Note: When I say weight, I mean anything you carry that presses on you: a responsibility, a worry, a decision, a person you are holding.
This past spring, I built a small practice for catching weights early, before they could pile up into something I could feel and not name. Five minutes, most mornings, in the journal I already keep. On quiet mornings, it worked. What I had not tested was whether a practice built on quiet mornings would hold on a morning that was anything but.
I did not have to wait long to find out.
Two Good Weeks, One Fading Habit
The trouble started, as it often does, with good things. I had two weeks of travel back-to-back. First, I flew to Texas for a LifeFocus teaching event for a room of accountants, the kind of work I love. Then a few days later, a long drive to lead our Leadership Accelerator intensive, four days of it. Two good weeks. Two full weeks. And somewhere in the middle of them, the young habit I had just built, the daily question about my weights, stopped. I was in airports. I was teaching. I did not journal. I didn’t notice the habit slipping the way I notice a habit forming. It just slowly faded out of my awareness.
Nashville handed me something I had wanted for years. The surprise was it came earlier than expected. Sitting in the rooms, I realized I was not teaching any of the content. Our team had handled the logistics. Two colleagues were teaching, coaching, and facilitating, and doing it better than I would have. Two years after launching the program, I watched it run without me, and it was beautiful. It was also, in an odd way, one more thing to carry home and feel. More weight came on the drive home, more than five hours of it, especially the emails that had been stacking up, the task notices that I could see but not touch from behind the wheel. Awareness without the ability to take action always weighs me down.
Breaking My Own Rule
My rule after traveling is simple. The next day is a recovery day. No meetings, no calls. Unpack the suitcase. Scan the receipts. Sit down and close the loops from the trip, the commitments made, the promises that need to become tasks before they evaporate. That week I broke the rule twice. Friday went to my granddaughter and my grandson and my daughter, a good day, the right day, but not recovery. Saturday went to Jan and the fun we had missed, also right, also not recovery. By Sunday I was home in my body but still unpacked in every other way.
The Message From Colorado
Sunday morning I woke later than usual and sat down to do my Weekly Preview. A full week stretched ahead with no travel, the first real strategic time I would get this summer. I should have felt the open space. Instead a wave rose up over me, and I could feel that wave before I could find the source.
The source was a message from my brother in our siblings’ WhatsApp thread. My mom and dad have been struggling with memory loss, and it has been getting harder, faster. My brother had just been with them, and he was telling all of us how difficult it had become, and how heavily it was weighing on him and my sister, the two who carry the most of it close to home. I was sitting in the quiet I had set aside for stillness, feeling anything but still.
My thoughts jumped immediately to action. I could fly to Colorado. I could be there the next day. And I could feel, in the same breath, every reason this was the one week I could not, the week I needed to recover and catch up from being away from home. Torn between my love for my dad and mom and my need for rest, I was overwhelmed. Not a good place for a coach who teaches others to live and lead from overflow, not overwhelm.
Five Minutes, No Margin
I built my journaling practice for quiet mornings. Sunday is my sweet spot. It’s not unusual for me to spend 2 or 3 hours in quiet reflection before I go to church. But that Sunday was not quiet. The missing time from sleeping late and the unexpected hard news meant I had five minutes and no margin. I’ve learned the secret when I’m under pressure is not more time; it’s more precision. The more specifically I could name the real weights, the faster I could see where to channel them.
Burdens, Loads, and the Line Between
There is a distinction in the biblical book of Galatians I had known about for years and now needed. Bear one another’s burdens, it says. And a few lines later, each will have to carry his own load (Galatians 6:2–5, NIV). For a long time, I understood that passage intellectually. I did not realize, until that Sunday, that I was experiencing it emotionally. The words burden and load are different. A burden is the crushing thing no one should carry alone. A load is the ordinary pack each of us is meant to carry ourselves.
Henry Cloud built much of his book Boundaries on that very line, and his point lands hard for anyone whose work is carrying other people. Pastors, priests, therapists, coaches: we absorb for a living, and the line between a burden worth sharing and a load that was never ours to take blurs fast.
