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If you’re reading this blog you probably want more abundance, freedom and choice in your life. More fun, happiness and joy. But everyone’s life includes some mundane tasks, right? Not everything you do is going to set your heart on fire with joy and inspiration. Is it?
What do I mean?
Well, for example, I don’t love wiping my bum. But I do love having a clean bottom. It’s a mundane task that I can’t really say I love doing, but I do love the outcome of feeling fresh and clean. So I do it, and I do it well. Not gonna stop!
The point is: even if you don’t love every task itself, you can still love why you’re doing it.
Loving the bigger ‘why’ of what you’re doing across all of the tasks you perform, gives your life a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Even with a sense of meaning and purpose, though, we still need to have fun from time to time!
What happens when you find that you’re doing a whole bunch of tasks that you don’t love but you just do them because you have the skills and you think you should? Or maybe because you think you have no other choice? Yet there’s little time or energy left over for the things you love to do…
When your life is full to the brim with that mundane stuff, it can start to take over and drain the joy and inspiration from your existence. Time gets sucked up and you feel like you have little of value to show for it. That’s when you can find yourself feeling really flat, tired and unfulfilled.
Know what I’m talking about? Most of us have been there at one time or another.
It may be the job you take because you have the skills to do it, but you don’t love it. You might be good at it, and it may pay you well. So maybe that’s the bigger ‘why’ of it: you need the money, and you like what that can buy you. Nothing wrong with that. But it does beg the question: is there a way that I can achieve the outcome I desire (eg. the money) in a way that is less of a drag for me?
It’s useful to do an inventory of your life and assess this. Is it REALLY true that you have no other choice?
Look at all of the tasks you do, and ask yourself: “Do I love it?”
If the answer is no, then: “Do I at least love the outcomes of it – what it gives me? So that I’m willing to keep doing it? Or, could I delegate it and use my energy elsewhere, which would give me more joy?”
Years ago I was reading an interview of the daughter of a famous female comedian. She was asked:
“What was the greatest thing your mother ever taught you?”
She replied something like this:
“My mother didn’t really know how to use a vacuum cleaner. Seriously. Even though she didn’t grow up rich. When I asked her why that was, she told me that she didn’t waste her time learning to do things she knew she wouldn’t enjoy or ever want to do. Instead, she spent her energy in the direction of figuring out how to get those things done by someone else, so she could focus on the things she truly loved instead. The things that make people laugh.”
That struck me as a great piece of wisdom. That comedian made a choice which not only gave her more joy, but also generated enormous abundance in her life as a result. That’s not a coincidence…
How many things do we end up doing because we think we should? Because we’ve been told that’s what we ought to do? Or just because we know how, and we can? Things that, with a bit of imagination and attention, we could figure out how to delegate or even just stop doing altogether (because they’re really not that important after all)?
If I don’t love doing something, and I don’t even love what it gives me, then why am I doing it?
It’s a good question!
When you sit down and do a really honest inventory, I bet you’ll find a few things in that category.
Find a way to ditch or delegate those things, and you’ll open up space and energy in your life for many more joyful and abundant things to take their place.
To YOUR Abundance,
Julie Ann Cairns
