Photo Credit: Chanel
The words and wisdom of Coco Chanel were once a rally-cry for me. She made me stand up taller, care more, want more and know that anything was possible.
While her brand feels totally out of step with today’s world, she was once a determined underdog with a vision. A woman who did a good job pretending she had it all under control. A woman who masked her insecurities with a good pair of shoes and her editing eye. There is wisdom lurking under her slightly judgmental and deeply-privileged perspective.
I have always followed Chanel’s rule of looking in the mirror and taking one thing off before I leave the house. As a total magpie (if it’s shiny I want it), I am prone to a desire to wear at least two outfits at once. Not only does that leave me looking like a Christmas Tree but I usually wind up feeling burdened by the heels or the necklace or the bag - the one thing too many. That tendency carries over to my to-do list. Exponentially.
In the universe of overwhelm we are our greatest enemy. We add but we don’t subtract. We don’t pause and look in the metaphorical mirror. We don’t even contemplate the option that less might be more.
We know we should lighten our load. Being in various degrees of lockdown for the past - however many months it has been - has given us time to clean out our literal closets. What remains for us is to edit what is hiding in plain sight.
Scope-creep is a term widely used in the contracting world that also applies to the burden we place on ourselves.. It means that the original parameters of the brief, or job, have been lost as countless new requirements have been added.
Scope-creep is problematic because it implies the original ask is no longer clear. For a contractor that usually means you are being overworked and underpaid. While I know that will resonate with you, it’s actually worse than that. We also lose something critical. We lose sight of who we want to be in the world. We get so busy getting the to-do’s done - we forget what it is all in service of. We lose ourselves.
I know. That should really hurt to read. Sorry but...not sorry.
Weekends have become weekdays, email and entertainment merge, personal has become business. And business is getting personal. Our living room is an office, our bedrooms are offices, our kitchen is an office. We have become chefs and daycare and teachers and cleaners and social workers.
We have added and we haven’t subtracted.
So your mantra this week is “do less”. Every morning you will say this, every day you will honor this, every evening you will assess this. It's a simple exercise. I intentionally want to start small. Once we gain awareness of what we are doing we have a much greater capacity to change our actions.
And it’s harder than it sounds. You will invent a million reasons to do the stuff that doesn’t matter. Watch yourself justify and rationalize. As you do, ask yourself “what is this in service to?” You, your future, your goals? Or are you feeding the busy-ness beast?