Gratitude #21 - willingness to change
I think I'm a pretty habitual person, which is especially obvious when I know there is an easy way to do something but I keep doing it the hard way because I forget.
But my habits don't always serve me. I've been working on integrating some new habits with decent success. I think that changing my reason from "because I should" to something that resonates more with me is helpful. For instance, in trying to develop an exercise habit, rather than doing it to be thin, which seems like a discouraging and far away goal that I will possibly never attain, I decided to focus on the way exercise affects my creativity and my mood. And those are effects you can see in about a week, and so the exercise habit actually stuck because seeing results overcame my inertia.
Certainly, my work habits were something I've always been proud of. I was raised to think being called "lazy" was the ultimate insult, and that I needed to scrape and struggle and be working every waking hour of every day in order to consider myself a worthwhile human being. And I was also starting to suspect that living like that was making me weird.
I had it on my goal list to look at the balance in my life in 2012 and figure out how to incorporate down-time...but weirdly enough, I came across a book that inspired me to change my work habits, and when it explained WHY (brain fatigue) I adopted a new work method of timed bursts immediately, at the end of November. And suddenly I can clock out at 6pm with about twice as much work completed as I ever did before. Why? Because while I was able to force myself to pay attention to something for a four- or six-hour stretch, my brain was not able to make use of that attention, because it gets fatigued in 45 minutes.
I can to more writing in three 45-minute bursts than I could do all day before. And in between I can do admin or bookkeeping or art or whatever. Or exercise. Or read. Or journal. Or just sit and think.
I'm grateful I was willing to change. I'm also grateful I allowed myself to take a look at that now rather than waiting for 2012 and the New Year holiday to begin.
(The transformative book is Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields
which I think I've mentioned before. I heard him on a podcast and thought he sounded interesting. I buy a lot of books that way.)
But my habits don't always serve me. I've been working on integrating some new habits with decent success. I think that changing my reason from "because I should" to something that resonates more with me is helpful. For instance, in trying to develop an exercise habit, rather than doing it to be thin, which seems like a discouraging and far away goal that I will possibly never attain, I decided to focus on the way exercise affects my creativity and my mood. And those are effects you can see in about a week, and so the exercise habit actually stuck because seeing results overcame my inertia.
Certainly, my work habits were something I've always been proud of. I was raised to think being called "lazy" was the ultimate insult, and that I needed to scrape and struggle and be working every waking hour of every day in order to consider myself a worthwhile human being. And I was also starting to suspect that living like that was making me weird.
I had it on my goal list to look at the balance in my life in 2012 and figure out how to incorporate down-time...but weirdly enough, I came across a book that inspired me to change my work habits, and when it explained WHY (brain fatigue) I adopted a new work method of timed bursts immediately, at the end of November. And suddenly I can clock out at 6pm with about twice as much work completed as I ever did before. Why? Because while I was able to force myself to pay attention to something for a four- or six-hour stretch, my brain was not able to make use of that attention, because it gets fatigued in 45 minutes.
I can to more writing in three 45-minute bursts than I could do all day before. And in between I can do admin or bookkeeping or art or whatever. Or exercise. Or read. Or journal. Or just sit and think.
I'm grateful I was willing to change. I'm also grateful I allowed myself to take a look at that now rather than waiting for 2012 and the New Year holiday to begin.
(The transformative book is Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields
which I think I've mentioned before. I heard him on a podcast and thought he sounded interesting. I buy a lot of books that way.)
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