How to keep all the balls in the air?

Plus more As to your Qs & gentle nudges towards courage

How to do it all?

How do I keep all the balls in the air AND feel like I have space to be myself, find peace, grow and thrive?

Lovely readers,

I don’t know about you, but I have been a little overwhelmed by all the noise lately. I haven’t wanted to add to the kerfuffle. A big challenge of our time at present is finding internal stillness amidst what can feel like external chaos. If you have been feeling the same way, I wrote a bit about it here on Instagram and here on LinkedIn.

In this issue of Sparks of Alchemy, I’m answering a few of the questions that have come in through a women’s leadership program I’m running with a government department, my What Comes Next? coaching program, and via socials.

Here’s the first question:

Dear Gemma,

My issue is being too busy … but am I really? Or am I just not great at managing my time?

When people ask how I am, I tell them ‘I’m keeping all the balls in the air’. I want to feel like I am thriving but most days I feel like I’m only surviving.

I am juggling work, kids, elderly parents and a partner, and at any one time I am letting one or more of those aspects down. If I please one, I offend or disappoint the other.

Finding time to exercise and do any form of self care amounts to a home manicure and a face mask every 3 months. At work, because of the required multi-tasking, I keep to myself.

My question is this: How to do it all? How to keep all the balls in the air and feel like I have space to be myself, find peace, grow and thrive? Not much to ask 😊

Dear you,

What a marvellous question. I’d like to answer it by telling you about a moment in 2007, and another in 2024.

On a cool Melbourne afternoon in the year 2007, I decided to leave work early. I remember that there was a 4 at the start of the time, not the usual 6, 7 or 8. The sun was still out - what a blessing. I caught the tram home to Fitzroy. I let myself in the house. I found the dog, grabbed her lead, and walked her to the park.

I remember feeling so very, very tired. For months on end, I’d worked six day weeks and 16 hour days, many of which were spent on planes or interstate. Intellectually, I knew had earned an early finish to my day.

Do you think I was able to enjoy my dog’s look of surprised delight as she trotted alongside me in the weak Melbourne sunshine? I was not. I spent the entire time looking anxiously over my shoulder for colleagues who might spy me absconding from duties and judge me as lazy. When I wasn’t looking, I was worrying. I worried about what I needed to buy for dinner, about my partner’s health, about whether I should start taking pre-natal vitamins, about my weight, my workload and a shitty review of a report I’d submitted at work.

So many balls, so little spaciousness in which to juggle.

At this point in my life, aged 29 and supposedly in my prime, I would look longingly at a sunny piece of bitumen on my morning walk to the tram and dream of lying there all day. I’d dream about becoming a barista. Or working in a bookstore. Anything to get me away from the overwhelm of life as I knew it.

Fast forward sixteen years to May 2024. I spent a Tuesday morning curled up outside on a comfy chair. The verandah was bathed in light and the chair had been pre-warmed by the sun. I meditated, then sat in stillness for a while. I read for a bit. I reviewed my notes from a leadership retreat and journalled about how to apply the learnings. I responded to a couple of work messages, then made lunch. Then I hauled a mattress out on the grass and spent a pleasurable afternoon on Oyster Sisters business. I finished at 4pm. (These days, I finish many days with a 4 in front of the time). At no stage was I worried, worn out or wearied by a never-ending to-do list. At every stage, I felt free.

A lot had to happen in the 16 years between each of these moments to allow myself delightfully gaping pockets of time to be myself, find peace, grow and thrive. Here’s my best take on what helped the most. I’ll phrase them as four suggestions (some very gentle, some less so), knowing that you will take what feels right and good and discard the rest.

1. Stop trying to do it all. Instead, define YOUR all.

You cannot do it all, my dear. Of course you can’t. You can’t fly a hot air balloon (I’m assuming), you can’t skin a rabbit (again, tell me if I’m wrong), and you will never, ever be able to please all of the people all of the time.

Give it up. Let it go.

This one precious life in which you get to be you is YOUR masterpiece. Your life doesn’t belong to anyone else but you.

Therefore: paint it as you wish.

Choose what you want to paint. Importantly, choose what you really don’t want to paint. Choose when to paint, and how to paint. Wear what you want while you paint. Learn from other master painters, but only take on the tips that will help you create your masterpiece in the ways that feel good and right to you.

2. List all the balls you’re juggling. Drop a quarter of them.

Resist the urge to start hyperventilating, and stay with me here:

You are not here to keep all the balls in the air.

You are here to choose the balls you want to juggle, then enjoy juggling them.

Even if you only chose one ball to juggle for the rest of your life, you would be no less worthy than if you juggled 24 balls all at once with great aplomb.

Ball-juggling is an over-rated skill. Ball-choosing and ball-dropping, though, are skills to master.

