Sometimes you need to demolish what you have to build what you want.
Imagine buying an old derelict building and you want to create the home of your dreams.
You have 2 options – work with the current structure of the building or demolish it and start from scratch.
Over the past four years I have been demolishing what took me over 15 years to build.
Why would I do this?
Because what I built over 15 years wasn’t sustainable.
I built way too much, I took on way too much work, I wasn’t able to manage everything and I paid a very hefty price.
Where did I start with demolition and how did I know what to demolish?
I started with the end in mind.
What do I enjoy?
What do I want to keep?
What can I easily sustain?
I started this process four years ago and at the time all I could sustain was my weekly email to my community.
This meant everything else I had built over 15 years was to be demolished. This was a very painful decision but the silver lining was the lesson I was to learn.
This humbling lesson will ensure I never ever find myself in this impossible situation again – building way more than I can manage and stressing myself out with it all.
And so four years ago I spilt my focus in two.
My first focus was consistently sending my weekly email to my community.
This one weekly email has been a most rewarding experience and has brought me an incredible amount of joy.
Through this weekly email I have learned a huge amount about my style of writing. I have built confidence in my writing to share more of myself. I have also built the most rewarding relationships with those who read and reply to my emails.
If you want to join my community and receive my weekly email you can sign up here but downloading your free ebook – The A-Z of Effective Change.
My second focus was demolishing everything I have built over the previous 15 years, this has been so painful and painstaking.
It’s really hard to let go of what took such effort and passion to build but letting go is necessary to create time and space for what I want to build in the future.
Some things naturally stopped and I just didn’t follow up to sustain them.
- I cancelled the hosting on my travel photography website (where I sold my Fine Art prints) which removed it from the internet – that was a sad day.
- The Fine Art printing studio that I used closed down and I didn’t find another one.
- My photography software required an upgrade yet I didn’t purchase one.
- I unsubscribed from most email newsletters, stopped subscriptions to services I no longer needed and left online groups that I loved being a part of.
- I took a break from writing blog posts and posting on social media.
- I stopped listening to podcasts, audiobooks and watching youtube videos.
Bit by bit I demolished every single thing that I had built.
By far the biggest change that I made was leaving my day job without another.
Leaving my day job without another was the scariest professional decision I have ever made yet it turned out to be the best professional decision I have ever made.
Writing all of the above brings tears to my eyes but it also brings a huge relief to my soul.
As a new year starts, I continue to demolish what no longer serves me and I start to lay the foundation of my new path.
Building takes time and so does demolition – just like building something, the benefits of demolishing things is not realised overnight, it takes time to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you want to demolish any part of your life to rebuild it, I promise you there is light at the end of the tunnel.
You may not be able to see the light in the dark depths of change but it is there, it is waiting to shine on whatever you want to build for your future.
- What would you like to demolish and remove from your life?
- What would you like to build and welcome into your life?
- Do you need to create room for something new?
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Thanks for reading,
Siobhain
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