It’s been a busy week over here at Modern Day Sorcerer. But last night, as I was softening into a booth at a swanky cocktail bar in the company of a handsome second date (who happens to be a business consultant and totally gets me), we couldn’t help but laugh together at what that “busy week” really entailed.
Though I had a couple of deadlines, big meetings, and my usual Sorcerer School and client work, the bulk of my week was spent in my pajamas, curled up with a journal, a meditation cushion, and a long list of crunchy topics that had come up for me in my life and business.
My week looked more like tears, deep feels, processing (which for me means lots of yawns and energy moving through my body), and plenty of sleep, than it did strategy and implementation.
And yet we still made progress and experienced growth in the business.
Which is magic, considering that I wasn’t the only one on #teamMDS spending my week this way…
We had to shift the logistical structure of our work flow this week because two of us were being led into this abyss of deep work, and we required yet another team member to “hold space” for us and support us as we moved through the darkness to find the light — for the sake of our individual wellbeing, the business, and the MDS vision as a whole.
But how do you stop everything to do the deep work when the business still needs to run? When you’ve already committed to serving people, meeting deadlines, maintaining day to day operations, and the tangible realities that a business simply has to make money, it can be a challenge to the deep work, continue to operate and grow to survive, let alone to thrive.
At MDS we were reminded this week of a few of the ways we’ve found this balance between just getting s#%# done and stopping to do the deep work.
And inspired by a new level we’ve found in this beautiful balance this week, we’re bringing you five tips to find balance between the growth of your business/career and your personal growth.
1) Doing the deep work will help your business growth as much as your self-growth.
Every single crunchy thing that comes up in your work is your responsibility to find the growth in. Be it a trigger, frustration of how other people are (or aren’t) showing up, feeling overwhelmed, or something completely different. All of these things are opportunities for you locate and transform areas within yourself where you have been creating these things.
When you do the work, you’ll see improvements in work + work flow, especially in places where you may not have seen solutions or flow before.
2) When deep work is demanded of you, do it right away.
When you wait to do the deep work, the external problem catalyzing the internal work will only grow and become worse. The reality is, once the need for growth has been catalyzed and shown itself to you, you enter into the space of “contraction before the expansion” (that icky crunchy feeling that can come pre-growth). From that space, your work will be negatively affected even if you try to “hustle” or “suck it up.”It’s when you trust in the need for deep work being shown to you in the perfect timing, and surrender to that moment, that it will show you how much better it can make your work in the end.
It’s for the sake of improving your business/work that this growth opportunity is coming up, so as counterproductive as it may seem to take a side step from “doing” or implementing for a moment, resisting the need to be still and go within will only hold your business back.
3) Get creative with priorities that still allows deadlines to be met and forward movement to be made.
Once you’ve been at this setting-time-aside-for-growth thing for a while, you will reach a point where the space in your business for deep growth and the space in your business for getting sh#$ done will become two equal containers that can co-mingle side by side, supporting each other. To find this balance, ask yourself and your business what must get done this week for forward movement and find a way to fit this in that still feels good. If you have a large enough team, this may mean asking for support to carry the work load.
If you’re a solo-preneur or for whatever reason it’s just you in your work, this may mean setting aside time when you know you’ll be fresh (perhaps first thing in the morning, after sleep and a morning practice) to rock out some focused work before going back to internal mode, or it might look like prioritizing the internal work with the intention to move through it with time to still do x, y and z before the week is out.
4) Trust in creative and innovative possibilities to still get things done.
Sometimes still getting sh#@ done doesn’t mean exactly what we think it does. In order to support you in a true balance between taking time to go within and still getting your work done, open yourself up to the possibility of a creative option you may not have thought of.Consider calling upon support (your guides and angels, or a mentor or friend, if you don’t want to go that woo :P), and trusting that within the surrender of the internal space you’re about to enter there will also be waiting an innovative or imaginative way to still do what you need to do. And trust that it will show up in the perfect timing (meaning, if it doesn’t show up until the last minute, maybe it’s because you wouldn’t have been ready for it sooner).
5) Be clean and clear in how you’re passing things off or what is changing in structure.
What we found within #teamMDS this week is that when the structure of who is doing what, or how things are getting done is adjusted, if we aren’t cautious, the energy of the weight of that thing can remain muddy, or still felt by other people involved.For example, if person A passes a task onto person B, if the pass-off isn’t clear enough energetically (following a specific protocol) then persons A and B still end up carrying the weight of it, leaving everyone feeling exhausted and the work to be done in a way that feels muddy or unclear.
When you are going to re-structure how your work gets done, make sure you set and adhere to a specific structure to make the pass-off or the re-structure clean and clear to you and everyone involved. It’s a matter of the balance between the tangible and the intangible. And any time you are opening up the realm of the intangible to go deeper into your internal work, your business needs you to counter things with a similar amount of tangible structure to anchor it.
