Three Deep Breaths

My birthday is November 10.

As my birthday present to myself, I am giving me at least day each week between now and then to turn this site from an occasionally visited side project to the awesomely helpful site I know it could be.

If you knew me in real life (and some of you do), you’d know that I’m a ’4 in the morning friend’ – you know, the type of person you could call for help at 4 in the morning.

Obviously, I can’t do that for everyone all the time, and there are a lot of different 4 in the mornings every day, so I need a better system.

I’m going to have posts here about what to do when a 4 in the morning worry strikes you. And I’m going to offer 4 in the morning type help – encouragement, empathy and enthusiasm – so you can take more control of your life and stop letting all sorts of annoying, upsetting thoughts derail you.

If you are reading this thinking ‘what the hell is she talking about?’ or ‘why did she just say hell? that was unnecessary!’, I’m probably not your go-to-dame. But if you read the sentence above and let that breath you’ve been holding out a little, then I probably have something to offer you.

As I’m working on this, I’ll post some tidbits of helpfulness. The bigger stuff will be ready on November 10.

Now, take three deep breaths, do a few stretches, and be kind to yourself. I’ll see you soon.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 09 29th, 2011 | No Comments »

I’m driving myself crazy lately.

“Only lately?” you might ask, and I frown because that’s unkind.  So, let me just say it is worse than normal.

The problem is my juggling act is getting worse.  I have a giant client project* I am working on at the moment but I have a whole bunch of little things for other projects that need to get done and because of the gears problem I mentioned yesterday, I keep blustering ahead on the big project and leaving the little things in low gear (or no gear).

When someone asks about the low gear things, I pick a time that seems reasonable (but has no relation to the amount of work I have to accomplish in the meantime) and say I’ll have the task done by then. Then I go about my business until I remember that task at the last minute and scramble to do it.

See? Crazymaking, no?

But the good news is, I have a plan.

I’m going to start carrying a notebook with me at all times and whenever I think of something I have to do (or someone asks me to do something) I’m going to add it to the list…

“Sure,” you say, “but that’s no improvement.”

That’s when I chide you for your impatience (chide is a great word, no?) and you realize you didn’t let me finish.

I’m going to add it to the list but, BUT, I am not going to commit to a time. The time commitment will have to wait until I get a chance to look at my calendar, see my work time and pick I time I can fit it in.

So here’s the plan

1) find the proper (pocket) notebook

2) create running list

3) when a new to do comes up,  add it to the list but do NOT agree to a time

4) pick a time each day to add to dos to work schedule, cross them off the notebook list as they are added to the schedule

5) email/phone people to tell them when stuff will be ready

6) do the stuff when scheduled

7) feel less overwhelmed

So that’s the plan for this part of the problem. I need a whole different plan for scheduling my work time, but let’s take this one step at a time, hey?

*to clarify, the project is giant, the client is average-size.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 08 4th, 2011 | No Comments »

At the moment I have several green stripes in my hair, my toenails are painted green, and so are both my thumbnails.

If I had been nervous about my test last night, these things would have been charms  to help me do my pattern right, but since I had prepared adequately for a change, I was wearing the green as a celebration, as a badge of confidence.

But when I first planned on my green hair and nails, it struck me that I do little rituals, carry ‘charms’ and call on the universe* for help in a somewhat superstitious way on a fairly regular basis** and I began to wonder why.  It’s not an OCD thing (my crazy doesn’t manifest that way, usually), and I can do these things without the charms and rituals so it’s curious but not worrisome.   I don’t believe in the Law of Attraction*** so I’m not really thinking that I conjure up success with these things, but they do help me on some level.

The key to figuring it all out came when I reread an email from Marianne Elliot of the 30 Days of Yoga program I’m doing. In her note, she mentioned certain ritual type things you can do (burning incense, lighting candles, playing music) to put you in the right frame of mind for your yoga practice.   The email made me think about my charms and the like, and made me realize that the objects and rituals are part of my preparation.  They’re anchors holding me in the mental space I need for the activity at hand.

Lighting the candle in my ‘create’ candle holder puts me in a good space for writing,  painting my thumbnail green would help me focus on my punches and blocks instead of any nervousness, calling on the universe reminds me that I need to ask for help, or that I need to let go of my need to control, just lean into whatever is going on and trust that it will work out.****

So, my charms and rituals are a way of creating a space for the task, and pulling my concentration back to that task when needed, a way to remind myself about something important.

Now I feel a little less silly about my approach.  Creating space to accomplish things is vital, and I should use any tools I have in order to do that.

