How alternating work and self-care changed my posture and my revenue
I've been working a completely different way this year, and it has changed my life. It is simple enough to explain in one sentence: I do a little bit of work, then I do an act of self-care, then I go back to work. Back and forth. I built a free tool for it HERE if you would like to do the same. What I did not expect was how much it would change my business.
The Shift From Doing to Being
The longer I work without stopping, the more I disconnect from myself. I'm still excited. I'm still doing things I love. But somewhere in the middle of it I stop being a person and become someone doing things.
Every act of self-care brings me home. It is a shift from doing to being, and that shift makes me better at the work, because there's more beingness energy in the doing, which makes what I do better.
It also means I don't have to do as much. The more disconnected we are, the more we overcompensate. We overwork. We add too many bells and whistles. We doubt what we're doing and decide it isn't enough. Connecting to yourself frequently is what gives you a sense of what enough actually looks like.
You Cannot See the Line When You're Disconnected
There is a line between an appropriate amount of work and self-abuse. Your eyes are straining. You haven't gotten up to go pee. You didn't eat lunch. That is the far side of the line, and you crossed it hours ago without noticing.
When I connect with myself throughout the day, I can find the stopping point. I put in enough work today. I'm stopping here. I'll come back tomorrow. When I don't, that line gets blurry and I sail right past it.
If you have ADHD, hyperfocus makes the line ten times harder to see. The breaks keep hyperfocus from superseding your humanity. They keep you in the driver's seat.
Sitting Is the New Smoking, and Your Posture Knows It
I looked back at old videos and photos of myself and saw what years of chair time had done to my posture. Having kids affected my core and I was still sitting in front of a computer half of the day running an online business, and the cumulative effect was real.
So I started using my breaks for posture exercises. One day I walked past a mirror and my neck looked twice as long. My face looked different. My back looked different. I had reclaimed my posture.
I didn't stop working at a computer. I stopped working at a computer chronically, and I started reversing the damage. This is not a cute self-care idea. This is your health.
Your Body Has Been Talking This Whole Time
Regulating frequently throughout the day makes your nervous system feel safer, and helps your intuition speak to you more clearly. Mine started telling me things.
Get rid of the bed and sleep on the floor. Lower the desk and make it a floor desk. Do this kind of workout. Do this kind of morning routine. Stop going to the gym for an hour and break the exercises into micro workouts throughout the day.
I got rid of my bed a year ago. We took the legs off my desk and put shorter ones on. I'm sitting on the floor as I write this. Later I learned I have ADHD and those were my needs around regulation, coming through long before I had a name for them.
Capacity Is the Real Growth Strategy
When you first try this, you'll hit the tension. You take more breaks, the work isn't done, the deadline is coming. That's a fork in the road. One path says you cannot take breaks. The other says something about the work needs to change.
The fear is that if you don't get it all done, you won't make the money and the business won't grow. That is the lie. There are dozens of ways to do things differently that you cannot see, because the only method you've practiced is to sacrifice yourself and work hard. Once you refuse to sacrifice your well-being, the better questions show up. How can this be faster? Simpler? What boundaries, what prices, what systems?
You will only do the ideas you have capacity for. A live round of your program could bring in thousands, but how does that feel to someone already running on empty? It isn't a match for the capacity she has. Small capacity, small ideas. Big capacity, bigger ideas, bigger revenue.
Capacity does not grow from working harder. It grows from taking care of yourself more. So when I want my business to grow and I don't want to work more, I don't ask what I need to do. I ask where I can raise the ceiling on how much I am taking care of myself.
