Today happens to be the Summer Solstice of 2021, it is the longest day of the year, but oddly enough not the latest sunset of the year as I suspected.
Enjoy these extra pockets of sunshine as long as we have them. We don’t have them for long.
Hello 8 PMish sunsets.
Author: Bardees
Perfectionism is misplaced creativity
In his 5-day Beyond Perfect Challenge that ended yesterday, the author Jon Acuff came up with a new definition for perfectionism that I would like to share with you today.
Perfectionism is creativity with misplaced focus on fear instead of hope.
This is how it operates:
- It avidly tries to protect us from failure and rejection and criticism.
- It worries we wouldn’t be able to handle them if they take place.
- It prevents us from starting new habits because then, it believes, we need to commit forever, which is impossible because life will get in the way, so why even start?
- It complicates our goals to make them more perfect, so they would become unachievable.
- It does not allow us to finish what we start because then we will need to show what we made to the world and get subjected to the above-mentioned failure or criticism.
- It makes us imagine what might go wrong, but rarely lets us imagine what if it goes right.
- It considers any achievement less than 100% as nothing.
- It compares our beginning to someone else’s middle.
- It causes us to burn out by believing perfect results are attainable.
- It makes us focus on outcomes we can’t control rather than our efforts which we can control.
- It believes in “the hard way or no way”.
This was some of what I learned from the generous information Jon shared in the challenge and from reading his book Finish . He’s offering a course and lifetime access to the challenge here if you are interested.
Professionals Show Up
This morning, in my gratitude journal, I was thankful for many positive interactions I had this week that pushed me to keep going. Having people sending me thank you notes through Instagram and email for what I am doing and sharing is amazing. Knowing that my friend recommended my name for the training I was hired for is a blessing. Seeing the number of downloads of my podcast peaking to new records is encouraging.
We don’t get positive feedback on our life’s work every day. We shouldn’t wait for positive feedback to do what we already committed to do every day. We are professionals. We are also humans, and we will always want more, and that is a recipe for disappointment.
However, when this feedback does come in, we don’t take it for granted. We cherish it and hold it dear and keep it for the rainy days when we feel we can’t go forward. We write about it in our gratitude journals and smile about it.
More importantly, we keep working the next day.
We are getting better
My bedtime reading is usually spiritual. I’m loving my recent selection so much, it’s a book called “Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers” by Anne Lamott.
I’m sharing with you a quote I read last night that perfectly aligns with the blog post I wrote in the morning.
“I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven’t made any progress at all. But it turns out I’m less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off and get my sense of humor back. That we and those we love have lightened up over the years is one of the most astonishing sights we will ever witness.“
I feel the same. We are becoming more resilient, we are bouncing back faster after failure. This makes me hopeful and more committed to all my good daily habits.
Let’s keep waking up early, meditating, journaling and reading. Let’s keep praying and moving our bodies. Let’s keep reading our affirmations and visualizing our success.
We are getting better.
How helpful are your comments?
The other day, I noticed I was being negative when I complained to others and in my head about someone being late to a dinner gathering. The complaining went something like this, “Where are they? Why aren’t they here yet? They usually arrive early, why so late this time (when I am so hungry?)”. I remembered that being hungry usually got me edgy. Therefore, I decided to get some food in me, so I would be more pleasant for the rest of the evening. It worked.
That’s what happens when our self-awareness expands. We become more sensitive about how we behave and catch ourselves early when we act negatively. We notice that unhelpful comments we make left and right are probably polluting the space we share with other people.
Let’s think before we speak and take ownership of how we feel without whining to have our owns issues magically fixed by others, just like we did when we were kids.
We are adults now.
What to do when you don’t like your job?
When you don’t like your job that waking up in the morning becomes a burden, you might need to change your job. We spend so much of our days at work, that means you need to enjoy what you do at least half of the time.
It’s a fact, we all get tasks and bosses we don’t like. But if all your tasks feel painful, and all your interactions with your boss seem horrible, you need to seriously consider finding a new job.
Your job does not have to be your calling or the reason you were born. Even those do who find their passion in life are advised not to quit their day job to relieve themselves of the pressure of making money off their passion. At least, not until they can match their current income or exceed it. Elizabeth Gilbert was the best to talk about the difference between a job and calling. You can have both.
