New Leanne Is On A Phased Return

This September, I’m trying something different with the whole “new season, new me” thing.

This September, I’m trying something different with the whole “new season, new me” thing.

I think I’ve spent the last couple of weeks preparing for the arrival of a woman who doesn’t technically exist yet.

I’ve cleaned the cupboards, packed away the swimming pool, sorted the garden, got everything ready for school and, as of today, even the bloody weather has changed. It’s about ten degrees cooler, the rain is coming and after what feels like approximately seven years of summer, there’s suddenly that definite change in the air.

I’ve essentially prepared the premises for her arrival.

New Leanne™.

Apparently she’s moving in this autumn and I’ve made sure everything is ready for her.

I know January gets all the attention when it comes to starting again, but I’ve always thought September feels much more like a new beginning. Maybe it’s years of school conditioning, but there’s something about the end of summer that makes me want to buy a notebook, sort my life out and decide that from this point onwards I will obviously be a person who is organised at all times.

This year I’ve taken it particularly seriously.

I should probably introduce you to October Leanne.

She gets up at 6am. She does her Six Minute Diary, followed by twenty minutes of yoga. She’s going to experiment with some fasting days around her cycle, meal prep on Sundays and use the Turbo Cuisine to make getting a decent dinner on the table easier during the week.

Once the children are fully back at school, she’ll have three solid hours for work. Monday will be her main homework day, there’s another project starting that she needs to make space for, and somehow she’s also going to smash out a late-afternoon workout while dinner is cooking.

She’ll be in bed with a book by 9.30.

Oh, and she’s not drinking until Christmas.

She sounds exhausting when I list it all like that.

The thing is, I actually want to do all of it.

This isn’t one of those routines I’ve seen online and decided I need to copy because some woman on Instagram gets up at 4.45am and has already meditated, exercised and made homemade granola before the rest of us have located our left slipper. These are mostly things I already know work for me. I like getting up early. Yoga makes me feel better. I want more time to read. Meal prepping makes the week easier. I want proper work time again and I’m ready to get back into a more regular exercise routine.

I’ve even started some of it already. The new diary came out this week, rather than sitting in a drawer waiting for some imaginary perfect Monday, and getting the house and garden sorted has been deliberate too. I know myself well enough to know that if there are cupboards to sort, summer stuff everywhere and jobs staring at me from every corner, I’ll find it very difficult to concentrate on anything else.

The truth is, I know planning works for me. That’s partly why I’ve spent the last few weeks getting everything else sorted. I’ve been deliberately clearing some of that background noise because once the children start going back, I want some of that time and headspace back for me.

And I’ll be using my Plan By Energy™ Planner through September too, but probably slightly differently than I might have done before.

Rather than sitting down and planning the finished version of my new routine, I want to use it while I’m figuring the routine out. What energy have I actually got? What fits this week? What am I adding next? What sounded like a brilliant idea last Sunday but is already doing my head in by Wednesday?

Because the planning isn’t the problem.

Planning for a version of myself I haven’t actually met yet might be.

The children go back to school on Tuesday after fifteen weeks at home.

Fifteen.

I absolutely love summer. It’s my favourite season, and as tiring as these holidays have been, there’s another part of me that doesn’t want them to end. My children are still small. They want to be with me. They want Mummy involved in everything, all day, every day — which admittedly has tested the limits of how much one person can hear the word “Mummy” without developing a twitch — but I know this bit of our life is precious and it isn’t going to last forever.

So I’m sad to see it go.

And at exactly the same time, I am so ready for Tuesday.

I’m ready for a routine. I’m ready for a quiet house. I’m ready to know what day of the week it is again. I’m ready for cooler mornings and proper work hours and the general feeling that life has some sort of structure to it.

But the funny thing is, the children don’t go back on Tuesday and immediately return to their full routine.

They have a settling-in period.

Their hours build gradually through September and they won’t be completely back to normal school hours until October. Nobody expects them to walk through the gates after fifteen weeks off and immediately pick up exactly where they left off in June.

And somewhere between packing away the swimming pool and planning the life of this extremely efficient woman who apparently goes to bed at 9.30 every night, I thought:

Maybe I need a settling-in period too.

Because I know exactly what I would normally do.

The children would go back on Tuesday and in my head that would mean summer was officially over. I’d want the 6am starts, the yoga, the workouts, the food, the work routine, the meal prep and everything else to start at the same time.

And if I managed it for a week, brilliant.

But if half of it disappeared by week two, I’d probably assume the new routine wasn’t working.

This time, I want to see what happens if I don’t ask myself to arrive on day one as the finished version.

I’ve got the whole of September.

So instead of starting everything on Tuesday, I’m going to add a couple of things at a time. Some have already started. A few more can come in next week. Then I can see what actually works when the children are back, what fits around my real work hours, where exercise naturally belongs and whether Sunday meal prep is quite as appealing when Sunday actually arrives.

Because that’s the bit you can’t really know when you’re sitting down making the plan. Something can look completely reasonable on paper and be an absolute pain in the arse in real life.

And maybe that’s where I’ve gone wrong with “starting again” in the past. I’ve decided what the new routine is supposed to look like before I’ve actually lived it.

January is probably the best example. We come out of Christmas and immediately decide that on the first available Monday we’re going to eat differently, move differently, sleep differently, work differently and generally conduct ourselves like someone who wasn’t eating leftover Christmas chocolate in her pyjamas four days earlier.

Then we’re surprised when it feels like a lot.

I think that’s why September feels different to me this year. I’m still using that lovely new start feeling — because I genuinely enjoy it — but I’m not treating it like a starting gun.

September can be the month I try things out.

Maybe the 6am mornings slot straight back in. Maybe they don’t. Perhaps twenty minutes of yoga every morning becomes ten minutes some days. Maybe the late-afternoon workout works brilliantly while dinner is in the Turbo Cuisine, or maybe I discover that by late afternoon I would rather launch a dumbbell through the window than pick one up.

I’ll find out.

And that’s quite different from deciding in advance that if I don’t follow the routine exactly as I imagined it, I’ve failed at it.

I think I’m finally realising that a reset doesn’t have to mean wiping everything clean and beginning again. I’m not actually starting from scratch anyway. I’m taking things I already know about myself, trying some new things, bringing old routines back and seeing how they fit the life I have now.

Even the seasons don’t change as neatly as we pretend they do. Yesterday still felt like summer. Today it’s cooler and raining. The pool’s gone, but it doesn’t suddenly mean we’re in the middle of autumn.

We’re somewhere in between.

Maybe September can be that for me too.

So yes, I have plans for October Leanne. Quite a lot of them, apparently.

But maybe October will be the official arrival of the newest version of Leanne.

I just don’t know exactly what she looks like yet.

And for once, I’m not going to decide for her.

I’ve got September to figure that out.

Until then, she’s on a phased return.

Leanne