Take A Deep Breath And Start Again

I mess up a lot. I fail quite often. I get uncomfortable making small talk and often say stupid things. I make a lot of mistakes. I don't have my shit together. I have started a lot of things I haven't finished. I have trouble keeping with an exercise plan. I become frustrated, angry, disappointed, sad, bitter and fed up, sometimes all in the same day. I look back at my life and wish I had done some things differently. I think about my past and feel guilty for things I did. I allow fear to keep me from doing things. I become cynical and sarcastic way too easily. I do a lot of things wrong. I procrastinate. I don't always give my all.

I have a life I am proud of. I get to go to work each day and help animals and people have better lives. I have the ability to make changes in my life and stick with them when I need to. I have amazing people around me who don't care about the first paragraph. When I fail, I get back up. I wake up every morning knowing the day is a fresh start to do new things. I try to incorporate what I write about into my life, even when I am not always perfect at doing it. I accept the fact I have done stupid things in the past and forgive myself for doing them. I try to overcome fear whenever I can. I work hard. I am constantly learning new things.

I'm not an expert in how to live life anymore than any of you are. I have done a lot of things and I have faced a lot of hardships, but I am still learning and growing each and every day. I'm going to continue to make mistakes and fail and say stupid things. I am going to do things I am not proud of. I'm also going to succeed and do things right and say smart things. I am going to do things I am proud of.

I have to give myself some credit and cut myself some slack. I have to learn. I have to try. I have to accept and embrace change. I have to put in the work. I have to get up when I fall. I have to try to live each day a little better than the day before. I have to take a deep breath and start again.

What Questions Will You Ask Yourself

I have written a lot about the importance of finding happiness. People much smarter than me have written hundreds of thousands of words about how to find what makes you happy. There are entire sections in bookstores (what few still exist) on living a happy life. Every day, people look at you and decide if they think you are a happy person. For many of us, we wonder why we aren't happier and read everything we can to figure out how to get to the level of happiness for which we yearn.

Every time I start thinking about why I am not happier, I ask myself some basic questions. What do you do that makes you happy? How much time have you spent doing this lately? How much have you exercised lately? What is keeping you from being as happy as you want? What difficulties are you facing at work or at home that are causing stress? What can you do about them? What do you want to change?

While this may seem like a lot of questions, I think we have to find a way to ask ourselves these questions more. Instead of waiting until our mind starts wondering why we aren't happier, we need to make sure we are making the time to do the things we really enjoy doing. We need to exercise (as I am living proof that all the studies are correct...the more your exercise, the better you feel). We must look at the things that are keeping us from being happy and figure out how to change them or eliminate them. Being honest about the difficulties we are facing is the first step in solving them. It probably won't be easy, but is necessary. Figuring out what to change is also going to be difficult, but if you aren't happy now, then you have to make changes to become happy.

There are some things you can do and control internally to help, too. Stop taking constructive criticism personally. Hell, stop taking any criticism personally. For me at work, I have a hard time doing this. I want to do an amazing job and any time any of my staff aren't doing things they way they should, I take it is a knock on my leadership. I can't do this and be happy about my work. Instead of looking at criticisms as negative, view them instead as a challenge to do better. Don't think of them as being caused by you not being good enough, instead think of them as stepping stones towards greater things.

Stop talking about other people and instead talk to the people. Difficult conversations are just that, difficult to have. But, they are the best way to get everyone on the same page and help to eliminate any future problems or misunderstandings. We owe our friends, loved ones, family and colleagues the respect of discussing any issues with them instead of everyone around them. No difficulties go away though gossip.

Quit focusing on everything at the same time. Nothing leads to unhappiness more quickly than being overwhelmed, stressed out and not reaching deadlines and goals. We all have a lot of things we need to work on and a lot of things screaming for our attention. Focus on fewer tasks at once and get them done to the best of your ability. Then, move on to the next ones. You have to be able to prioritize.

Cut yourself some slack. We are going to make mistakes. We aren't going to reach every goal every time. There is going to be criticism and feedback. Here's a secret...none of us is perfect. We are going to be harder on ourselves than anyone else is. Give yourself some credit and just do the best you can do each and every day.

