The past few weeks have not been on the top of my list. I was more scatterbrained than I’ve been in a long time. I couldn’t quite get myself pulled together. I was fired up about so many different things and as always thinking of new ways to make the difference I’m on a mission to make.
I’ve been reading High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard for a while and ready to implement the ideas and practices he lays out. My schedule has been a bit thrown off as my now 8 month old has changed his sleeping routine along with my 2 year old who has been deciding on some days that a nap isn’t in the cards. I’m just about done with the rough draft of my book so now needing to read through that and organize it and add things. Or subtract since I tend to go on tangents.
I was also getting a bit frustrated as I was trying to figure out places to contact about speaking. Where should I go next? I caught myself multiple times staring into space thinking, “what do I do next?” I was avoiding things, I didn’t want to reread the book and make changes. For a minute I was sick of searching for places. Then I looked at the pictures of my goals to work toward in my planner, my word of the year is Believe. I gave myself a couple minutes to decompress and flipped through some Instagram. Lets be productive right?! I found someone I follow had been at a conference so I looked at the background at the name and looked that up. Then I started thinking I used to see all sorts fo summits happening in my old office. Surely there are some of those.
I pulled up Google and started typing. Voila! All sorts of conferences and summits I’d never heard of. I looked up some keynotes on YouTube and followed some suggestions from that which lead to more different leads. Progress indeed! I started taking some rather large leaps and told myself if nothing else, doing all of this is getting whatever pits are in my stomach after making big moves slowly disappear. Keep going.
Why do you care about any of this? Because it brings up another good point and the subject of the next book I started. Everything is Figureoutable- Marie Forleo. In it she talks about how we use so many excuses to let ourselves off the hook. Everything we do is a choice, EVERYTHING. Choices are good and bad after all. Everything we choose to do or choose to let ourselves believe is just that. A choice. No matter what it is, do you think you don’t have enough time in the day? Find some scrap paper and write down everything single thing you do during the day, even the smallest thing. Do this for at least 3 days. And no, your not allowed to change your routine to make yourself and routine look and feel better. I bet if you go and look back, you would find some time that you probably could cut out doing something pointless. I’ve done it, it was a bit painful to look at.
Everything really is figureoutable. We just have to decide how willing we are to choose to believe that. Nobody else can decide to figure it out. Not to say those decisions are easy and pretty. At some point, the pain of staying where we are is more painful than changing. As frustrating as it is to figure it out, at least i’m doing something. Feeling the pain of the struggle means that I’m at least doing something. I’m taking the baby steps to get where I want. I’m finding the grit to move the obstacles that will always be in the way.
So I ask this: How willing are you to figure out whatever it is you need to figure out? How willing are you to get down and dirty? Taking a hard look at how you spend your time takes guts. It makes you actually hold yourself accountable for your actions. I’ve found that we don’t like to do that. Take a look at how you choose to spend your time and what you could really do with your life if you took out the things that didn’t serve you.