How Knowing the Season Reduces Stress and Creates Success.
There are mini seasons of success lasting one day or several. Often, it is a period of a few days where your pendulum has swung in a noticeably different direction. Like a true Spring day when the grass is beginning to green and flowers reach toward the sun, in your metaphorical Spring, you wake up vibrating with the energy of production and creation; the thoughts in your head are coming so fast you can’t keep up to capture them effectively. You know today is going to be full of accomplishment. Your work will advance. Your “to do” list will be obliterated. What you have been stressing about creating will powerfully pour out.
Then there is Winter. The days you wake up sleepy and slow as if a heavy snow has fallen on you while you slept. Your normal rituals seem cumbersome, work is effortful and distractions are unusually, well, distracting. Your motivation, like Elvis, has left the building. You feel the stress of what you aren’t accomplishing and, the longer winter drones on, be it an entire day or three, the more anxious you become. You don’t have time for this, you tell yourself.
Summer and Fall are moderately productive, not as good as the Spring when you seem to move at warp speed and produce your best work, but the days are quite full of powerful, if more normal, levels of achievement.
My instinct during Winter days is to panic that the words aren’t coming, at least not in any way that advances my mission of helping others or my desire to produce inspiring work. During Summer and Fall days, an increase in the rituals or a return to them, is sufficient to increase the energy of the day. Rituals are what you do daily to get into your uplifted, energized view of the world. Some examples of rituals are taking a walk, meditating, exercising, praying, saying affirmations, reviewing your vision board, listening to or reading something motivational, observing nature, and doing yoga. Rituals can be anything that puts you in the zone for maximum, effortless achievement. During Spring, you don’t need the rituals on which you habitually rely for your optimal, creative mindset. It seems that breathing is enough to put you in the flow. In Winter, the rituals have little or no effect. When your “go to” for mojo doesn’t work, your stress level rises.
So how do I get more Spring? The question is often asked by creatives and every entrepreneur, myself included.
My best advice, having struggled with this myself quite often, is to go with what shows up. Normally, each mini season lasts only a day or a few days. Neither peak state nor sleepy state can endure for weeks at a time but rather they ebb and flow more like the tides. As surely as Spring has arrived before, it will show up again. Rest during Winter. Do more relaxing things. Restore your energy and health. Enjoy the day, knowing that Summer and Fall exist and Spring will return soon. And when it does, you will leap out of bed and bound with the current, happily creating with ease while time will seem to stand still and watch.
There are many practical aspects to entrepreneurship and any creative endeavor but intuition can guide you to your most productive, vital self. You can fight and use all your energy trying to create Spring on a Winter day or you can tune in and flow with what shows up, knowing that whatever season it is each day is just right for the most balanced, vibrant version of you. And tomorrow is another day and quite possibly a new season.
Originally published at medium.com