Driving With the Brakes On

As I listened to the lyrics of Del Amitri’s song last night, “When your’e driving with the brakes on, when your’e swimming with your boots on, it’s hard to say you love someone, and it’s hard to say you don’t” I got to thinking….That is exactly what I have been doing. I have been driving with my brakes on with my business. I really want to write and speak and teach yoga.  Somehow I have managed to keep myself nice and distracted from doing any of it, at least any of it well with resistance, tentativeness, holding back, in other words, with the brakes on. I start to get my momentum going, and then let something else get in the way.

We choose how we spend our time and energy. Period. Larry Winget talks about this extensively in his book, You’re Broke Because You Want to Be. We set ourselves up to drive with the brakes on when we can’t say no, don’t have appropriate boundaries, or have unrealistic expectations of our time and energy. And it creeps up on us. All of a sudden we wake up on a Sunday morning in tears of overwhelm, realizing we have not “caught up” on the laundry, grocery shopping, or the work we carried home from week before. And we really haven’t rested or had any fun either because we are driving with the brakes on.

What to do? We take something out! We go deeper instead of wider. I think the secret of getting more done is to do less. Yup, that’s right. And whatever you do decide to do, you do full out, not with the brakes on, because of fear, doubt or any of the other of the thousand insecurities we all share. So I am cutting back on the yoga classes I teach so I have more time to devote to my writing and speaking, full speed.  What about you? Are you driving with your brakes on?