I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. — Charles Dickens
Are you exhausted yet! Christmas is here(!) and it has a way of draining us—many times in good ways—but more times in bad ways! As we wake up on Christmas morning, I wonder what it took all of us to get there.
I mean, “T’was the night before Christmas and all through the house, everyone was racing and stirring because, dang, we are all scrambling to get cookies baked and presents wrapped!”
I Have Good News
There are three things that I believe you can do to [truly} enjoy Christmases to come beginning now.
- Slow the music down! It’s never to late to turn down the volume of life. If you are missing dates, appointments, and family events, you are probably in trouble and spiraling down. How does an adrenal junkie stop? By coming to a point of realization that all the activity, promotions, and material wealth means nothing if you don’t have someone to enjoy it with.
- Think about others before yourself. Consider what is meaningful to those who love and care about you. Christmas is the perfect time to stop the rushing and buying of gifts that are given just to check something off your list. Do you really know if the gift you give will be the one remembered with love? Will your impact be something that makes a difference, or will it simply be forgotten in the next couple of weeks?
- Put a plan in place for 2023 that places the right priorities first! (Someone reading this may not know what is right vs. wrong for your personal life.
I believe that if you want to live life to the fullest, you must first put your energy, your time, and your money into your own life first. What? Haven’t we just come through the biggest giving season of the year when we share our love and care for others, but please read on and “hear” what I have to say.
Only Leftovers?
Instead of work dominating your life, mold your life so that your business grows around your priorities first. Because either you mold your business around your lifestyle, or your lifestyle becomes sublimated to the eternal quest to answer the next text or email. If your business always comes first, your life becomes . . . well, leftovers. I call it Lifestyle Deficit Disorder. Bottomline is that you may have a lot in the “bank”, but you are overdrawn and even bankrupt when it comes to relationships and peace.
The irony is that we are so stunningly loyal to our businesses, but we need to ask the question: are our businesses as loyal to us? Of course, the answer is no. Most employees don’t take the mission as seriously as we do.
Clients we serve, leave. Here we are, giving the best years of our lives and the best moments of all the days of our lives to something that doesn’t love us back! Isn’t that a little like chasing after wind? You bet it is!
Meanwhile, you are surrounded by people who would love you—a spouse, your children, friends, families—if only we had time and energy to show them the love we feel.
We are proactive about work and reactive about everything else. When you see it put that starkly, doesn’t it become abundantly clear that such an approach makes no sense? There’s the old expression: We trade out health to gain wealth, and then we need to use our wealth to regain our health.
What Does Your Perfect Day Look like?
When we put work first, we put ourselves, our health, our nutrition, our exercise, our nurturing, and our relationships in a tie for last place. Leftovers. I don’t know about you, but at our house at mealtime, no one ever gets very excited about leftovers—especially at Christmas!
Always on, always connected, always answering voice mail no matter where we are or what you are doing? Important? Maybe, from a certain perspective but through the eyes of those who matter the most how do we look? Imagine how much better your life would be if you were just as connected to those who love you as you are to your cell phone?
When you build in time for your personal life (yourself) first, you make even more money because you are not clinging, you are living. Your relationships don’t suffer, so the time that you do have in the office can be spent as quality time.
I can’t describe what your Perfect Day entails, but you can. What I can do is give you a roadmap to help you get there.
This Christmas stop asking why not. Stop asking how to make the change that will last a lifetime and just do something that will leave an impact on the lives around you. All too many entrepreneurs feel more like caged animals than like successful, free people. One thing that is for sure: putting your business first doesn’t work—not in the long run and certainly not forever.
Merry Christmas you! I’m offering my book Perfect Day free! In it, you will learn how to turn imperfect days into Perfect Day. It will also teach you how to be free from Lifestyle Deficit Disorder! Sign up for a free consult and let’s get on the road to having more Perfect Days starting today!
About The Author: Cokie Berenyi
Cokie Berenyi has been in financial services and serving the needs of individual and institutional clients and entrepreneurs since 1996. Mother, author, business owner, financial “samurai” and Perfect Day engineer, Cokie loves food, wine, travel, stray dogs, goat cheese, tennis, and alpine mountaineering.
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