The Seed of Slowing Down

Yesterday my coach friend, Prriyanka Shah, and I did a coaching exchange together. Coaching experience hours are the most important piece to earn an ICF certification. As we just started our journey, bartering coaching hours is an effective way to both gain experience and accrue accredited paid hours.

I brought up the topic of my struggle with my plan of "pipelining" 3 things at once: the coaching business that's near term, a mid-to-long term SaaS project, and a community-driven project that's even longer term. The 3rd one is fine since it only takes me 2-3 hours a week, but the 1st and the 2nd are where the struggle is: doing any one of them is a full-time job, while the fact that I still don't make any money since I was laid off has been ever-pressing. Over time, I felt an internal energy draining cycle had been formed: every day I was spinning rather than powering through. How do I create a baseline income, move all my initiatives forward, and stop spinning?

We unpacked the motivation behind what I was doing, we explored different alternatives, we dug deep, we gradually accessed the being behind each doing. At some point, to my surprise, my mouth spoke on its own almost mindlessly.

"Maybe, all in all it's that I never allow myself to slow down."

My body trembled. There was a spark of relief igniting from my belly, and soon it flowed through my spine. I cried. I did my best to contain my tears so I wouldn't melt down. Recalling that moment, maybe I should have allowed myself to do that.

This morning, thinking about the idea, I notice that slowing down is also about reflection. One particular stressful idea I've had is that I've achieved nothing in the past 6 months since I earned no money, but the truth is I've learned and grown in a way that would be impossible to achieve if I had a full-time job.

During the session, we chatted about how I'm a plant lover. She brilliantly used this as a metaphor for what I'm doing at this stage—planting seeds and tending plants. So we agreed that I will use a dried roselle ovary that I made the other day as a metaphorical reminder for myself. It's technically not a seed, but close enough.

Slow down.

Create intentional pauses to look around, to reflect back, and to appreciate where I am.