Slowing Down, So You Don’t Miss What Matters

This season has a way of speeding us up.

More commitments. More deadlines. More expectations. (and as a result, less patience)

You feel it when a conversation takes longer than planned.

When one of your kids interrupts your thought mid-sentence.

When someone needs something, it lands as an inconvenience instead of an opportunity.

Most of us don’t intend to rush through the holidays.

We just drift there. The calendar fills. The pace picks up. And before we realize it, we’re reacting instead of being present.

That’s when we start sounding short, and the people we care about most feel pressure instead of peace. No one wakes up wanting to be a Scrooge. It happens when we stop slowing down long enough to notice how we’re showing up.

Slowing down isn’t about doing less.

It’s about being more intentional with what’s right in front of you.

It’s choosing to listen fully instead of half-listening while thinking about the next thing.

It’s treating interruptions as opportunities instead of obstacles.

It’s remembering that people are not in the way of your work.

They are the work. This applies at home and at your 9-5.

Your family feels it. Your team feels it. Your members feel it. Your presence, how you carry yourself, changes the tone of a room faster than any strategy ever could.

Imagine this season marked not by how much you got done, but by how present you were. By the conversations, you didn’t rush. By the grace you extended when it would have been easier to push past.

This is what leadership looks like during the holidays.

You still lead. You still decide. You still carry responsibility.

You just do it with a steadier pace and a softer edge.

And that carries into the new year with you.

Merry Christmas,

~MW

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