Can we make this less complicated?
Hi! It’s me. I’m a chronic over-complicator and over-thinker. I tie myself in knots jumping to the most complex and unlikely scenarios and then wonder why I always feel over-whelmed and stuck. Meal planning? I definitely need an elaborate spreadsheet, everyone’s workout, travel, and meeting schedule, their relative caloric needs for each day of the week, and only fresh, local, organic ingredients from 10 different vendors. Ugh. I want to hide my head in the sand just thinking about it. And then emerge and get chipotle instead of scrambling some eggs with leftover veggies.
Or perhaps, I think there’s an aardvark in my backyard at 5:30am. An obvious conclusion to a stationary blob in our Western North Carolina yard. It was freaking out the dogs. It was not an aardvark, but the cover of our fire pit that had been blown off by the wind. A far more obvious and logical conclusion. In my defense, I had not had coffee and was wearing very dirty glasses.
And so, we come to this column. In which a highly anxious person attempts to edit her life so she can move forward with focus and confidence.
For our first column: THIS NEWSLETTER. I’ve been really trying to distill what I want to do as a yoga teacher and how to do it. I love making breakdown videos. I love encouraging movement that makes people feel strong and confident. I love teaching classes. AND, I do want to build a stronger online following. Social Media is a powerful tool, but it also changes fast, is unreliable, and requires a level of grind I’m not interested in. I’d rather make less, higher-quality content, than post every day about my morning energy “hack”, or the cheesy revelation I had while I was washing dishes.
I had come across the advice to really zero in and focus from multiple accounts and books. We don’t make much progress by doing a thousand things all at once all the time. We need to pick one and commit. This message had been floating around in my brain for a while, running in to all the “shoulds” and “what-ifs” and “what abouts”. It didn’t take root until I read three-pages from Essentialism, decided it wasn’t applicable to me, and then realized, “oh wait…this is directly applicable to me”.
I was trying to do social media, plus youtube, plus a newsletter with not much in it. But what I’m really trying to do is build and engaged following with which I can build a meaningful relationship. And to do that I need emails and a newsletter with useful content.
So here we are. My focus is now on this newsletter. It will come out more often (weekly or bi-weekly) and have practical, applicable tips for movement and maybe life. Exclusively for subscribers. Have ideas? Questions? Drop them below and they’ll make it into a future newsletter.