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April 3, 2019 - January 24, 2020
burdens of expectation from our shoulders so that we can place ourselves first in terms of self-care, self-worth, and, most important, self-compassion.
deconditioning of the old paradigms of doing-more in order to be-of-worth and entering a revolutionary way of flowing with one’s true nature: doing-less in order to be-more-yourself.
I thought that productivity was what made us valuable. Look at what I’ve done, and I’ll show you how much I’m worth.
We are animals. We are nature. Yet we live and work as though we’re not.
Focus on quantity and growth above quality and sustainability leaves the soil depleted. Focus on these very same deliverables leaves humans depleted.
nearly half of two-parent households have both parents working, and in 40 percent of families, the mother is the primary breadwinner.5
the leadership pipeline for college-educated women breaks down at middle management.
share child care for free and each have some free time to work on our businesses at the kitchen table.
We expect ourselves to be in a perpetual late summer/early autumn. We ask for the harvest year-round.
The answer is supporting it within ourselves, in our daily work lives, and in our homes. Because the only way to create a new system is to be it.
I wanted to create financial freedom (enough residual income to cover my living expenses) by the age of 30 so that I could stay home with my kids one day.
nonpaid working mothers
(1) Much of what I’d been doing to keep myself busy prior to getting pregnant was unnecessary. (2) My power and worth go far beyond the list of things I’d accomplished by the end of a workday.
I just did the least amount I needed to do in order to keep things running.
do less in order to have more.
Most of us were only offered one model of success. It looked like this: pushing, working harder and harder, putting in more hours, putting in more effort, focusing on achievement above all else, the accumulation of status and material wealth, and being productive as a way of showing our worth.
I’m only asking you to try doing less as an experiment, because I bet you’ve never tried it before and therefore you have no evidence that it won’t work.
This is a “Hey! I’m learning how to do this thing that I think is really important. Do you want to learn with me?” kind of book.
In a research review published in The Lancet involving more than 600,000 men and women, it was found that a 55-hour workweek led to a 33 percent increase in stroke plus a 13 percent risk of coronary heart disease.1 Another study found that working 49 hours a week was associated with poor mental health, especially in women. (The average person working full-time in the USA works 47 hours a week, and 4 out of 10 people work 50 or more hours per week.)2 These results are not surprising when you think about it.
Interestingly, though, we’ve evolved from a survival standpoint to interrupt ourselves. Forty-four percent of our interruptions are self-inflicted because our brains want to make sure that we’re aware of potential harm in our environment. Therefore, focus takes training. It’s more about what you say no to than what you say yes to. (More
The Universe is a whole bucket of duality. Light and dark. Stillness and movement. Wet and dry. Quiet and loud. Fast and slow. Inward and outward. Without one quality or energy, the other one couldn’t exist, and both are critical to the whole.
So many of us have been raised to believe that our worth is equal to our accomplishments. That we must earn our deserving of life and all things good through doing. But this couldn’t possibly be true if we also believe, as I do, that our worth is inherent, that no person is born more or less worthy than another, that we are all children of God/Goddess and that we deserve to be here no matter how high we climb on the ladder of success.
But we get our panties all in a wrinkle because we forget that the happiness comes from the process of progress and growth, not from the result of progress and growth.
tells me it’s linear. “Yeah,” my brilliant sister said, “and when you look at a day as a circle it’s so relaxing because as the day goes on you’re always moving back toward the beginning of a new day instead of running out of time in the day you’re currently in.”
creativity and workflow as cyclical instead of linear, you’ll shift from feeling like there’s never enough time and you’ll never get it all done to feeling like you’re in flow with the creative forces that be.
“What we appreciate appreciates.”
Either they’d quit pursuing their dreams outside motherhood, thinking they just couldn’t have the career they desired and be present with their families at the same time, or they were totally burned out and hanging on by a thread. Or they’d suffered health consequences. Or they were stuck and depressed, unable to get any forward momentum.
this way of being makes self-care part of our rhythm as opposed to a reward.
The parts of our brain related to attention and concentration are the least active during the shorter days of the year in the winter months and the most active during the summer months.
Don’t worry, that’s just the cultural brainwashing that raised us to believe that our worth is equal to our achievements and that if we’re not doing anything, we’re essentially worthless.
thought, as so many women do, that if I didn’t keep spinning all of the plates and holding the entire world on my shoulders, all of them would come crashing down and the earth would fall out of orbit to its doom.
My friend Terri Cole, clinical psychologist and master coach, calls this overfunctioning, and it’s super common with high-achieving women, which, if you were attracted to this book, I imagine you are.
Abraham-Hicks says that appreciation has an even more attractive vibration than gratitude because it’s purely about noticing what we like about what’s in front of us instead of gratitude, which is often about liking what’s in front of us as compared to what could be in front of us or what used to be in front of us.
This is simply about seeing what happens if every day, in small ways, we practice doing less than we might usually do.
our obsession with action and productivity is programming.
in Chapter 3, each of our distinct four phases
does that even look like? Can I get something a little more
Kindara, Glow, Clue, and MyFlo. I also love my Daily Energy Tracker, which
The whole purpose of doing less is to have the experience of having more. Not more stuff, but more meaning in our lives.
reverse engineering my life based on what matters to me most.
In my book, energy saved is always time saved. Why? Because when you’re leaking your energy into beating yourself up, beating someone else up, trying to change someone, or trying to do something that doesn’t actually matter to you, you not only have less energy for what does matter to you, you also have a tendency to have trouble focusing, to lose your creative edge, and to feel uninspired.
Connection and expression.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
When it comes to your health, there are a vital few things that need to be focused on that are a foundation to your whole body working. In your life and business, there are a vital few things that you and you alone need to be doing in order to keep the train moving and have the greatest impact. Yet most of us spend the vast majority of our lives focusing on everything—and therefore really never focusing on anything, especially not the vital things.
The first step of this Do Less Experiment is to identify your vital few, or your 20 percent, which you can use the previous exercise to do. The next step is ongoing, and that’s to start to spend more and more of your time on your vital few and less and less of your time on the things that don’t fall into that category.
