Grow Better by letting things go.
I am a person who is constanly doing. Be it working on three projects at once, juggling personal and professional goals, finding ways to be supportive of the people I care about while still taking care of myself is my normal mode of operation. But sometimes the state of constant motion not only results in being less successful in any one thing, but also in missing opportunities I could have reached for if my arms hadn’t already been full.
This week my company HubSpot is hosting INBOUND, a mega conference that focuses on inbound marketing and gatherers marketers, sales professionals and aspiring HubSpotters from around the world. This year’s theme is “Grow Better”, which has casued me to take a moment to reflect on how I can grow in the best way possible. For me, this means letting some things go.
That may be the extra workout I promised myself to get in this week. It could be the not-to-pressing blog post I have been deferring getting started on. It may be that craft project I started 6 months ago but is sitting unfinished in a bag in the depths of the creative cabinet. These less-than-priororites create mental weight that can drag on more impactful efforts.
However letting go isn’t easy. I tend to get attached to the effort invested in unfinished projects or goals I had set for myself but haven’t yet begun to tackle. Not completing (or sometimes worse, not even starting) an effort I put on my personal plate can feel like a failure. My strongest critic wants to complete every effort on time, efficiently and impressive enough to recive high marks from a pannel of judges. Spoiler alert: that critic and the judging panel are both me.
The cost of fervantly holding onto all of these projects can be great. Trying to accomplish all the things results in less attention to each task in progress. And what’s worse, being distracted by too much can mean that one really impotant thing might pass me by while I’m busy being distracted.
What I vow to remind myself of in an effort to Grow Better is that by letting some things go, I’ll have more time and attention to focus on the things that really count. Letting go isn’t an excuse to avoid what’s hard or necessary or an excuse to be lazy. It’s about jettisoning the stuff that’s less important and putting everything you’ve got into the things that truly count.