Here’s a slightly bastardised exercise I learned from Martha Beck that may be helpful:

1. List all your balls (I promise Martha didn’t call it that).

2. Give each one a score from -5 to +5 in terms of how much it drains you (-5) to how much it uplifts you (+5) (a score of 0 indicates that the ball neither drains nor lifts your energy).

3. Peruse the low-scoring balls. Take the bottom 25% and either:

   1. Just stop doing them

   2. Give less energy to them (how can you take your foot off the pedal by about 20%?)

   3. Find someone else to do them (good old-fashioned job sharing works better than we think it does)

   4. Find ways to make them less draining and more uplifting (I, for instance, do not enjoy clearing my inbox, so I now only answer emails in chunks, twice a day, while playing cheesy 80s and 90s playlists or musicals (today: Hamilton).

3. Lean into the discomfort of space

As a society, we’re pretty terrible at being quiet. We’re even worse at doing nothing. Yet when it comes to finding clarity on what you’re here to do (and what you need to drop), the biggest investment you can make is in prioritising stillness.

Take non-negotiable pockets of time where you leave your phone and your to-do list out of reach. Do nothing. Walk in nature, if you like, but with no headphones in your ears. Just be.

This is how you find the space to thrive. By taking it.

4. Learn to give far fewer f*cks about what other people think

In the spaciousness, clarity has room to emerge. You’ll start to get whispers about what to do and what not to do.

The trick, at this point, is to act on that clarity without caring about what others think. Research tells us that people are thinking about you 50% less often than you think they are. You are wonderful, but you’re not that important. How freeing! You can blaze your own trail without giving one gentle stuff about others’ opinions.

As I shared in point (1) above, this is YOUR LIFE. Live it as you wish.

(If you’d like a practical tool to help you care less about what others think, I shared my favourite here on LinkedIn and here on Instagram).

These days work looks more like this 👆

Answering a few more of your Qs

I ventured into the wilds of my Instagram stories this month and asked the delightful people there for Qs they’d like me to A. Here are some randomly selected offerings:

Should you always listen to your gut?

A younger and presumably less wise version of me would have exclaimed WHY YES! OF COURSE! Now, at almost 47, I’d answer “yes, but …”:

• Yes, but check in with the still, quiet voice of your wisdom. What does it say? In the past, my heart/gut has led me into situations and relationships (love and business) that my wisdom would now tell me to avoid.

• So yes - check in with your gut. Then check in with your wisdom. Listen to both.

How do you deal with a vulnerability hangover?

I used to push the feeling away, not wishing to relive any embarrassment. I think we’ve all been there! Now, I allow myself to fully feel the uncomfortable emotions (research shows that when we let ourselves feel our feelings without drama or stories, they dissipate within 90 seconds). Then I ask myself what I might need to learn from the experience. And then I surrender the whole event to grace. I let it go. It’s served its purpose; no need to hang on to it.

When will the next podcast episode come out?

I know - it has been a while between drinks. Apologies, and also … there is an excellent reason for the delay, which will be revealed in the next month or two.

Sssshhhhhhhhh Photo by Geranimo on Unsplash

As for the next episode, as luck would have it, it’s just been released! It’s called Holiday Break and it’s a powerful tale of how Mia used a spinal fracture to find positive growth and upliftment. You can find it on your favourite podcast platform - just search for The Oyster Sisters.

What do you consider the perfect poem for a wedding reading?

I’m not sure about the perfect poem, but I love e.e. cummings i carry your heart, Banjo Patterson’s As Long as your Eyes are Blue, One Swaying Being by Rumi, many of Hafiz’s love poems, and this excerpt from Rilke’s First Poems:

“Understand, I’ll slip quietly
Away from the noisy crowd
When I see the pale
Stars rising, blooming over the oaks
I’ll pursue solitary pathways
Through the pale twilit meadows,
With only this one dream:
You come too”.

A gentle nudge for the month ahead

There are things you are uniquely tasked to do.

Things you are uniquely positioned to say.

Things you are uniquely gifted to create.

If you don’t do, say or create these things, someone with less passion and talent will have a go, and the world will be poorer for it.

You are here for a reason.

Choose to do a thing that gives you joy. Commit to it fully - no fear, no doubt.

Then PLAY. To quote the Bhagavad Gita, “you have a right to your labour, not to the fruits of your labour”. Don’t over-worry about the outcome of your work. Just go and have FUN.

(Here’s the Tony award-winning Jonathan Groff saying wise things about this).

Perhaps it’s time to stop taking yourself so seriously all the time.

Perhaps it’s time to remember that you’re here to make an impact while steeping yourself in joy.

Big love to you,

Gemma 💛