I’m not busy. Life is FULL.

I’ve never liked describing my life as “busy.”

The word busy makes me feel like an over-scheduled child whose parents want him to get into an Ivy League school on a golf scholarship. A child whose time is entirely controlled by external pressures, expectations, and obligations.

If you Google the word “busy,” this is the first way it’s used in a sentence: “he had been too busy to enjoy himself.”

Damn. I think that’s my biggest fear.

When I say, “I’m busy,” I feel like a victim to my schedule.

At Third Nature, we like to say, “Be the CEO of your life.” Part of being the CEO of your life is owning your schedule — not letting your schedule own you.

As Arthur Basley says, “Believing you don’t have choices is the most common limiting belief.”

When I say I’m too busy to show up to a gathering, or too busy to call my grandma, I know deep down that’s bullshit. I’m choosing to do other things with my time.

I guess it’s become more socially acceptable to say I’m busy. And in most cases, saying “I’m too busy to…” isn’t an outright lie. But maybe we make ourselves busy to avoid potentially uncomfortable conversations and environments.

I also think a lot of people equate “I’m busy” to mean “I’m important” or “I’m valuable.”

First, busy ≠ productive.

But more importantly, how busy / productive we perceive ourselves to be shouldn’t equal how valuable / worthy of love we feel.

I don’t want to be busy. So even when my schedule is filled to the brim, and I feel like I’m trying to balance 6 full plates spinning on top of sticks, I remember that everything on my plate(s) is there because I want it there — and if I don’t want something on my plate anymore, I have the power to remove it and live with the consequences.

I also recognize that not everyone has the same ability to remove things from their plate that they don’t want in their lives, often due to financial needs. This is why helping people become financially independent, and wealthy in every definition of the word, is so important to me.

Anyway, recently when people ask me how I’m doing, I say something like this:

“Life is FULL. I have so much on my plate, and these past couple of months have been quite overwhelming. But I’m truly so happy and grateful to be doing everything I’m doing, I don’t know if I would change a thing.”

If busy makes me feel like a victim, full feels more empowering.

Between us — I’m clearly still learning how to keep my plate from overflowing. My mom always said my eyes are bigger than my stomach. At the buffet of life with endless options, I always take more food than I can eat. I’m still getting better at saying no, and out of seemingly endless opportunities that I want to pursue, trying to choose what I want most.

Thanks for reading! Here are some journaling and reflection invitations if you’d like to go deeper. Feel free to comment on this post or reach out directly if you’d like to share any of your responses…

How does it feel when you describe your life as “busy”?

What might you be avoiding by making yourself so busy?

Why do you think being (or claiming to be) busy is so common, acceptable, and oftentimes even encouraged, in our society?

After reading this article and thinking through how it applies to your own life, what’s one change or shift that you want to implement?