Commitments to scheduling

Commitments have been on my mind a lot lately. Deadlines, agreements with my friends and with myself, they can all be like quicksand. We start making commitments and more commitments until we are buried; drowning or otherwise smothered by everything we have to do. If commitments can be quicksand scheduling is our rope to pull ourselves out. This is not my strong suit, if anything when the quicksand starts to surround me I am more prone to dive for the bottom them to grab the rope.

Today I am trying to grab the rope, the habit I want to create within the next two months is keeping a calendar, blocking out time to do what I have committed to and at the same time cutting back on the number of commitments I have. So my plan is to use Google calendars to organize my day, it sinks with my phone so I will have it with me wherever I go and the visual style works for me. Different blocs of collar for different types of activity are great, it lets me se how I am spending my time. The real problem here, at least for me, will be sticking to the schedule once I set it.

How do you deal with over-committing or keeping yourself on task?

A fifth trap

So in the natural course of things yesterday I posted about traps that get in the way of our successes and I left one off the list, moreover I left one off the list that would bite me in the ass latter in the day. I had a speech to give in my speech class yesterday and I was not prepared, I had then outline done but no notes or solid situations to back up my points. I decided I was not prepared enough and would sit the speech out. I told the instructor this and he noted it down. All through class it was eating at me though I knew this stuff, sure I did not have everything I needed to do the job but I had enough. As class came to an end the instructor was raping things up but I cut him off and said I would give my speech. It went well, even without the notes I was supposed to have I feel it was my strongest speech of the year, go figure.

The trap I am talking about here is self-created obstacles. Procrastination, unpreparedness and excuses you have the ability to overcome fall in to this category. This is the trap of setting yourself up to fail at the things you don't want to do. It is an insidious and clever trap easy to fall in to but once we are committed to something we must do all we can to avoid this one.

4 Traps to avoid when changing your life

So you have decided to make changes in your life and you want them to succeed. There are a lot of things that seem like good ideas at the time but just get in the way of our growth, let's call these traps. Here are a few traps to avoid.

Doing too much at once: This trap is a problem both at the beginning of trying to change and at times when we rededicate ourselves to change. We see everything that we want to work on and try to do it all at once. The result is we can't put enough effort in to any one item and we fail to see meaning full change.

Unrealistic expectations: I will illustrate this trap with a story from my life. I was living in one town and working in another the towns were about 12 miles apart and connected by some nice country roads. I wanted to lose weight so I decided to start riding my bike to work. The problem was that I had not ridden my bike in too many years to count. I should not have thought oh I can just hop on my bike and ride twelve miles to work but that is exactly what I tried to do. The ride my bike to work kick lasted one day.

Doing it alone: Sometimes when we try to change we find ourselves embarrassed that we need to change and we don't let others know that we are working on our selves. This is not to say you should tell every stranger you meet what your problems are and what you are doing about them (unless you write a blog like this). But you should share your goals with your trusted friends; this gives you accountability and encouragement as well as someone to give you a reality check about your progress.

The fear of failure: This trap stops us from starting the change we know we want and know we need. We will not fail as long as we keep trying.

We will change the world whether we want to or not. The changes we make may be small they may be large, they may be intentional they may be accidental it does not matter we will change the world. Does that scare you? It should because if you understand that your actions will change the world you must then understand that your actions impact others. Like the changes we make in the world the impact we have on theirs can be intentional or accidental, large or small but no matter what we will leave our mark. With this in mind we must take not just responsibility for our actions but also take into consideration the impact our actions will have on others before we take them.

Yesterday we talked about little bricks and how they can help us to build up our dreams but little bricks come together in different ways to. They can come together to create problems, and more often than not they will when the bricks are just thrown together haphazardly. Consider this a college decides for the health of its students it is going to ban smoking on campus. As students are ticketed for lighting up the smokers drift across the street and begin to stand in front of apartment complexes while they smoke. Some think about their actions and take away their cigarette butts however the majority just drop them on the ground. One butt at a time one brick at a time a problem starts to form. The owner of the property finally has to put a no trespassing sigh up to keep the smokers from covering the front of his complex with cigarette butts. The world changes, it becomes less friendly, more standoffish because a number of little bricks built up a problem.

