Swimming & Boundaries on Social Media
I read an interesting article by Marlee Grace who often speaks on how to maintain creativity and your sense of identity when social media and phones are vying for our attention so much. (Would highly recommend following Marlee and their interesting writings and offerings.)
When you swim you can’t bring your phone. Pretty much every other activity your phone can be in your pocket or a bag. Swimming you can’t hold your phone, put it in a pocket or anything.
You need all your focus and ability to be to help you swim and survive in the water. You can only rely on yourself to keep you alive.
You can’t reference anything. You can't look anything up. “Am I swimming good enough, am I swimming the right way, maybe I should look up a video on how to swim correctly?”
No.
When you are in it, you just swim. You can’t compare yourself, you can’t look at a selfie and judge yourself. You are just swimming.
And it feels amazing because your brain for once is only focused on that one thing. It’s not fragmented, multi-tasking and getting pings every 5 seconds from apps vying for your attention. Your attention is only on one thing: being in the water.
So how do you create that feeling outside of the water? How do you bring back that focus and attention and freedom back to real life (and by ‘real life’ I mean the life where you use your phone but it’s not taking over your life).
And having boundaries with social media could be one of the answers.
We grew up with social media and it is so ingrained in our life now, we don’t know when to stop. It is supposed to pull our attention away from other things so that you feel compelled to see things and buy things.
Choosing to not look at your phone is powerful.
Choosing how you spend you time is powerful.
Deciding intentionally how you want to spend your time and actually doing that is powerful.
It’s a matter of making that commitment to yourself and not to your apps.
You can feel that feeling of swimming and focus on one thing at a time.
If you need a little more help setting boundaries with your social media accounts to live intentionally, I can help you. Through life coaching, I help people get off their phones to create the life your want to live IRL.
I find a lot of people need this work, so I'm trying to get the word out to more people. And that's why my coaching program is 30% off right now!
…because I know y'all know someone who needs this! Someone who talks about how they wish they could get off social media, or how it makes them anxious, or how they can't get enough sleep, or they are disconnected from their relationships because of their social media use.
Maybe this is you even!
And if it is, I would love to talk more about it just for me to get more insight on what people are struggling with in regards to social media and you may get something out of it too :) or forward this email on to someone who would get some value out of it.