For as long as I can remember I have yearned to create an integrated life. My life in the corporate world got pretty out of balance at a certain point. My time was rarely my own. My travel schedule was not my own. I had little say over which projects I got staffed on and where I’d have to fly to every single week to do that work. Sometimes it was the same city over and over every week for months on end. Sometimes I was traveling to different cities across Europe every day of the trip (which may sound exotic, but was actually pretty brutal).
When I left my last corporate consulting job, I didn’t know what was next. I just knew I needed to be home to spend the last couple of months I had with my dog Savannah. To help her through her transition. For everything she had given to me, I at least owed her that. That I knew at my core. I trusted the rest would sort itself out.
I thought I would “get a new job”, but this time one that fit me. Really fit me and my needs, and so I started thinking about my needs and my skills and what would be a fun job. All the calls I got were from all kinds of consulting companies who wanted for me to do the exact same work with the exact same business model and travel schedule that I had just walked away from. Why in the world would I do that? Even for a bit more money? I wanted to live a different life.
I wanted for my life to feel integrated, holistic. I wanted for my life to feel like a life, and not work, work, work, and my personal life gets squeezed in along the side when I can fit it in. I still have friends from that life who are doing the same job, even if for different companies, and they prioritize work over almost everything else. One of my close friends from that time will cancel plans to catch up and have lunch, every single time, for the silliest of things – “my colleagues need for me to write an email” or “draft a deck for a meeting that they didn’t tell me about until the last second”, or some other seemingly minor thing that seems like it would be an easy boundary to set. And yet it isn’t. Ever. For her.
I looked at my history, and I knew my tendency when I worked for employers was to put the employer’s needs first. It was such a strong and automatic drive in me, that I knew that if I “found a new job”, I would go right back into that old habit. That no matter how much I may have wanted to, I would never figure out how to prioritize myself and my needs into the mix. Not at that time. I realized that integration wasn’t going to happen unless I created it purposefully.
I knew that for me to really figure this out, I needed to be in total control of all of my time. I needed to have the ability to determine what to say yes to and what to say no to. I needed to maintain my own ability to schedule my time and to determine what to do with my time. And to do that I would need to create my own company. With that realization, Wholehearted Business Consulting was born.
But it went beyond that. Because creating work that worked for me was just one piece of it. What about the rest of my life? I didn’t really have one. How did I figure that part out? It was definitely much harder than it seemed like it should be – manifesting this thing that I had always yearned for. That my work and my life would just ebb and flow together. I knew how to work and prioritize work. I needed to learn how to live and prioritize my life. So I swung the pendulum in the other direction. I stopped worrying about work.
I invested in myself and lived off of my savings for a while, and I started focusing on how to live a life that I enjoyed living. How to make friends who weren’t working 9-5 jobs. When you make a drastic change in your life like this, you need to find other people who are also living a similar life, and have a similar schedule. I started developing closer relationships with neighbors who had more time freedom and flexible schedules. I started taking pottery classes during the day during the week and met other people who had more schedule freedom. I became a regular at my favorite neighborhood breakfast spot and built relationships there (now I go there for the relationships more than the food). I signed up for trips and conferences that inspired me and allowed me to meet other like-minded people who were interested in the same things I was. And perhaps most importantly I gave myself permission to be. To not know. To not be “productive”. To not have to have it all figured out. To play. To experiment. To explore. And I was still completely dedicated to my healing journey, to leaving “no stone unturned” as one of my mentors always says.
I have learned so much about myself through this process. I went from a totally structured life to a totally unstructured one, until I really embraced and relished the non-structure. Then I was able to start to figure out what structure I wanted to re-introduce to support myself – but only enough to serve me, not too much that would make me feel trapped or boxed in.
What are the things that you have done to create a more integrated life? Would love to hear what worked for you in the comments below.