As a personal coach, I spend a lot of time helping clients clean up and throw away the crap in their lives that takes up a lot of emotional space: stuff ranging from dirty man caves to “taker” friends to unrewarding jobs. As a coach, I’m really interested in what clearing that detritus makes room for.
Last week, I got a taste of it.
Early in the morning, I answered the daily joy question with: “One small thing I can do to increase my joy today is to figure out the taxes problem.” So after dropping the kids off at school, I sat down to amend our taxes from, well, 2008.
This is something I’ve been meaning to work on since discovering I’d screwed up the cost basis of my Amazon RSUs. For two years, I could somehow never find a chunk of time to focus on it. Amazing how that is. I mean, really? For two years I couldn’t find the time to work on it?
So last week I sat down to do it.
It took me maybe two hours to figure out the problem and create an amended return. I’d been worrying about and procrastinating and arguing defensively with my partner about this for two years – and it took me two hours to fix.
Ridiculous. That heavy weight wasn’t any weight at all, and I’d been carrying it for two years. I wonder what I could have done with that emotional space instead.
I don’t know yet what throwing off the weight of that dreaded task will make room for. Hopefully not an audit from the IRS.