The school did not intended to have their neighbor put up a no trespassing sigh. The students did not intend to make the apartment complex owner spend money to clean up after them. But it happened that way. Also no one involved in the situation did it to give me an analogy or example to share with you about the power of unintended consequences.

When we make our plans we need to take a moment and think does this decision go farther than me, who else will it affect and how. We could become paralyzed trying to think of all the possibilities that could come from any action we take. We avoid this by understanding what is important to us, who is important to us and creating the habit of consulting both of these lists before we act. As this sort of consultation becomes habit it passes in to intuition, so as long as we know the facts and live in the moment appreciating its subtleties and giving it our full attention we will be able to act not just in our own best interest but the best interest of those around us. When we touch others lives let it be for the reasons and impact we wish, use the small bricks to build communities not create tensions.

It is not the big actions that will bring about world peace or global change on any issue it is our commitment to live our lives appropriately. Have a great day and don't forget to change the world.

Small Bricks

Small bricks. You can do a lot with small bricks if you put your mind to it, don't believe me just look at these Lego creations. But small bricks are useful for more than constructing spaceships and car replicas, we can use small bricks in our lives to make changes in our lives or accomplish large complex tasks.

Small bricks. When we start a large task we have a lot of enthusiasm for it but as we struggle day in and day out without apparent results we bog down. Momentum can be sustained through a feeling of accomplishment and that is where the small bricks come in. Breaking down a large task to smaller sub tasks lining them up in the order they will be needed and then using one brick at a time we can start building.

Small bricks. Each one snaps in place fitting neatly with the next as well as the one before, it is not hard to lift them but each one does its job. The cycle of accomplish and move on becomes habit after a while and then we get to the midpoint and look back on what we have done we see the foundation of our creation, our goal, our task fully complete the skeleton of it all ready starting to reach for the sky and we can say to our selves we are almost there, the hard part is over get back to work.

Small bricks. Have something insurmountable in your life, a project that never seems to be finished. Take it apart break it down and work on one small brick at a time.

Thoughts on birthdays

Birthdays are important. I am not just saying this because today is my birthday.

Birthdays provide great opportunities for us to start making changes in our life. A birthday is our own personal new year's day, a time to make commitments to our self about who we want to be and how we want to change. One advantage your B day has over other days for doing this is you have the well wishing of friends and family directed at you. They all want you to have a happy birthday and this attention can be great for the self-esteem and confidence. We can use this to get moving beat inertia and start redirecting our lives

That is all have a great day.

Reducing suffering

I have come to believe that we as people intent on bettering our selves have a moral obligation to also work on making the world a better place for others. We must be willing to look at the horrible things that happen in the world and say how can this be stopped. We cannot look away and at the same time we cannot let it destroy the joy we find in life. This is a tough balance to be struck. The important thing to understand here is it is not wrong to be happy while others suffer it is wrong to be happy that others do suffer. If this were not true then it would always be wrong to be happy.

Instead we have a obligation to work and minimizing the suffering of others as it comes in to our life whether it be the suffering of friends, strangers, or people halfway around the world. If we can help we should. Help does not only mean giving money. It can be lending an ear, passing on information, feeding people, volunteering. All these things are ways we can alleviate the suffering, even convincing others that the struggle to grow them selves and work alongside us in reducing suffering helps the cause. And it is a cause, if not the cause the one thing that most charities work towards is reducing suffering whether it be through advocating rights, finding cures, providing food; all these things work to lower the level of suffering.

Thoughts about space

There is something I have realized in the past week space is important. I am not talking about Mars Jupiter and satellites here but rather the space we inhabit every day. In particular I want to look at the way we define the tasks we perform to the spaces we perform them in. Were I am living right now I do not have a desk to work at. The only quite place I have to sit and work on blogs and school work is my bead. Working from bed I have found a lot less focus and that I am more easily derailed from what I am supposed to do to the little distractions of the web.

The underlining principle is before I had a work space and a play space, even though they were different chairs at the kitchen table If I was facing one way I was there to do work face towards the TV and it was play time. These tasks to space connections were a powerful tool for me to keep my focus or let it go. The problem was I did not even relies I was doing it. In my new space I need to find a way to create separate work and play spaces.

This idea goes beyond just how we utilize the space we have in our homes. We tend to fall in to behavior patterns in different place, acting one way att a bar, acting another at the office. Some of this is because of expected social norms and the social rules that govern different place another part have to do with our attitude towards the place. Understanding our relationship to the places we live work and play in can give us a level of control over how we feel when we are where we must be.

