Taking Emotional Inventory

If you've ever had a job you know the importance of taking inventory.

If you don't take inventory you can't order properly, you sell shit you don't actually have, and it makes planning for the future impossible because you never know where you're at.

So you take inventory. It sucks. It feels so extra. But you do it because if you don't, you get fired.

Taking our emotional inventory often feels much the same way. We know we should carve out time to reflect and ask ourselves important questions:

"How do I really feel?"
"Are my actions aligned with my goals?"
"What truly makes my heart sing?"
"Am I doing this for me, or to meet other people's expectations?"
"I'm going somewhere — is it where I want to be going?"

It's easy to ignore taking emotional inventory because we have a little bit more work to finish here, or we want to get ahead on a project there. Maybe we have a pretty solid idea of what the result of sitting with our emotions might be and we don't really want to face it because it feels easier to not.

But just like inventory at our job, if we ignore it, it's going to bite us in the ass at some point and when it does, it's going to hurt way more, and take more time, energy, and effort to correct than it would have if we would have simply gotten ahead of the game.

So take some time out today. Take your emotional inventory. Turn it into a regular thing to be celebrated and not something to be ignored and feared. You deserve it.