Did ya miss me?

There was no letter last week.

Did ya notice?

No seriously, did you? Hit reply and let me know with a yay or nay.

Because in the pit of my stomach I have, what I hope is, an irrational fear that I have destroyed the trust I’ve built with you through consistently sending out this letter for 82 weeks and you’ll all disappear. POOF! And my business will go POOF! And I’ll be a failure [and I’ve run out of breath!]

I created a rule that I have to send a letter to you all every week and I doubled down with my word of 2021 being CONSISTENCY.

On the one hand, it’s been positive, I’ve developed a writing habit, I’ve been developing my ideas and some of you tell me it’s useful.

But, I’ve also been beating myself with the consistency stick.

And reading over the past 83 letters, I see some weeks I was writing more for sake of consistency than usefulness.

So the question I need to be asking is, is this consistency rule still serving me?

But before I get to that, I want to check in with you.

What are your rules?

Where did they come from?

Are they still serving you?

And the answers may not be as black and white as it seems.

Take my consistency rule for example.

On the whole, it does work for me, it’s that the emphasis on sending a letter out each week is not working for me anymore.

Instead what’s more helpful is to focus on consistently writing every day. I can still have the goal of sending out a weekly letter and I can live with missing a week here and there.

Despite the panic I felt above, rationally I know that I haven’t destroyed my reputation by missing one week. The relationship we’ve built up over the weeks means you’ll cut me some slack from time to time.

That’s something for you to think about as well.

We often hold ourselves to a standard that is only in our heads. Odds are that the majority of people won’t notice if we drop our standards a little and those that do are dicks and aren’t worth your time!

Remember that while rules can be useful in keeping us on track they also need to evolve with how we want our life to be.

Stay awesome, remember you’ve got this.