Compassion and happiness

A while back I posted up 10 thoughts on happiness. I was looking over the list this morning and thought I would be a good idea to delve deeper in to one of these: My happiness is not your happiness.

What this does to say: It does not mean we should not share our happiness with others; it does not mean that we have to take away the happiness we feel and keep it hidden from others.

What is does mean is we should not feel guilty for feeling happy. It is human nature to try to pick others up when they are feeling down, this is good it is part of being compassionate. But when act in this way we some times take on the other persons sorrow rather than giving them some of our joy. The giving of joy does not define it, the taking on of sorrow only increases the sorrow for now it is felt by two instead of one. When we take on the sorrow of others we do not lessen their pain but remind them that they are not alone.

Think about this: You are walking along a country road one day and see a truck stuck in the mud. You stop to help the driver get the car unstuck and in the process get splattered with sticky smelly mud. The other person thanks you and goes on their way. What is the first thing we would try to do? Go home and clean up, take a shower rinse the mud out of our hair.

Emotionally we need to get rid of the mud. When we sit and talk with those who are down we do not need to hold on to their sorrow as if it is our own. We have to guard our happiness, not just for ourselves but so that we are more available to listen to others, to dive in to the mud pits and help others out.

I want to make it clear that if we wish to act compassionately, which if eel is a better way to live then acting selfishly, we must strive to eliminate sorrow and suffering where we have the tools to do so. But taking another's pain into our selves does not do this. We should help carry their burdens but not make their burdens our own.

Goal post

Last week's goals:

Utilize week plan all week and keep up with it. This went well for most of the week, faltered a bit over the weekend but over all I like it a lot.

Be a better communicator. Did ok with this, was more striate forward with what I wanted to say. Still needs work

Eat better not bad had a burger when I could have had a veggie sandwich but some things in life must be indulged.

Get back to working on my gaming blog Well made one post last week so it is a start

Post next week's goal post on Monday Here it is so well it is done

So for this week my top five goals are

Continue using Week Plan

Have new speech written by Monday

Finish Analogy paper for critical thinking

Eat better

2 posts for my gaming blog

Finding a fortress

I woke up this morning angry and I don't know why. Have you ever had a morning like this were the littlest things set you off, put your teeth on edge and just make you want to scream.

The only way I am finding to get past this is to cling to what is important. Try and treat those I love with the kindness they deserve, strive to live my values, and focus on accomplishing my goals.

This litany of how to live is calming, even now writing it I feel the troubled waters of my heart beginning to ease, feeling the tide turning maybe.

These three things, our loves, our values and our goals are the touchstones of our day; the fortress to which we can retreat when things are hard. No matter what the world throws at us if we know these three and take refuge in them, champion them when we can and it is necessary, then we will grow, we will prevail.

Planed Spontaneity

Have you ever wanted be more spontaneous but find yourself in a rut of planning and scheduling every moment of your life? Here is tool that can help: Planed Spontaneity.

The idea may at first seem oxymoronic but let me explain. The idea is simply block out a space of time to be spontaneous every week. Say 3 pm on Saturday afternoons, give yourself a few hours of empty space and do not try to fill it until it comes around. Set down a few rules for your spontaneity: It should be a different activity each week in that time slot; it should be an activity you do not normally do.

If you still find yourself stuck and trying to plan what to do take some time make a list of ideas. If you are not a gaming nerd the list six items long if you are a gaming nerd (like me) make the list 20 items long. Number the list 1 to whatever and roll a die (this is why gaming nerds get a bigger list we tend to have dice that go up to 20 lying around, if you to want a bigger list go to your local nerd store and by a bigger die). Look up the activity on the table you made and go do that, when you get done think up a new activity you want to do some day and add it to the list in place of the activity you have just done. The activities on your list should require only minimal preparation. Some suggestions could be: go on a hike, visit a local tourist destination, call a friend and go out for coffee, try a new restaurant or organize a photo album.

Even a little bit of spontaneity can give us a greater sense of freedom in our lives, if we have to schedule the time for that freedom so be it. Make the time and have a great day.

