Joanna Martin

When there's too much to do.
Dance.

I know that sounds flippant, but it really isn't.

When the list is too long, the decisions won't stop coming, and you've been holding everyone else together all week, your nervous system doesn't need another strategy. It needs to move.

So before you open one more tab, or write one more email, or solve one more problem that isn't actually yours to solve...

Put a song on. Move your body. Even for three minutes.

It resets something. Every time.

What's your go-to song when you need to shift your state?

Drop it in the comments...I'll see if it's on my playlist ahead of One Woman Conference.

It's been one of those weeks.

I've flown back into the UK. We're planning our annual conference, still delivering live trainings. And the rest of life doesn't pause for any of that, does it? Friends need you. Kids need you. Partners have their own stuff going on.

My go-to when it all stacks up? I close the office door, turn the music up loud, and dance.
Badly. To embarrassingly good pop songs. Sometimes with the kids. They're completely unselfconscious about it in a way I find genuinely inspiring.

I know it sounds daft. But moving your body when your brain is at capacity is one of the fastest resets I know. And here's the thing, it's not productive. There's nothing to show for it. That's actually why it works. It's the one thing in your day that isn't for anyone else, isn't ticking a box, isn't an achievement.

Just joy. For its own sake.

Do you have something like that? A little practice that shouldn't work but absolutely does? Tell me in the comments, I'd love to know.

I want to tell you something about the room at One Woman Conference that I don't think we talk about enough.

Most rooms in your life are filtered. By age, by career stage, by life shape. Even your closest friendships, when you actually look at them, are more uniform than they feel.
Conference is one of the few places I know where that doesn't apply.

On 13th and 14th June in London, you'll be in the coffee queue next to a woman who has never heard of us before. She said yes to a weekend and she's not quite sure why. She doesn't know what she's walked into yet.

You'll have lunch with a woman who has been coming for years. Who can tell you exactly how it actually went when she did the thing you're considering doing, if you ask.
And you'll sit in a row with a 28-year-old in her first proper job, a 52-year-old running a department of two hundred people, a woman who has just been widowed, and a woman who has just decided to start again. All on the same afternoon.

The woman three years ahead of you and the woman three years behind you, both within arm's reach.

What happens in that mix is its own thing.

Here's what unifies the whole room. Every woman there has come because she wants the world to be better. That's the through-line. You stop having to explain why you give a damn. Everyone gives a damn. It's the baseline.

There is something the soul does when it's in a room like that. I don't have a tidy phrase for it. But you feel it when you walk in.

If you've been wondering what the weekend actually is, that's the truest answer I can give.

Comment DECISION and I'll send you all the details. 13th and 14th June, Hilton Bankside, London.

Putting off an unimportant task isn't procrastination.
That's prioritisation.

We've borrowed a word from productivity culture and turned it into a way to feel bad about ourselves.

Before you call yourself a procrastinator, ask: is this task actually important right now?
Sometimes the answer is no. And that's not a character flaw. That's wisdom.

What's something you've "let yourself off the hook" about recently that was actually the right call?

What's the real cost of another year of this?

Not the event ticket. I mean the cost of keeping going the way you've been going.

Holding everything together. Being the one everyone else relies on. And never, not once, prioritising the space to sort yourself out.

I'm not exaggerating when I say I've seen women turn a corner at this conference. Not because the content is magic. Because they finally gave themselves two days to actually land in their own lives.

There are still some seats left for 13th and 14th June in London.

I'd love to see you there.

A while back I was all set to film content. Hair done, studio booked. And I just... couldn't.

My first instinct was to tell myself I was procrastinating. But I wasn't. I was exhausted. And pushing through would have been the worst thing I could have done.

If you've got a task that keeps not happening, I'd love you to read this before you give yourself a hard time about it.

Link in the comments.

"A real, grounded, magical and above all different approach to life."
That's what Bonny walked away with.

Not a notebook full of theory. Not another thing to implement on a Monday morning.
Something that actually moved inside her.

One Woman Conference. 13–14 June, London.

Comment SEAT and I'll send you all the details