Do you have rituals, charms or potions to help you with challenges? Does my use of these things still seem superstitious to you? Do you use prayer to help you with challenges instead? How do you view prayer in that context?

*I don’t practice any organized religion, but I believe there is power in the universe above and beyond individual human power. That may jibe with your feelings about God, do with it what you will.
**And I am passing it on to my kids too.  I have a little leather bag full of courage/luck charms that they wear when they are feeling nervous, I draw a red dot on their fingers so they can ‘focus like a laser’ when they are having trouble settling, and I recently told The Boy that caffeine gave you extra math abilities so I gave him a shot glass of pepsi before bed so he could be ready for his math test in the morning.  I ‘fessed up afterwards on that last one, though.
***I was on board for the positive stuff, in the sense that once you tune in to something, you notice more examples of it (like when you buy a red hat and suddenly the world is full of red hats) so you can take advantage of opportunities that come your way.  I couldn’t get on board for the negative though, I can’t buy that rape victims vibrated on a frequency that brought on their attack, and I refuse to blame genocide on the victims either.  Glerg.
****So the dots on my kids’ fingers reminds them to focus, anchoring them in the task at hand. Their little bag of courage lets them draw on their own courage without having to ‘find’ it.

Christine | Calmer Brain, One Foot in Front of the Other | 01 28th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I got my green belt today (YAY!) and I wasn’t even a bit scared.  So I have officially checked one goal off my 2011 list – the fearless belt test.

The nature of the test helped. It was broken up in two parts, was held at our usual practice spot and I was tested by the easier of the two testers.  But while that made it less intense,  it was me controlling my preparation that made the difference.  I knew my shit, I couldn’t be shaken on that , so no matter how hard the test I would have been okay.

It makes me wonder how often my feelings of fear are actually telling me that I haven’t prepared adequately.

One of the problems with being able to think quickly on my feet is that I’ve learned I can get away with minimal planning  when I’m the only person really affected.   But ‘getting away’ with minimal planning/preparation is not the same as succeeding and it means I’m not really trying that hard*, even when things are important to me.  And I’m causing myself unnecessary stress because I have time to prepare these things, I just don’t.

It’s another example of how my fixed mindset ** holds me back.  Like the kids that Carol Dweck studied in her Mindset book I somehow think that having to prepare means I don’ t know my stuff.  It’s an endless loop of foolishness – how am I supposed to know something I haven’t learned or haven’t studied?  - but I get stuck in it all the same, subconsciously preventing myself from getting ahead because I don’t want to seem like I have to work at it.  The most annoying part is that it is me I’m most trying to impress, I’m not even trying to look ‘smart’ for other people – although that would be my preference, of course, if I seemed awesome and effortless to everyone else too.

So this fearless belt test has become about more than facing the nervousness that comes before a test of skill. It turned out to be about learning that fear can equal an acknowledgement of the need to prepare, and learning that actually doing the preparation leads to real confidence.  That confidence, of course, leads to increasing my chances of success.

In my last post, I said I needed to make time to do the work for my goals, and this is clearly part and parcel of that.  Even if the job ahead is just a task, not part of a larger goal, I need to make the time to prepare.  And I need to do that while keeping a growth mindset.   I feel like a lot of pieces are coming together for me right now.  This should be interesting.

Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed one?    Is my (now-former) ‘don’t try too hard and failure isn’t real’ approach familiar to you? Is your fear related to a lack of preparation? How much preparation time do you give yourself for something important? Got any ideas about how I can avoid getting stuck in a fixed mindset next time?

* I think for me, this is a way to avoid self-criticism, because if I fail when I’m not trying that hard, it’s because of lack of effort not a ‘real’ failure.  Not a logical train of thought, but a track I seem to end up on.  I’m workin’ on it. (see what I did there?)

**My natural state – I’m developing a growth mindset but it takes conscious thought, at least so far.

Christine | Big Questions, Calmer Brain | 01 28th, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I know goals and I know goal setting and I know how I’m supposed to make them SMART* (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) and I’m supposed to have checkpoints and so on and so on.

I completely understand all of that, and the reasoning behind the structure. The problem is, of course, putting it into action. 

I’ve broken down my goals into small steps, and laid those out on my calendar, milestones to meet on a long journey toward whichever goal I’ve got on my radar at the moment.  But I still haven’t really gotten far with a lot of them.  Instead I spend a lot of time reacting to stuff that jumps out at me from my To Do list, or via phone call or email.  It’s not an effective way to work and it can be rather demoralizing.

