What Happens When You Stop Trying to Get Your Act Together | Blog

This year, I’ve decided to let go of “getting my act together”! 

The never-ending internal thoughts and ideas that if I could get a more focused, disciplined, structured, and organized, my life and business would be SO much easier and better. 

The constant raising of the bar and standards by which I should live to be a healthy, impactful, fulfilled, and successful woman and business owner.

The hamster wheel of optimization for better, quicker results that feeds perfectionism.

Uh oh, does that mean all hell is about to break loose? Will everything just fall to pieces? Will life be mediocre?

I mean, isn’t it a good idea to optimize, hack, and be disciplined, focused, and productive? 

It sounds responsible. Mature even. Forward-thinking and smart.

It suggests that somewhere, just ahead of me, is a version of myself who is finally organized enough, disciplined enough, optimized enough to relax into life.

The one who has the right systems, the right routines, the right rhythm, and therefore earns success, ease, flow, and satisfaction as a kind of reward.

But the longer I’ve lived, worked, and listened, both to myself and to others, the more I see how deceptive that promise is.

Because “getting my act together” has never actually arrived.

What has arrived is an ever-moving bar. A subtle raising of standards. A constant sense that I’m not quite getting it right.

I see it most clearly in the small, ordinary places. Wanting to move my body, so exercise becomes a whole internal debate: what time of day, empty stomach or not, strength or cardio, consistency versus recovery.

Wanting quiet in the morning, and then the research begins. How long, when, and what neuroscience says is optimal. A simple impulse to ground myself morphs into a project to perfect myself.

What started as a nudge turns into something else to get right.

Losing time and wasting my internal energy on determining the best way to do it, versus just starting.

And when I don’t meet the invisible criteria I’ve created, the mind is quick to conclude: Well, you’ve already blown it. Try again tomorrow.

I was recently with a friend who loves to sing. She has a beautiful voice. We were sitting having coffee, and she said, “I want to sing more. I love singing, and it brings me so much joy!” Then she said, “But my electric keyboard is in storage.”

I asked, “What electric keyboard?” She told me she bought one, and that led to realizing that she doesn’t know how to play it yet and needs to learn. 

Pretty soon, we were both laughing. A simple, enthusiastic desire to sing, within seconds, had turned into needing to learn piano first. Like, somehow she couldn’t just sing throughout the day; she had to have the piano, learn it, and then sing with it. 

She had an idealized image of being someone who plays the piano and sings, so now the bar had been raised.

It’s such a simple example of how we quickly do this to ourselves. We place conditions between ourselves and the thing that’s calling us.

We tell ourselves we need better tools, more clarity, a more optimal setup. And all the while, life is right there, waiting for our imperfect participation.

There’s an illusion here.

Underneath this pattern is something deeper than productivity culture or self-help trends. It’s an illusion of control.

I recently listened to a podcast conversation between Rich Roll and Oliver Burkeman that gave language to this. It explored how optimization often becomes a sophisticated way to avoid the vulnerable truth of being human.

Let’s read that again.

Optimization, raising the bar, becomes a sophisticated way to avoid the vulnerable truth of being human.

If we can just find the right system, the right structure, the right protocol, then maybe life won’t feel so uncertain. Maybe we won’t have to feel exposed, new, or unprepared.

Oliver Burkeman shared an analogy comparing a super yacht and a kayak.

On the yacht, you’re up high, surrounded by screens and controls. It feels orderly. Predictable. You chart a course and trust the technology to deliver a smooth ride. It gives the feeling of mastery.

But real life is much closer to being in a kayak.

You’re right on the water. You can’t control the river, the weather, or the rapids ahead. You don’t get to pre-program the journey.

What you do have is responsiveness. Attention. The ability to adjust in real time.

The kayak is more honest. It’s closer to life, to the water, and what’s unpredictable.

And when I look at my own patterns, I can see how often I’m trying to climb back onto the yacht, how often “getting my act together” is really about wanting certainty.

Wanting guarantees. Wanting reassurance that if I do it right, it will turn out right.

But life doesn’t actually work that way.

I’ve been enjoying leaning into the adventure of this truth.

I still find myself drawn to an illusion of control, or to conditioned thoughts that promise a better version of me if I just get more organized, braver, more disciplined, more focused, etc.

But it’s been liberating in so many ways to follow the current of what happens when I stop insisting on a better version of me.

There’s a strange relief in admitting that you are never going to sort your life out once and for all. That the to-do list is not just long, but fundamentally impossible.

That no amount of optimization will eliminate uncertainty or guarantee a certain outcome.

When I stop treating the present moment as preparation for a future version of myself who finally has permission to live, something opens. I’m no longer waiting to arrive somewhere before I can begin.

This is the beginning. This is the water.

And from here, a different kind of agency becomes available.

Not the agency of domination or control, but the agency of presence.

Of meeting what’s here with curiosity and responsiveness. Of trusting my capacity to learn, to adapt, to find my footing when things get messy.

I recently heard a quote from Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. The interviewer asked her where her confidence came from when she decided to back her idea of Spanx. She replied, “I didn’t have confidence that it would work. I wasn’t sure. But what I did have confidence in was my ability to learn. I knew I could learn anything.”

I love this. This is where I can place my certainty. That we have within us the capacity to learn, to evolve, to rise to the occasion.

We can’t predict the future, or know for sure what will happen or the outcome, but we can know that regardless, we are ok. We are whole and complete as we are, and we can listen, adjust, and navigate the waves.

Imperfectly.

When we let go of trying to get our act together, we come closer to the texture of real living. We stop keeping life at arm’s length. We allow ourselves to be seen mid-process, mid-learning, mid-adjustment.

There is an aliveness there that no optimized system can replicate.

So, this year, I’m experimenting with stepping in before things are tidy.

Sharing before insights are fully packaged. Moving without waiting for the perfect conditions. Letting my morning be my morning, not a referendum on the rest of my day.

I’m noticing where I raise the bar in ways that quietly delay me. Where “doing it right” becomes a stand-in for not doing it at all. And when I catch it, I’m practicing a gentle letting go.

Not because effort or structure are bad, because I’ll continue to play with those as well, but because life is already happening.

The river is already flowing.

And maybe the invitation isn’t to get our act together at all.

Maybe it’s to get in the water.

Right now. As we are.