About four months ago, I started working with a life coach. I felt stagnant like I was just sitting still. I didn’t feel like I was being challenged anymore at work. I found new projects to take on, but I didn’t find them exciting. I began to feel that it was time to change things up. I realize the time has come after seven years to find a new job,  something that will challenge me and provide me with the opportunity to grow.

So, I got a coach and started to learn more about myself, my passions, my vision, my values, and all that makes me tick. I started to unearth all of those desires, dreams, and goals that I’d had years ago that had been forgotten.

I started reading, writing, and meditating. Then I started a blog. I contributed to it fast and furiously. I had lost touch with how much I enjoyed writing. Putting words to paper sends me into another world.

I get up at 4:30 AM each day because I am so excited to get the words out. The more and more I wrote the more and more I had to say. Words, stories, ideas, just started to flow through me. I couldn’t keep up! It was wonderful! I had found my zone, zen, and reignited my passion.

About two weeks ago, I came to the point where I realized that it was time to take serious action in finding a new job. I began to use my writing time in the morning to do my job search. I researched companies, reached out to my network, set up informational interviews, had real interviews, wrote and rewrote my resume. Worked on cover letters, all the things you do when looking for a new job.

My greatest challenge was pulling together my resume. Suddenly my free form was put into bullets. My work experiences for the last twenty years was whittled down to two pages. I’m pleased with the outcome and believe that it will be a key tool in getting my next role. But it came at a cost.

I stopped writing.

I have become more irritable at work and distracted at home. I fixate more and more on the things I didn’t like or re-living conversations that could have gone a different way, or building stories around all the different ways that a situation could possibly turn out. I feel disconnected and ungrounded.

I feel as though I stopped running for weeks, and I’m now trying to tie up my laces to get back to the pavement. I feel groggy and have a million excuses as to why I can’t or shouldn’t go out there and tackle those four miles. But I go anyway. The first few minutes is a slog, and not pretty. My legs aren’t working with my arms, and it feels like someone turned the air into a thick creamy soup. It is not easy. But eventually, come the first mile, I’ve begun to find my stride and eventually finish the run, feeling pretty good, and ready to do it again.

That’s how this writing is going. I can’t for the life of me figure out what to write about, I can’t get my fingers to travel across the keys as swiftly as before, typos slow me down because, in addition to the slog of getting the words out, Perfectionism has taken a seat on my left shoulder and is critiquing just about every other word. Ugh.

I know that I can get this turned around, that once I get this post up and running others will follow. That the more I write, the easier it will be to come up with new things to write about. It’s a great lesson for me to see how quickly things can change when I fall out of habit and how difficult it is to get the momentum going again.

In order to get my steam back in my engine, I need to post this. To get it up and get it out there.

My words of advice? Don’t stop what you’re doing. If you’ve developed a great habit, don’t quit, keep it going. It’s so easy to think that a day off here, or a couple of days off there won’t make a difference. It will. Just ten days of not writing has messed with my mind and affected the people around me. Let this post serve as a warning to future me about what happens when I give myself a writing break or feel that something else is more important than this.