You don’t have to be consistent (S3 E4)

Remember when our hobbies were cyclical by nature? There were seasons, and there were breaks. 

Why are we beating ourselves up for doing it differently now and not being consistent? 

Let’s get into it!

I would love to hear from YOU! Sound off in the comments: Is there a hobby you’ve been beating yourself up about not being consistent with? Can you release yourself from that by claiming, “It’s not the season for that right now.” 

Is there an activity you’d like to pick back up?

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Music by Alex_MakeMusic from Pixabay

The Loves to Chat Podcast is hosted by Keela Fowler.

Email me at lovestochat@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

My name is Kim Allen, and this is the Loves to Chat Podcast. On the Loves to Chat Podcast, we're gonna be talking about the hopes and dreams we have for our lives as kids, and how it'll turn about as adults in the lives we currently live today. There's a lot of unexpected things that happen. There's excitement, joy, contention, grief, hardship, and funny. Then we're gonna talk about this room of life that we find ourselves in, and how we can walk alongside each other and feel a little less alone. What change will be hopefully in the case? Let's take the same. How many of the life that we want? What's the couple challenges that we face? We'll find it all here together on this podcast. If you're ready to have some company as you go on the grocery run, wash the dishes, commute to work if you still do that. Wherever you find yourself, let's chat. When I think back on how I spent my free time as a kid, I was involved in a lot of activities. Some of them included Girl Scouts, soccer, cheerleading, basketball, softball, band. And as I got older, the activities started to require longer time commitments than they did when we were in elementary school, for example. As we hit middle school and then later in high school, the commitments just grew. In elementary school, all of our sports were recreational. So we could go to school, play all of our favorite games at recess, have art class, music, PE, but the older we got, we began having to choose. I remember the first big one for me was this. What would be my fall sport? I always did soccer and cheerleading. At school, I was a cheerleader, but in our rec league, I played soccer. I was able to do both, and my life as a kid was set up to accommodate doing both. And it was a great time, let me tell you. But homework and academic demands increased, and then so did school sports. Suddenly, the time commitment was long practices, games during the week, and it just wasn't possible to manage it all. Plus, the rec teams that we had grown up with, the teammates that we grew up playing with, like, all of that just stopped after middle school. High school came, and it was time to get serious. Make a choice. So I chose cheerleading. No regrets. Well, okay, maybe that like one-time junior year, but you know what I mean. Ultimately, I feel like I made the right choice for me. But that was just the first of many choices. What used to be specials were now called electives. And while the offerings became broader, the number of options we could select stayed minimal. And some things conflicted with others. Would I choose band or art? I chose art. Just like that, I was already leaving behind two major activities. I was leaving behind soccer, and I was leaving behind playing flute. I'd otherwise been doing both of them for years. But it was time to get serious. Do y'all remember this time? I hadn't really thought about it for a while, but that was a really pivotal time, that transition into high school, that transition into everything getting serious. And we had to leave some things behind. Some of them we picked back up later, but some of them were left behind forever like a sad character in Toy Story. We were starting to envision our adulthood and our activities were now being examined from a new lens. Do I see myself pursuing this professionally? Can I make money doing this? Am I good enough to be the best? A top performer? I spent high school considering if my art was good enough to get into art school, and then later, would it be good enough to get into galleries? Could I be a professional artist? I also questioned would I continue to develop my skills as a cheerleader? Would I cheer in college? Could I later become a UCA or NCA cheerleader? The same questions popcorned around all of us about our academics, too. Depending on which subjects we were proficient in, that started to crack the door open for certain careers. If we were going to go to college, we had to start considering what major we would choose, what would be our specialty? If we were really getting skilled in a vocation, then that path started to open up towards an apprenticeship or a career straight out of high school. How young were we when we were first asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? What a weighty question for a five-year-old. Because that's about when it starts, right? Kindergarten, what do you want to be when you grow up? If I'm assuming positive intent, I think the goal here was just to help us dream, to imagine, to get creative, to think about how cool it would be when we were grown-ups. But in some ways, it started a really exhausting and anxiety-inducing thought pattern of always feeling responsible for figuring out our entire futures. Wow. Like what a thing to put on a person. What used to be a question of what would be fun? transitioned into how will this pan out in my future? What will I be able to make of this? And I think many of us have been stuck there for a really long time. I think that's why there's been such a dramatic shwing. There's been such a dramatic swing these past few years towards re-engaging in hobbies just for the fun of it. Because that's what it used to be about. Having fun. Because here's a simple truth that I think we all need a reminder of from time to time. We get to have fun. We get to learn new things and spend our time enjoying something just because we feel like it, not because there's a big achievement at the end. And we don't have to stick it out just because we started or said we were doing a thing. I was at dinner with some friends when it struck me. As adults, we can lose sight of the seasonality of our hobbies and activities. It dawned on me as I was describing my focus for fun summer this year to a friend. So here's the TLDR, the too long didn't read description on fun summer. I usually hate summer. I hate it because of the sweat. I hate it because of the heat. I hate it because of the bugs. Listen, summer is not for me. I am not trying to yuck your yum for all of you who love summer. I am thrilled for you to be in your season. But for me and those like me, this is a terrible, terrible time. But let's refocus because more importantly, my beef with summer is that it always felt like summer was sold to us as the season of possibilities. Like every good thing that could happen would happen in summer. And in reality, summer has often been my least favorite time of the year, and the only one that I look back on with any sort of joy is the summer of 2005. I will promise you, you will never hear the truth of the summer of 