Fireside

Over the last few weeks I’ve been pre-launching The Cabin and writing a lot of content on the blog that really digs into some of the concepts we’ll be immersing in in The Cabin. In the last episode, how to be fulfilled, I super briefly covered the nine pillars, so today I’m sharing the four deep dives from the blog: Presence, Devotion, Ritual and Effort.

Clickbait episode title alert! This is not going to be an episode that’s going to tell you an exact formula for feeling fulfilled in the next 3-5 working days - but I think you know me well enough by now to know that wasn’t really going to happen. Rather, today I want to talk about what I’ve learned about fulfilment so far, giving you some jumping off points on your own journey.

Today I have a topic for you that has been coming up for me over and over again in conversations with friends, with people I work with, and in my own head: overcorrection. We know what it means to overcorrect in a car, but we do it in our decision-making too. We experience something as so painful, so frustrating, so unbearably uncomfortable, that we turn the wheel a full 180 in our efforts to get away from it. And sometimes that works. But often it leads us somewhere we don’t actually want to go.

Today is a Q&A episode with questions around longing and curiosity and what to do when things feel impossible. We have questions about getting started when things feel out of reach, openness, the hard in-between, what to do when work is all-consuming and how to stop going after the new and shiny things.

In the last Q&A episode I said something like ‘rather than failure, I’d be more worried about regret’. Quite often, I don’t know I think something until the words are coming out of my mouth, and that is a particular statement that has stayed with me since it tumbled out. I’ve been thinking a lot about using fear of regret as a tool, trickling it into my thinking and planning and prioritising, and today I thought we’d have a deep dive into this - the pros, the cons and whether it actually works.

Today I am back catching up with Sasha in a very juicy, sunny episode. We talk about the fear of judgment around making changes or seeming chaotic and where it even comes from, we talk about coming to an objective place about what it is you really want and where we’re at as we approach the mid point of the year. We also talk a lot about resources, money, energy and how our perception of them is changing, as well as what we’re willing to do.

And now we emerge blinking into the new era. We have, over the last two episodes, talked about how Simple & Season started and grew into a business, and then the messy middle of deconstruction where it became less and less like a business. And that leads me to now, where I have a lot of pieces of things and am about to put them into a new shape.

This is part two in this series on the evolution of my work, and last time I told you about my motivations for starting out and the circumstances that pushed me into my first pivots. I left you just as 2020 was about to start, so shall we continue?

I am writing this at my desk at home, in the second week of April and outside it is raining like it’s October. By the time you are listening, however, it will be May, and I will be in Lisbon, hopefully walking along sun-dazzled streets in a floaty dress. Although I will be writing on the trip, it now no longer occurs to me to take my podcasting equipment away with me, even though that is something I have definitely done before. So, for the beginning of this new season on the podcast, I’ve put together a three part series of solo shows about the Evolution of my Work.

Today is a special episode with a conversation I’m so excited to bring to you. As you know, as a rule I don’t do interviews on Grow With Soul but I make exceptions for people whose work I find super interesting - and Jamie Varon is one of those people. After decades of never feeling good enough and always wanting to achieve more, Jamie began the process of unlearning so she could approach work and life from a place of peace, joy and radical contentment. Today we talk about her writing process, defining her own success metrics and loose goal setting, separating personal worth from work and a radically content approach to working.