Aiming for Less to Allow for More

My dear friends,

The world around us seems obsessed with always achieving more: more productivity, more content, more followers, more visibility, and more significance.

But what if instead of aiming to achieve more, we design our lives, organizations, and environments to allow for more: more creativity, more focus, more clarity, more connection, more presence, more vitality, and more wholeness.

What if to allow for more, we need to aim for less: less pressure, less intensity, less noise, less clutter, and less rigidity.

What if to allow for more, we need to design for spaciousness, flexibility, freedom, and systems that support actual human rhythms rather than uphold fixed linear output structures.

Underneath the obsession to achieve more lies a deeply embedded fear-based system rooted in the fear of not having enough, and the fear of not being enough.

This is all to feed our most basic human need for safety. When operating in this fear-based system, we hold on to the belief that once we have enough and prove that we are enough, then we will be safe. Then we can exhale. Then we can rest.

But as we all know, the genuine safety, exhale, and rest never come.

The system is designed to keep feeding the same fears that it relies on for survival. There is always one more area you need to “fix,” one more way you are falling behind, one more way you are not measuring up, one more goalpost you haven’t met. It is endless, especially for women.

This is the trap that contributes to chronic exhaustion, burnout, a host of mental and physical health conditions, and the inability to feel aliveness and allow for healthy growth and creativity to flourish.

We become survival adaptations of ourselves, rather than living in alignment with who we truly are and what we are here to create, share, and enjoy with the world.

To allow for natural expansion and the most aligned expression of who we are, we need to begin with safety.

And real, lasting safety is only found in something I’ve said many times in these letters: within ourselves.

When we feel safe with ourselves, we start caring less about achieving the moving goalposts set by society and focus more on allowing our genuine alignment to unfold.

Oddly enough, that is also when we start to expand and even “achieve” more long-term. With this orientation, “achievement” becomes a byproduct of nourished, aligned living, rather than the result of an anemic and exhausted one.

It is rather striking how seeking to achieve more from the lack of internal safety can lead to chronic burnout, anxiety, and a lot of suffering, while allowing for safety can lead to unimaginable creativity and advancements that energize and fuel us further.

It makes you wonder: if this is how we are designed to flourish, why is so much of the world set up to contradict it and pull us away from ourselves?

Could it be that human flourishing is not actually the main objective of most of our organizations and systems?

If so, what are we even doing here in this one very temporary existence of ours if we are not here to flourish and help one another do so as well?

I’ll leave these questions for us to ponder on for future letters.

For now, I hope you’ll remember to focus on allowing more space for you and your nervous system to exhale this summer. Rest, breathe, and let yourself be. Your body will thank you, and so will your future self.

Let your next steps emerge from a calm mind, a rested body, and the whispers of your soul that knows exactly why you are here and what will delight you most.

May more internal safety, ease, peace, and trust continue to take root in your life,

May you start aiming for less and allowing for more to naturally unfold for you,

And may you truly thrive.

With love,

Maliheh