If you attend a lot of personal development events, conferences, seminars, or workshops, you’re likely familiar with the sense of urgency and exuberance that comes at the end of an event.
You just spent a few days making new connections and absorbing a lot of great content. Ideally, you are leaving with a clear next step to take in your life or business, and a mandate to take “massive action.”
Immersion in a live event or conference is a powerful catalyst to change. But jumping straight into action can backfire.
When you’re immersed in the energy of the event, you don’t always consider what next move is most aligned for you. Without creating space to check in with yourself you can end up taking massive action down the wrong path. That won’t serve you.
I used to return from a conference and try to implement everything at once. That approach got me nowhere fast. I scattered my focus and depleted my energetic and financial resources trying to do too many things at once.
As I learned to live by the energy of the seasons, I realized I could apply those principles to this context too.
Consider that during the event you reaped the abundant harvest of ideas. This is the energy of the fall season. Once the event is over, you shift to the seasonal energy of winter.
Our cultural conditioning teaches us to overlook winter and go straight to spring energy. This is the root of all burnout and failure.
Every ending — whether of a project, an event, a phase of life, a day, a month, a year — brings us into this “winter energy” — a time for dormancy in which we can recover our energy and hear the still, small voice of our inner wisdom that seeks to guide us. Without this period of dormancy we cannot grow.
When you honor this winter energy, you allow your body and mind to recover. You also create space to sort through the abundance of your harvest. This gives you clarity to create a plan for sustainable implementation that will help you avoid burnout and resource depletion.
I know you’re eager to take massive action. But the laws of nature dictate that the first action is stillness.
Come to rest. Listen. Then act.
What exactly should you do as part of a post-event recovery ritual? I’ll share some of my process tomorrow.
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