Episode 24: Slowing Down To Speed Up

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of The Work Of Becoming podcast! In the last episode, I talked a little bit about my powerlifting goal, and I updated you on how that was going. So, if you haven’t listened to that, go back and listen to this one. But for those of you who don’t know, I had set three big goals for the year. One was the powerlifting goal. One was to create $250,000 of revenue in our business, Body Brain Alliance, which we did. It’s super cool. Thrilled for that. And then the third one was to become tidy, and that one’s a little bit interesting because obviously it’s harder to objectively measure what the heck tidy actually is.

And so, it’s a lot more about my perception. I use my partner’s opinion and perception a lot because he’s obviously a more neutral observer who’s in our house and sees the effect of my tidiness or messiness. And so, what I wanted to talk to you about today, the lesson that I’ve really learned this year on a journey to become tidier — and I do think I have become tidier, but the main lesson that I’ve learned is that much of the time, I need to slow down in order to speed up.

So, if you’ve ever watched Big Brother or Survivor or one of these stereotypical game shows, there is inevitably always a puzzle, and one of these puzzles, the results always happen like this. There are two people. One of them is going really fast and frantic. They’re throwing things on the board. And the other one pauses, takes a minute, sizes up the situation, and starts very slowly and methodically approaching that puzzle. And inevitably, what usually happens is that the slow person, the person who took a second to make a plan, the person who slowed themselves down, that person inevitably finishes the puzzle first and actually wins. I have this image in my head. I was thinking of those types of scenes because that is exactly what I have learned about me and my tidying and my messiness.

So, when I was little, my mom used to call me a tornado because I would walk into a room and, within minutes, stuff would be everywhere. Everywhere I went, I displaced things, I moved things, I carried things to places they shouldn’t be. I dropped things in random places like a total tornado girl. And what I’ve realized in my adult life and particularly in the past year while focusing on my tidiness is that that is deeply related to me being in a rush.

So, when I wake up in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much to do today. I have to jump into work immediately,” I go into the kitchen, I slam some breakfast together or I make a cup of coffee, and because I’m so anxious to get into work, I leave the latte maker on the counter, and I don’t put away the coffee creamer, and there are things that get left out and inevitably create a tiny mess. And then what happens is that I don’t have time for a lunch break so, again, I walk out, I walk into the fridge, I open up the bread and leave the bread on the counter and make a piece of toast and the peanut butter spills, but I don’t think I have time in my brain to clean it up. So, all of a sudden, there’s double the mess that there was that morning, and all of it has nothing to do with my actual desire for the house to be clean. It has nothing to do with my awareness. I know I’m making a mess. Really, the root of my messiness is time, and it is being in a rush.

And so, one of the things that I have experimented with lately that has really made a huge impact on my tidiness is giving myself more time in the morning to get ready. So, I use time blocking. I have a calendar where I block in my schedule so that I know approximately what I’m doing, and I don’t follow it every day, and I’ll talk about that in another episode, but what I do do is I usually give myself about a half an hour to get ready because I’m pretty low maintenance. I basically put on mascara and call it a day. But recently, I’ve been giving myself a full hour so that I have time to do breakfast slowly, I have time to grab my pajamas and put them back where they need to be before I need them the next night. I have time to grab my clothes from yesterday that I was too tired to put away and put them in the appropriate laundry basket.

And so, I want to remind you today that a lot of us are constantly in a rush, and we’re constantly in a rush because we think if we’re going fast, then we’ll get more done, and there’s always so much to be done, and if we get it done, then we’ll finally feel relaxed. But what I want to remind you of is we will feel relaxed and we will change our behavior (and, in my case, we will become tidy) if we slow ourselves down. If we work on being in the moment, living our lives in a relaxed way, that is how we create relaxation. Busy plus busy will never equal peaceful. That’s not how math works. That’s not how the universe works. So, if we want to be living a life that feels tidy and peaceful and intentional, we need to start approaching each individual moment that way, not trying to get everything done so that eventually we can feel something that we think we’re gonna feel.

That is what I’ve got for you today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Always share this on your Instagram stories. Tag me. DM me and let me know if you are loving what you’re hearing, and if you have any quests, I’m always down to take those. I will talk to you in the next one!