A love note from me to you

Hello friends! It’s been a while since I’ve written any blog posts or newsletters for y’all. Most people have long since posted their new year’s resolution, “recap of the past year” type posts.

Truth is, both myself and my business have been in a state of flux, or transformation if you will. If you listen to my podcast, you’ve already heard about some of this, since I talked about it in more than one episode. But in short, I’ve been working on a few different things, including shifting focus to coaching clients rather than design clients, deciding what shape the podcast is going to take in the future, and taking time to work on some things in my personal life at the same time. Oh, and I went back to school last year to do a certificate in fundraising management and I graduate in a few months. It’s been busy, that’s for sure!

2018 was a year of possibility.

Yes, my word of the year for 2018 was possibility.

Here’s what I said about that at the time:

Possibility is my word of the year for 2018. For me, it’s all about being open to what life throws my way, whether it’s a business opportunity, a personal opportunity, or a million dollars. Well ok, that last one isn’t likely to happen. Although if you know someone with a spare million lying around, you know where to find me!

In all seriousness, in order to allow myself more freedom to explore possibilities in my life and business, I’m also getting things focused and streamlined so I’m not so all over the place (as I mentioned above).

Now you might be thinking, hey Candice, doesn’t focus and streamlining make you less open to possibility? In my case, no. Once I pare things down to a much more manageable set of tasks, products and services, I think I’ll have more breathing room to allow that exploration into my life.

So how did that go?

In the interest of not making this post so long you all start nodding off, I’m going to quickly summarize what worked, what didn’t work, and then we’ll get on to what’s coming up for this year.

What worked:

• Taking only clients that were a good fit for my business.
• Writing, producing, editing and publishing my podcast. It was a great year for Life Beyond The Massage Table!
• Starting my fundraising certificate. I’ve wanted to work with non-profits for years, and now it’s much more clear on how I can do that. Being open to possibility allowed me to be ok with the idea that more formal education is a good thing!

What didn’t work:

• Trying to set dates for the relaunch of my online course, ‘Build Your Own Website (for health and wellness)’. Unfortunately, with things in huge flux with the WordPress platform and with the release date of a big new feature looming, it just didn’t make sense to redo all the videos and content only to have to do it all over again a few months later.
• Trying to do a newsletter, podcast, blog, instagram… you get the idea. This is where possibility was a great thing, because I was able to ask myself: what would be possible if I just focused on one or two of these things?

This brings me to this:

I hope that 2019 will spark joy.

I know, a lot of people are talking about joy this year, and much of that is due to the whole Marie Kondo trend. But that’s not why I chose the word as my framing word for 2019.

Truthfully, I’ve spent a lot of the last few years focused on the needs of others – clients, teachers, friends, family – and not focused at all on what I want out of life. It’s ok to want to help others. It’s ok to be in a helping profession! But it’s not ok to make most decisions based on someone else’s compass. So I’m tuning into my own this year and seeing where joy will take me.

So what’s that mean for all of you?

As I write this, my podcast has been on hiatus for a few months, and while it is not going away, I won’t be following a specific production schedule until at least the second half of 2019. This is because there are only so many hours in a day, and I need to prioritize my mental and physical health right now. So my spare time that used to go into the podcast is now funnelled into other things that bring me joy. I’ll be releasing a podcast episode about exactly this very soon – I plan to do sporadic episodes as time permits – but that’s the gist of it.

It also means my old newsletter format, where I wrote a long-form article about a business topic in massage, health, wellness or life, is not returning. So while I know some of you have written to me asking for it to come back, the truth is I simply can’t do that anymore. Those articles took about 4-6 hours to complete from start to finish, and I need to put that time towards other things. I don’t believe in hustle until you make it – you need to work hard, but working hard and ‘hustle’ are not the same thing in terms of your mindset about it. I don’t believe that work should be your priority in life. Living your life should be your priority. A career is just a career, you know? Even if it brings you joy (and creating stuff for y’all does bring me joy!) it’s still not your entire life.

So I hope you guys can understand where I’m coming from and what’s next for me. Maybe you’ll stick around to see what’s next? I still have lots to share on running a health and wellness business, and love to talk about how to make living life the priority! As always, I’m open to y’all emailing me to chat.

Wishing you much success in building your own happy little biz,