Two summers ago, I decided to get a tattoo on both my wrists, a word on each that would embody how I plan to live my life going forward. I’d just moved to Mexico the month prior and was on the other side of my divorce, feeling a sense of returning to myself that I hadn’t felt in a long time and I wanted to cement that moment.

The first tattoo was an easy one, “Prosper”…in all things, prosper. Life, love, health, wealth…simply prosper.

But for the last 2 years I couldn’t figure out what to put on the left wrist. I knew I wanted it to reflect a relaxed state, but “chill” just didn't quite land for me, so it’s been blank…sorta like an abandoned canvas, waiting on me to decide what goes there.

And then 3 miles into a 5 mile walk last Saturday, it hit me…

…and here we are.

Let's kick this off by talking about the life you're actually choosing, because I can assure you it's not likely one of ease.

You wake up and before you're even out of bed you’ve already answered the email that could have waited the hour for you to arrive at work. You tell yourself you’ll circle back to your own list later, just as soon as that one thing sitting on your desk is handled, except something else was already waiting to take its place by the time you look up again.

You agree to pick up your niece/nephew from practice because saying yes to your sibling was easier than explaining why you couldn’t, even though you already had something planned for that afternoon, but you canceled it anyway. You took a call from your mom and your default response was, “Ok. I’ll do it.”

By midmorning you’ve fixed a mistake that didn't belong to you, agreed to move up a deadline nobody actually asked you to move, and answered for a decision you didn’t make in the first place. Meanwhile, the list with your own goals and dreams is still sitting there untouched.

…boy do I love a good run on sentence.

By the end of each day, the only thing that you’re left with is exhaustion and overwhelm, but somewhere along the way you started treating that as a positive character trait. Afterall, it’s evidence that you’re needed, that you care, that you’re not the kind of person who lets things slide when someone else needs help.

Here’s the problem with that version of your life, ease starts to feel suspicious once you’ve spent years measuring your worth by how much you can take on without putting any of it down. If something isn’t difficult, some part of you assumes it doesn’t count, and if you aren’t exhausted by the end of the day, you start to wonder whether you actually did enough with it.

That belief, well it deserves to your attention; because it isn’t true, and living inside it is costing you far more than it’s giving back.

I want to talk to you today about the specific ways we make our own lives harder than they need to be, and what it might actually look like to choose ease on purpose instead of waiting for permission that is never going to come.

At some point you likely picked up the idea that you’re the only one who can handle whatever is falling apart around you, and that idea has been running your life ever since. And after years of showing up and handling things, the people around you learned they could count on to always solve for x. A friend’s crisis becomes the afternoon you had originally set aside for yourself. A coworker’s mistake becomes the weekend you’d promised to your own family. A family member’s poor decision becomes your emergency to fix.

We all like to believe it’s generosity, and sometimes it genuinely is, but often what’s happening it is that you’ve somehow managed to appoint yourself the last line of defense for problems that were never assigned to you in the first place.

Every time you step in ahead of being needed, you teach the people around you that they don’t have to build the muscle themselves, and at the same time you teach yourself that your value depends on being the one who fixes things, which is an exhausting standard to hold yourself to indefinitely.

Think about the last time someone mentioned a problem in front of you, not asking you for anything, just telling about something that was going on in their life, and you found yourself already mapping out how you’d solve it before they’d even finished the sentence. That reflex isn’t really about them.

It’s about you, and how uncomfortable it feels for you to witness a problem without immediately doing something about it, but that discomfort is trying to teach you something, if only you’d sit still long enough to listen.

The next time you’re faced with someone else’s problem, pause, and instead of asking “can I fix this,” decide whether this was ever yours to fix in the first place, and answering that honestly, even when the answer disappoints you, is where ease actually begins.

This is where it gets fun, because we all have to work, right. But it’s also where this pattern tends to show up the most. Because nobody actually asked you to answer emails at nine at night or to take on the project that fell through the cracks after someone else dropped it.

No one asked you to redo your colleague’s work instead of taking the time to show them how to do it correctly, and nobody asked you to be the person who says “I’ve got it” in every meeting when what you actually mean is that you don’t fully trust anyone else on the team to get it right.

Working harder than anyone stops being dedication the moment it starts costing you your evenings, your weekends, and your ability to be fully present with the people who actually know and love you.

