“I’m grateful today won’t last forever.”

OK, I don’t mean that about today.  But I have written that on gratitude lists in the past.

Sometimes, I try to be grateful for things I’m not really grateful for or I try to find aspects of awful things to be grateful for.  I say or write things like “I’m grateful for this challenge because I know it’s helping me develop coping skills.”  Or perhaps as above, “I’m grateful today won’t last forever.”  This doesn’t make me like the challenge or the day really.  It doesn’t make my heart blossom with gratitude or make rainbows come out.  But it does actually help in some way that I can’t explain.

If I look back at the challenges in my life, I can generally see where there was a lesson learned or where I somehow developed into a better person because of it or things worked out OK and I’m in some weird way glad things happened how they did.  It’s a lot harder to have that sort of perspective on a challenge when we’re in the middle of it.  It takes an extra effort to find something about a tough time to be grateful for in the midst of it.  Even finding something to be grateful for doesn’t necessarily make going through the challenge less painful, but it does sometimes help.

Going through a painful breakup, I might take the time to remind myself that I am fortunate to be the sort of person that feels deeply and really cares.  To me, there is very little worse in the world than having to break up with somebody that I really care about, in part because I genuinely care about others and I don’t want to cause anybody else pain.  Of course, this can’t always be avoided, but it is such an awful feeling.  Still, I am thankful that I’m the sort of person that is sensitive about such things.  I would take that over being some heartless person that doesn’t care and has an easy time of it.  This doesn’t exactly make the whole thing less painful, but it does somehow help me to feel better about the pain.

Working to be grateful when facing a challenge is also like making a statement to the universe, “I am going to face this the best that I can.  I may not like what is going on, but I am going to show up as the sort of person that has coping skills and uses them.”  It shows that you’re not just going to be a victim about the circumstance, but you are going to make an effort to control your mind and your reaction.  This aspect may be one of the most powerful things about working on gratitude in the face of difficulties.

There are some questions that can help one to find things to be grateful for in challenging situations:

• What skills or strengths do you have that will help you to get through it?
• Who do you know that can offer support or help?
• What things do you have that you can do to feel better?  (Go for a walk, curl up with the cat, make a cup of hot tea, etc.)
• What can you learn from the challenge?
• What other things in your life are still going good?  (It’s easy to focus on the 1 bad thing when there are 100 good things.)

Another thing that can help is looking back at a challenge from you past and thinking about how you learned from it or grew because of it.  Think about how while that challenge may have been awful to go through, whatever was wrong at the time no longer bothers you at all.  Then try to have a little faith that whatever you are facing now will be the same in 5 years: just something that you look back on and are grateful for the lessons.

Above all, be gentle with yourself.  It takes a lot of strength to even think of being grateful during a challenging time.  When we are stressed, afraid, or struggling, gratitude can be the furthest thing from our mind.  Those can also be the times when we stand to benefit the most from it.

Further reading on gratitude:

• The power of gratitude
• Daily gratitude
• Gratitude for my home
• Gratitude for my job
• Gratitude for people
• Gratitude for things

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Do it right

Do it right means taking the time to make it perfect.

Do it right means that you don’t leave any loose ends.

Do it right means that you don’t half-ass it.

Do it right means going through all of the cleanup afterward.

This is a BIG one for me.  Taking the extra time needed to really do something right the first time around is sometimes a pain.  I may be tempted to procrastinate or to just try to make it “good enough” or squeak by.  More often than not, this creates more problems later.  I’ll be bothered that it’s not right.  I’ll have to go back and fix it.  For a lot of projects, by the time I make it back to fix it, I’ve forgotten half the details I need to know and it takes longer to make it right than if I’d done it to start with.

An example would be taking the time to rename, organize, or delete files that I’ve used on a work task instead of leaving random clutter on my desktop in a folder called ‘New Folder (7)’.  It’s a small step that’s easy to skip but it makes a difference later if I need to go back to those files and I don’t have to try to figure out later if they’re files I need or ones I can delete.

Do it

Do it means that it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Do it means that the important thing is getting your rear in gear.

Do it means that ‘good enough’ really is good enough.

