Hello beautiful people of Expansive Capacity! Hello you beautiful souls!

It’s time once again for Superpower Sunday! 🙂

This is all about how we can implement wee changes that may turbocharge our *existing* superpowers so that we don’t dim our own lights due to inertia, stress, or any other upper-limit problem that reveals itself along our path.

This month’s Superpower Sunday is a focus on the What’s the Kindest Choice I Can Make question.

Specifically, we’re going to examine this question through the lens of a reality *before* the money exists to make it feel SAFE to say NO, to set boundaries on our time, to come at our lives with a perspective of “create the most space for ME” rather than “stay most open to those who may need me to work.”

Yes, this travels a bit into money territory and that’s okay, of course. You certainly know by now that there’s quite a bit of overlap in our monthly work, because even as we work to isolate often-lumped issues so we can take the most empowered stance at tackling them in our lives, everything is the sum of its parts at some point. 😉

So, just like the old line that when you don’t have 5 minutes to meditate… that means you need to meditate for 10, it’s actually before you believe you have the financial stability to set boundaries on your time that it’s most important to do so.

The work here is to make it feel SAFE to allocate our time differently.

Let’s go back to Deviled Eggs and Best Bon, shall we?

As you recall from this month’s curriculum, I learned earlier this year before the SMFA Escape that I was going to have to disappoint someone in the micro in order to bring Best Bon to the macro of our time together.

There was a time — not too long ago, in fact — that I would leave open coaching slots on my calendar for times of day during which Keith and I would be driving to our Desert Hot Springs getaway and definitely for days in which we’d be there, decompressing in the mineral water. Because, technically, I could *do* a coaching call from the car. There are cell phone towers and I could use Keith’s phone as a hotspot for getting on the computer to create the recording at the platform’s website while I called in from my phone to do the coaching as we hurtled east on the 10 at 75 MPH, right?

And of course I could take a break in my soaking schedule to come into the room, get on the internet (even though the Hacienda’s wi-fi was very spotty due to high winds and low prioritizing of technology altogether [part of its charm]), and do a coaching call for 15 minutes, right?

Yes. Of course I could.

But why would I? It was always the spottiest, choppiest, least-tech-reliable coaching I could possibly do, filled with, “Oh shoot. Can you hear me? Did I lose you? Bonnie? Are you there?” and other such not-at-all-productive gaps in the experience, leading to frustration and my feeling as though now I owed the client even MORE of my time due to such a disappointing experience due to things I couldn’t control (tech stuff).

Thing is, I *could* control all of this… if I felt SAFE disappointing in the micro (having a few — literally TEN hours that are usually on my coaching calendar — hours walled off while I decompressed in the desert for a few days) in exchange for bringing Best Bon to the table in the macro (having a snag-free coaching call the following week).

Until I felt SAFE disappointing people by not being available just a handful of hours in my otherwise wide open coaching schedule that month, I was going to do whatever it took to make NOT BEST BON situations work.

“What’s the kindest choice I can make?”

This question — in this case — actually serves not only ME (the primary concern of this question, always) but also those I’m here to serve.

The kindest choice I can make allows me to have my time off. It permits a complete unplugging from the world as I decompress in the desert. It also allows my clients to not struggle WITH ME through less-than-ideal tech scenarios just for the sake of getting a session one week earlier. When I played out the “what ifs” of this, imagining setting a boundary that I was not comfortable setting from a financial (or enoughness) level at that time, I realized that if I were to put on my scheduling calendar a color coding system — like, you can get an earlier session under YELLOW tech conditions or a week-later session under GREEN tech conditions — of course people would choose the green. But I wasn’t even being *kind enough* to my clients to give them the option of having Best Bon (because that’s actually what the GREEN on my calendar would indicate).

Woof.

My low enoughness and low bank balance were forcing me to offer something less than Best Bon to my clients without even letting them know that’s what they were being offered.

And it was hard to take, but when I played this out in my journal, I realized it was the low enoughness that had far greater impact on this decision to NOT set boundaries than the low bank balance. I could *use* the low bank balance as a justification for the lack of boundaries.

But what’s the kindest choice I can make?

It’s the one that is honest about where this feels hard. Setting boundaries often feels hard because of what we FEAR is true, not because of what is *actually* true.

If we were to map out how often we actually DO have to pick up a money-job shift or say yes to something just for the cash vs. what would’ve happened if we HAD walled off self-care time, the data will pan out — I promise you this — to support the truth: We could’ve walled off ME TIME and watched it rarely get disturbed.

Try it in baby steps at first. That’s what I did.

Bra-Free Mondays — that’s the day that I first killed off any client slots. I decided I would only ever be available for clients Tuesday through Friday (and specifically only during four hours of each of those days, but that limit came later). I *can* work on a Monday, but it’ll be on admin stuff. And usually, Mondays are for my therapist, personal trainer, mind-body doctors, massage therapists, and the like. Before I had the budget for all that dream-team action, Mondays were for chilling out. Sleeping in. NOT working with clients.

Now, as I write this, it’s a hot Friday night… a time when you may say I should be clocked out and not working, right? *shrug* I’m happy. This is a kind choice I’m making. I didn’t build my own empire so I could live by 9-5 M-F capitalist expectations. I’ll sleep ’til the Georgia game kicks off tomorrow… after noon! Life is good!

Without concern about expectations others may have for what your life’s calendar needs to look like, start marking off an hour here, two hours there… just tiny windows of time when it’s LESS LIKELY that you’ll need to be available for your jobby-job or auditions… and make dates with yourself to do something replenishing.

Build up your muscle for doing this a wee bit more each month ’til you reach a level that feels really nourishing to next-tier you, really inviting to the best version of you, really ready to sustain future you, whose *core* time-management issues are made without a concern in the world about MONEY or other people’s needs.

I’d love to hear from you on this. What’s the kindest choice you can make when it comes to honoring YOU time in your schedule between now and the end of the year?

Yes, it’s a particularly crazy time — all the more reason for the muscle-building now. When you can’t meditate for 5 minutes, you clearly need to meditate for 10. 😉

Heads up: Your December Aligned Hustle Calendar is at the Welcome page if you haven’t already grabbed it. Sagittarius season is lovely for flow and travel and lots of energy! ENJOY it!

As always, pop in at the dojo to share how Your Relationship with Self-Care is evolving thanks to this month’s focus. I’m so excited to gear up for Your Relationship with Happiness next week as December’s Expansive Capacity page opens up for us all!

Self-care-filled smooches,

Enoughness is an inside job… and sometimes you need a guide to find your way there. Let Bonnie Gillespie get you started.