Musings on values

I have said recently that we have to know what we want to be happy. This is true but we also must make sure the way to get what we want is in line with our values. Our values are the concepts and ideas we hold important. When we decide upon a course of action to change who we are we must make sure it does not violate these values. If it does then no matter how effective the change, how great the reward we will have saddled ourselves with regret.

Regret hold us down and help feeds the little voice that tells us we are not worthy. On the other hand even if we fail at change but do it within the parameters of our values then we come away with a moral victory. While we may still have the behavior we wished to change we also know we have held true to the higher truths that make us who we are.

It is important to understand that values can change, they are based on our understanding of the world and our definition of what is right. They guide us to act morally, but even the same action in different situations is not necessarily right. Take for example throwing a punch. It is fine and right to do it in a boxing ring, or to hit a punching bag in exercise. The same punch thrown at a child is not to be tolerated. Understanding that values come in to play in situations is important but more important is that this gray area does not create room for us to wiggle around in and talk our away around our own values.

What it should do is make us strive to understand the situations we find ourselves in as completely as we can before acting.

Bailing

Every once in a while I come across a blog about or hear a stories of someone creating a life for themselves that they want. When this happens I like to share the story with others since it is nice to see that it is possible to achieve our dreams. I feel this sort of proof that achievement is possible is intensely necessary. If and when we get discouraged with were we are and our own lack of progress in creating the life we want, we can at least look around and see it is possible.

When I was in my early 20s I remember reading an article in surfer magazine called '5 who bailed' (I think it was 5 it might have been 7.) It was the story of seven people who had rejected a cutlery normal life style to create a life for themselves that centered on surfing and still provided for their wants and needs. It was a beautifully written and photographed peace with some interesting profiles. I think it is one of the things that have made me understand the importance of not wanting what we are told to want but rather listening to that voice from inside that tells us what will really make us happy.

So in the spirit of those who have bailed I am pointing you over to a little blog called Alexander Knows. Alex recently posted an interesting little interview with a friend of his who is making a music carrier work on his terms. Enjoy, live the life you want, and have a great day.

Commitment to grow

Procrastination has been creeping back in to my life, like a cat on the hunt. I hate procrastination when I relies I am doing it. So once again it is time to up my vigilance and get down to defending myself against the pounces of procrastination.

My usual technique to guard against my habit of putting things off is to look for the key words that let me know I am about to procrastinate. It used to be I will do it in a minute. Now it has become I am waiting for inspiration.

What this change of phrase is showing me, reminding me is how insidious our bad habits can be. We learn to recognize them in one guise then they change their appearance and come at us from another angle. This is just one reason why it is important to take a moment here and there throughout our day, throughout our lives and take stock of the progress we are making. In this business of changing who we are we have to stay committed to the discipline it takes to keep our old nature in check.

I have a teacher who is soft on deadlines; this does not mean I should be. Just because she will allow me to put off the work does not make it right. I have a standard to which I must hold myself. The promise to be the person is not between me and another but between me and myself; If I do not change then I am the one let down, I may disappoint others but the commitment must first be to myself.

So I must (and so must you if you choose to walk the road of personal development) be vigilant, be committed and be honest with myself. Have a good day.

Goal post

So goal post time again, I do not know why I have so much trouble being consistent with this concept.

This week's goals:

Utilize week plan all week and keep up with it.

Be a better communicator.

Eat better

Get back to working on my gaming blog

Post next week's goal post on Monday

Hopfully having next weeks post on my goal list will help me get it done. Any way have a great week.

The journey to here part 1: making the rock

I have been asked to write about how I got to where I was when I started this blog. I think this is something that I need to explore and maybe understand better myself. I will be trying to work thought this on Monday for the next few weeks. Here goes.

At the moment I decide to start-up from the ashes I was dissatisfied with my life. My relationship with the man I love was falling apart, we were under financial pressure, there were no jobs to be had, and I did not know what to do about it, or the cause of all the hardship I was facing. In the flood of all this uncertainty I needed to find a rock to cling to. I started to look around but there were no rocks in sight, hell it felt like there was no land in sight. So I decided to stop panicking and make a rock for myself.

I started a process which I have referred to in the past as life mapping. I listed my desires, values, commitments and passions; as well as my strengths and weaknesses. Once I had all that I looked it over and deseeded I would be going back to school for a career in journalism. What I also realized is that in this modern world if I want to write for a living I need some place to show off what I can do. This was the impetus to start the blog. Like a lot of bloggers I had hopes of making an income from my blog, it has not happened yet, but the blog has become an important part of my life.

