My time on the mat leaves me feeling grounded and calm. And that’s the perfect way to start a day. I find that when I sit down at my desk with that mindset (as opposed to the just-woke-up-yikes-look-at-that-to-do-list mindset), I’m super clear on what I need to be working on and I seem to be heaps more productive and methodical in everything I do.
It was about 6.30am and I’d just come back from a SUP. I was getting ready to start work and found myself brushing my teeth, putting laundry in the washing machine and making the bed — all at the same time. It was only when I realised that I was about to spit out my toothpaste all over the floor that it was pretty stupid to be trying to do a whole bunch of things at once.
A reminder to us that all we needed to do was focus on our own practice. Nothing good would come from looking around the room. Either we’d fall into a place of self-doubt because we didn’t feel like we were doing good enough or we’d jump into our ego because we thought we were doing better than everyone else.
On my ride back home, I kept thinking about it. Stay on the mat. I realised that this aligns so closely with where I’m at in my business.
Just last week, I came across this awesome quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (an American poet with a rad name)
‘Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare think’.
It seemed super relevant to me after that surf lesson, and even more so when I thought about how we could apply that to entrepreneurship. I work with so many clients who struggle with (the super common) Impostor Syndrome. Where, despite external evidence of their competence, they still hold this belief that they are, in some way, a fraud, and that they’re not good enough at what they do.
You see, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you’re probably doing in your business, day to day, that really doesn’t fit into your ‘core genius’ category. It’s just the stuff that has to get done in order to keep your business moving in the right direction. It’s the kinda stuff that you wish you could ship out to a VA or an intern. These are the tasks that crop up on your to-do list every single freaking week.
