And just like that I switched on the hot water at 3:30pm on a Thursday afternoon. It was raining that fine mist spray.

“I need an afternoon bath”. I’d just said to my partner.

A comment that would have him looking confused and quizzical 5 years ago and now he’s come to see this is just me.

I’ll wear runners with dresses. Stop working in the middle of the day to have a bath because I’m feeling stressed and stuck. Unashamedly watch rom-coms back to back and scoff microwave popcorn whilst doing so.

It’s often the littler things like taking a bath in the middle of the day that we can *almost* wrap our heads around.

Even if you were a bit confused or put off by my opening sentences, by now you’ve reasoned and justified.

You’ve called it “self-care” and acknowledged that it’s necessary.

But what about the bigger stuff?

The telling your boss that you actually don’t like going to external meetings and would much rather run the data processing team. (Even though she’s come to rely on you to attend all the meetings on her behalf).

Or telling your bestie you’d actually much rather stay home, not drink, and crawl into bed at 8pm instead of going out. (Even if “going out” is still somewhat “virtual”).

Or enrolling in that architecture course because you’ve always loved the idea of design yet somehow ended up in a science lab. It doesn’t “make sense” but it just feels good.

There’s so many areas of our lives that we hold back on the bigger stuff because we don’t have that easy go-to rationalisation.

We can’t position the request from within with a “self-care” label and be done with it.

So we hold back. Resist the change. Justify why now’s not the right time, place, or hemisphere to be thinking about it.

In this week’s podcast conversation with Denise Duffield Thomas she talked about how we hold ourselves back from what we really truly want because we don’t think we’re “allowed” to have it.

We feel guilty for imagining ourselves somewhere different and stop ourselves before we’ve even started.

I’m not sure I would have always had a mid-afternoon bath on a weekday when there was still “lots” of work to “get done”.

But I do know from the moment I started saying YES to what would make me happy, everything else started to change. It was the seemingly small domino that I tapped, cascading all the rest.

And now I find it easy to say yes to the big things too. I’m not afraid to reach out and ask for what I want. Because I know that feeling good is powerful.

If you’ve been feeling even a tiny bit guilty about your joy, you need to listen to the episodes on the podcast this week. In Episode 63 I share more about what I call “joy guilt” and in Episode 64 Denise’s practical, loving, and simultaneously butt-kicking stories and advice will have you feeling ready and able to transform any resistance you’re feeling right now.

It’s time to say yes to the big things ?