When was the last time you gave yourself permission to really sit back and reflect? To have space to figure it out without feeling the need to keep charging forwards?

When challenges have come up, your automatic response might be to keep on going, keep on plowing through and ignoring a lot of what you’re feeling that needs to be processed and moved through. Not honoring the need for that space.

That used to be exactly how I responded to challenging times.

I didn’t know how to press pause and be with myself. I was very much in the energy of just doing and pushing through even if things didn’t feel good. Right now that’s probably how you feel. It seems impossible for you to take your foot off the accelerator because as a high achiever, you’re used to always being on and your nervous system doesn’t know any difference. It becomes a habit because that’s just who you are. It’s what you do, it’s how you operate.

Despite what you might believe right now, pulling back and pressing pause doesn’t slow you down, it actually enables you to speed up and move more quickly.

The problem? Slowing down can feel really scary in your go, go, go busy life. It’s not something that’s a natural rhythm within your day because that masculine energy of doing is what so many of us grow up with. It’s what society really instills within us.

You’re used to living in your head and it can feel really difficult and really hard to even know how to go inwards or to even recognize the need to slow down.

Have you ever thought to yourself:

If I just keep doing, I can figure it out or if I just keep myself busy, I can almost ignore what’s actually going on because it can often feel uncomfortable.

But you need to go into the discomfort to actually move through it to a place of shifting your energy and how you feel.

In a world that talks about consistency and values the actions we take it can feel extremely daunting to press pause and do less. But what if you trusted that by giving yourself more space to be and to honour how you feel, you would actually move through it all far more quickly? Instead of squashing emotions and feelings down and carrying them with you, you’re able to set yourself free from them.

Lack of reflection keeps you stuck for longer because it keeps you in stress. You can’t be productive if you’re stressed and you have no energy. You’re going to make more mistakes because you’re rushing through things.

What would it look like to press pause, pull back, and give yourself space to feel the emotions and move through them?

Reflection is a key learning tool and it helps you evaluate your experiences, it helps you make sense of them and that makes you more effective and successful in the future.

Where are you forcing and pushing things right now that you would benefit from slowing down and taking time to process everything that’s coming up?

Let’s think about a bow and arrow. In order for the arrow to really have a very powerful fast trajectory and have any chance of hitting the target, the bow has to be pulled back really quite far and then it’s released. If you just pull it back a little bit, it’s going to drop to the floor. It’s the pulling back that is required to make the arrow fly forwards in the right direction and hit the target.

That’s the same for you where you are right now. When you pull back, you’re actually going to go forward far more quickly. It does not slow you down. That is a belief that needs to be shifted and changed and it gets to be.

Are you ready to take that break?