When the weight of life’s challenges gets you down… sharpen the saw.

Lately, CGA’s got me feeling a tid bit overwhelmed. One glance at my to-do lists, calendar, email, and all the other things has me like:  

It’s not that I don’t enjoy CGA. I’m honestly loving my experience here! It just so happens that all this growth and development and whatnot is pretty darn challenging at times. Go figure. 

To complete all that’s expected of me, I keep finding myself staying up late and waking up early and sacrificing me time for homework time. It’s resulted in quite the lack of rest for me. 

In college, four hours of sleep per night was enough to keep me plenty alive. But these days, a week where I don’t consistently get my eight hours per night leads to Fridays like yesterday, where the only genuinely productive thing I did after 9am (besides write some of this blog, if you count that) was respond to about five emails…and, at one point yesterday afternoon, I looked a little (read: exactly) like this: 

 (I wish I was kidding, but, alas, I am not. #thestruggleisreal) 

But what if the big issue here isn’t the amount of work I have, but the speed at which I’m completing it? The reality is that, while CGA comes with a lot of expectations, all of my responsibilities still shouldn’t take me as long as they do. It all has to do with how effective I am. And all that has to do with how much time I’m investing in renewing and restoring myself.

It’s that nonsensical little cycle of spending extra time on my work throughout the week, finally getting to the end of the week and feeling so exhausted that I veg out half the weekend, put off upcoming work, & fail to refill myself, and thus starting the next week feeling unrested, working at a near-glacial pace, and already playing catch-up. Rinse and repeat. 

But even if CGA was the “problem,” viewing it like that is not going to accomplish anything. What will see some results, though, is the decision to start making my personal renewal a priority. 

The irony of all this is that I literally gave a presentation on the importance of personal renewal in Leadership Track on Thursday. It just wasn’t until I was “figuratively” falling out of an office chair yesterday afternoon that I realized how valuable it is. 

Stephen Covey calls this value of personal renewal “sharpening the saw.” Think of your daily responsibilities as cutting down a tree. You can spend hours on end sawing through that trunk, but unless you take a break to sharpen the saw, it’s just going to take you longer to cut through the tree with a dull saw. Yet how many of us neglect our “saw sharpening” time, without even realizing how much less effective that makes our “tree cutting” capabilities?? 

Sharpening the saw is all about preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have: you.

It means “expressing and exercising all four dimensions of your nature [physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional] regularly and consistently in wise and balanced ways,” and sometimes it means taking a break from your crazy, busy, nonstop life to work on yourself. 

I release you of the feeling that you constantly have to be doing something, that spending time to improve yourself is a waste of time. Because, in reality, it’s wisest to spend time every day to do whatever you have to do to renew and improve yourself physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally.

Make that a priority, and you’ll see what a worthwhile investment it is into the rest of your life. 

 

So when you’re feeling like the weight of life’s problems, demands, and challenges is just dragging you down, out of your control…consider what YOU can do to combat it.  

You might just see everything from a different perspective, and maybe even be a lot more effective!