. When you break it down, there's really no way to win the game. And there's something fishy about that! It just can't be true that you must forever experience unrest about how you are spending your energy and time...My Vogue-Cosmo-Glamour Aha Moment:
During my previous career as a performing songwriter, I did a song project where I individually interviewed 30 different women and girls about how they felt about their bodies in relation to pop culture images of beauty in magazines. After completing the final interview, there was one thing that stood out above everything else: each and every woman and girl, no matter what she looked like, had at least one if not many dissatisfactions about some part or parts of her body.It didn't matter if the interviewee looked like the women in the magazines or if her body type and features were dissimilar, each and every woman was dissatisfied in some way with her body. Something clicked for me in that discovery - the frustration these women were feeling had nothing to do with their individual body parts or their self-esteem or the photos in the magazines. Instead, it had to do with an epidemic, something I started calling "The Culture of Never-Enough". I could feel how even if these women were able to change the body part in question to look like how they wished it would look, the feeling of dissatisfaction wouldn't go away, it would just find a different channel through which to show up.
And guess what: this "never-enough" habit shows up in our businesses too. I see it with each and every one of my clients. It applies itself in new and exciting ways, like in the dilemma mentioned at the beginning of this article...
Try This On The Fly:
When you feel guilty about spending time on your business, notice that if you were spending time in your personal life, you would be stressed about not putting energy into your business. And vice versa. The more you notice this, the more it becomes apparent that the stressed-out feeling is not so much about where you are choosing to put your energy as it is about a habit of feeling unrest, questioning and dissatisfaction. No need to beat yourself up about this habit, it's one that most of us fall into. And don't worry about trying to change this habit- all you have to do is keep recognizing when it shows up because the recognition is what dissolves it away.Play with it and see what you notice. Awareness of the "dissatisfaction habit" is just one piece of the puzzle to feel more at peace with how you're walking in your business and life. Stay tuned for more pieces to come...