July 17: Wisdom Wednesday

Good morning beautiful people! 🙂

Rise and gift the world with your amazingness! ☀️ ✨

So today I am going to share 7 of my favorite quotes from the book “Someday is Not a Day of the Week” by Sam Horn.

I really love this book, and I enjoyed reading it because it speaks to my current “golden cage” situation. I love that it has a bias for action and that it nudges you to do something that will make your heart beat faster, now.

~ ~ oOo ~ ~

1. The mark of a successful organization (I swapped this for “person”) isn’t whether it has problems, it’s whether it has the same problems it had last year.
2. The question you should be asking isn’t “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”.
3. Clutter is simply delayed decisions.
4. Anxiety is a sign you’re confronting the potential of your own development. Do what makes you anxious, not what makes you depressed.
5. When we focus on what we don’t want, that’s what we’re going to get.
6. Instead of allowing that to define and defeat her [or me/you], she did one thing differently to improve the quality of her life.
7. One way to hack fears is to realize they don’t prevent things from going wrong, they prevent things from going right.

~ ~ oOo ~ ~

This book is full of encouragement & motivation on every page but perhaps my favorite line is: “What is one thing you can do this week to improve your situation?“.

So often I focus on the cage and what’s outside that cage to the exclusion of the space within. This book encourages the reader to do something (and there is always something!) that makes your heart sing – this week! I ❤ that there’s a timeframe to it because it forces our brains to focus on an action item that we can do asap.  Often, a small act of improvement is enough to create a ripple-effect of positivity in our lives.

Here’s something that I’d like to leave you guys with, I hope it blesses you as much as it did me 🙂

 

Seize the day!  ❤ ❤

Hunkering Down: Learning the Indonesian Language Week 1

So after this realization, I decided to dedicate 1 month to each goal.

This doesn’t mean that everything must be wrapped up and neatly tied with a bow by the end of the month. This is just to make sure I give each about 20+ weekdays of undiluted attention during which I put all my other goals on hold.

If a goal resonates, and I decide I want to spend more time with it, I will for as long as I need to. If a goal doesn’t resonate, then I will feel no guilt putting it away by month’s end knowing that I gave it a fair shot.

Let’s do this! 💪

I decided to dedicate July to goal #1, learn the Indonesian language. Here’s an overview of how the 1st week went:

Day 1

After weeks of neglect, I resumed with lesson 46. Focusing is difficult because I have ideas about my other goals and I have to exert willpower to bring my mind back to the day’s lesson.

Day 2

Moved on to lesson 47. Started to ask myself how else I could reinforce my learning. Dusted off an old edition elementary school workbook that I found on bargain a long, long time ago and proceeded to werk.

After 2 pages, looked for and found a podcast about language learning on which I heard Benny Lewis say that he didn’t need to speak the new language perfectly, he just needed to be able to communicate in it (or something like that).

Perfect! That’s what I want too.

What is coach surfing? 🤔

Enrolled in Benny Lewis’ 1 week email course : “Speak in a Week”.

Day 3

Woke up at 6AM with the intention to do some reading in my target language while everyone else was still asleep.

I worked on my new diamond painting project instead, and I wasn’t even aware that I made the switch! 😫

Plodded through lesson 48, midway, I was typing in my credit card details with 4 items for check-out in my online shopping cart. 😫😫

Day 4

I decided that if something was driving me to shop online when I had no need to, then I needed to take a step back from this and re-group.

Found a local TV program about arts & crafts, enjoyed it so much, and wrote down some new vocabulary.  Finally. Score! 😃

Day 5

I sat down for the day’s lesson but found myself watching a YouTube video about the 10 people who hate Megan Markle instead  😲😲

Good Lord, I have never sunk so low!

Decided to redeem my dignity by watching the local arts & crafts program again with notebook and pen in hand. Hmmm … decoupage looks like something I could get into. 🤩Noted!

😵😵😵

Week 1 Conclusion:

I’m really struggling with this. Maybe the language classes I bought is no longer engaging because at this level, I’m bombarded with words that are not common to everyday conversation. Then there’s grammar … 🤢

The local TV program helped because it was interesting and it’s training my ears to how Indonesian is actually spoken. I am happy when I am able to make out words, even those that I don’t know the meaning of 😀 I then write these down and note their meanings.

The old schoolbook also helps. Somewhat.

