Last year it really felt like I was trying to force so much of my life.

When I look back on the decisions I was making it felt like my energy was, “if I get this right, everything will change.”

Of course, I don’t get everything right and not every output led to a momentous change, which had me feeling frustrated and led to more forcing even more.

In the first 3 weeks of this new year, I have been super focused on evolving the energy around my business and work.

If 2024 was force, 2025 will be flow.

It’s not an overnight evolution. I did a good job the first two weeks of the year creating space in my business.

Because of that, come this Monday, I am feeling super energized and ready to “get after it.”

I am trying to decipher whether I am truly energized to work more or am I falling back into addictive habits of the stress that comes with overworking myself?

Last year, if I woke up at 6am energized to work, I would let myself work. Rather than shame myself and think, “No, no, do your morning routine, don’t jump right into work all hopped up on coffee and disregulated.” Instead I would think, “don’t shame yourself, just love yourself for being excited about work and let yourself get after it!”

I think I’ve come to realize that I’m like a smoker with lung cancer telling myself, “just let yourself enjoy another cigarette,” when, of course, if I was showing honest love to my best friend, I’d be telling him, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!?!? STOP FUCKING SMOKING!!!!”

Each morning I have been doing breathwork followed by various meditations or visualizations to center myself. On a few occasions I will turn on this visualization by Flynn Skidmore, which you can find here, and in it he asks you to think of a specific desire.

I desire to grow my community to 200 members.

Then he prompts you to ask yourself what you fear.

I can clearly see that there’s a part of me who believes he can’t handle 200 members. Meaning, 200 people will be in the membership and a certain percentage won’t show up to the calls, do the trainings or get any value. So I need to create the perfect robust onboarding sequence. I will need to reach out to all the members to see how I can support them better. I need a system in place to follow up with everyone. And on and on…

It’s unsustainable and overwhelming.

I feel the need to do all of this because deep down I can’t stand the idea of people thinking I’m a bad person. That their lack of success inside my membership is because I set them up for failure and those people will hate me.

I fear being a bad person who does all the wrong things.

I can see how this fear has been showing up and how I have been attracting more reasons to do more work. As if everything that I’ve already created and offer in the community isn’t right. So I create feedback forms to understand how I can improve. I DM members who I haven’t seen on a call to see how I can better support them. I create a new mini-course to make their investment even more valuable.

I do all this not because I am a good person, but because I’m so afraid of being a bad person.

If I do all these things right then I will know exactly how to please and support everyone. If I have those answers, I can finally relax, and play, and just show up as me.

Even as I type this, this feels like me saying, “I now know the answer to my problems which means I can do everything right!”

But this isn’t that.

This is me understanding a bit more about my desires and fears and learning to create a loving relationship with those fears.

Instead of rejecting those fears and calling them silly, I look forward to bring those fears along for the ride.

The part of me that wants everyone to like him because he hopes, if they do, he has more access to play. All he wants is the freedom to play, but he fears if nobody likes him he will have no access to play.

Continuing to build a life hoping others will give me the safety to access play is no way to live.

As I build my community to 200 members I look forward to asking him how he wants to build it (life).

What sounds fun, Matt? You have access to all of that right now. Love, safety, light and god. Together we will explore what is the most fun way to build this community and we get to go do those things. We no longer have to wait for others to give us access to fun.

Thanks for reading.

Matt

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