Enjoy this week’s guest post from Ada Mbonu from Boss & Broider, a modern and inclusive copywriting firm, on the importance of taking a moment to SIT!
The year 2020 seemed like the one we had all been waiting for. Halloween is on a Saturday, Christmas is on a Friday – heck, even Cinco de Mayo fell on a Taco Tuesday. Then, in marched Miss Corona and all her minions, prepared to wreak havoc on our internal stability and interpersonal experience. With all of the global unraveling we’ve witnessed this year, one of the greatest secondary losses we’ve felt as citizens of the world is the loss of control. With whole economies and personal plans seeing derailment and postponement to an undetermined time, it can readily seem like everything we would typically do is now without a point.
Even before we embarked on this decade, finding balance has often seemed like more of an achievement than a life habit. Working as a community organizer for 2 agencies, I thought I had everything sorted – that is, until I experienced burnout. It was predicated by a classic combination of spreading myself too thin and not setting firm limits. I felt far more tired than expected, given the fair amount of sleep I’d been getting. Small tasks began to feel like huge projects, and I had started to become irritable. I was doing and going and sending, but I was never pausing or assessing. Once my coworkers’ voices literally began to sound like the adults in the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, I knew that it was imperative for me to back away from the grind and let my body and mind decompress. While watching TV and digging into an order of takeout that would last me the entire weekend, I began to sit. Sit and reflect. Melt into calm. Let calm melt into me.
After ample time for reflection, I realized that part of the reason my wellbeing was shaken was because my daily structure was not sound in the first place. Besides knowing what was due, when to be where, and how much sleep I needed to function, I did not spend much time investigating my needs or ways I could optimize my life to meet them. The art of delegation grew dusty and rusty in my toolbox, and I had not considered that my time spent off the clock deserved some thought as well. I felt that a “generally functional” order to my life was good enough. Operating with minimal plans, I inadvertently ramped up until I became helter-skelter, personified. Getting sucked into this professional whirlwind and spit right out let me know that I never wanted to get on this ride again. It wouldn’t be until later that I developed the SIT method. It helps me keep a healthy amount of “get up and go” while steadying the flame. SIT, or Sit, Identify, and Try, has helped me to stay focused while I put out quality work and enjoy guilt-free downtime I can really snuggle into.
The aim of SIT is to continually check in with yourself to determine your priorities and what needs to be in place for you to get there. It is a readily adaptable system that employs mindfulness and encourages self-awareness to help you spin life’s plates a bit more smoothly. To combat feeling undereffective or like I’m not capitalizing on my personal hours, I remind myself that play time and work feed into each other cyclically and are of tantamount importance. The SIT method can be applied to both. Each component works as follows:
Sit: Sometimes, we may have a tendency to steamroll the landscape – to keep barreling on through without giving ourselves a moment to note the feel of the grass or to examine the sunset. Pause. Breathe in. Breathe out. When you stop moving, do you feel your body relax? Now is a great moment to engage in an activity that brings you back to baseline, like briefly closing your eyes, stretching and/or practicing mindfulness techniques. We know what’s next, but can we even remember the last thing somebody said?
Identify: How high is your stress level right now? What are your current primary stressors? What structural changes to your day will make things easier? How can you modify your approach (i.e., rearrange the order of your activities, delegate, postpone the minor things)? How can you add joy? Identify what you need to do and what you love to do. Plan to tackle the former to make way for the latter. Cut out the optional low-yield activities that drain your time, and streamline your must-dos into efficient, reasonable block sessions. If you would gladly sit for four hours straight doing life admin on a Saturday morning in order to have the rest of the weekend to yourself, do it. If you know you’ll hit a wall if you don’t get up to rotate the scenery every 45 minutes, lean into that truth about yourself. Build a plan that works for you, not for your idealized, peak-optimal self.
Build a plan that works for you, not for your idealized, peak-optimal self.
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Try: Test drive your solution. Don’t try to steer things toward a certain outcome; merely carry out the ideas you’ve planned. Don’t be afraid for implementation to differ from imagination, or for you to be pleasantly surprised when it goes quite right!
Make sure you always have some time built in to process and to do nothing. At some point, we’ll need to SIT again. The level of detail is customizable. Some may find that too much detail makes it easier for the story arc of their day to get lost while dissecting the weeds. Others may find that structure of a higher magnitude really allows their productivity to flourish. We are humans, not rocks. It’s good to be flexible.
Sometimes, we all need a moment to SIT and reflect on how we’re actually doing. As seasons change, there is a continual need to make time to reflect, adapt, and find our personal practical medium between productivity and play. By being honest about the discrepancies between how we are doing and how we’d like to think we’re doing, we give ourselves the space to be better and ultimately, to just be. By engaging in productive self-care, we are likely to get more work done during working hours and fully exhale into our leisure. You are the president of your life; govern yourself accordingly.
You are the president of your life; govern yourself accordingly.
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Ada Mbonu has spent the last 6 years serving in the nonprofit space, transitioning from community organizing to administration. One of the toughest, yet most vital lessons she’s learned is to find balance so as not to pour from an empty cup. She now savors her downtime with reckless abandon. As a first-generation Nigerian-American, she relishes her bicultural upbringing and continually seeks opportunities to learn about others. During quarantine, she has been able to perfect her ideal night in – spicy food, comfy clothes, and documentaries.
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