2005. It's literally one of those you had to be there moments. Because when you have one of the greatest summers of your life, and then you start to describe it to another person, it all feels like fiction. It doesn't feel real. You had to be there. And I promise you, the summer of 2005 was the greatest summer of my entire life so far. So I've been on a mission to have fun summer. I am claiming it. This summer is the summer of fun. I'm going to do all the things that I enjoy, despite, despite the heat and the bugs and the perfusive sweating that never seems to end, I am making a conscious effort to pack my weeks with fun activities so that I can make some dag on meaningful memories and look back on summer 2026 with a smile, with joy in my heart, the same way that I do about the summer of 2005. So in my efforts to take notes on the different activities that I want to do for a fun summer, I realized that we get stuck in this cycle with our hobbies and our activities about being consistent. And one simple question struck me. Why? Why does it matter if we're consistent? Who cares if we paint for three months and then not again for 12 months? What does it mean about us if we bake cakes for two weeks and then stop? Who is judging us if we take an acting class for six weeks and then move on to something else? The answer came to me at rapid speed. Me. I'm judging myself. Why aren't you consistent, Keila? Why can't you get it together? And when I challenged that inquiry, the answer just made me giggle. I'm not trying to go to the NBA. Like, I'm just not. Here's a little background. Okay, I come from a big basketball family. My brother and I play basketball, my dad coached, we love we love a basketball game, all basketball all the time. Could never escape it. And when you're striving to be the best basketball player, the dream is to make it to the NBA. But when we think back to those early activities we did as a child, there was a cyclical nature to them. Typically, there may have been one or two constants, but our favorite things that we love to do, we probably might still find ourselves participating in regularly now. But beyond that, we had seasons for things. Basketball season, circus camp, art club. There was a specific registration period for our for our activities, and then they took place over a set duration of time. Maybe like six weeks to three months. And then they ended. And we'd go do other things. And come back around for the next season. If we felt like it. If it was still a thing we wanted to do. That model made way for you to transition into another season of play. I specifically did soccer and cheerleading in the fall, basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring. Girl Scouts happened sometime during the school year and overlapped a bunch of those activities. And I'm sure there was other stuff happening at the same time that I just don't even remember. Why are we beating ourselves up for doing it differently now and not being consistent? I had a sport for each season. And looking back, it was such a healthy model. It taught me how to pick things up, enjoy them thoroughly, and put them back down for next time. It taught me how to plan ahead and prepare for an upcoming season. It helped me with goal setting. And now thinking back, I think it inadvertently was a protective model against burnout and ending up hating the thing that you previously thought was awesome. When you're constantly rotating between activities and exploring a variety of things, it's hard to get burnt out on something that you enjoy. When you aren't thinking about how to make something a job or how to monetize it, it gets to just truly be yours, even if you choose to share it online or share it with your friends or do it with other people. Consistency isn't the goal. It shouldn't be the goal. Enjoyment should be the goal. Because here's some real talk for you. Consistency with your hobbies isn't going to get you into the NBA. You won't win a Super Bowl ring. There isn't an Emmy Award waiting for you. So just do the things you like when you like them. Let's all stop beating ourselves up for not being consistent in our free time. I've noticed that we get a little nervous or shameful around our hobbies as adults. And it's in a way that feels very similar to middle school. You know, back when we cared so deeply about fitting in and being amongst the crowd and one of the group. And I think it's that consistency part. That's a big part of it. Like that's what keeps tripping us up. But why do we care? At my recent work retreat, there was a Dungeons and Dragons game, there was a soccer game, a makeup class hosted by me, a morning running club, and those are only the activities I can remember. But there were so many choices. So many of us raising our hands to say, Hey, I like doing this thing that's fun. Wanna come join me? And everyone was met with others who enthusiastically said, Yes, I definitely do. And isn't that how we made some of our friends in the first place? Before it all depended on where we work and who our kids are hanging out with. We would do activities, and then other people would also want to do that same activity. And all of a sudden, we were able to clearly see, hey, we have a shared interest. We would get to talking, we would spend time together and recognize, hey, I think you're really cool. We should probably be friends. That's what our hobbies can do for us. Our hobbies can bring us happiness and friendship and enjoyable ways to spend our time. And we can tap back into them whenever we want. We get to choose. We don't have to stay on a hamster wheel of knitting baby blankets for friends just because we know how to do it and we said that that was our hobby. We can put it down and pick it back up whenever we choose. So now, I ask you, is there a hobby that you've been beating yourself up about because you haven't been consistent with it? Can you release yourself from that by claiming it's just not the season for that right now? I think we should all practice that throughout this week and the upcoming moments of our life where we find ourselves being really hard on ourselves because we aren't consistent. Oh, I started doing this thing and then I stopped. Oh no, what does it mean? It's just not the season for that right now. Or maybe you just took a break, or you're in and out. All of it is allowed. Is there an activity that you'd like to pick back up? Where does it feel like the season for something new? As always, sound off in the comments. You can email d email me directly. The emails loves to chat at gmail.com. Whatever is the thing in the back of your head telling you you're not consistent. You should really stay on top of it. Release yourself from that. I'm releasing myself, and I think we owe it to ourselves to go back to just having fun. I'll catch you in the next one. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much for listening to the Loves to Chat podcast. Make sure you share this with your friends, your family, via social media, or word of mouth. Either way, I appreciate you sharing this out, listening every week, and leaving me your comments. You can listen to Loves to Chat on whatever podcast player you prefer, and you can reach out to me at lovestochat at gmail.com. I'll see you in the next one.