How is you summer lining up? I hope you are creating some intentional time for fun and rest and time doing things you love with people you like to hang out with. And I hope also that you are feeling you can still be connected to the goals and intentions you set for yourself this year.
This is not a productivity piece! Rather, my intention is to help you clarify the choices you are making as you consider the summer months. If you are choosing to forget about your diet or stop going to the gym, thinking to abandon your efforts at dating or give up on progressing your work or home project until September, I want to invite you to reconsider.
Waiting until September often feels like a decision, but in reality, it is more an absence of decision. That’s why it is so seductive! If someone says, as a client said to me along these lines last week: ‘I’ve decided to take July completely off and focus on family, holidays and being offline,’ that’s a decision.
If someone says, “I’ll think about my career/ diet/relationship in September,” that’s often not a decision at all. It’s a postponement disguised as a plan. And that has its costs.
The first cost is that you start to lose your connection to your goals and intentions and what you’ve been saying matters to you. Sometimes this arises when you haven’t been seeing the results fast enough, maybe you’re losing faith that you can achieve those things this year, so you start to disconnect from them, using summer as the excuse.
Most people don’t suddenly abandon their dreams; they simply stop spending time with them. A vision that’s neglected all summer often results in you arriving in September feeling more distant from those goals and less able to (re-)create the energy and enthusiasm to create momentum around then again.
The antidote here is not to feel you have to be full-throttle on all your goals and dreams all summer, but simply to ensure you retain the connection with them. A small weekly action can keep something alive. It’s also about reinforcing that we are full spectrum beings with full spectrum lives and visions. You have a vision for your health, your relationships, your work and impact in the world and for your time and money freedom. You might be slowing down on the work goals for some weeks or even months, but you may be living into your relationship and/or health goals or leaning into your time freedom.
One way of balancing this out is to hold for yourself that “as I lean into my vision for my relationships and wellbeing this summer, my business/career expands in tandem”. And trusting that as you hang out by the pool you will have a eureka moment or get talking to someone who wants to hire you or can introduce you to your next investor or open a door for you in some way.
Another challenge that arises from I’ll wait til September is that September is not a strategy. It’s just a date! And dates don’t change outcomes, decisions do. Waiting til September is actually reinforcing an existing habit or strategy of yours which is the habit of waiting.
Do any of these delaying and waiting strategies sound familiar:
- I’ll wait til the holidays are over
- I’ll start when the kids are back in school
- I’ll do it when work settles down
- After Christmas I’ll…
The challenge with waiting is that we rarely become people who stop waiting by waiting! Whatever pattern is operating in June is typically operating in September too. If life feels too busy now, it will most likely feel busy in September. If you’re waiting to feel confident, ready, motivated, or certain, those conditions don’t magically arrive because the calendar changes. September doesn’t create a new you. It simply reveals the habits you’ve been practising all along.
If the waiting strategy is familiar, perhaps the real question is less about how you spend your summer and more about whether this strategy is creating the results you want? The cost here is likely that your life is slipping by and suddenly another year, 5 years, a decade has gone by, and you haven’t moved on. I’m not saying this to upset you, but to invite you into awareness of the habit and to consider whether it is serving you or time to do things differently.
And finally, when we think we’re pressing pause over the summer and waiting til September to restart, we miss what summer can actually offer. Summer isn’t an obstacle to your vision; it may actually be one of its greatest allies.
The slower pace and extra space, the opportunity to think, to notice what you’re noticing, to receive all the good that’s here already, those are all benefits to embrace. Some of our clearest insights arrive when we’re not driving so hard.
The shift therefore is moving away from how do I keep doing everything over the summer to how can I stay in relationship with my vision, goals and intentions over the summer? Summer isn’t a pause button. It’s two months of your one precious life. You don’t have to choose between enjoying summer and honouring your vision, instead you get to choose how you do both. Because staying in relationship doesn’t require huge effort.
It might mean:
- Ten minutes each week reviewing your vision.
- A journal beside your morning coffee.
- One meaningful action every Friday.
- A conversation you’ve been meaning to have.
- Reading a book connected to the future you’re creating.
Tiny actions that maintain living connection. And when September comes you segue into it feeling refreshed and in flow, momentum maintained and integrity intact.
If you’d love that, I invite you to reflect on these questions and embrace summer intentionally:
- What have you been consciously or unconsciously postponing until September?
- What would it look like to stay gently connected to it over the summer?
- What is one small action you could take before the end of this week?