Hi everyone, happy Monday. 🌼🍎
Hope you had a nice weekend.
I wanted to share something I have been thinking about lately. As someone who likes to read about mental health and find ways of applying new ideas to my own life, I can sometimes get a little bit intense. 📚📖💭
I find that I end up spending a lot of mental energy thinking about whether two different ideas actually contradict each other in some ways, for example
- great advice on the importance of taking responsibility versus knowing I also need to work on accepting things as they are
- great advice on making friends and the importance of social connections, versus wanting to live in tune with my current priorities which requires that I spend a lot of the free time I have... alone
- great advice on productivity and time management, versus knowing from experience that what often helps me when I feel overwhelmed is simply slowing down
What is the right balance? When do I need to do more of one versus the other?
Then I came across some great meta-advice in a nice newsletter I read, which was:
"One of the most profound skills you can acquire is the capacity to know what doesn’t apply to you."
🤨🤔
Huh. Ok.
She also pointed out that advice could be useful, profound even, but still not apply to me. This seems kind of obvious now in retrospect, but I kind of feel like I've just been trying to absorb everything like a sponge. Turns out that recognizing what doesn't apply, trusting our own intuition around that, might be a better approach. Might give us less to carry, fewer things to try to balance and figure out and get right.
Some things in us are a bit under-developed, and others might be a bit over-developed.
I have actually even given other people this kind of advice*, e.g. 'take what resonates and just leave the rest', but I still needed this nudge or maybe just slightly different framing to recognize that I needed this advice myself.
Thanks for reading.
Lots of love 💗💛💚
Sofie
*I'm starting to think that maybe the advice we give others is really just what we need to hear/do ourselves?