Stuck in Maycember
I’ve gotten stuck in Maycember!
If you have a child in school, you already know. If you don’t, let me paint the picture: May is the month where the calendar, which seemed perfectly manageable in April, suddenly reveals that it has been lying to you. Field day. Spring concert. End of year awards. Promotion ceremony. Teacher gifts. (Oh, no! I forgot teacher gifts!). The last week of elementary school for my child, who is heading to junior high in the fall and all of the activities and emotions that go along with closing the chapter on this season.
Layered on top of that: a consulting trip, a busy coaching season, International Coaching Week, and the general sense that the world had collectively decided that May was the time to schedule everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.
In other words, I got caught in the whirlwind.1
Here is the part I find ironic: I coach people on this. I work with people who are so busy keeping everything running that they can’t find the time to do the things that would move them forward. There’s no margin. I know the pattern intimately, and this time, I caught myself in it.
But I remembered my resilience menu. I stopped trying to outrun chaos and made a few simple choices.
Simple choices like coffee and a YouTube rabbit trail on productivity systems, obviously. But also: fifteen minutes in the afternoon sun between calls. A quick LEGO build. Journaling. Sitting still long enough to notice what I’m actually feeling instead of just reacting to the next thing on the list.
It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, but it is helping to pull me out of the whirlwind. (Well, maybe the YouTube rabbit trail isn’t really helping with that.)
Recently, I’ve been working through the idea of a resilience menu, a short list of small, restorative things you decide on ahead of time so you don’t have to think when the pressure builds. Turns out I needed to use my own.
If you’re in Maycember too, I hope you find your fifteen minutes of sun.
Reflect: What’s your version of Maycember? When have you realized you were caught in the whirlwind? What was the first thing that slipped?
Act: Build your resilience menu. Write down five to eight small things that restore you, making sure that they vary in time, energy, and location. Keep it somewhere you’ll actually find it when you need it. (Mine is on a sticky note on my desktop.) Because you will need it. The whirlwind comes for us all eventually.
Need help building your resilience menu?
The whirlwind is a concept I first encountered in The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney and Sean Covey; it’s the idea that the urgent, ongoing demands of keeping things running consume the energy you meant to spend on what actually matters.
In it with you! We are on our last week of school and crawling to the finish line.
For me a quick walk in the morning after the morning rush hour is my go to reset (even 10 minutes counts). When I can't squeeze it in, I do some somatic shakes and wiggles to get thing moving again.
I'll be putting mine on my desk as well since that is the place I will most likely feel stuck or overwhelmed.
Sitting in the sun.
Listing beautiful things around me.
When working at home, a few yoga poses.
That's just a start off the top of my head. I will be adding and refining, but first, a cup of warm tea (winter is coming here in the southern hemisphere).