Here’s hoping week 2 will go much better.

Not This Year

When I was still climbing the career ladder I was a very goal oriented employee. I would reverse engineer the annual performance review by picking out in advance the areas I wanted to stand out in, and proceeded to take on the shiniest projects that would showcase my excellence in those areas.

I had this system so well down pat that when I became a housewife I experienced some sort of crisis. It felt like I was let loose all of a sudden and all that freedom was just confusing, I didn’t know what to do with it.

For maybe a year or two I had a notebook and pen and wrote down monthly goals such as “learn to cook 2 new recipes”, or “learn to knit beginner’s level”, or “lose X number of lbs”.

But there was no annual review to prepare for, no boss to wow, no gold stars to earn & show-off on my imaginary wall of fame that I slipped into nonchalance. I set vague goals that I forgot the following week. Or, I didn’t follow through, or I list so many that I overwhelm myself into catatonia all the while thinking that I have all the time in world to do them anyway.

Lately though I have become conscious of it and I do not like it. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I’m not even showing up for myself. I say I will do something but I don’t even honor my word.

So I went back to my notebook, looked at the goals I set for this year and decided to re-commit. It’s not yet too late, I can still hunker down and make a dash for the finish line.

My goals for this year were/are:

1.  lose post-pregnancy weight – but I didn’t specify how much and how to do it (because, who cares except me, right?)
2.  learn Indonesian – I bought an online course & some books that are now just gathering dust in some nondescript drawer
3. start a separate blog dedicated to crafting – I did partially discuss this here, but I failed to clarify that I wanted a separate, topic specific blog because I want to do something with it later

I still wrote down a couple or 3 more but that’s just my sneaky brain trying to overwhelm me again and disperse my focus.

I am deciding to take deliberate action on these goals for the remaining 6 months so that at the end of 2018 I will have finished the things I set out to do. This matters because I don’t want to have to do them again next year, I want to create space for new goals in 2019.

And perhaps, even more importantly, I don’t want to excel at quitting, I want to excel at staying committed.

 

Photo by han song on Unsplash

This Is How A Perfectionist/Procrastinator Goes Back to Exercising

I probably had my mouth agape while sleeping last night. And I probably was snoring. And it seems like I was stuck in place like an immobile statue to the bed. And I am aching all over. It’s especially brutal when I go down the stairs.

Whatever!

I’ve put it off for long enough …

I am finally exercising again! (Squeal!)  🤗 🤗 🤗

I didn’t think it would be such a feat, but now that I think about it, my worrying about what to wear, where to exercise, how to exercise, how long to exercise, how often … that was just the perfectionist me procrastinating. I didn’t get it at first because I love to exercise. And I have no problem doing it at home. But I guess the body is a sneaky little thing, it likes to be lazy.

Well, lazy won’t get rid of my kangaroo pouch 😤 I’ve lost some post-baby weight already but, this pouch out front that’s just ruining my silhouette, it won’t go away without some deliberate physical activity.

First I had to get me a drill sergeant whose role was to tell me motivation started with getting off my fat ass 💥 (she actually said it like that!) and that, if it’s proving to be such a gargantuan effort to do something, that I should just start with blocking off the time. It didn’t matter if all I did was walk in place. Just honor that time as exercise time. Rinse and repeat until momentum builds up.

Well that’s what I did but the standing in place was a 5 min warm-up video by my favorite exercise team Daniel & Kelli, because as I stood there I thought “might as well”. And I followed that with a 5 minute cool down video because, having already warmed up I thought, “might as well”.

I allowed the first couple of days to not be perfect. To spend time tweaking stuff including creating a routine that would include feeding time for my baby. By Friday I had it down pat 👏 Which brings us to today’s glorious muscle soreness 🤩, proof that all I needed was to start where I was and improve from there.

So what’s the lesson here?

For fellow perfectionists/procrastinators it is this:

1. Get a coach/cheerleader/drill sergeant (whatever works) to motivate you because it really starts with your head. And if there’s nobody in your life that fits the bill (or you don’t want to spend the money) there are podcasts. I first had to sift through a few podcasts before I found Corinne, and her no-bs style of telling it like it is was just the kick in the arse I needed.
2. If necessary, start ridiculously small. So small that you tell yourself, “Oh what the heck, I can do more than that”.
3. Keep doing it and build on from there. You’re looking good, sexy thing! 🤩