St Swithin's Day - A Blog of Reflection

It's St Swithin’s Day.

Folklore says that if it rains on St Swithin’s it will rain for 40 days. It also says that if today remains fine a period of fair weather will follow. 

It was Emma (Ambika Mod) in the adaptation of David Nicholls in One Day who shared Charles Dicken's words from Great Expectation:

“Imagine one selected day struck out of your life, and think how different its course would have been. Think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.”

I loved the recent Netflix adaptation and watching it made me reflective. It made me think of a time when life was simpler, easier perhaps. I wondered whether there could be something in the day that could be helpful. As the months ticked by at the beginning of the year I realised that there were things that I still hadn’t done that I wanted to. For example, I really wanted to complete a “Year in Review”. I didn’t do it. For weeks I had a daily reminder to do it. I moved that to weekly and I felt embarrassed that I was so late with it.

Could I still review the previous year in March? April? Of course I could but I was trapped by the worry around what other people thought about me and the way I was doing things. I didn’t like that. I didn’t need to carry the weight of other people. But then something happened. I realised that I wasn’t carrying that weight unless I wanted to. I realised that nobody else cared about the date I wrote my review but me, heck, no one really cares about my review but me. It was unlikely to that anyone was going to judge me about reviewing the last 12 months after January because in reality everyone else is so busy in their own lives.

It was a helpful realisation to have, one that removed a lot of pressure.

It was then that I had the idea that perhaps I could share the my thoughts and reflections on the year, but just in a different way. A reflective way. That’s when I thought, what about it I took St Swithin’s Day and began an annual reflection of my business, and my life too, and so this is what this is. This is what you're reading now. Not a normal blog with legal tips, but a reflective journal style post which may or may not be exactly what you need to read today.

To frame my thoughts in a way that could be of benefit, I’ve pulled together three things that right now, are messages that I need to hear and you may want to skip right down to those. But first, let me look back at my life on this day over the years. 

15th July 2015 - I've been a qualified solicitor for three months now. Even though I spent my career to this point working towards this, I still feel like I'm trying to find my feet. I'm so worried about getting everything wrong. I feel proud but it doesn't feel how I thought I would. I have this weird feeling, is this it?

15th July 2016 - The achievements I have worked my whole life to make happen really are not all that. They are not as fulfilling as I thought they would be. So I've done something I've always wanted to do and signed up to do my first big adventure. I'm going to climb the highest freestanding mountain in the world.

15th July 2017 - I've got a new job in a new sector. After much soul searching and contemplating whether to leave law and go into fitness and wellbeing, I've instead changed sectors in the hope that I could make a difference in the world and maybe even to start to see it without being chained to my desk all of the time.

15th July 2018 - I have replaced one job with long hours for another. But I've signed up to the biggest adventure of my life, I'm going to run 6 marathons in five days. What if I can't? I've only ever run a marathon before. What am I doing? Why do I think that I can do this? It's going to be so embarrassing to fail.

15th July 2019 - I'm engaged!! We're getting married this year just a few days before Christmas. I have two huge cases at work and I know that if they go well I'm going to be offered a promotion this year. Oh and that big run, it was the best experience of my life so far. It felt like I was running on Mars! 

15th July 2020 - How can so much have happened in just 12 months? I have never felt sadness like this. My body made me believe that I could achieve anything but it dealt me the cruelest of cards. I never knew I wanted a family as much as I do right now and I don't know how things will ever feel brighter. 

15th July 2021 - I will never take this moment for granted. She's arrived. Everything has changed. I didn't know it at the time but three days after last St Swithin's Day last year we would find out we were pregnant and this time I didn't lose them. Life is full and tiring and precious and I now work for myself. I took a leap I didn't even know that I wanted to take and I started working for myself. Then I did something I never expected to. I've set up a law firm. Three days ago I got all of the authorisation paperwork and it's official. I'm going to be running my own law firm

15th July 2022 - How is this my life and not a dream. I feel so lucky but so incredibly worried that this is too good to be true and that something will happen and I'll lose everything. I want to enjoy the moment but there's a feeling that in accepting this is my reality it will somehow ruin it and the bubble will burst. 

15th July 2023 - I've learnt the hard way that just because you do something once it doesn't mean that it will be like that again. Baby two has arrived and she's so unwell. I've been stretched in ways that I never thought were emotionally possible. Life seems to be passing by in a blur like I'm just a passenger. Everyone else seems to be achieving great things and I'm very much stuck trying to survive each day as it comes.

15th July 2024 - Life is chaotic and calm, wonderful and challenging. It's full of the desire to create the most incredible huge things within the businesses, and also to simply just be. I crave quietness and simplicity but then I also feel like I'm just getting started and that there are some really great things around the corner. I feel like just as I work out one part of life there are new challenges around the corner.

Looking at this moment each year as a snapshot really shows that we have no idea what's around the corner. Doesn't that make life so exciting and interesting. Feeling incredibly fortunate for every chapter, even the tough ones.

How did the business do in the last 12 months?

