Rhythms

Are you moving in rhythm right now, or are you off the beat? I don’t have a great sense of rhythm, so I’m often off the beat when it comes to my dance moves or clapping. In the grand scheme of things, there are certainly worse limitations than this.

If we’re out of rhythm in our daily lives, there’s probably a bigger challenge to address than just our dance moves. 

The challenge for most of us is that we’re trying to stay on beat with multiple rhythms:

- The cycle of the business that we’re part of

- The school cycle or multiple cycles, if we have kids

- The weekly chores cycle

- Training cycles if we’re an athlete or a performer

- The seasonal cycles

Trying to manage all these cycles can get us quickly overwhelmed. We don’t have any control over most of these cycles, so we need to find ways to mitigate the likelihood of getting out of sync.

I started thinking about this challenge as you might think about a marching band – lots of different roles and priorities but with an absolute need to stay in sync with each other, or the performance suffers.

Everyone needs to know their part.

Everyone needs to know how their part fits into the bigger picture.

Everyone needs to practice until it’s second nature

Everyone needs to show up to do the best they can do each day.

In our lives, we can follow a similar line of thinking:

We need to understand our role in each cycle and what the expectations of us are

We need to be clear on how all the cycles fit together and where there are overlaps or gaps

We need to make sure we calibrate our rhythm in each cycle to optimize our performance

We need to focus on doing our best and accepting grace when our best isn’t what we hoped for.

There are no guarantees that you won’t miss the rhythm and get off the beat, but we can be intentional in trying to create the best-integrated life performance.

If you’re off the beat, what will you do to get yourself back to the rhythm aligned with your priorities?