As I’m nearing my 50s, I realize now that if I had just listened to her in my 30s, my 40s would have been completely different.

As I sat there in the thin blue gown, my feet rested on the cold metal tray. The paper covering the bench crumpled and split beneath me as I shifted slightly trying to get a little bit more comfortable. Just as I started drifting off, the door opened quickly bringing me back to reality as my doctor walked in. She pulled up my electronic chart where she had just received the results from my heart monitor test and blood work. We were trying to figure out the slew of strange symptoms that I felt like I was too young to be experiencing. Complete & utter exhaustion, heart palpitations, swollen ankles, irritability, unexplained weight gain, stomach issues, shortness of breath, just to name a few. Most symptoms on their own are easily written off but I was in my 30s not my 70s for crying out loud! 

I remember the discussion like it was...

Hi, we are Katie & Lynn and we are recovering over-committers.

We spent our entire adult life, and if we are being real honest as early as our teen years, overcommitting to things. We continually accepted more projects than we should. Our hobbies started as things we loved, but quickly turned into side hustles adding more commitments and eating up more unavailable time. We took on the "turn around" teams, even when we knew it wasn't a good fit. And we kept starting/taking on new corporate initiatives framed as "unique opportunities" thinking they would help us get ahead. We were master multitaskers and we did it all with a smile on our faces, even if our home life was filled with shit... literally. My boss was shocked the day I called to let him know I was working from home for an afternoon because I had an insurance inspector coming to the house. He had no idea that two weeks prior my finished basement had a city sewer backup into it and we had to essentially move a soggy...

Overcommitting is impacting your life, but not in the way you intended.

We have been there, completely stressed and overcommitted. Sitting on the couch at midnight, rewinding, yet again, the latest Netflix craze that is automatically playing in the background as we pound away on our keyboard planning forecasts for the new year, setting team quotas, rejecting and approving account trades and accepting the next 3 interviews that were just dropped into your calendar for tomorrow afternoon. And you still have to prep for the morning, take the dogs out, do the dishes and research a perfect spot for the girls night dinner this week. Not to mention the piles of laundry still left unfolded, and the holiday decorations that may not come down until March (if you're lucky).

So often we overcommit because we have a hard time saying no, letting people down, or thinking taking on just one more project or commitment is going to help gain favor in our career or...

We had no idea how we were sabotaging our relationships when we were just "working hard" to be successful.

Here we were again, texting "Finding parking now, be right there"... a message we could have put into a keyboard shortcut because we'd sent it so often. We were once again running "just a little behind", completely stressed out, blaming parking for why we were literally running in heals down an icy Chicago sidewalk because our friend had been waiting alone at the bar of a crowded downtown restaurant for over 30 minutes. But to be honest, it had nothing to do with parking, it wasn't even that we had left the office at the same time we were supposed to meet her. We were doing it AGAIN, a consistent pattern we started to recognize and neither of us was ok with any longer. 

We've all heard that old adage "You can't find the solution from the same thinking that created the...