Hearing loss and living life
A new year is the perfect excuse to kick out some nasty habits and cultivate some new ones. In an earlier post, I chatted about setting realistic goals. There is no point in setting yourself up for disappointment.
Continue reading “You will stick to what you enjoy”
After a lovely break in the Eastern Cape, my tribe is no back at home. We arrived back on Thursday and have been doing mostly… washing (because adulting is laundry).
Let us also be honest, there is nothing as motivating and inspiring as the start of a new year. And that inspiration probably lasts well into the first day back at work until you realise that your low carb intentions actually suck and that your goal to drink more water is not as satisfying as the third cup of coffee. Some form of discipline is required for those days when motivation does not show up for work. Because good intentions only count if you follow through.
Continue reading “Planning ahead”
What my reading challenge taught me about New Year’s resolutions
I somehow feel that I should apologise for this post… because this is what everyone does, isn’t it? I have always said that I will not be making New Year’s resolutions because I tend to set myself up for disappointment.
Last December (2019), before we knew that the world would go mad, and fall apart, I set myself a Goodreads challenge. I have chatted about Goodreads before, and how it feeds into my tracking fascination so well. This was my third year setting this challenge and I had to acknowledge, finally, that being grown-up, meant that I was not able to read as much as I used to… mostly because, most nights, I would actually fall asleep on the second page. So for 2020, I said 18 books. A little more than once a month. And I almost made it. Today is the 31st of December and I should finish book 17 today. So close and yet so far!!
Continue reading “At the end of 2020…”
Emotional tracking continued
Please forgive this incoherent ramble but there has to be a home for this as well amidst the planning and the sorting and the dreaming.
I wrote about the emotional tracking here and I am struggling today to give the anger a name. I have looked up synonyms: irate, annoyed, displeased, irked… I have weighed them up and turned them around in my mind and on paper… but nothing felt appropriate, nothing was exactly right. And then it dawned on me, what I am feeling is not anger or rage… it is “disappointment”.
Continue reading “When we disappoint ourselves…”
I started my bullet journal and the planning around it as an extension of a task given to me by my psychologist. In short, the task boiled down to “Find something that works for you to get your butt in gear”. She was kind about it, but the message rang true – stop complaining about feeling overwhelmed. You have identified the problem, now put in the work.
So a plan started taking shape. I wanted to identify what I needed to do every day, write it down and do it… even if I did not want to. I wanted to stop avoiding things that I felt was too hard or would be too much effort. I wanted to stop angonising over everything on the list and just know that I would get to it eventually. Rome was not built in a day. I wrote a little about my time blocking plan here.
I started the time blocking in August and I am still not quite winning. I am however determined and stubbornly persevering because on the days it works it really does work great.
With all this notetaking and analysing and list-making, I did however realise that I have gotten to the point of overplanning. The effectivity of it all got lost in the writing things down and not actually doing them. So… back to why of it all.
2020 has been a year where I had to put in a lot of work into figuring out why I do things the way that I do them. It has been a year of accepting that I am an overthinking, overplanning, colour coding ball of anxiety, and converting these elements of my personality into strengths instead of weaknesses. And in many cases, it was actually just a mind-shift and a happy realisation that some people are really just different and approach the same problem in different ways.
I have recently done a lot of reading on goalsetting. Mainly because I want the things that I do and the things that I am to have substance and a clear purpose. Various resources advise on how to formulate goals but nothing quite made sense to me. Of course, you have to write them down, but to write them down you first have to have something to write down!
Which all boiled down to the simple questions:
For example, while putting on my running shoes:
And while on said run a penny dropped. When goal setting I should perhaps not ask what do I want to achieve, but instead, who do I want to be. By doing this my goals align with my morals and values or at least and should, in theory, steer me towards an improved version of myself. In a roundabout way this makes me trustworthy and accountable and moving towards something instead of just hanging around.
A simple example: I make time every morning and every afternoon to answer and organise my work email. This helps with my to-do list and also that you do not get into a position where things just remain unanswered. It also helps to not be on my email the whole day and then just generate more email. Yes, I will share my inbox organisation tricks with you soon :)! And why did I decide to do this? Because at some stage when things were all happening at once, I realised that I was not getting to my email and things fell through the cracks. So the little block on my schedule dedicated to my inbox is me just trying to address that failure. Again this is something that I am now trying. I am trying goalsetting and will see what works, what helps and what does not actually contribute anything. And yes, I will happily report back in an overthinking fashion. So yes, I have identified the problem and I am putting in the work.