Why you must strategically rest, especially if you live in a culture that fears slowing down.
I live in NYC.
Regardless of how slowly I move, the pace around me is rapid. There’s a constant pulse of human bodies, machinery, buildings, and the invisible surrounding me.
This is what I call invisible impact.
It’s real.
I remember choosing to work for myself because I didn’t fit well into 9-5 jobs.
Time passed, and I succeeded at making a living as a freelance consultant and creative.
Woohoo!
What I didn’t succeed at was rest.
It was an obvious fact to me that clients come first. Working on the business was the equivalent of working on me.
But is that true?
Early on and even years into working for myself, I was in a state of quiet anxiety around my business.
I didn’t know when or how the money would come in.
But more problematic still was that marketing and sales education ignored who I was as a person.
Tactics that would garner “good money” at faster rates for others seemed to backfire for me. I intuitively knew better. They didn’t match who I was as a leader, healer, or person.
Business education, outside of my work with Seth Godin, didn’t take the power of perception into account.
It didn’t prioritize how I viewed myself or how others perceived me, either.
Aggressive DM’s selling your product might work, but they feel needy.
These tactics also broke silent, energetic agreements I had with people.
Trust matters.
When I acted out of character, I broke rapport. I also compromised one of my greatest assets and the very reason people hire me. They trust me.
I violated something unseen and felt shitty.
But I needed to make money.
I came to believe that to succeed in business, I would have to do things I didn’t like.
More than that, I’d have to be inauthentic.
I’d have to ignore my own needs and prioritize hitting six or seven figures to stay relevant or get more fancy-name clients.
This was a success, right?
If you read this far, and you’re sensitive in the slightest, you might feel the chaotic nature of the first part of this essay. If you feel it, it’s because that was the nature of those times.
It was an earnest search for not only how to make a living and grow up in the world of business, but a deeper search for who I was as a person.
For who I was as someone with a purpose to help others.
I didn’t know who I was, not as a business person or human being.
I thought I needed to exclusively focus on client needs because, hello, that’s where the money came from.
It was a big enough success to escape mainstream society and do something meaningful with my life, right?
But over time, fatigue set in.
Fatigue of a deep nature. The kind of fatigue that takes place when you don’t know who you are and keep trying to build, anyways.
The kind of fatigue where you don’t know what you’re afflicted by, and thus do not know the proper treatment.
So you keep going.
You’re tired of trying to do right, trying to do well, and yet you’re taught to oppose your values, do shady shit, or sacrifice who you are to ‘succeed’.
As creative healers and leaders in business…
As sensitive coaches and consultants…
As wisdom seekers who quite literally know shit…
Ignoring who you are is never the path to your success.
Business blueprints that ignore your unique identity will fail you because you are the nature of your gifts and talents.
Marketing that feels aggressive or overtly loud will compete with your natural gifts.
Repressing your voice where it counts will suffocate your power.
In your well-intended effort to grow, you cut yourself off at your ankles.
You want to be authentic, but you haven’t yet defined what authenticity means to you.
Rest, then matters, as a place of being. It allows you to see. To address who you are, what you’re here to create, and why your voice urgently matters today.
With love,
Lalita