Permission Not To Be Superhuman

This week I am writing something different. No framework, nothing technical... Just from my heart to yours and in the heat of the moment

I have been sitting on it for a few weeks. Something shifted this morning, so I am writing it down while it is still fresh.

I am not writing from the other side of anything. I am in the middle of it.

🎧 If you prefer to listen to this edition instead, click on the audio image below for an audio podcast as a deep dive which is AI-generated based on this edition and Jess' intellectual property:

Busy is the proof

Busy is how most of us learned to show we are doing our job.

Somewhere along the way, being busy became the proof. It never gets said out loud, and it is not in anyone's role description. The people who are always flat out look committed. The person with a clear afternoon looks like they have less to do.

I am not standing outside this. I have lived it for years, and I am good at it. I liked being the person who could hold more than most people can hold, and I still like it. That is what makes this hard to write.

Once busy becomes the proof, an empty hour starts to feel like something has gone wrong. So you fill it. There is always something to do.

The line between working and living, and which one won

Work has deadlines. Dinner does not.

For years I thought I was holding a balance. Work on one side, life on the other, and my job was to keep them roughly level. That is not what was happening. The two were bleeding into each other, and when that starts, one of them takes over. It is mostly Work.

Work comes with deadlines, consequences, and people waiting on you. It has a reason why it should go first, every single time. Life does not have that level of consequences with deadlines, because dinner does not escalate and a walk will never follow you up.

The side with the deadlines wins by default, and it keeps winning until you stop it.

By the time I noticed, the evening was no longer an evening. It had become the quiet part of the day where I could finally get things done.

This is also not about work-life-balance. We are the ONE human being behind both. While you are in “life” you are thinking about work and vice versa. As human beings we can’t but work in a box and another box for work.

I recently heard the term “wired and tired” and without needing any explanation, that resonated with me 100%

I am very good at what I do but am also connected all the time even when I try to disconnect by binge watching Netflix.

I try to do a proper disconnect from time to time, but still not done well enough or frequently enough.

And yes I know, you are probably saying… I wish I had the luxury of disconnecting. Well, yes you can have that “luxury” before it becomes a forced time out. And what’s stopping you is not the workload, kids, household… etc. it’s the inner dialogue that has been programmed and conditioned in a way that makes this not a priority or not as important. Until your biology has had enough and will take over at one point

Am not talking to this from a place of having less workload.. I am currently involved with 3 clients and 5 transformations and for my community and private mentoring clients and running across time zones. Just this week I passed 55 transformations in my 26 years of doing this work. So, am very much in it

Superhuman

Superhuman is a nice word for carrying more than 1 person should carry.

There is a word going around for the people who do all of it. You are superhuman. You are like a machine. Creating, designing, managing, shaping, delivering, and somehow having a life running alongside all of it. It gets said with admiration, and it gets taken that way.

What it describes is a load, and loads add up. There is no day when it all becomes too much. It builds. You become impatient over something that does not matter. Your heart is going faster than it should while you are sitting still. You wake at 3 am, and your head is already at work.

The signals tap you on the shoulder, then it goes away, and because it goes away you decide it was nothing.

So you keep going. Stopping takes time you do not think you have, and if a gap turns up you fill it anyway. The train has no brakes, and we do not stop it.

What we call the signals so we do not have to do anything about them

Our bodies tell us plainly, and we are the ones who translate it into something we can ignore.

This is the part I have thought about most. Our bodies, nervous system, and our biology are not subtle about any of it. They tell us, and then they tell us again. We have got good at calling it something else.

It is my hormones.

It is a busy stretch; it will pass.

I have leave coming up.

I am tired, that is all.

Maybe I need a massage.

Maybe I will take the evening off, as if the evening was ever meant to be work.

Then there is the one I use most often: it is only this once, only these 2 weeks, only until this piece of work lands.

Those 2 weeks are almost never the 2 weeks that change anything, and there are not many moments in a life that do.

The work is important. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I still care about it. What I can see now is that important and urgent are 2 different things, and I had been treating them as one.

Today

It took weeks to decide what has been years in the making, and about a second to do.

Today I gave myself permission to stop being superhuman.

It sounds small written down. It took weeks. Weeks of turning it over, feeling it, arguing with myself, getting angry with myself for even thinking about it, and being honest that I like who I am when I am carrying all of it.

Underneath that, something quieter had been saying for a long time that I was not happy. I heard it. I had also got good at talking myself out of it.

I kept waiting for something big enough to give me permission, and that is not how it works. There was no crisis this morning. I stopped negotiating with myself, and that was the whole thing.

What slowing down looks like from here

1st gear still exists. Most of us have forgotten where it is.

If you have driven a manual car (or known of it), you know the difference between 1st gear and 5th. At some point I started living in 4th and 5th, all day, most days. After long enough, that stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only speed there is.

Slowing down, for me, looks ordinary. My thoughts stop running ahead of the conversation I am in. My heart rate settles. The pull to rush through one thing so I can start the next one eases. I take the blinkers off long enough to see something other than the job in front of me.

The human things we ignore the most… resting, attention, a bit of quiet, turn out to be the ones that open up what comes next. A different list of things to do, with a different level of impact, and a faster route to getting there.

It all comes out somewhere in the end; our biology always wins, and the only question is when and what it costs.

Permission

Permission not to be superhuman, even if only for today.

If any of this sounds like your week, I am not going to turn it into advice, because that is not what this is. What I can do is pass on the thing I gave myself this morning.

Permission to stop, without needing a reason for stopping.

Permission to do less today than you are capable of.

Permission to leave something undone and let it stay undone.

Permission to sit in an empty hour instead of filling it.

Permission to have a walk without a podcast in my ears or a phone in my pocket.

You do not have to take it today. It will still be there when you want it.

From my heart to yours!