On Calming The Inner Voice

I had a bit of a wobble over the weekend.

I started finding it really difficult to switch off at nght, and found myself waking up at 4 in the morning with my head spinning with all the "stuff" I had to do, which led to getting up at silly o'clock to get work done and then fretting when I couldn't think clearly. By Monday morning I was in a bit of a state, and by Monday teatime all I wanted to do was sit in a corner and cry.

Instead of doing that, I took myself off to bed for some quiet time to think, drink tea and calm down.

I listened very hard to what was going on in my head and realised that my inner voice was chuntering away along these lines:

"You've got to think about marketing and you need a PR strategy and there's that workshop you're running on Saturday and you need to be ready for that and have you contacted the people that are coming yet and you're nearly out of business cards and you need to learn how to hold a teleseminar and it's about time you recorded another podcast and when are you going to find somewhere for your workshops and if you held a seminar would anyone come and what kind of cupcakes are you going to make and...and...and..."

It's no wonder I couldn't sleep! Once I started to pay attention to what my inner voice was saying, I immediately realised that I was stressing myself out because I had fallen into one of my usual self-inflicted bear-traps - I had got so swept up with the excitement of new things, that I'd stopped planning and prioritising, and now I couldn't see the wood for the trees.

So, instead of just letting the inner voice keep going and driving me mad, I decided to pay it some attention, and I wrote down all the things it was telling me I needed to do. This immediately helped me to feel calmer. It's like paying attention to a small child - if you ignore it it just gets more and more persistent and insistent, tugging at your sleeve, getting louder, climbing all over you until you get completely exasperated with it. If you listen to what it's saying (provided you're not in the middle of something critical) and acknowledge what it's trying to tell you, it's happy and will wander off to do something else, leaving you to concentrate on what you were doing.

So I acknowledged my inner voice, recognising that, in this instance, it was trying to help me. Once I'd written down all the things it was reminding me about, I was able to prioritise them and recognise that actually only a very few need my attention this week, and the rest could wait. Another huge weight off my shoulders, and a lessening of my stress.

And then, of course, I acknowledged that what I need is to draw up a plan and stick to it, rather than getting carried away with things and wanting to do it all now. And how those of you that used to work with me will be laughing now, famous as I was for chafing against the need to be tied down by plans!

Well, you live and learn. I don't want to allow myself to get panicky and anxious in my new life - I know it's inevitable that there will be some stress, but I'm not going to let it take over as I have before. I've done pretty well so far, and I think this weekend was the first time I've felt anything other than exhilarated since I gave my notice in back in October. Maybe I was due for a reminder that you can't expect to run on exhilaration without getting exhausted, and that I need to take some time to relax every once in a while?

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