Validation and willpower

It is nice when we begin to see validation of the choice we are making to better out lives. Last weekend my newspaper practice class put out our first issue of the school paper. It was a lot of work and late nights to get the stories edited, laid out and proofed again and again. On Monday afternoon we received the first issue from the printer and distributed it around campus. The validation comes in the fact that this was an extremely good experience. I am on the right track.

It can be hard for us to struggle to change, be honest with our self and work every day to make changes to our life and then suddenly we do something, achieve something or notice a change in ourselves and it is suddenly worth it. We know that work we are doing will pay off and we have made the right decisions. However to reach that point we need to persevere, we need to keep trying to make the changes in our lives that we know are necessary and we need to keep trying different tools and methods until something works.

This takes will power, something each of us only has a limited supply of. To conserve our will power we need to pick our battles. When we work on changing everything about ourselves every day we have no energy to make all the changes stick. IT is like trying to catch rain in a sieve we run around all day gathering drops of water but at the day the sieve is just wet. We run around all day doing this and that and it has to be done again the next day. It is better to take the changes we feel most importance and make them habits.

As we create new positive habits of the behaviors we want to have in our lives we do not need as much will to maintain that change. Let's think of each whole in our siv as an aspect of our lives we want to change. Each whole drains willpower so as we create new habit we patch the holes. Soon we have a bowl instead of a sieve, we may not have any more will power but we are more confident in our ability to apply it to create change and we can save it for the things that are important to us instead of just sloshing it around every were hoping something will come of it.

For me the habit I needed to create was being a good student. This took effort, I had to go to class and I had to do the home work. Each of these where habits I have had to create. These skills are important to the newspaper as well. The Idea of letting down my fellow staff, missing deadlines and not putting out effort is unthinkable to me now. However if I had not patched the holes of ditching class and slacking on my home work I would not have been ready to do my part in bring the paper to life. Keep an eye out for validation in your life it is a great motivation even if some time it to come in the form of hard work.

Editing Project: Good stuff or bad stuff and how we relate to to others