137. How Essentialism Can Help You to Reconnect with the Change You Want to Create
How much of what you do on a regular basis is really essential?
And how much do you do because you “should” or you always have?
Focusing on what’s essential can mean becoming more minimalist, getting down to only the things you need. But there’s also a conversation around what is essential in the actions you do or don’t take, and why it’s important to pause and reconnect with that.
Erica asks a key question to help you assess what’s essential and what you may be ready to let go of, and gives you her take on what’s essential, and what isn’t.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How reconnecting with your values allows you to discern what’s essential
How marketing convinces us we don’t have what’s essential
Why small actions help us focus on what matters
How your “normal” influences what you consider essential
How Do You Know What’s Essential?
To know what’s essential, you have to reconnect with your values.
You have to be clear on what your values are, if they are still values for you, and what you need to do to make them actions and not just stagnant words on a sticky note.
Your values will always key you into what is truly essential, explains Erica on the Pause On The Play podcast. It provides the base that you are working from when you are contemplating the 5 prompts below.
1. Essentials Aren’t Always Things
So often the rhetoric of what is essential is focused on selling us things. The messages make us think we’re not enough unless we have that thing.
But sometimes we have to pause and be clear about what we already have access to that exists inside us and around us.
What is it that we're already aware of that doesn’t require us to seek new information? And what are the actions that we can take in order to serve us in the best ways possible? This is essential in creating the impact that we're all seeking to make together.
2. You Can’t Do “All The Things”.
Doing “all the things” means that you are likely not doing what you value, what you love, what matters to you, and what benefits you and those around you.
Doing all of those things is not connected to your values, it is not connected back to what matters to you. In fact, it’s probably connected to what matters to other people.
3. Take One Small Action Regularly
It’s important to be in action. It’s also important to remember that it’s not always about doing one big thing that fixes everything. Don’t wait for what you think is “the big one.”
The big one puts you in inactivity, and doing nothing is not essential. It is essential to be in action consistently. Essentialism is about a collection of small actions taken regularly.
And that means giving yourself small, actionable steps that contribute to a larger collective whole. That’s what the big one truly is.
4. Reconsider Your Normal
Reconsidering your normal is not just one more thing to put on your to do list. Reconsidering your normal means pausing to question your assumptions or judgments about who other people are and why they are that way.
Reconsidering your normal means pausing to question why you process people the way that you do and if that actually gets you where you want to be. It means you question not just what someone else is experiencing that is different from your experience, but also why.
Reconsidering your normal is a prompt to pay attention to everything that happens around you, with everyone that’s around you. And those opportunities are everywhere: music, movies, the news, articles, conversations.
You have so many chances every day to learn from unassuming places that you might not be fully aware of.
It is essential to be more open to learning new things and ways of being. This supports you in reconsidering your normal and all of the opportunities that present themselves to you on a daily basis.
5. Input vs. Output
Learning is essential, but it’s not essential to constantly take in new information, read more, learn more, think about it more.
If it never leaves your head, what is the purpose?
What are you going to do with all of this information and learning? What are you going to impact with it? What are you going to change? To share?
With everything that you’ve learned, processed, digested, what shifts have you made and what does that change going forward?
Output is necessary. Output is essential.
Ready To Dig Into The Essentials? Join Us:
At Pause on the Play® the Community we are talking about what's essential and digging into this so that we can reconnect to what really matters most.
Learn more and join us at www.pauseontheplay.com/community
Resources:
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown