These days, our lives these days are shrouded in uncertainty. This week Janine and Shannon discuss building in some margin to make life–and decision-making–a little easier.
Discussion topics include:
- Creating a margin in your life so you have some flexibility
- How this is particularly important during times of uncertainty (like now)
- What we mean by margin
- How things often don’t go as planned, even if (or especially if) they’re planned to the detail
- The value of building margins in travel
- The margin Shannon built into planning her low-stress wedding
- A great example of imperfection: Shannon and Mike celebrated their wedding anniversary on the wrong day this year
- Basing decisions on those things that you can be certain about
- How giving yourself margin provides flexibility to deal with circumstances that do arise
- Remember: Not making a decision is making a decision
- Janine’s challenge in trying to plan a trip to Washington state for her father’s 90th birthday in September
- The mental and emotional bandwidth taken up by living in a global pandemic during a time of social unrest and economic and political uncertainty—and the benefit of building in a margin for our own mental health
- An important reminder: Keep cutting yourself slack!
Links:
- Episode 59: Travel
- Shannon’s joy-filled Instagram post about her anniversary celebration
- Shannon’s aghast Instagram post the next day where she discovered they’d celebrated the wrong day
I always try to build in a little wiggle room around things. I just now have a more professional sounding word for it: building margin. I like it. I find it keeps me sane because I am not always stressed out about things. Down to the smallest things like arrival times. I have a friend who always tries to arrive exactly on time for meetings and appointments and is constantly arriving stressed out by traffic. I arrive 5-10 minutes early for appointments and spend that 5 minutes either doing deep breathing or going over my calendar and to-do list. I would much rather sit in my car for 10 minutes and not worry about traffic jams (and idiot drivers)! It’s so much nicer not to feel frazzled.