And what began as ambition can easily turn into a way of avoiding the discomfort of being ordinary at something, or letting a ball drop and finding out that the world keeps turning regardless of whether you were the one holding it up.

Sobering, isn't it.

What’s hidden underneath a lot of that overworking is the very real fear that if you stopped proving your value through effort, people might notice you were replaceable, or that the version of you who does less might not be worth as much attention as the version who does everything.

That fear is not something we like admit, because it drives an enormous amount of behavior that gets mistaken for work ethic by everyone watching, including you.

Now don't misunderstand me.

Yes, you get to do genuinely good work, but inside hours that leave room for the rest of your life, and yes, you get to let something be good enough without needing it to be perfect in order to feel finished with it.

…and unless you're in the business of medically or legally saving lives, I promise you no one will die if you set boundaries around your time.

The job will still be there tomorrow, and so will you, ideally with more of yourself left over for the parts of your life that were never supposed to come second to it.

As you all know by now, I built this business intending for it to stay small.

My goal was to work directly with fifty women a year, have one retreat annually, a YouTube channel and a Substack running alongside it. That model would bring in a few hundred thousand dollars annually with little to no overhead, and eventually I’d buy a couple of laundromats on the side because I liked the idea of income that didn’t ask anything of me emotionally.

That was the whole plan. It was simple, sustainable, and mine.

Then I partnered with a marketing agency and subsequently hired a salesperson (old habits die hard I suppose), and within a month a three hundred thousand dollar business turned into a three million dollar one. Now on paper this looks like exactly the outcome everyone tells you to chase. I mean it's the kind of growth people build entire strategies around achieving.

But in real life it meant a cohort running every single month, sometimes two at the same time, a live monthly membership that needed constant attention, three separate events a year on top of the retreat, and a stack of upsells and downsells, audios and guides I could barely keep straight.

It also meant going from a team of two to a team of at least seven. And I, of course, was like FTS.

I decided last weekend to take a few days away from everything to figure out what I actually wanted, and the word that kept surfacing, no matter which direction I approached the question from, was you guessed it…Ease.

My mind didn't get excited about a bigger vision.

All I wanted was ease, the thing I had somehow built entirely out of the business I had originally designed around protecting it…and it happened so fast, I didn’t see it coming.

Now, I love money just as much as it loves me, but there are ways to make it with more ease, so I scaled the business back to a handful of stacked cohorts instead of a monthly one, and I cut down the events to two premium live events instead of three lower ticket ones.

The community stays in place, but now it feels like a place to keep the practice alive instead of another obligation.

The marketing team will keep doing what they are good at, the salesperson will work seasonally, and I get to take 3 months off, live my life with ease and still be of service.

Listen, nobody is going to hand you permission to make your own life easier. You have to decide on your own that carrying less doesn’t make you less committed, less capable, or less worthy of everything you’ve already built, and that decision is available to you the same way it's always been available to me.

…in life, in love, and all the good shit in between.

What are you carrying right now that nobody actually asked you to carry? Where have you started treating exhaustion like evidence that you’re doing life right?

Pick one thing this week that you can hand back, delegate, or simply stop doing. Notice what happens when you let it go. Most of the time, the thing you were so sure would fall apart doesn’t.

Drop a comment and tell me one thing you’re choosing to let go of this week. I read every single one.

I know ease can feel like a word that belongs to other people, people with fewer responsibilities, more resources, or lives that were simply built with more room in them from the start.

But ease was never actually about having less to do in some absolute sense. It’s about no longer needing every single hour of your day to feel hard in order to believe that it counted for something real.

You can love the people in your life without absorbing every problem they’re carrying as your own responsibility to solve. You can do excellent work without needing to prove that excellence at the expense of your own evenings and weekends. You can build something significant without allowing it to swallow the rest of your life in the process.

You get to choose what your life actually requires of you, rather than continuing to accept a version of those requirements you assumed without ever stopping to question it.

Most of the time, when you actually stop and look closely, your life is asking for a great deal less than you’ve been giving it out of habit.

— Donteacia 💛

P.S. Join us for the Sept accelerator. That’s it. That’s the pitch. Book Your Reset Coaching Call.

P.P.S. Download the free audio activations to reset your nervous system for ease. Yes fellas, you can access these. Listen Here.