Your Solar System
Before we jump in: This article was originally shared with my email community in August 2020. I'm sharing it with you on the blog today in the hope that it may be of some encouragement and insight to you in your creative journey right now, and also give you a little sneak peak of what you can expect from Weekly Letters too. If you'd like to receive letters like this one straight to your inbox every Sunday, you can sign up below. You'll also have access to all of my Mini Books too!
One of my core business mantras is this:
My business orbits my life, not the other way around.
This mindset and approach is at the very heart of how I’ve built a business that is rooted in the life I want to live and the way I want to work, instead of it feeling like a machine outside of my control and at war with my own desires and needs.
It doesn’t mean that my business feels like a walk in the park every single day: steering this ship takes devotion, focus and energy each week.
But it does mean that my business doesn’t ask of me anything that I’m not willing to give, and that its foundations are rooted in how I want to live and work so that the entire enterprise feels rooted and aligned with my core vision for my work and my life.
This mantra has been at the heart of my business for years now, and the more I’ve thought about the ways I want my business to orbit my life the more the more I’ve realised that really what I’m working with here is a metaphor of an entire solar system.
We all have so many layers to our lives - business, family, friends, self-care, health-care and creativity just to name a few.
And the more intention we bring to these layers, and the ways they orbit and interact with each other, the more we make it possible to live a life that feels rooted and grounded in what matters most to us each day.
It’s when we show up on autopilot and make choices on what we think is expected of us instead of how we want to truly live and work that we can start to find ourselves feeling a little disconnected and unfulfilled.
And I think that a great way to ground and root ourselves into how we want to be living and working is to visualise how we want our own solar system to function and flow, to bear witness to how we truly want to be prioritising and spending our life minutes each day.
So you might now be thinking: what the hell is this solar system you’re talking about, Jen?
Let’s break it down:
You are the sun
The sun is the beating heart of your solar system. It’s what everything else orbits and it’s the very core of who you are and what matters most to you.
The planets that orbit you are the different layers and priorities in your life
So these planets may include: your business, your family, your friendships, your education, your activism, your health care, your self-care, your creativity - all the pieces that you want to prioritise and fill your life with.
And not all planets are made equal - some will naturally be of more importance to you than others.
Without the sun, your planets will just be floating around unintentionally - the sun is what guides what matters most to you, how you want to prioritise your energy, focus, and time, and what role each of these planets plays in your life too.
By diving into this process, we can ground ourselves into the intention we want to bring to our lives in this season, into the ways we want to navigate our work and our day’s and everything else in-between.
If you want to dive deeper into your own solar system I’ve created a mini workbook for you.
My biggest encouragement for you today is this: you have permission to be oh so intentional with every layer of your life.
In a world that can so often encourage us to play by someone else’s rules, we can find so much freedom in opting out of that path and rooting ourselves into what feels true to us instead - even if it goes against the grain of what’s expected of us.
Here’s to being the sun...
As always, I’m rooting for you!
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