Weather I want to or not I need to talk about the things that led up to the flood, I need to understand those forces for I find that they are still affecting my life and threatening to pull my feet out from under me again and again and again.

10 quick thoughts on happiness

I slept in today and it felt good but that means I don't have much time to write this morning which feels bad. Sigh that is life so here are 10 quick thoughts on happiness for your Friday.

1. Don't confuse a sugar rush for happiness, and remember that sugar rushes come from more than just a candy bar.
2. Happiness should be worked towards but held loosely.
   
3. We must know what we want and need to be happy, not what we are told to want and need.
   
4. Happiness can be found in small things as long as we are looking for it.
   
5. The more we worry about being happy the harder it is, think about living and happiness will happen
   
6. My happiness is not your happiness.
   
7. Happiness is spontaneous, it flows from the moment, recreating the same moment to relive happiness may not always work.
   
8. Happiness comes from overcoming challenges and achieving goals. Set yourself goals and challenges that are realistic and then achieve, achieve, achieve.
   
9. No matter how bad the day, no matter how dark the mood, it is not disrespectful to yourself or others to laugh when things are genuinely funny.
   
10. Make time each day for something that brings you happiness.
    

I hope you have a happy Friday.

Week Plan reviewed

So I want to do something I have not done in a while, something that was part of my original purpose for this blog. I want to talk about an online tool I found for helping with personal growth. The sight we are looking at today is called week plan.

The idea behind week plan is simple it lets you plan and track your goals and tasks for the week. What makes it different is that it associates your goals and tasks with the roles you fill in life. For example self, student employ. It lets you plan your week's goals by role and then offers a week at a glance calendar so you can place them. At the bottom of the calendar space is a place to make note of any lessons you have learned in the week as well as places to track areas that require improvement. While this is all well and good I wish there was a place to track things we feel we did well, victories build confidence, and confidence builds successes.

The other aspect of Week Plan is that it has a separate page to keep track of your vision statement and values. On this page they do offer a place to track past achievements which is nice but unless you are in the habit of checking this page on a regular basis you will not be reminded of them. The other problem I have with this placement is that it removes balance from the weekly view. I would prefer to see a balance sheet view were we could look at our successes and failures for the week and get a better sense of how well we had done.

Over all it looks like it will be a good tool, I am giving it a try this week and next to see how it works for me. If I like it and remember to use it I will let you know what I find after a the first few weeks.

Let life be

Some of you may find what I am going to say today sad, but that misses the point. This post is not about pessimism but about valuing that which make you happy.

Our lives are cut apart in to bits by the two-edged sword of change. Things have beginnings middles and ends and each part of this cycle fallows in its due cores. To ignore this fact is to lie to ourselves. When something brings us happiness we must know that it will end, and the same is true of sorrow. Some will find it sad to think about happy things ending, and this sadness can taint and corrupt the pleasure we feel. This is not the effect that impermanence should have on us. Instead we should remember to value what we have when we have it.

These happy moments will end and holding them to tight will break them. We need to be happy when we are happy and not fret about what might be. When happens ends and it is time to be sad be sad then stop and make room for new happiness to come. If we sit there starting back on the things that have made us happy in the past we will miss the happiness that is coming our way. If when we are happy we turn our faces to the coming end of that happiness we will not experience all of the happiness we have.

Let life be, giving each moment its due and each day the consideration it deserves. Plan as you need to, remember when the time is right, and don't turn away from what is necessary. This is the way to live.

Want what you want

If we are to be successful, if we are to be happy we must define these terms for ourselves. We have to understand the difference between the external pressure to want and the internal desire to have. The external pressure to want is a function of society; it tells us you are successful if you have this brand of jeans, if you drink this brand of coffee. By creating symbols that show off how well we are doing advertising and consumer culture creates false wants. I say false because they do not originate in our hearts and heads but are placed there by others.

The problem with these false wants is that when we get them they do not satisfy our real desires. They give us momentary flashes of happiness but like kids on Christmas day the joy of the new toy quickly fade or to put it another way, the sweetness of the candy does not stay on the tongs forever. When we satisfy our true desires, the desires that come from our hearts and our heads, when we create a life style geared towards being our selves, then we can find happiness that lasts.

