When I was a kid, I hated group school projects, but I loved getting straight A’s. So any time we were assigned a group project, the voice in my head immediately replied: “I’ll just do it myself.”

As an adult, though, my callings required more of me.

When you want to create big things or truly impactful things, you can’t do that on your own. And in the process of exorcising my inner resistance to collaboration, I realized that doing it all myself was one way I’d been repressing my own inner genius, depriving it of the resources I needed to put my soul fully on deck in the form of my work. 

Cut to: Quarantine Season 2020.

One of the things I hear the most from my executive and entrepreneur coaching clients is how urgent their lifelong dreams have become as they’ve sheltered at home.

This is an urgency that feels bodily and almost aches: so many brilliant ideas, writhing in a mass within their chest or their throat to come out. Books. Talks. Brands. Businesses.

Movements, even. 

And in Quarantine Season 2020, maybe the 2nd most frequent pattern I’m detecting among the badass boss ladies in my world is a mind-blowing list of All The Things they’re doing everyday, at home and at work. 

They’re running businesses and business units.

They’re dealing with layoffs or dealing with being laid off. 

They’re ramping up their companies and their customer loads. 

They’re trying to organize curriculums and Crisis School kids.

They’re working out and baking, or stressing about not working out and ordering in. 

They’re walking the dogs and walking the kids and walking themselves.

They’re tending the tender emotions of their children, their parents, their mates, their employees, their employers, and their customers. 

They’re writing and creating. They’re envisioning and dreaming. 

They’re feeling what Anne Morrow Lindbergh described as “zerissenheit”: the feeling of torn-to-pieces-hood, pulled in every direction, all the time.

And then they say: I feel like I’m so busy. Like my hair’s on fire all day. Then I crash, without feeling like I’m getting almost anything done, even though I don’t even have a commute anymore. And I haven’t paid attention to my own goals or dreams at all since the quarantine began.

Let me say this: However you’re doing this quarantine, you’re doing it just right.

You can’t sleep “too much” or do “too little”. Give yourself the grace you would give a stressed out toddler.

But IF you are pulling more than your weight at home or at work, and IF you feel like you have an urgent, deep dream or desire inside that you can’t quite get out, I need to break some sobering news to you: 

You are using your codependency to repress your own brilliance. And it’s keeping you from playing the bigger game you came here to play.

See, codependency isn’t what it sounds like. It’s not being dependent on another person. It’s actually the exact opposite: It’s being addicted to fixing other people’s problems.

It’s a chronic pattern of interfering between others and the natural consequences of their behavior. 

Doing it all ourselves one way we deplete and distract ourselves so that there’s nothing left to invest in our own callings, passions or visions.

Then we “get to” tell ourselves the story that there’s just no time to do our own dreams, or that life is so chaotic you’re not sure how you’d ever do anything else in addition to All The Things You’re Already Doing. 

It’s an addiction because it is toxic and very, very difficult to stop doing, even when you know it’s toxic.

And the truth is: To take little, beautiful steps toward what you’re called to do, you don’t need to add them to your existing plate. You need to take some things off your plate, like the things you’re currently doing at work or at home that others could reasonably be asked to share in doing. 

Your kids can do more than you think. Even the little ones.

Your team can do more than you think. Even if they never have before. 

If you find that hearing this sparks resonance and resistance, hear this:

All inner resistance to your own dreams and soul-level desires and all resistance to what would free you up to foster them is a form of self-repression. 

One of the gifts of the current crisis is that it will disrupt your cherished, dysfunctional ways of being, giving you an opt-out opportunity: a chance to reclaim sovereignty over your old story and start gracefully being a new way. 

And in fact, for some, that will look like a system breakdown at first. If you’re living the lives of 5 people or doing the work of 12 people right now, the moment will come when the urgency of all that working and living and the urgency of your callings will reach a collective fever pitch, and you’ll realize the only option you have is to stop. 

Stop asking yourself to do more. 

And hopefully, you’ll also stop stressing because you can’t do more. 

And then, it’d be great if you also decided to reclaim a tiny corner of sovereignty over your own time, your own power and your own life.

Hopefully, you can stop telling that old story of being the fixer, being the superhero, being chronically stressed and overextended and under-assisted.

Because you get to change this story right now.

And you don’t do it by wheedling or convincing or controlling or trying to force other people to do things you used to do, or by wheedling or convincing or controlling or trying to force other people to do things the way you used to do them. 

You do it by holding the others in your life as sacred and powerful. Even your toddlers and your elders.

You get to change your old story of “so much potential, perpetually unfulfilled” by deciding to sit with the initial, disorienting, disturbing, discomfort of requiring the people in your life to experience the consequences of their actions or inaction. 

You do it by trusting life and the universe, and by trusting your team and your family. 

You do it by holding yourself as sacred and your dreams and goals as sacred, too. 

You do it by reading Boundaries. 

You do it by stopping your toxic, crippling patterns of fixing and living other people’s lives for them.

You do it by trusting me when I say that you DO have plenty of life force and energy for YOUR life and your desires, for the callings of your soul. If motherhood is one of those callings, you have plenty resources to be a wonderful mom, too.

But wonderful moms create self-sufficient kids.

Wonderful bosses create self-sufficient teams. 

Wonderful entrepreneurs create thriving, interdependent customers: not co-dependent ones. 

And when you decide to sit with the darkness and disturbance of disrupting your toxic pattern of fixing, very, very soon, you’ll start to recoup the incredible wells of energy and life force you’ve been using to spin other people’s wheels, maybe for decades.

Maybe forever. 

And with that restoration, you’ll find yourself receiving your Divine Downloads at an unprecedented level of fidelity, so that all your old mental fogginess and inner chaos will gradually subside and allow you to hear whatever your soul is calling you to that day.

Maybe it’ll be a book, a business or a movement. 

And maybe it’ll just be to curl up with your pugs and take a long-needed, well-earned nap for a few weeks.

Head up + heart out,

P.S.: Did this resonate? Let me know. 
 

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.