The business over the last 12 months, well it's been amazing working for myself. Juggling a baby and a business is hard, really hard. But it also provides so much freedom and excitement and I wouldn't change that for the world. We didn't grow financially last year. Revenue was down slightly. That's okay because profit was up and that's what it's about really. Plus, growth wasn't necessarily the goal. I didn't put huge pressure on myself to achieve anything last year because I had a new baby and she was the priority and that's what matters. It feels almost like I failed because my revenue hasn't increased year on year but we've supported more people than ever and I feel like I'm finally getting to a place where people recommend us and what we're doing. We're making an impact on the lives of so many people. We don't just sell legal templates, we give people the courage and confidence to start their own business and change their life. 

My thoughts and reflections over the last 12 months:

1.  Nobody is watching you as closely as you worry that they are - Do things your way

I expect that a lot of what I've shared already explains my thoughts on this. More and more I hear people share their worries about what others think of them and their business. It can get to a point, especially when you factor in social media, that you worry about how every single thing will be portrayed and you apply a filter to your life so that it looks a certain way. But it gets worse, you don't just apply the filter to the way your life looks, but the way that you live it. You make decisions based on how you'll be able to show that to others. We have to stop doing this and instead have the confidence to do things ourselves in a way that reflects our own personalities. After all it’s our uniqueness that brought us here to create a life and, if you have one, a business like this in the first place.

We have to find the confidence to take advice from people who matter. Then we have to use that advice as a guide and do things in our own way. Someone shared something with me once when I was trying to work out which path to take and I couldn't take them both. I felt that I should take route A but my heart was telling me to take route B. They said, "if it won't matter to you in 5 years then don't spend more than 5 minutes worrying about it now" I knew that if I took path A it was the right thing for now but it was path B that would matter in 5 years.

If it's helpful, path A was a work commitment and path B was a family commitment, for my new family, the one I was marrying into. I didn't have a young family at the time but either way, I think that family first is always a helpful tool when deciding what's most important.

2.  Not my chapter

This has been my motto over the last 18 months. It started as something that I quietly said to myself and now it’s something that I use as guide. Around 18 months ago I had my second baby and this time around life has felt so much more of juggle. For most of my life I’ve had the belief that anything is possible and that I could achieve anything I wanted. However, with a second child in tow I have had to revise my expectations and initially that stung. I watched from the sidelines as others did what I wanted to do. They got awarded promotions, achieved incredible physical challenges, they travelled the world with their business and got themselves in rooms that accelerated their growth. I couldn’t do that. Or at least that’s what I was telling myself.

It wasn’t until I found the reframe that I needed. That reframe was was that I could still do it, but now wasn’t my time.

I was in exactly the right place I needed to be, at home with my beautiful family. Those opportunities would still be there in a year or two. Probably not those exact opportunities but ones very similar. I didn’t have to speak on stages and have time away from my children. I could still have a successful business, just not one that was chasing fast growth, because I didn't need it. That wasn't actually my goal. Sure, if I was trying to raise funding or we needed fast growth for some other reason I could have done it, but I didn't need it. That wasn't my goal.

When you're surrounded by others who are living a similar life to you it's tempting to start chasing the things that they are following. It had not been my lifelong goal to be in a mastermind or be invited to speak on stages. It had been my goal to have a family and losing that back in 2020 made me realise how much I wanted it. I wanted to prioritise being with my children, and I did. I knew that I was never going to get those moments back with my family whereas I would create the external opportunities again. 

Staying blinkered in life to what truly matters is a skill, and it's one I'm getting pretty good at now.

3.  Strive to make it fun

It’s only been this last 12 months that I’ve realised that it’s up to me to make life fun. It was around this time in 2016 that I realised that nobody else is going to create those big memories in your life but you. You know when you see other people achieving great things, most of that comes from self-motivation. I had achieved a lot of professional success at that point but my life was so boring outside of work that if someone had written a book about my daily life it would have been so boring that even I wouldn’t want to read it. It hadn’t always been that way. I had been someone who loved doing exciting things but somewhere along the way I’d gotten lost. Prioritsed the wrong things. So I booked my place on a trip to climb Kilimanjaro. That was incredible.

Recently I lost sight of that feeling, in the noise of the day to day and I wanted it back. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just trudging along but actively finding the fun. Because I believe that you have to. I don’t believe that people wake up every day and they are happy and have lots of fun by chance. I believe that they make life that way, by doing the small things that bring them joy – perhaps drinking out of their favourite mug or using their favourite ‘special’ cut-glass day to day. Happiness isn’t just an automatic right. I believe we have to put the effort in and create those magical moments, we have to actively make and create a life we love. I suppose if you do that enough then you get to a point where the fun feels effortless and your life is full of the things that you enjoy. And then you have space to add in more fun.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading this. It's a post full of nostalgia and also with the greatest excitement for what's to come next. If you've enjoyed this post then please leave a comment, I'd love to know what you think. Or come and tell me, send me a DM over on Instagram. 

Have a wonderful St. Swithin's Day. I've got my fingers crossed for a day full of sunshine.

Lucy