I just decided I’m taking Mondays off this summer. Wednesdays are already my day with the kids, but I looked at the school holidays stretching out in front of me and thought, sod it, I want Mondays too!
Not because I need to. But because I want to.
And why should I care, I hear you asking yourself??
Well here’s why
That distinction between needing and wanting matters more than you think, because the moment I said it out loud, and I mean the exact moment the words left my lips, the voice in my head showed up right on cue.
Am I doing enough? Is the business growing enough? Am I growing enough?
I know that voice well, because it’s the same one I help my clients quiet every single week.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. My kids are little right now, and there’s a small window where they actually want to hang out with me, before the teenage years arrive and I become deeply uncool. At that time there will be plenty of years later to work every hour of the day. But this phase, this exact one, doesn’t come back.
So for the next five weeks, I’m working a three day week instead of four, and I can tell you with total confidence that it’s not going to damage my career.
When it comes to your life and career there are two things you have to know; what phase you’re in and what your priorities are
Because every choice in life has a trade off, and if you don’t know what matters most to you right now, you’ll end up sacrificing the wrong things without even realising it.
Working a 3 day week for the next 5 weeks won’t destroy my business, but it will slow things down. Knowing my priorities I can make peace with that.
This is what I teach in every session I run, before we even get near a CV or a LinkedIn profile. You can’t build a career strategy on top of priorities you’ve never actually named.
So here’s your homework, and I mean this properly, not as a throwaway line.
- What phase of life are you in right now.
- What actually matters to you in this season, not five years from now, not when things calm down, but right now.
Because your priorities will shift again, they always do, and the goal isn’t to get it perfect forever. It’s to keep checking in and making sure you’re building a life around what’s true for you today.
If you’re realising you’ve lost touch with what that even is anymore, that’s exactly the work I do with my clients. Book a call with me and let’s figure it out together. 🧡