I get big projects done, but usually by concentrating my efforts for a few days here and there. Even my NaNoWriMo novel involved me writing 30,000 words in two days – I impressed myself, sure, but it is not a sustainable way to work.  And I sure as hell can’t exercise that way, and it will never work for my business.

So we come to the question I’ve been driving myself nuts with for years.  How do I actually apply myself to those small goal steps?

I’d like to say the answer came to me in a vision, or that I had a great revelation after reading a work of genius but it wasn’t that exciting.

Instead, I was putting some dates in my calendar for AAMP  and pulling back from the deadlines to see when I’d have to do promotion for those events. As I entered the promotion schedule into my google calendar, the program was setting each work topic as an event, usually an hour long one.  I was shortening those promomotion schedule ‘events’ to 15 minutes when it hit me:  I was actually going to need an hour to do the promo work – why not leave things as they were?  Even if I had to move the timing around on the actual day (or even the actual week), at least I had allotted time to do the work.

And then I was hit again (I should learn to duck ).  I had allotted time to (say it with me) DO THE WORK!

You see where this is going, right?

All this time I’ve been breaking things into steps (even teeny tiny ones so wee that they can’t even be described as baby steps), and I’ve been attaching them to dates as deadlines but I haven’t been allotting time to actually (say it again!) DO THE WORK.**

This has, of course, been complicated by the fact that I haven’t had a lot of work time in the past few years.  The time I did have I often frittered away in trying to choose what was most important to do at that moment.*** So scheduling time to do specific goal work hasn’t been the only factor in not getting to some of my goals, but it’s been a big one.

So can you guess what I’ve been spending this last week of Planuary doing?

*Apparently the new acronym of choice is HARD (snicker) but that book won’t get here until next week, so let’s run with this, it’s just the opener anyway.

**I’m sure I’ve read somewhere or at least been told about this, but it never got translated into something to do until now. If I go back in my archives and discover that I’ve discovered this before and didn’t act on it, I’ll be really annoyed.  Best not to go delving into my archives, I guess.

***I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gotten to the end of an unproductive work session only to realize that if it is all equally important it doesn’t matter where I start. Glerg.

Christine | Goal Setting, One Foot in Front of the Other | 01 26th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

I’m like a frickin’ Zen Koan here.

One of my goals for 2011 is to learn to face my Taekwon-do belt tests without fear. * 

Usually, right before my test I’m all whacked out, worried that I might mess up, or that I don’t know my stuff or that I might make an ass of myself.  I’m trying to let go of that fear, well, to acknowledge it and then let it go because I know that the fear of messing up is far worse than when I actually mess up. 

I waste a lot of time on fear.  I don’t often let it stop me but I do often let it loop over and over and distract me from more interesting things, and sadly, TKD belt tests are only one of the the things that I fear.  The advantage though, is that belt tests are fairly fixed.  I know far in advance when they’re going to be and I have a list of things to prepare before I do a test. 

It’s ideal, really.  A fear-inducing situation where I have a decent measure of control, where preparation will make a definite difference. 

So, I’ve been practicing my patterns (Do San is my current one) and reviewing my theory (I know the Training Secrets of Taekwon-do inside out) and I’ve been step-sparring like it’s going out of style (it was never in style, don’t worry, you aren’t behind).  I’ve been taking as much control as I reasonably can, and you know what?

I feel good.  I’m not afraid for my test on Thursday at all.

Now, come Thursday, I may be scared a bit, but usually I would be getting anxious already.  This is huge for me.  And even if I get scared on Thursday, that’s a fairly reasonable amount of time to spend thinking about something important to me.  I can accept that level of fear as part of the process.

The plan is to translate this into a plan for other fear-inducing situations. I want to bring other worries down to a reasonable size by determining what I can control,  planning for that, and then letting the rest go.

How much of a role does fear play in your life? Does it stop you from doing things or have you learned to work around the fear?  Or are you out of the fear loop and not get this at all?

Now, on that note, I’m off to do Do San again.

*I just typed feat.  Somehow I don’t think that’s going to work.

Christine | Calmer Brain, Crossposted from Mombie | 01 25th, 2011 | 4 Comments »

When I was in Girl Guides I always hated the Guide Law that stated ‘A guide smiles and sings, even under difficulty.’  I can see the value in the be-cheerful-keep-your-spirits-up sort of mentality it implies and sure, sheer grumpiness might make a bad situation worse sometimes but given that I will power through, I wanted the freedom to power through in whatever mood I wanted. 

