Eek! I’ve got a touch of flakiness

You’ve perhaps heard the saying “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” So what do you do when you love something but risk letting it slip away?  Here’s some context: I enjoy writing for my blog, yet lately I haven’t been attending to it as much.  Of course I feel bad about this, and by bad I mean guilty, disappointed and frustrated. Despite loving to write, it has somehow managed to turn into just another item on a checklist, which was not the sentiment I had when I first decided to create Just Me, Maybe You.  If I take the saying to heart then, does it mean that I do not love what I am doing, that I’m wasting my money, my energy, my time, heck your time in this seemingly failing venture?  Should I cut my losses and move on to the next best thing?

Truth is that while I come up with really great ideas, sometimes my follow-through isn’t as awesome as my brainstorming. I sometimes tell myself that I just don’t have the time.  Other times it’s that my current great idea just has to take a back seat to an even greater idea.  I’ve had health issues indefinitely throw me off my schedule.  Whatever the excuses, I’ve grown tired of this pattern of behavior as it clearly impedes my pursuit of progress.

I suspect that at the heart of this dilemma is my struggle with committing to commitment and focusing on focus.

In a previous article, I spoke about focus while I was rock climbing.  In that situation, I found it easier to focus as my choices were 1) focus and complete my goal or 2) not focus and get stuck or seriously injure myself.  The day-to-day consequences of not committing and focusing are less dramatic and can seem less urgent.  If I don’t write today, I tell myself that tomorrow’s another day.  This easily gets out of hand.  I mean, forget committing to my writing!  What on earth happened to committing to commitment?  The same can be asked about focusing on focus.

The acts of following through and staying the course are monumental.  Great ideas and good intentions are just words in the absence of these two character traits.  So here I am giving myself the hard look and I’m more than a little concerned that I’ve got a touch of the flakiness!  Yes guys…I did say I was going to document the successes and failures of my pursuit of progress.  I quickly remind myself that I am a work in progress but at this stage of my life I’ve got to make it a priority to practice committing and focusing in a meaningful way.   So what did I do?

1. I paid closer attention to the people I know who are experts at committing and focusing
2. I scrounged around the internet looking for information about commitment and focus

My husband is an expert at commitment and focus with regard to his career. He will eagerly tell you his ‘glow up’ story anytime, anywhere, and I tease him about buying the rights to it.  He has a very close relationship with what he wants and makes sure to prioritize time and resources needed to be successful.  One of the things I particularly noticed was that he doesn’t juggle a million things at once—he keeps it simple.  I am always multitasking and attribute this to being a woman, a mom, a career person.  I’ve started doing some of the things he’s doing and I tell you, it’s very difficult to unlearn multitasking, to simply focus on one thing at a time.  But it is necessary.  He also has down time, which I also tease him about—but hey, once I started making this a priority, I realized that it afforded my brain time to rest to better attend to what I needed to do once I powered up again.

My internet search was as simple as “quotes on commitment” and “quotes on focus”. I’ve posted them in different places so that I always have easy access to them.  My favorites are:

-“Commitment means staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you”—www.muscleforlife.com

-“Commitment is finishing what you started even when you don’t feel like doing it anymore”—Pfitblog.com

-“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started”—David Allen

-“Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality”—Abraham Lincoln

-“Finish what you start”—unknown

-“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks”—Winston Churchill

-“I am too busy working on my grass to notice if yours in greener”—InspirationalQuotesGazelle.com

The past few weeks I’ve been reminding myself over and over that yes I am not in the mood to work on a goal but in this moment it is more important to follow through on what I said I was going to do.  I rely on this thinking in times when I cannot summon the motivation to go on, even after I recall the whys of my goals.

Sometimes I feel as though I am building a whole new person!  Maybe I am.  It’s pretty exciting and I am glad you are joining me for the ride.

Happy New Year!

Olanta

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