This will be my last in the series about lessons I’ve learned from therapy.  We started with asking for help, analyzed root causes, and explored thought traps and radical acceptance.  We will end by reflecting on therapy and investing effort.

As I mentioned in the first blog, I leveraged our Lyra services for therapy.  Going through this experience consisted of a few different things like live sessions, assessments, articles to read, and online videos to watch.  We were a few weeks in, and I was telling my therapist that I appreciated the different resources.  She shared that she was concerned she was assigning me too much, because she recognized that I was busy in life.  I thanked her for her consideration and told her that she was not overburdening me.  I explained that I wanted the materials, because I knew how important it was to invest in my mental health.  I came to her, because life was kicking my butt, so my number one goal was to work through that.  As a result, I was committed to investing in my mental health, and I made the necessary trade-offs to do this.

How does this connect to anything?  So much of life is about putting in effort to grow.  The challenge is that there are so many domains in life we could invest int.  We can put in effort for our physical health, mental health, relationships, parenting, careers, etc.  This can be overwhelming, especially if we allow ourselves to fall in the trap of thinking that we need to master and max out all of those domains.  Instead, we need embrace that everything can’t get equal focus all the time, AND THAT’S OKAY.  For me, in that period of my life, I over indexed on my mental health, because I needed that.  I did the extra work in that space and deprioritized other things.  As my life moves from season to season, I know I’ll continue to evolve where I put the work in and how I invest my effort. 

The challenge: Where will you invest your effort?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry