Motivational

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Slaying Your Demons

What I’m talking about here are our inner demons, soul sucking situations, and the self defeating circumstances we have boxed ourselves into. And let’s also include the people in our lives that are the enemies of our self esteem and peace of mind.

The Arabic saying is….”Should you sit in your doorway long enough… you will see the bodies of all your enemies carried past you….”

So, what do these quotes actually really mean? I don’t know. But I, for one, am tired of waiting. What about you? Are you tired of waiting? Let’s get proactive!  Today let’s actually do something! Let’s do some inner and outer head hunting.

Let’s kick some ass and take some names… which means having multiple victories over a number of opponents in quick succession, with a pace showing that this feat is not over yet. “kicking ass” means completely conquering an opponent, usually to a humiliating level, basically “kicking their ass”.

On the other hand, “taking names” refers to marking a number of individuals which have not been beaten yet, to be beaten later. It derives from the mafia, as taking names of future victims helps in finding more information and keeping track of them.

With that in mind… let’s do some name taking first. Who are your inner demons? What are your soul sucking situations? And lets add in the names of the people in our lives that definitely need to back off or go away. Here are some of mine:

  • Dread
  • Resistance
  • Procrastination
  • Avoidance
  • I Should (as opposed to I could)
  • Anxiety
  • Paralysis
  • Negative Self Talk
  • Self Defeating Behavior

Here’s an example…

When I have to do something that seems hard and not fun on any level, I PROCRASTINATE the doing of it, and spend a large amount of time catering to DREAD and RESISTANCE, and having ANXIETY because I am AVOIDING what I SHOULD be doing, which inevitably leads me into a state of PARALYSIS during which I sit and stare at my phone or the television and BERATE myself for doing nothing, all the while, dreading, resisting, and procrastinating whatever it is that I think I should be doing that I’m not doing.

However:

I will say that I also get a huge payoff from that behavior because after a certain amount of sitting and doing nothing, I can usually distract myself with an art project or my website. My best art usually happens when I’m busily  avoiding and resisting practical life stuff.

My website, including this project, is a direct result of me resisting and procrastinating stuff that wasn’t getting done 5 years ago, and still isn’t getting done today.

I think this will clearly require some more thought. I absolutely do not want to sacrifice my creative projects on the altar of practical day to day chores and bullshit. There has to be a way to preserve my pay off while actively working towards a better quality of life. What about you? What’s your pay off?

So… Kicking Ass…

Today I’m going to tackle at least one of my demons. I’m going to hit the procrastination demon head on and stop putting off my household chores and exercise plan. Right now. I’m going to just do that stuff. All the stuff on my to do list that I’m wanting to put off till later (or never) are going to get done today. Hell or high water. I’m going to rush through it… do a blitz attack.. and then sink back into something creative and interesting.

In my mind, it looks like this:

The reality will probably be more like this:

What about you? What are your demons? Where is your pay off? Is there just one thing you can have a “come to Jesus” moment with today? What is it? And what are you waiting for?

Just Do It!

Remember, we don’t have to win the war today, but we can at least win a battle and maybe even gain a tactical advantage!

You Got This!

Knowledge and self-confidence can be used to turn your weaknesses into strengths. A true warrior is someone who fights for his or her own self-mastery. Here are some tips:

  • Know yourself.
  • Face your fears head on.
  • True victory is victory over yourself.
  • Always strive to be better today than you were yesterday.
  • Be secure in both your strengths and your weaknesses.

It is the inner warrior that allows you to be brave and take risks in unfamiliar situations. Cultivate your inner warrior by seeking out opportunities to express your true self; to be who you really are; and to be the person you want to be instead of the person you are expected to be.

My Hero

Here’s a great suggestion for dealing with or resolving problems and situations that feel impossible and overwhelming.

  • Pretend to be your hero.

When you’re faced with a challenging situation, an intimidating project, a new career leap, an important meeting, think about a hero. Someone you have a lot of respect for, someone with experience in dealing with similar situations and problems. Then ask yourself what this person would do in your situation. How would they handle it?

Now imagine yourself doing exactly what you think your hero would do. This helps to clarify what the right actions are for you by removing the self-doubt and negative self-talk that can bog you down in uncertainty.

Don’t have a particular person in mind? Can’t come up with a hero that you would or could emulate? No problem. Play the “If I was” game.

It goes like this… “If I was the most … the best … the legendary …”  Imagine what that might look like for you. Enjoy a moment of your epic greatness, then ask yourself, “So, now what could I do and how could I go about doing it?” And then (this is important) actually do that thing!

I did this a lot back in the day when I was a full time dog trainer. Sometimes I’d have an impossible dog but since I’m particularly stubborn, I wouldn’t give up… I’d maybe take a day or two off to think, and if all else failed I’d do the “fake it till you make it” ploy. It went like this:

If I was the best dog trainer in the world, the all time most famous and most knowledgeable trainer of dogs… legendary in the dog training world… what would I do? And then I would go forth “as if” and it always got me through.

So let’s just do it… the hardest most challenging aspect of self care… that one thing that we’ve been avoiding or dreading… channel your inner hero or your most respected expert in the field… and then JUST DO IT!

Maybe you need to tackle the whole shebang… maybe you just need to start the journey by heading out the door. Either way is fine. Consult your heroic self and just get started! Now is the time. Today is the day!

You got this!!

Divide and Conquer

One of the things that I’ve discovered is that, for me at least, dividing impossible stuff into smaller more manageable portions makes it more likely that I can do it. For example. As part of my “best boss ever” protocol, I’m doing a to do list for each week end. This is something I’ve done over the years and never had much success with. I write an ambitious to do list and then I do NOTHING that’s on it.

My new “to do” list is compiled with the entire weekend in mind. That way, I can put stuff off until tomorrow if I want to. I also add in rewarding and fun stuff.  Get groceries (which I really really hate to do) now looks like:

  • Make a grocery list.
  • Go to the grocery store.
  • Buy at least one decadent thing ~ wine maybe.
  • Unload groceries out of the car.
  • Put the groceries away.
  • Drink a glass of wine to take the whine out of that experience.

I also put plenty of stuff on there that I’m sure I will do, for example:

  • Drink 2 cups of coffee.
  • Relax and watch TV.
  • Go to Art Class with Layla. (I do this every Saturday, hell or high water).
  • Feed the dog.

And then there’s fun stuff that lightens my mood and gives me incentives to mark even more stuff off my list. This weekend I have:

  • Listen to music.
  • Howl at the moon.
  • Spend time with my family.

This way, I can start my weekend with stuff that’s fun and easy to mark as completed, and I don’t feel defeated or depressed by my list. Even if you aren’t a “list” person, I find that it really helps to break hard things down into smaller portions.

For me, being overwhelmed is one of the biggest reasons that I don’t get certain things done. What about you? What over whelms you? Can you divide it up into tiny little baby steps?

It’s A Meet Up

A fun fact: More than 11 million business meetings take place daily around the world, so learning which words affect the productivity and outcome of those meetings can help companies change the course of their success. Research shows that the words “yeah,” “give,” “start,” “meeting” and “discuss” have a bigger impact than other words. Furthermore, those words often result in proposals being accepted more often than others.

So what’s that got to do with anything? I thought it might be helpful to discuss the idea of having a meeting with yourself. Maybe take some time to look at your collection of “wants and needs” and give yourself an opportunity to think about how to start actually doing something practical and radically real.  Yeah us!

So lets call a Board Meeting… or maybe a Bored Meeting? I don’t know. Maybe in your world it would be Tribal Council, a Meeting of the Minds, a Parley, a Huddle, a Town Hall? Possibly even a Get Together for the purpose of Getting It Together.

What’s on the agenda in this meeting? Let’s check in with ourselves and take a look at our wants and needs. Remember how we started? The story about a teacher who had students leave notes about their needs in a box? Now, I don’t know if you have a mental list of notes, or a box with notes in them. Maybe you have a list of notes in a journal. Doesn’t matter how you keep track, what does matter is that today we’re going to schedule a specific time to sit down with that list, pick just one thing, plan some affirmative action, and then take steps to actually follow through on those plans..

I think I’m going to call for a Parley. How about you? What are you going to call your meeting and when are you planning to schedule it?

A Fresh Start?

According to Oliver Burkeman, there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Yes! He says exactly that in his Imperfectionist Newsletter. He also says, and I quote, “You have already failed.”

Say what?

The unspoken hope is that you won’t just change a few things for the better, but make a total break with the past. You’ll reboot your life, leave disorganization and procrastination behind you once and for all, and do everything differently from now on….

He goes on to say:

I’ve only more recently grasped the deeper point here, which isn’t simply that fresh starts don’t work as intended, but that there never are any fresh starts in the first place. Contrary to self-help cliché, the thing we perfectionists need to learn isn’t that we’re probably going to experience failure. It’s that we’ve already failed, totally and irredeemably.

This is liable to sound incredibly depressing, but since it’s actually fantastic news, I hope you’ll allow me to elaborate.

Behind our more strenuous attempts at personal change, there’s almost always the desire for a feeling of control. We want to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over our lives, so that we might finally feel secure and in charge, and no longer so vulnerable to events. But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion. It implies the ability to somehow stand back from or get outside of your life – which you never can, obviously, because you just are your life.

What this means, for one thing, is that the perfectionist’s fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn’t just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start, because (to mix metaphors) the years she’s already lived are water under the bridge. All the time you’ve already wasted, the people you’ve disappointed, the opportunities you failed to seize – it’s all already happened, and can never be undone.

It also means that the person attempting to leave the past behind, by making a fresh start, is one who’s been completely shaped by that past. The self you’re seeking to transform is the same one that’s doing the transforming – so you’re like Baron Munchausen, trying to pull himself out of the swamp by yanking on his own hair. You can never start life afresh, because you’re hopelessly stuck in this life; there’s no breaking through to another one in which everything’s different and better.

The reason this is so liberating, for anyone with even a hint of perfectionism, is that it means you get to give up on the exhausting struggle to take charge of your life, so as to steer it in a new direction. You get to abandon all hope of one day finding the perfect time management system – or perfect relationship, job, neighborhood, etcetera – and relax back into the inescapable chaos and muddle of the one you have.

And then – once you’re facing your real situation, not fixating on a fantasy alternative – you suddenly find yourself able to start making a few concrete improvements, here and now, unburdened by any need for those improvements to usher in a golden age of perfection. This, in my experience, is the only way personal change ever really happens: by first seeing that it’s always a matter of rebuilding the ship mid-ocean, making adjustments to a life you can’t ever take back to port or trade for another.

The American Zen teacher John Tarrant says, “freedom, waking up and fearlessness come down to the simplicity of ‘Wait a minute, what if this is it?'” When I hear such exhortations to live in the moment, the fresh-start addict in me is quite capable of turning them into perfectionistic plans, too: “From tomorrow morning, I’ll meditate every single day, and become the kind of person who lives in the moment!” But Tarrant’s point isn’t that you should live in the moment tomorrow. It’s that this is it, right now, with all its odious imperfections – the tasks that remain unaddressed, the messes that haven’t been cleared up, the enormous personality flaws that still haven’t been corrected. And it’s the only place I can ever hope to get anything meaningful done.

Ok so…

This kind of reminds me of that last charge in Lord of the Rings where Theoden King of the Rohirrim, charges down the hill in an impossible doomed to failure battle with an incredibly huge and vicious army or orcs, monsters, and bad guys of all shapes and sizes. And of course, my life isn’t any where near that dramatic or epic … most days anyway…

In years past, I might have imagined myself charging down that hill to battle my demons, my obstacles, my mistakes and misdeeds, my faults, flaws, and failures… But today, I’m looking at things a little differently. I’m thinking, “What if…”

What if, here I am, with my army at my back. My very own army of all of my good qualities, along with my many mistakes, faults, flaws, regrets, remorse, guilt, shame, mishaps, misdeeds, failures, and all the other imperfect and messy parts of me that make me human… and we’re charging down that hill to tackle the next big thing… totally unprepared… not even at all sure what we could possibly be battling…

I love this new vision…

Oh and by the way

If you haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings, or read the books, here’s a quote and a video:

“The end will not be long,” said the King, “but I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. … When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song, if any be left to sing of us hereafter.”

So now I’m feeling empowered and ready to take on the world… or at least that tiny little part of it that I think of as mine. How about you?

Heading Out

The fourth of our Five Simple Things , ” Every time you use keys, visualize they are unlocking opportunities to get you closer to your dreams.” has been difficult for me in that I rarely lock anything other than my car, and these days I’m not actually driving to very many places. So, I did think of a number of different ideas related to locks and doors.

  • See every open door as a new opportunity.
  • When you walk out the door, open your mind to new ideas.
  • Every time you walk into a room, imagine that you are walking into the best thing ever.
  • When you walk out the door, open yourself up to new opportunities.
  • When opening a jar think about opening up to new ideas, experiences, and knowledge.
  • When opening a door, think about moving forward with your goals, ideas, and/or life.
  • Every time you walk out of a door, imagine that you are walking into a grand adventure.
  • When you pick up your keys, know that within you is the key to happiness.

As you can see, I also made some stickers. Which was a lot of fun. And in the process of making them, I ended up with “Every time you walk into a door, imagine you are walking into a grand adventure, or even something wonderful.” LOL…

And then I realized that this is actually a really good idea!

We’ve all had the experience of hitting a wall… or running into a doorway that we thought would be open to us, but instead it is not… I have had this happen to me a lot!

And I thought, what if, instead of thinking it as a setback or a road block, I saw it as a grand adventure… as something wonderful? How different would my life be? And what are my current blocks? What walls have I walked into recently? And how does it feel to think of them as wonderful or grand or an adventure?

What about you? What is your grand adventure?

Thinking About The Sun

I have been thinking about the Sun a lot as we worked our way through this project, and a number of things have occurred to me.

  • We can count on the Sun. It shows up every day… on time… as expected.
  • The Sun shines on everyone, saints and sinners alike. It doesn’t matter if you are a good person, if you deserve the sunshine, or if you are a terrible person and don’t deserve it at all. The Sun is right there, shining.
  • Even when we can’t see it, it’s there. Cloudy skies, storms, and rain? The Sun is still shining.  Even at night, that Sun is still shining somewhere.
  • The Sun is the Sun no matter what. We can complain that it’s too hot, or we can wish the days were longer, or shorter. We can throw temper tantrums, we can beg, we can cry, we can do ritual and ceremonies… and the Sun remains the Sun. It does not change it’s essential nature to suit our needs. It is what it is. No apologies ~ no regrets.
  • The Sun is good. Yes, too much Sun can have a detrimental effect. But, in essence, the Sun is good. It gives us life, warmth, happiness, energy, Vitamin D. It shines. Some people really suffer from not enough Sun during the Winter months.
  • Does the Sun worry about the future? I bet not! I don’t think it dwells on the past either. I can’t imagine the Sun is full of angst and regret, remorse and guilt, frustration and anger. I think the Sun is way too big, too powerful, too in the moment for that kind of thing.
  • The Sun withholds nothing. Boom! There it is. The Sun. In all it’s glory. All of it. Not just some of it, or pieces of it… all of it. Right there in the sky. Shining.
  • I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we love the Sun. We love it because it is, we love it because of what it does for us, we love it because we need it, we love it because we love shiny things… we have lots of different reasons to love the Sun.

I wonder what would happen if I was more like the Sun.

A Tremendous Force

Surely, there must be a tremendous Force, Power, Being or Presence, which has brought forth the sunlight, the rain, or the snow of this day. There is a Something operating invisibly in this universe, sending forth all this glory into expression, a glory of which I am a part, for I, too, have been sent into expression by That which sent forth the flowers and the trees, the birds, and all that is.

I am one with all life. And just as this invisible Force is pouring sunshine into the room, so it is pouring life and being into me, and through me: intelligence, wisdom, guidance, direction, love, care, and protection. All of these are flowing in and through me.

~Joel Goldsmith

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