My own personal version of that law became ‘If you can’t smile, then try not to throw up.’ – much more do-able for me.  And while I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I think part of my irritation came from the feeling the as a girl, I was supposed to be sweet and kind and never angry or upset.  Perhaps that’s not what the writer of the law intended, but I get that feeling from it even now.  *shudder*

I hate those sorts of sayings*,  a pat little description of how someone is supposed to behave without any reflection on the individual circumstances. 

One I’m struggling with right now is ‘Start as you mean to finish.’

How the hell am I supposed to do that when I don’t know what the end is going to look like yet?

Sure, I can see how it’s consistency is valuable, and I can see that it would be good to know where you’re going before you start but it’s not always possible – and it can really cause someone like me (always looking for the perfect system) to get stuck because I can’t start the way I ‘should’.

How does starting the way the way I mean to finish allow for growth?  How does it address the changes and obstacles that alter our plans?

Sure, I’m probably asking too much of a saying, but I expect a lot of words and this group is failing me.

I have a lot of big plans for this year, but I’m not starting as I mean to finish.  I’m starting where I am and seeing what happens.  I’ll aim for consistency, work toward finishing my projects, but I refuse to get so caught up in the method that I can’t do the practice.

I have no idea how I’ll finish – so I’m going to start as I mean to start – one tree at a time.**

* Another one that gets me is the one about how God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.  That actually hurts my teeth.  Seriously? So much presumption and shut-up and take it, all in a few words.  Sure, on the one hand it’s telling you that you have the strength to make it through, but it also makes it sound like you were given this trouble because you’re strong. Grrr.

** You remember, of course, that I have a backward forest and trees problem – it’s not that I can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s that I forget the forest is made of trees and I only see that giant, scary, dark mass and think I have no way to deal with it.

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie, One Foot in Front of the Other | 01 24th, 2011 | No Comments »

The five minute part

• I want to remember waking up at the cabin with my friends and the guys having beer for breakfast and me making pancakes for everyone.  I want to remember the kids all sleepy headed in their pajamas in the sunshine looking out through the door of the cabin.
• I want to remember how I felt when I finished my novel for NaNoWriMo, the sheer energy and prode that surged through me.
• I want to remember getting my Green stripe in Taekwondo, and watching The Boy earn his.  And I want to remember my competition and how hard it was but how it made me want to try harder, not give up.
• I want to remember my brave Little Guy getting up to the mic at his school concert dressed as a Jedi Action Figure and saying his line as clear as anything.
• I want to remember sitting by the fire on summer vacation cuddling the boys and sitting next to The Man.
• I want to remember lying on our bed with The Man in the sunshine, with his hand on the small of my back, talking and laughing.
• I want to remember doing the endless setlist in Rock Band with our friends last May.  It took forever but it was big fun, we had a sandwich bar for supper and we took turns singing.
• I want to remember making the pirate movie with the kids in October.
• I want to remember the love I feel when I look at my husband and my boys,  when I see them I feel as if I might burst with joy.

Thinking about the 5 minute part

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Reverb10 Prompt: Appreciate. What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it? by Victoria Klein author of 27 Things to Know About Yoga

In 2010 I’ve really come to appreciate my friends.  I have always been appreciative of them,  don’t get me wrong, but this year I have been seeing them even more clearly and become even more deeply grateful for them.

There are 7 of us (10 if you include the kids) that get together most Friday nights, and then another 5-6 who join us when they can and we play Rock Band, or board games, or watch stupid movies or just chat.  We really get each other and each of us accepts the others, not in spite of our various crazinesses but BECAUSE of those crazinesses.*

We have a running joke in the group that no matter what (geometric) plane of geekery any of us happens to exist on, someone else in the group is on that plane with us.  So far we haven’t found any geeky topic obscure enough that someone else hasn’t done it before or at least heard of it.  We’ve spun the joke out into a pretend movie ‘Geeks on a Plane’ ** in which some hapless individual is trapped in an airplane bathroom when a geek drops from the ceiling to demand if she prefers Kirk or Picard.

That sort of stuff isn’t going to work with many people, but we’re all over it.  And I’m grateful to be part of this circle.

If you asked me to describe myself, I’d probably use a lot of buts and ifs (I’m a good mother but…  I’m a good writer if…) but I’ve always described myself as a good friend, no ifs or buts required.  So to show my gratitude for these people, I’ve mostly been keeping on keeping on, but I do take it up a notch when I can – always going to pick up the ones who don’t drive, keeping a variety of snacks on hand to match everyone’s dietary restrictions (gluten free, dairy free, no citric acid, chamomile tea),  collecting their kids from school, planning events for us all.

