What to do when life has other plans

So I've had an *interesting* start to the year. The thing I’m realizing about life is it never moves as smoothly as you plan for it to.

At the start of this year I was ready to be amazingly productive, (#newyearnewme, anyone?)

I was ready to be fearless and dogged in pursuit of my goals. Most of them, okay, all of them, we focused around success in my business and my bank account. Now not that there’s anything wrong with that but it’s not a long term strategy.

I was so fixed on my goals that I forgot about all the other parts of life. The funny thing about life is that it often has other plans for you, than you do for it.

The older I get, the more I understand that you need to work on all areas of your life at the same time. There’s no point in putting extra time and effort on your career because everything else will start to slip. Believe me on this. Short term maybe you can get away with if you like to live life on the wild side a bit, but it’s dangerous.

If you don’t have time/energy/resources to move into that higher gear in your business AND your self care, or your work AND your relationship, or your career goals AND your family, then just hold up a second and think about it. You need to find the sweet point to the point where you can do both equally.

The other thing is that in addition to life having other plans than you are prepared for, it also often has the irrational timing of a 5 year old having a tantrum. I mean, shit rarely hits the fan when you’re calm, collected and have a spare 2-4 days to process things, right?

Now before I go way down deep to the point where you stop reading because this article is depressing AF, I have some helpful thoughts and things to consider to this lowkey life lesson. These will help you set yourself up for success as much as possible!

1. Sustain everything equally as much as you can. If you work for 8 hours, make sure you have enough hours to go to the gym, or go for a walk, spend quality time with your partner, or cook yourself a good meal etc.

2. Put a few things in place in case of a “shit hitting the fan” emergency. A few blog posts pre-written, work on having a support system in place that you know you can call, always try and stay on top of the washing so you’ve got clean clothes to wear and a few meals in the freezer. (Why am I sounding like a mum right now).

3. Call yourself out on your own shit regularly so one day 10 years of unhealthy habits don’t come crushing down on you and fuck your life up. Every time you make a decision get into the habit of asking; "Does this benefit the future me, or is this a learned behaviour from past me?"

4. And the last thing, try and work on these every day because your brain is hella tricky and will convince you none of these things are important until they are stacked up so high and you can’t anything but all the stuff you’ve let slide.

So, in closing, keep these in mind, and I recommend trying to learn a few lessons from me instead and save yourself some heartache.

Love from, a version of G that has very good hindsight.

G x