It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve sent an issue of this newsletter. Feels like I need to come up with an interesting insight or something and these days with life settling into a “regular” rhythm it feels like I’m having insights about life a lot less than I used to. I guess a few years ago, I’d spend all my spare time reading personal development books, and learning all these new things about how to manage my time, how to change my mindset, how to approach business building. These days, I don’t spend much of my spare time reading personal development books… instead, I finish work by 6:30pm, hang out with my wife and baby, go for a run, then spend the evening on the sofa reading Harry Potter Fan Fiction while my wife watches Bridgerton.
With this sort of pedestrian life setup, I often get to the weekend thinking: “hmm I should kinda be writing an issue of LifeNotes… but I feel like I just don’t have anything useful or interesting to share lol”
I guess I always have interesting things to say about business growth, especially now that our Lifestyle Business Academy is well underway, with 100+ students, and I’m running workshops every week, making changes to the curriculum all the time, and working directly with students to help them figure out their businesses. But… there’s very little that comes out of that that isn’t super specific to the world of starting an online business, which judging from what I hear in the replies to these emails, isn’t something particularly interesting to most of you. (Btw, if you ARE in fact interested in those things, we write about them in FreedomNotes, our dedicated “business” newsletter).
Anyway, with those lamentations aside, there is something I did want to share this week. Not sure how useful or interesting it is but oh well…
One of the things you learn in meditation is becoming more aware of your own thoughts and feelings. When you’re meditating, you “observe” your thoughts, feelings and sensations, and then… don’t do anything at all. You just “observe” that a thought or feeling arises, and sit there as the “passive witnessing”, and then observe as it passes.
I’m not particularly consistent with my meditation practice but I’ve done it enough over the years on-and-off to have gotten better at recognising my own thoughts and feelings as I go through day-to-day life, and generally doing a good job of not getting “caught up” in them.
At least that’s what I thought. Until I caught myself many times in the past few weeks feeling… dissatisfied for some reason.
Here’s what tended to happen: it’s an evening, I’m hanging with the wife +/- baby (depending on what time it is), reading some Harry Potter Fan Fiction. We start getting ready for bed. I use the toilet, turn on my phone, check Slack and see a bunch of notifications for work-themed stuff, with various things that need my input, or that seem to be going wrong, or that could be optimised. I then think “cool, all that can wait until tomorrow”, and start getting ready for bed. But as I’m getting ready for bed, I feel a subtle undercurrent of… dissatisfaction… colouring my mood, and my experience of the moment. It’s like an internal “buzzing” of sorts… and then I think “huh, why do I feel weirdly discontent even though life is awesome”, and I examine the feeling, and realise that there’s a subtle energy of “uh oh the business is going to crumble, we gotta hustle harder” beneath it.
And then I’m like “huh that’s interesting, even though I thought I put the Slack messages out of my mind, they’re actually still there under the surface, and they seem to have triggered this pattern of energy that’s fearful and anxious about whether the business is going to die”. And then I’m like: “huh that’s interesting…” and then I sort-of “smile” at the feeling, in a “thank you for looking out for me, we don’t need to worry about this right now” and focus on enjoying the peace and serenity of getting ready for bed.
I realised recently that I’ve been telling myself a story of “I’m pretty good at not getting caught up in my thoughts and feelings” that’s only partly true. Yes I was good at noticing the loud, obvious stuff, but the lower-level anxiety that was presenting as a hum of background noise was still totally there, I just wasn’t aware of it. My friend Alok said once that meditation is like peeling back the layers of an onion – there are always more layers. Guess I’ll have to do more meditation to find more and more of these layers.
The more I’ve noticed this feeling, the more I’ve realised how often it’s there, this persistent, low-level hum of “there are Problems to solve in the business, we should Figure Them Out”. But all it takes for the spell to break (at least temporarily) is to just notice it’s there.
If any of this resonates, I’d love to know. What’s been your experience of the subtle buzz of dissatisfaction? Feel free to hit reply and let me know 🙂
Have a great week!
Ali xx
