When you start off September uninspired

The summer went by in a blur of celebrations, landscaping projects, house guests and unexpected trips. I got to September feeling like I needed a break, rather than excited to kick off the last few months of the year.

September normally feels like the second start to the year for me. In the past, it often brought with it deadlines, new projects and inspiration. In my corporate role, it was a busy time of finalizing business plans and budget. Now, it's often characterized by reconnecting with clients, delivering leadership programs and creating new projects.

I often feel excited, energized and inspired to develop something new and fresh. Not this year. 

This September, I have loved reconnecting with clients, and feel connected and present when I'm with them, but the in between moments have felt clunky, stagnant and off.

This in turn has led me to judge myself for not producing, doing and delivering. So much so, that I was a bit hesitant to share this with you here.

I'm in the business of inspiring leaders how could I admit to lacking it!

It has felt like such an important issue that I started trying to make sense of it, as if diagnosing an illness.

I thought...

My Illness - uninspired state

Possible Causes - super busy summer, trip overseas to take care of mom, perhaps I need to consider a new profession, maybe it's hormonal, maybe I need to take the entire month off, and so on...

I noticed my mind quickly spiralled into a flurry of possible reasons to make sense of my uninspired feeling. As I continued thinking about it and trying to "fix it", I also noticed that I didn't feel any better about it.

If anything, I felt worse, more confused, less inspired and no closer to "fixing" the issue.

So I tried another approach.

I started wondering why 'starting off September uninspired' was an issue? Why was it a problem? Why was it wrong to be uninspired? And why did feeling uninspired have anything to do with me, my job, my capabilities, my performance or success? 

I started seeing that none of it was actually a problem, unless I thought it was.

The only time feeling uninspired became an issue was when I thought about it and tried to fix it. In the moments when I wasn't thinking about it, it wasn't an issue. I was simply being in the moment, whether that meant creating or not. 

I started to see all the things my mind made up about this supposed uninspired state: "I was wasting time", "I was getting nothing done", "I was failing", ...

I started to see all the fears it conjured up: "what if I remained uninspired for months, or years?, what if my clients could tell and didn't want to work with me?, what if my business started to fail?..."

Guess how I felt after all of these thoughts...UNINSPIRED!

See how our thinking can keep us stuck in the very thing we are wanting to move away from.

So I started to ask myself other questions.

What if my 'feeling uninspired' was a signal to simply rest? 

What if having an internal barometer that tells me whether it's a good time to create is in fact an asset?

What if doing nothing was my doorway towards inspiration, rather than a sign I didn't have it?

And, what if feeling uninspired doesn't actually exist but in my mind, as an imaginary judgement I cast on my life?

Would it be possible for me to simply be in it, without fixing it or figuring it out.

I can't tell you that this is the "right" way to handle this (each of us finds our own way forward), but what I can report is that "feeling uninspired" doesn't look like such a big issue any longer.

It doesn't look like a problem. 

And it certainly doesn't look like it's telling me anything about what will happen next month, next week, tomorrow or even later today. 

It's simply what may feel true in the moment, and then it passes, and I find myself getting up to go do stuff. It's that simple. 

So, if you're feeling uninspired, or better said, the next time you're feeling uninspired, what if you simply were ok with being in that place...until you found yourself out of that place.

You might find that it too would be less of a problem.

And all the crap our minds make up about it, is just that... crap our minds make up.