The past six weeks have been a roller coaster. My husband and I took a two week Nordic vacation, spent the following two weeks packing and painting our apartment so we could move to a new one, spent Labor Day weekend at my parents' new dream house, and spent the following weekend wedding dress shopping for my younger sister.

It is difficult to maintain structure and work from home when you're either not home at all or packing your home up to move.

As taxing as these past few weeks have been, they've also given me some clarity. I was forced to think differently about how I've been working and the plans I had laid out. From the beginning, I had a clear outline of the sequence of events to open Hazel & Rose, but as I executed some of those tasks, certain things didn't remain as clear as they used to.

As I spent time working on a specific project, I began to feel fatigued. At first, I tried to push it aside because I assumed it was fear creeping in, and I was not going to let fear stop me from moving forward. But once I recognized the fatigue, addressed it, and still continued to feel it, I paused to figure out what was really going on. 

For the first time since I started this venture, I felt like I was doing something because I "had" to, not because I wanted to. I'm not saying I never expected tasks that I don't like - taxes will be unavoidable, after all - but when I thought about thewhy, this project wasn't the only how. It was the how that I had initially planned, but it didn't need to be, and I was continuing down a path that I wasn't excited about. More troubling, it was a path that, the longer I took, the further all other steps were delayed and the later my store would open - not great. 

So, I decided to make a change. I knew that the amount of work I would have put into that project would not have been worth the end result - not yet, anyway. And Hazel & Rose is not about doing things half-heartedly. Things don't need to be perfect, but they do need to come with my full attention and energy, and that can't be faked.

This marks the first time (likely the first of many) that I am changing course. I am still going to reach my end goal of opening a store when I want it to open, but I'm doing so in a different way than I initially intended, and that's ok. It's ok to walk away from a project if it's not the right project anymore, and that happens. I have finished projects for the sake of finishing them, even if it didn't feel right, or the impact would have been greater had I done something else, and I'm not going to work that way anymore. 

Have you ever changed course? What prompted you to make a change?