Finding a new job is a challenge and you need to be actively seeking new opportunities and putting yourself out there. You also need to be patient until you get that new job that excites you, where you excel and shine.
But what should you do until then?
What if changing your job is not an option at the moment, and you still hate it?
- Remember your why of keeping this job: What freedoms, privileges, possessions do you currently enjoy because of your job and the money you’re making?
- Remember the value you add to your workplace with the role you have. If you don’t see it, think what would happen if you are gone, will you be missed?
- If you don’t think you will be missed, that means you need to step up. Create new tasks to start adding value in a way that only you, with your personality and experience, can add.
- You can make those tasks the reason you start liking your job, let them be play to your strength points.
- Think about the people you interact with on a daily basis, you are in each other’s lives temporarily, and for a reason. How can you interact with them in a genuine and meaningful way?
- How can you make your coworkers’ lives easier, starting with your boss? Be proactive and surprise them with your thoughtful actions.
JOY
When an idea presents itself to me more than once in a couple of days, my ears perk up, and I listen. This time, it seems I need to take care more care of being aware of and creating JOY in my life.
Here are the passages that presented themselves to me from three different sources in less than 24 hours:
“We can make joy and gratitude a daily habit and standard simply by measuring how often we cultivate such emotions. Several times each day we can assess our success by asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much joy and gratitude am I bringing to this moment?”
There is power in this wording. We are not asking how much joy and gratitude we are experiencing in the moment, as if we are somehow entitled to such high emotions. We are demanding personal responsibility—how much am I bringing?”
-Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto
“Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.”
-Maria Popova, Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings.
“Joy for human beings lies in proper human work. And proper human work consists in: acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirrings of the senses, identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.”
– Marcus Aurelius.
This week, I will ask myself often: “how am I bringing joy to this moment?”
I wrote the word JOY in my weekly planner and listened to this amazing Joy song this morning to keep it alive in my heart and mind.
Choose Joy.
What do you want to be true?
What do you want to be true about your health?
What do you want to be true about your finances?
What do you want to be true about your spiritual life?
What do you want to be true about relationship with———?
What do you want to be true about your home?
What do you want to be true about your career?
What do you want to be about your knowledge?
What do you want to be true about your impact on others?
I loved this goal-setting/habit-setting question I recently learned from the author Jon Acuff.
It’s a lot like the amazing question I learned from Atomic Habits:
Who do you want to be?
Best Gift
Finally, I got to feel that summer break has officially started as we enjoyed the first full weekend without any due homework or assessments to prepare for. I feel like the Universe created new hours, wrapped them up, and offered them in a shiny box for me. I am grateful for the gift of time.
I slept more, played with my kids more, and happily got overdue chores done. Please note the word “happily”.
Maybe not all summer weekends will feel as blissful. I am just taking the time, here is that word again, to honor the freedom to create our own schedules for the coming weeks.
Let’s make the best of this gift.
Help
You are in resistance mode to your new reality.
You want out.
You want to sleep and wake up to a world with this new reality having vanished in thin air.You can’t believe this is how it going to be from now on. You don’t think you can take it. It’s too much to live in a world where this new reality happened. You wonder “Is it even OK to keep living normally now after this happened?”.
Everything reminds you of what you lost or about to lose. Your new reality. You try to escape it with denial. You act as if no new reality took place. But your body acts up with ugly habits, you eat too much or sleep too much or smoke too much. The dread is still there. The grieving. The regrets. They are not going away. You want to feel in control again, as if you ever were. You want yesterday back, before you knew what you know now. Before you made that decision that will cost you for years to come.
Then it hits you. You realize nothing you do will change what happened. This is your new world.
You still find it hard to go on. You need a new kind of strength you feel you don’t have.
So you look up or, if it makes you more comfortable, you look within, and ask for help.
You ask for help to wake up in the morning and function. You ask for help to be able to see things differently because you still can’t. You ask for help to remember there is so much good in the world to warm your heart of ice. You ask for help to remember you are loved and lovable no matter what mistakes you made. You ask for help to contribute again and give back to the beautiful people in your path.
You believe your call for help is received the instant it leaves your lips. You trust that help is on the way. You accept your new reality.