So I've been having a lot of conversations lately with a lot of other highly sensitive and empathic people about what it means to be going through the changes that we're going through right now in this country. Particularly, as we're having an opportunity to shift after the pandemic, and open up. And one of the things that I've heard again, and again, is the concern of losing the ground that we've gained, as well as the fear of falling back into the old ways of doing things.
Falling back into the hectic-ness.
Falling back into all of the obligatory social gatherings.
Falling back into taking on more than we can manage.
And saying yes to a lot more responsibilities than we actually want to say yes to.
Now what I've noticed for a lot of the highly sensitive empathic people and certainly for myself, is that there has been a gift that has come with the lockdown and with this pandemic. In that, what it has allowed us to do is to say no to a lot of the extraneous stuff.
It's allowed us to keep things simpler.
It's allowed us to focus on doing the bare minimum.
This isn't true for absolutely everybody. But, it is true for a lot of the people that I've met, I've talked to and spoken with. The thing about this is that, there was in many ways, an external imposition of this boundary. It was like the universe just came along 15-18 months ago and said…
You're going to stop.
Time to stop.
Gotta stop people!
It allowed us to turn inward. It allowed many people to stop the daily grind of commuting into the city. We started working virtually instead. We started to become more conscious of when are we going to go grocery shopping? When are we going to go out and about. We stopped having social gatherings and feeling that obligation to go to the party that we didn't want to go to. Because it was a global crisis, there wasn't any sort of self doubt. There weren't those feelings of, “well, if I set this boundary, or if I say no, I'm going to come across like a jerk.”
So a lot of those people pleasing things, a lot of the feelings that come up for people when it comes to saying what is our truth, and actually setting boundaries that we need to set… the pandemic took that responsibility away from us. So what I'm noticing is now that we don't have that external imposition anymore, now that that restriction is being lifted, we are having to face the choice to set those boundaries ourselves.
Now, if you've been around my world, you've probably heard me say this before. What I sincerely believe in my heart of hearts, when it comes to setting boundaries: we can set them consciously and deliberately, or they will be set. But they will usually be set either by the universe throwing a curveball at us or in an unconscious way through self sabotage, getting sick, getting into an accident, or any number of things that will put a wrench in something. What I've realized is that I would personally much rather have my boundaries set consciously and deliberately, as opposed to having the universe do it for me in some kind of random and often extremely unfortunate way. In my personal case, getting bitten by ticks and getting Lyme disease seems to be one of the ways that I get boundaries set. So I've come to the awareness that right now we need to be be really deliberate about what we want to do with our time, what we want to do with our social connections, who we actually want to spend time with, and how do we want to move forward.
There are certainly a number of things that we may not be able to say no to. But there are a lot of things that we can say no to. And so what I'm asking you right now is how can you be more deliberate about what you choose to say yes to?
What do you actually want to say yes to?
How is your relationship with people pleasing with fear of coming across like beeyotch fear of upsetting other people?
How is this affecting the way that you're going forward in the choices that you're making?
There are things that we may not have choices about, if we've got kids going to school, if we have an office job, there may be places where we don't get to necessarily choose exactly how we go about this. But when it comes to other things we get to decide.
How frequently are we going out and running errands?
How frequently are we choosing to be social with other people?
Are we being social with people that we don't actually like that much?
How often do we want to go and spend time with family members?
And how many extra responsibilities and things do we want to be adding to our plate and do we want to be taking on?
So my question to you right now is, Are you being deliberate about the reopening? Are you choosing this consciously? Or did COVID just kind of come along and happen to you, and you kind of rolled with the punches and sort of took advantage of it? Or maybe you just struggled through it? But now that it's opening back up, you're just kind of letting it happen?
So let me know. jump on over to Empathmasteryshow.com and leave a comment. Tell me what you're noticing about this? Tell me if you could be really deliberate, if you could really decide what you wanted to take from the last 18 months of your life… What would it be?
