Morning rituals

Our morning rituals set the tone for our day. I am not talking about personal hygiene and the other necessary rituals of waking up, instead I am talking about the little things we do for ourselves every morning that make us happy. For some of us it may be our coffee making experience, others like myself, might get on the internet and play a game or two before doing anything else.

These rituals put us back in touch with the things we like, love and enjoy. It is important to be reminded of these things every morning because when life gets hard that bit of happiness can sustain us. There will be times in the day when life is tough we are up against deadlaines, people cause drama, we cause drama but if we have taken the time for our selves, and know we will have time for ourselves these hard ships are more easily born.

What are your morning rituals, what do you do for yourself every day, what do you wish you could do for yourself?

Growing habits

So I have been having a problem with deadlines lately. I have come up with a new plan to deal with this problem. I am planning on creating a desk top folder for every deadline I have. I will label it with the date the project is due and then store all files and info related to that project in that folder. As folders go out of date and the projects are finished I will move then to an archive folder.

The idea here is to create a structure that will help enforce the habit I want to create, in this case better deadline management. In a way I guess that habit building is a like growing peas. You need something in place that helps to guide were and how they grown. A trellis or a few stakes will give the new habit something to cling to. These little structural reminders are important since habits grow slowly, a bit at a time.

The rewards of new habits, especially when they are purposefully created are they become reflexes, we do not have to think about doing the things that are habitual for us we just do them. So what habits are you going to creat for yourself in the months ahead, are they going to be accidental habits or are they going to be habits that lead you to your goals, dreams and the places you want to be in your life?

Avalanches of annoyance

Sometimes we get to a point in life where everyone seems to be out get us, people treat us badly and life just feels unfair. Maybe what needs to change is not the people around you but what you are looking for in them. When things start to go bad it can have an avalanche effect. One pebble of unkind words gets our attention and the next pebble we notice, maybe one we would have ignored before. Now we start looking for pebbles and they begin to grow. Little things get bigger neutral things turn bad.

So what we need to do is stop looking for pebbles in this situation and focus back on the view. When we are staring at the pebbles of annoyance we do not see the beauty of the skyline, trees and birds. This beauty distracts us from feeling the hurt, and the hurt only heals when it is left alone.

This is not to say that all pain and hurt should be ignored. A pebble bouncing off your leg is one thing, one in your shoe is quite another. If it is in your power to affect positive change and alleviate a source of irritation do it. Remove the pebble from your shoe but at the same time don't let the things that are beyond your power to affect turn in to an avalanche of misery.