Sometimes, it’s easy to feel that we have to do something perfectly and that if we don’t have the time or skills to make it perfect, we’ll use that as an excuse not to do a thing at all.  Often times, it’s just easy to not do something.  There are a lot of things that don’t need to be done perfectly.  Sometimes, it’s OK to put in a mediocre effort, finish something, cross it off our list and move on to the next thing.  Fear and the desire for perfection often hold us back from accomplishing a thing.  ‘Do it’ is all about lowering our standards so that we can move past that.

For example, sometimes I feel like I sound dumb when I’m on the phone.  I have to let go of that and just make my work calls because solving a problem for a customer is more important that if I sound like the most polished, professional support person.

Knowing when to use which

Do it right and do it are two very different principles and there are places for each of them.  Asking yourself ‘How much does this matter?’  or ‘How long will the results from this last?’  can help you figure out which one to use.

If I’m working on the website for my business, it’s a ‘do it right’ sort of task.  Lots of people will see it, and once I finish the changes, I’ll likely not be back to work on it for quite some time.

If I’m vacuuming the floor, it’s more of a ‘do it’ sort of task.  If I get the high-traffic areas it’s generally good enough.  The goal is to just keep the cat hair from accumulating, not to make it so I can eat off of the carpet and in 10 minutes the cat will come in after rolling in the dirt outside and proceed to roll all over the carpet anyway.

Keeping these approaches in your arsenal and making sure you’re using the right on for a particular task can really make a difference in your productivity and success.

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I want to just start sharing the things that are important to me, the things that are getting me fired up and making me feel passionate about life.

One thing that comes to mind here is the idea of perfection.  I want all of my posts to be perfect.  They’re public, anybody can read them and I want them to be just right.  The thing is that if they never come to actually be because I’m waiting until it’s perfect, it doesn’t help anybody.  The truth is that they are never going to be just perfect anyway, and that whole idea of striving towards that is based on some assumption that ‘perfect’ is the same to everybody else.  I can’t please everybody with my writing and may not ever even have a popular site.  That is what some part of me wants to strive for, even though it’s not my real goal with this.

There is a lot of fear involved with it as well for me.  Fear is a topic that seems to be coming up in my life a lot lately, and I’ve started becoming super aware of it.  It’s an area where I think I’ve been growing a lot lately.  Where I used to just avoid things that made me feel anxious or afraid, I am making a conscious effort to face these things and overcome my fears.  I am trying to do things that make me afraid so that I can expand my comfort zone and grow through them.  Thinking about this has made me realize just how much anxiety and fear play a part in my thoughts.

I’m afraid people won’t like my writing.  I’m afraid nobody will want to read it.  I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.  I’m afraid it won’t be perfect.  I’m afraid that the things that I have to share aren’t compelling enough.  I’m afraid that I won’t get traffic because I don’t want to spend my time caring about SEO topics (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the topic of all of the little things one can do with a website to increase it’s ranking with search engines, or in simpler terms to make it show up in the search results on Google to drive more visitors to the site).

I want to overcome the fear of perfection.  When I started this site, I knew it wasn’t like it was going to appeal to every person on the planet, and I figured that if I let my personality shine through my writing that the people that would like it would be attracted to it and I shouldn’t waste my time trying to please the other people anyway.  I want to open up more and put myself, my thoughts, my writing, my soul out there… imperfections included and editing limited.

I want to challenge myself.  I thrive with challenges.  I expect that limiting time will increase my creativity and productivity.  Sometimes limitations actually force us to grow and create things that we wouldn’t otherwise achieve.

I want to not put off writing at all because I “don’t have enough time”.  And instead to leverage a small amount of time.  It’s not unreasonable to think that I could fit in 15 minutes a day.  Granted, I don’t plan to post every day just for the sake of posting if I don’t feel that I have something to say.

I do hope to continue with some of the themes here: figuring out what my goals and approach to blogging are, examine and work through things I’m afraid of, think about ways to be more productive and to be creative with my time, letting go of perfection, and letting go of worrying so much about what other people think and doing the things I want to be doing instead.

So, this is the first of my 15-minute posts, but I hope to write more of them, to open up and have the courage to be vulnerable and present a less-polished version of my work.  Anyway, the timer has gone off, so this post is done.

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