Tag: self improvement

Picking back up the good habits we dropped during COVID-19:

Leave a comment

It’s been a hard year and a half for goals! It’s been a hard year and half for everything really, but, you get my point. We’ve been told to cut ourselves slack, which is true, we needed it. We needed a break during the madness so we could properly take care of ourselves during the trying times, but it’s time to break back into the real world and start getting stuff done again.

I use an app that allows me to create daily to do lists, I even paid the extra ten dollars for a lifetime of being able to set reoccurring ones have a few other features. The app is really not that important, but the fact that I’m faced with eight bullet points under the title “habits” is. They are in my face daily. This is just one of the things I’ve tried to do to force myself into good behavior. I’ve also gotten a little help with my diet/active lifestyle by the mere fact that I’m pregnant and know I’m not just doing this for myself anymore. I have to be on top of it. Other than that? A lot of prayer and reflection trying to figure out why I struggle getting certain things going. A few motivational books. And a whole lot of trying to remind myself that I have willpower.

Willpower is a funny thing, I’ve talked about the fact that you have to exercise it to make it stronger before, but it’s also strange how when we tone it down (even for survival mode) it’s very hard to start back up. You read motivational quotes about how you can’t wait for motivation you just have to act on things, and they are right, but it’s much easier said than done. Some things really are a struggle, it brings us back to the truth that we find everywhere from the Bible to psychology text books, we do things we know are bad for us (or don’t do things that are good for us) even though we know we shouldn’t (or should). It sometimes seems like our natural response. Sometimes, I’m pretty sure it is our natural response.

Continue reading →

Hard times create strong men.

Leave a comment

DywSmIHUUAA3aU7

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

I came across this quote a while ago on Twitter. It struck a cord with me, because it’s true. We live in a constant cycle. I’ve talked about this in terms of mental health before, about how you have to stick through the bad and it’s terrible, but good always follows. There is a natural rhythm to life, some of it comes without outside help, but I think that a lot of it does come from the kind of things we indured.

We get lazy when things are good, we don’t work as hard, we don’t put our nose to the grindstone, we get comfortable and that comfort puts us at a disadvantage. The opposite is true for hard times. To survive we’ve got to give it everything we have and by doing that we tend to start an upswing. I know it’s not always this simple, but hardly anything in life is. This is a generalization,  but I think its a good one.

I also think that most people would agree with me when I state that right now we are in the middle of hard times. We have cities on fire, a global pandemic, economic collapse, rapid injustice, government overreach, massive unemployment, breaks in the supply chain. I could go on, but lets just stop and say that we aren’t doing so great right now, both as a nation and for most, as individuals. It’s hard to see an upside to this. There might not be an upside to the actual events, but there is one when it comes to how we grow through them.

Continue reading →

Self love isn’t self flattery.

Leave a comment

gemma-evans-89906-unsplash

Coming in with a hot take. I see a lot of people, especially young women on social media, who have gone the wrong why with trying to find self love. It’s turned into self flattery. As viewing yourself as a “goddess on earth” or something else equally as large. It’s gotten to the point that I see women talking up this form of self love, this form of flattery as the definition of what self love is.

Self love isn’t seeing yourself as a goddess, it’s not trying to hold yourself so high up that you can’t hear your negative thoughts, actually it’s normally the opposite. It’s seeing yourself as a wonderful but flawed being worthy of love and worthy of all the time and energy it takes to improve.

Self love is more self acceptance than it is self flattery. Yes, you should look at yourself as someone worthy and lovable and good as you are, but you it isn’t just about praising yourself. It’s about loving the core of you, faults and all and knowing how to make yourself better.

Continue reading →

Good role models aren’t the ones trying to influence people.

1 Comment

20180721_125500.jpg

Instagram influencers. Political influencers. Bloggers even.

If you scan the internet it seems that people aren’t just sharing their lives with you, but they’re trying to get you to live more like them. Whether it’s by changing your lifestyle, buying brands, or changing your opinions, there are a lot of people who want you to change. Maybe they want to be the standard that you’re reaching for, maybe they just like the fame. Whatever the case, the people who are trying hard to influence and be role models… they’re not normally the people you should aspire to be.

The best role models are ones that guide you through life. Their values are set and admirable and their life, despite it’s struggles, has joy in it on a really fundamental level. The best role models are moral ones. They are the content ones. And they are the ones we’d still like to be like when they are in their seventies. Good role models aren’t hard to find, despite what people say, there are a lot of good people in this world. Of course no one is perfect, but a good role model doesn’t pretend to be. They wear their flaws and they work on bettering them.

Continue reading →

The need for habit refining:

2 Comments

20190402_172743.jpgEvery once in a while I realize that I haven’t cleaned up my habits recently. I know I should be always working on refining and editing my habits, but I don’t know how realistic that is. We call them habits after all, they come naturally, we do them without thinking.

It’s also why they are hard to change, not that I’m telling you anything new. Bad habits die hard, they are something you really have to fight with. It takes a long time to establish new habits. I know they say 21 days, but lets be real, some habits are easier to form than others. It’s not all simple math.

