Restarting & Goal Setting
It has been five or so months since I last posted. When school closed, so did my brain. I went into survival mode trying to navigate quarantine, home-schooling and all the other changes that were occurring. Which means I basically stopped working on this blog and my own challenge for the year to DO THE WORK.
My February goal was to work on sleep hygiene. I’m going to be 100% honest with you: I don’t remember a single thing from February and sleeping. I doubt I did a good job with it. In March, I forgot to set a goal. And when April hit, I had no goals. Same with May and June and July and August. I was just keeping my kids fed and (mostly) clean. Getting through one day at a time.
I was kind of ashamed to jump back into the blog because I had failed. I couldn’t even keep my self dedicated to a goal for two months. (I am giving myself some grace for quarantine though…that was just a weird season.) But now it is almost September and with the kids starting school this past week, I realized I wanted to jump back in. And I decided to not be ashamed of my failure. (That’s another thing I’m working on.) If I wanted to talk about pushing yourself and working through challenges and reaching your dreams, how could I not talk about failure? Because if some failure isn’t a part of that, was it even a challenge to begin with?
Now the question for me is: how do I go forward? How do I set myself up for success and not failure? How do I set a goal that may need to be adjusted should life blow up again?
Do you ever struggle with where to start?
I do.
For instance, when I see the clutter and chaos all around my house, sometimes I get overwhelmed and act like my middle daughter did when she was four years old and puddle (our family word for a meltdown) to the floor. Or I act like my eldest daughter, grab the nearest book and dive inside to hide. I want to say that I never act like my three year old daughter and just start dumping more stuff all over the place, but we all know she had to learn it from someone…
I was watching my favorite vlog/blogger Jordan Page from funcheaporfree.com do a closet overhaul on YouTube recently. She said a phrase that has been helpful to me as I start to navigate making changes again. She said, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
One bite at a time.
As the girls and I cleaned up their playroom that looked like the floor had disappeared, my middle daughter started to get overwhelmed. “How are we going to do this?!” It was at that very moment the elephant analogy came to mind. After I shared it with them, we dove in, working on our own small tasks to help finish the larger goal.
My large, messy playroom size goal for 2020 is to DO THE WORK. The planner in me wants to make lists and try to plan each bite of the elephant before I even taste it. But that’s not realistic. If this pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that we have to just go one step at time.
Instead of a giant monthly goal, I think for the rest of August and into September I am going to work on doing the work daily. What are feasible goals that I can work on today that will benefit myself and my family?
Today’s feasible goal is simple: do the damn dishes.
I hate washing dishes and I let them pile up over the past couple days. It’s bad. Kitchen counter space is at a minimum. And when the kitchen is a mess, I’m less likely to want to cook a healthy meal. So this is me, asking you to hold me accountable.
How have you been doing during crazy time? Do you have any tips or tricks for how to stay motivated in a season of constant changes? Any Enneagram 7s have some tried and true tips for how you overcome distraction and avoidance?
House of Dreams 