Even thinking about how lucky I am to have these people who really care about me, who really accept me, who will really help me when I need it, in my life makes me tear up a little so I’d better sign off before I get all maudlin.

* Made-up word alert!

**See what we’ve done there?  TWO types of planes – and a silly movie reference!

Christine | Crossposted from Mombie | 12 15th, 2010 | No Comments »

Prompt: 11 Things. What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?  Prompt by Sam Davidson author of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need

Eleven things I don’t need, huh?  In no particularly order:

1. hassle

2. household clutter

3. guilt

4. emotional clutter

5. tiredness

6. junk food

7. bickering children

8. leftovers (stuff hanging around unfinished, not just food)

9. inconsistency

10. those old computers in the basement

11. toys the boys have outgrown

Okay, so those first nine are a little different than the last two but they are all valid, so I’m running with it.

I  love this prompt.  I got up this morning and thought about my to do list for today and then thought ‘To hell with it!  I don’t want to spend my whole day getting the house ready for Christmas and not have any pre-Christmas fun.’  This prompt ties right into that liberating thought.  I am ditching the guilt and embracing the fun of Christmas prep, instead of saving the fun for after the work.  I’m starting elimination of things on this list NOW, damn it! Whoot!

Ahem.

So how am I going to go about eliminating these things?

As for today, I am going to do some tidying – while blasting music and hanging with my kids – but I am also going to make some gingerbread with the boys and help them finish the Christmas cards.  And we are going to go for a walk in the snow.  Take that ‘work first, play later’ attitude!

As for my 2011 plan, I’m going to treat the list in groups.

Group 1: hassle, guilt, emotional clutter, tiredness, bickering children, leftovers, inconsistency,

These things all grow from the same seed, the same thing I identified in my first Reverb10 post.  I don’t set good boundaries in my life, I don’t have structure.  Without structure everything seems important all the time and my life is all about reacting to external things.

I’ve been re-reading Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to change things when change is hard and making notes about how to make it easier for me to adopt the structure(s) I have in mind.

Basically I know I have to make it easy and habitual to follow the structure by eliminating all the decisions about what should be done when, and I have to make sure not to tire out my will-power.  And I have to identify the things that really matter to me so I can use that identity as a means to automatically make other decisions (i.e.  ‘A self-caring person like me knows it is better to go to sleep when I’m tired than to stay awake reading.’)

When I get this structure in place, and hence eliminate all* of these things I don’t need,  I will  be better able to say no to things I don’t have time or energy for, and I will be building my energy all the time with good self-care habits.  I will have a consisent plan for getting my work done so it doesn’t seep over into other parts of my life, and I will be able to ditch ‘leftovers’ from other sets of past priorities.

Group 2:  junk food

Damn, I hate the way I eat and I hate the way I feed my family.  The structure I discuss above will help me with planning better things to eat, but that’s not the only source of this problem.

I have a lot of trouble with the notion that some foods are ‘bad’ and others good.  Even the ‘worst’ junk food has some nutritional value and I hate how foods come with moral values attached to them.

Yet I know that some food serves my body’s purposes better than others.  Some foods give me energy longer, some foods leave me feeling bad after I eat them.   And I want to feel good, and I want my family to feel good (and to be well fueled) but getting into complicated food rules.

So I am labelling food that doesn’t make us feel good as junk food, and I am going to find the easiest path to keep us eating food that does make us feel good.  And how will my life feel after that?  I can only assume it will feel GOOD.

Group 3: household clutter, those old computers in the basement, toys the boys have outgrown

Some ‘leftovers’ fall into this group as well, but this one is more specific, so I’ll handle this clutter group separately.

I feel bad about the things in this list.  I feel bad because a lot of it represents a type of person I thought I was, or things I thought I’d do with my kids, or stuff I meant to be better at.  And I feel bad about the idea of throwing these things out, so I’d like to find the perfect place to donate them.

I recognize the futility in this line of thinking, yet I haven’t changed it.

If I were to let go of the things that didn’t pan out, I could make so many other things pan out from what I know now, so I need a plan to ditch those old things.

I’m going to use Julie Morgenstern’s SHED principles and pick a time each week to go through some of the old stuff and pick the things I really want to keep and ditch the rest.

I think this is going to feel very freeing as I let go of things I meant to be, so I can decide where to go next.

*I know there is a limit to how much bickering I can eliminate, but I’m thinking of the kind that stems from boredom and lack of movement, not the basic sibling type bickering.

Christine | Three Deep Breaths | 12 11th, 2010 | No Comments »