Cloud says,
“Stepping in to save [someone] or cushioning their ‘fall’ may feel like help, but that often keeps them stuck. Love doesn’t mean protecting people from pain or growth. It means letting them feel the weight of reality so they have a chance to grow up.”
You can rob a person of the load that is theirs to carry, bury yourself under a burden that was never yours to carry alone, and call both of them compassion. My instinct that Sunday was to absorb all of it. Fly out, take it on, fix it. Part of that is a burden I need to help carry. Part of it is my siblings’ load, theirs to bear and mine to support without taking it away from them.
Naming the Weights, One at a Time
So I did the thing the quiet mornings had trained me for, only faster. I stopped staring at the cloud of overwhelm and started naming the weights inside it, one at a time, as exactly as I could. Specificity, it turns out, is a powerful tool. A weight named vaguely feels permanent. A weight named precisely usually has a door in it.
Take the weight that called itself cash flow. Cash flow is a frightening phrase; it sounds like a slow leak in the hull. But it only looked like a leak. Underneath, it was something far smaller. We had front-loaded some business spending to hit a credit-card deadline for travel miles, a client’s large paper check was sitting in a six-day bank hold, and a set of payments was due in four days. That is a thirty-six-hour timing gap, and a thirty-six-hour gap has an obvious step. Move funds from the reserve fund into the operating fund, wait a day and a half, move them back. Call it a “five-minute weight loss.” The anxiety took about ten seconds to lift once I’d made the weight more specific.
The next weight I recognized quickly, because it was the same fear that started this whole story. I had been dreading a flood of new bookings burying my deep work and my current clients once the podcast aired. Named precisely, it was a settings question, nothing more. A few minutes inside my scheduling tool, a few changes to my availability to protect time for current clients, and the weight had somewhere to go.
My accountant needed tax documents I had already sent and could not put my hands on. Named precisely, it was thirty minutes in the afternoon to find them and upload them to his portal. I gave it a slot and let it go.
The Weight I Couldn’t Fix
And then there was the weight I could not name my way out of. My parents are not a thirty-six-hour problem. There is no settings menu for a mom and dad whose memories are slowly leaving them. That doesn’t resolve in five minutes. There’s no easy fix. Perhaps there’s no fix at alll. But a weight that cannot be solved can still be channeled instead of swallowed. Jan and I went for a long hike that afternoon, and I spoke all of it out loud: the fear, the sadness, the ache of wanting to help from thousands of miles away. She listened. She offered a few thoughts. Nothing about my parents’ situation was fixed by the end of that hike. But the weight was no longer pooling in me alone. It was moving, between two people who love each other, which is exactly where Galatians says a burden is meant to go.
The Habit I Had Already Broken
I almost left this part out, because it is not flattering. The journaling practice that steadied that Sunday is the same practice I had abandoned ten days earlier without noticing. The practice had not failed me. I had simply gotten busy, and a young habit is a fragile thing. What mattered was that I came back. By the end of the day, in a Starbucks, I finally admitted that the energy I actually had did not match the strategic, creative work I had planned for it. So I cleared the decks, dumped the open loops into my project management software, and spent the evening with a novel and a movie beside my wife. Monday morning I was back. The same early hour, the same silence, the same journal, the same question. This time, the energy to ask the same questions again with less worry and more creativity.
Your Turn
So here is the single question to carry out of all three of these articles. What is the one weight you are carrying right now that you could name precisely enough, today, to move in five minutes?
And if you would like help building this for your own weights, that is the work I do. You can book a Clarity Session with me, twenty-five minutes, just the two of us finding out where your weights are actually trying to go.
We were never built to run the race carrying everything. Some weights we set down. Some we hand off. Some we carry, but with someone beside us on the trail. The water was always going to move somewhere. And I hope you know that you get to decide where.
This is exactly why I built a worksheet version of this practice: the same five questions, a simple step-by-step walkthrough, ready to run tomorrow morning. It’s not a finished framework; I’m still testing it alongside you. And I think it already earns five minutes.