The Great Reset. The Great Re-evaluation. The Pause. We’ve got all kinds of names for the past few weeks.
As I’ve been going through the various cycles of it, something feels strangely familiar to me.
Not the actual pandemic part of it, or the social distancing, or the masks.
But the feeling that this is a time to slow down. To pause. To re-evaluate things. To focus on what’s important.
And then I realized why it felt similar. Because it reminded me of 2016, when I had my own Great Reset.
That’s the year that I had a stroke.
Let me back up.
I had started a new business a year earlier (after walking away from several projects I’d been heavily invested in for the five years before), and I was all in.
I had made it my mission to help every woman learn how to sell, so they could go from “hating the sales part” to confidently landing higher-paying clients.
I was working crazy hours coaching students 1:1, doing client work, and giving 250% of myself to everyone else.
I didn’t sleep all that well. I didn’t take care of myself at all.
My wife and I, my fiancée at the time, argued about how much time I was spending working.
I didn’t eat well, rarely exercised, and focused solely on my students and clients. I had a clear vision of what I wanted my coaching practice and business to look like, and I prioritized that over everything else.
Then, one morning when I was making coffee, my vision became blotchy. I couldn’t feel half my face. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t cry for help, and within seconds, I felt like the entire, right side of my body was gone.
I was rushed to the hospital where, after a multitude of tests, they found that I had had a stroke.
I was 36 years old.
People don’t have strokes at age 36 unless something is very wrong.
Recovery took time, but thankfully I recovered. I had to work through some deficits, including difficulty with word-finding (Imagine knowing what you want to say, but you just can’t find the words. Every. Single. Time.). And when I was back to “myself,” I had to do some real soul-searching.
I had to pause. Reset. Examine my life and determine what matters. Decide to make myself and my health a priority even if that meant turning down a client or coaching fewer students.
I had to admit, out loud, “I can’t go on the way I was before.”
So what we’re doing right now feels eerily familiar to me.
Pause. Reset. Examine my life and determine what really matters. My health. My wife. Our son. My business.
Be honest about what I can feasibly take on, and what I need to say no to.
Pause.
Reset.
Examine your life, and determine what really matters to you.
Your health.
Your family.
Your business.
It’s okay to walk away from projects that aren’t the best fit, so that you make the time and space for the ones that are.
It’s okay to see this as an opportunity to choose one way to grow your business, and de-prioritize the rest.
It’s okay, as a student in this class of SIGNED decided, to not hustle while she’s doing full-time childcare, and instead be in “idea mode” until daycare opens again in July.
What is one thing you can take away from this experience that will make your life better in the long run?
To your health — and your success,
Leah