It’s hard work, which is why we aren’t working on them all the time, we have other problems to deal with, life takes over. Self refinement can wait.

Until it can’t. Until we have a rude awakening. Then we get back to it trying to edit and chip away at our bad habits while we lay ground work for new ones.

Well I’m back with my rude awakening. My pants are tight, my diet has been terrible lately. I’m snacking on anything that’s not nailed down. I need to be eating better and less. I need to be taking better care of my body. I need to be getting more exercise.

When you have one of these rude awakenings it often doesn’t end there. You think “oh I need to fix my diet” but then you realize that you need to exercise, but then you realize that you need to fix your posture from working at a desk because it’s leading to back aches when you work out. Then out of nowhere you realize that you’ve abandoned a hobby that you need to pick back up and stop spending time in front of the T.V.

I say its out of nowhere, because it seems to be, but really it’s not. Once you start working on improving yourself you start to see things that you need to improve everywhere. It can be a bit disheartening, but it doesn’t need to be. Finding things to improve means you’re growing and a lot of people don’t put enough effort into growth. It’s not that other people don’t have as many things to improve, it’s just that they’re not doing them. You’re already on top of the game just by seeing these flaws, these bad habits to fix.

Continue reading →

Air them out: Why communicating our emotions is so important.

2 Comments

20190525_191739.jpg

I wear my emotions on my face, it’s a curse and a gift. It’s a curse because I have very little control over it, it happens in a split second and often by the time I get rid of the expression or slight tone in my voice it’s already been noticed. It makes people ask about my emotions a lot, which in turn, has gotten me to talk about my emotions a lot more. It made me realize how important it is to air out our emotions on a regular bases.

It also made me realize that some of my emotions are stupid. I’m not going to lie about that. Not every emotion needs to be spoken or written or told, some of our emotions seem to come out of nowhere and defy our common sense, but paying close attention to our emotions and which ones keep swinging around help us determine which emotions we need to be ignoring and which ones mean something.

Hint: If it happens over and over again, no matter how stupid it seems, you should figure out what is causing it at it’s root. It’s probably more important than it seems.

Continue reading →

Don’t underestimate average everyday memories.

2 Comments

IMG_1649

When I was packing my childhood bedroom, before moving into my wonderful new house a few weeks ago, I was drowning in nostalgia. I kept finding little bits and pieces of my past, of everyday things that meant the world to me as a child. It was an interesting experience because it opened my eyes to what I remember most for the past and what memories really mattered to me.

I have a lot more memories of playing with my mom as a child then I do of going to Disney as a child, that isn’t surprising, because we only went to Disney once and played on the regular, but those Disney memories hardly even show up. They meant a lot to me in the moment, but looking back? A scattered memory or two made it through, and none of them stand a chance against my mom and I’s weekly tea party.

We make a big deal out of these once in a lifetime experiences, and some of them really are truly remarkable. I’ll never forget visiting Rome, just like I’m sure I’ll never forget my wedding day. But the everyday moments can mean that much too. We don’t realize how much we enjoyed our crafts with our grandmothers until we are no longer doing crafts with our grandmothers, then we realize that it was some of our most valuable time spent together.

This might not be news, in fact, I hope it isn’t. I hope you’ve looked back at life enough to really enjoy those amazing and seemingly average memories. But that isn’t all that this post is about. It’s not about just looking back, it’s about how we are living right now. How we are making use of our time at this moment.

Chances are we are looking forward to the next big thing and letting the day to day grind get lost in the mix. Chances are even if we know that our daily memories are important, we are still neglecting them, because we’re busy. We have a lot to do, sometimes too much. So we let them pass as if they are unremarkable. We don’t enjoy them for being the special and wonderful things that they are.

And honestly it’s tragic to only enjoy these memories in the past tense when they are here to be enjoyed in the present.

So I pose this challenge to both myself and others, enjoy the mundane, find wonder in the everyday, don’t let these beautiful things only be enjoyed years from now. Embrace them. Rejoice in them. And love them now, while they are in front of you.

Little Fixes: Getting rid of my road rage made me a better person

Leave a comment

 

img_0083

We all have little problems, problems that we sweep under the rug because they don’t seem to be a big deal, or we don’t see how changing them will change anything else. We try to tackle bigger things, and sometimes that works out for us, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes these items are to big to tackle all at once. Smaller problems also take time, but not in the same way, they take a week or two of constant reminder and discipline instead of months of it. But they change our lives too, sometimes in ways we wouldn’t think.

I recently was in terrible 5 o’clock traffic and got cut off by someone who almost missed their exit. I cursed under my breath something terribly unkind and had a moment of clarity were I realized that that action didn’t warrant that insult. I’ve cut people off in traffic before and it really wasn’t that big of a deal, because more often then not, it’s a mistake. This break through thought kept circling back around every time I muttered something unkind in traffic, and I started to realize just how often I was doing it.

Continue reading →