We have to learn to be unaffected the marketing chatter that pollutes our daily existence. We do this not by ignoring it, because if we ignore the charter it creeps in to our brain without us noticing: that is what it was designed to do. Instead we must become aware of the voice, listen to what it is saying and see how it is trying to manipulate us. We quite the voice of consumerism not by saying "SHUTUP!!!" but by saying "that is nice but no thank you." We watch for the hooks and snares it lays for us and side step them.

Once we have quieted the outer pressures to have a thing or live a certain way we can start to listen to the voice inside us that says it would be nice to have this. I want to be clear here I am not denouncing wanting things, instead I am encouraging it. It is just I want you to want what you want not what you are told to want. This may be the greatest honor you can do yourself, define your own terms for happiness and strive for them.

The three of us

When we are working on personal growth we have to relies that there are three uss involved in the process. The first us is who we are now the second us is who we want to be and the third us is the one that control the transition from one to the other.

We often think about whom we are now and who we want to be but little about the transitioners. Our transitioners can work in different ways, each has its place and each will work better for some people then it does for others.

The quiet teacher: This is the gentlest of the transitioners. Here we hold our own hand and say how should we approach this, what is wrong about what you did, what did you do right? This transitioner guides us with questions and gold start.

The authoritarian: This transitioner tells us NO! This is the voice we need to hear when the only way to improve is to not do something. Here we change by obeying a system of self devised rules designed to produce a way of living that is more conducive to who we want to be.

The coach: Similar to the authoritarian this transitioner keeps kicking are asses to do something. We push we push we push, that is the voice of the coach.

We need to understand the third us, and how we motivate ourselves and be able to switch between different transitioner models to overcome different challenges.

Only for the brave and the strong

Personal growth is only for the strong and courageous. I saw this not to dissuade any one from starting down the path to be better but to allow people to know what they are getting into.

When we decide it is time to change in a conscious manner, to grow in to the person we want to be, we must face the person we are. Whether we like our selves or not if we have found the desire to change our selves there is some aspect of how we act, behave or live that goes against the person we want to be. It takes courage to face that we are not always the person we want to be. It takes strength of character to change old habits.

Courage and strength play a role throughout the process of personal growth. We will have times were we fall back to our old ways and we must face again the part of our selves we have put to rest. When we get comfortable with where we are in our development we can find ourselves slaking off on the will power and falling back in to bad habits. This is part of the process but when we find it happening we must have the courage to stop and admit our error and the strength of will to get back to work.

The worst thing we can say is "well I screwed up I might as well keep screwing up." NO! The correct answer is I screwed up now I will do better. We cannot give in, once we have desired that we need to change we must continue to change. Otherwise our awareness of our flaws will cause us to become depressed and steal our confidence, our self-respect, and our motivation. So in addition to strength and courage personal growth also requires endurance.

So we must remember we are brave, teach ourselves to be strong and just not stop.

Open thought process courage

At the end of last week I was asked to write about courage and so I have been giving it some thought.

First courage is necessary for personal growth. To face who we are and what we need to do in our lives takes an endless amount of courage. The process of personnel growth involves looking our fears and weaknesses in the eye and saying I will not back down.

That said were does courage come from? There are two possibilities here we are naturally courageous and it comes from within or we are naturally fearful and courage must be created artificially and brought in to our selves. I think we are all naturally courageous. Fear slips in the cracks of our being and forms a fog between our sense of self and who we really are. Being brave, having courage is more a matter of seeing through the fog and finding what has been there all along. Fear makes us forget we are brave. The other option is that we create courage. This opens the door to questions like how do we create courage and how can we bring it in to ourselves. This possibility does not seem intuitively true to me. What do you think? What is our base state fear or courage?

No matter where it comes from courage is something that is hard to masseur, most of the time we only know that we have just enough and then when we need more if we dig deep, part the fog we can usually find a bit more. Fears on the other hand abound. We fear a loss of status, loss of things a loss of life, a loss of health. These things will happen, but that is not a reason to fear them. Things change, nothing stays the same. We must accept change and be willing to confront our doubts and worries.

Live courageously, face the demons and know no matter what they tell you, you are brave, you are strong and you can win.