Will doing all of these things make you as happy as you want to be? Maybe, maybe not, but it will help to lead you in the right direction. What questions are you going to ask yourself today? What harm is there in trying?

Keep Trying

I want to apologize for missing a scheduled Friday post. You may not have noticed the missing post, but I did. I have a self-imposed schedule for this blog and new posts are supposed to arrive every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. As you can see, there is a missing post for this week.

I could come up with a ton of excuses why there wasn't a post yesterday:

• I woke up later than I wanted.
• I had a morning meeting with my new boss, so I couldn't take a little extra time to write.
• The normal work day spiraled to an 11 hour work day, meaning I got home much later than expected.
• When I arrived home, one of my dogs was waiting for a bath (which I pushed to Friday as other things came up during the week).
• After washing the dog, I wanted to eat (as I hadn't eaten a meal through the day, only unhealthy snacks).
• I had laundry to do since I am going out of town tomorrow.
• After all of this, I ended up sitting on the couch watching a movie I haven't seen since the 1990's.

As you can see, there are a variety of reasons I didn't get a blog posted yesterday...except, all of these reasons are crap. The real reason I didn't get a blog posted yesterday is because I didn't make the time to post one. I missed a deadline (self-imposed, but a deadline nonetheless) because I chose to not do the work. I did a lot of other things, but just didn't write a blog post.

I'm not going to beat myself up for missing the post, but I can learn a few things from this experience:

• Habits are important: I recently took two weeks off blogging to go on my honeymoon. Prior to this, I posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It took a while for this to become a habit. In the beginning, I had to force myself to stick with these deadlines. Once writing was habitual, it became second nature and I built time in my schedule to write. It only took two weeks to lose this. It will be easier to start it back up, but will take work in the beginning.
• We have to make the time: We are all busy people. We have lives outside of the things we want to do (especially the things we do for fun). There are a lot of things competing for our limited time. We have to choose what we want to do and then make the time to do it. It's not always going to be easy, but we have to choose each day. I chose to watch a movie instead of writing. Is it the end of the world? Nope, but it did keep me from accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish.
• We have to prioritize our tasks: There will be days when we have to choose between things we want to accomplish because there is only a finite amount of time each day. Maybe you have to put off the Spanish lesson to run three miles. Maybe you have to put off weights to write. We may not accomplish everything we want to accomplish, but we have to figure out how to accomplish the most important items.
• Don't beat yourself up: We're all human. I'm not going to dwell on the fact I missed a post yesterday, but I will learn from the experience. I can write the post this morning and still have my three posts for this week. My day got away from me and I chose to do something other than write. It's a new day and I have new choices to make about how to spend my time. I may not get everything accomplished today either, but I can try.

Every one of us has things on our "list" we want to accomplish, but we fail to make the time to accomplish. What's on your list? How much of a priority is it? Do you really want to accomplish it or do you like talking about doing it more than actually doing it? Come up with a list of what you want to do today and then prioritize this list. Make the time to do what is most important for you. If you don't get things done, don't make excuses and don't beat yourself up, just try again. Keep trying until you do. 

Be Curious, Not Judgmental

Take a minute and think about something really stupid you have done. For all of us, this should be really easy. I know I have done tons of stupid things in my life and I could come up with way more than I would like. How would you like to be continually judged for this stupid thing? How would you like others to spread around what you did to other people, some you know and some you don't, who would also judge you by this stupid thing? 

My guess is you would hate it. You would think it was unfair and wish people wouldn't judge you by one stupid thing you did. We all would. Knowing this, why do we continue to judge other people based on a stupid thing we know they did? If it is something we wouldn't want to happen to us, why do we continue to do it to others? Quit being so damn judgmental.

We all make mistakes. We all do things that are incredibly stupid. Every one of us has something in our past we would be happy to forget. We learn from what we have done and become better because of these lessons. Would we prefer to not do some of these stupid things? Of course we would, but we can't change the past and just have to move forward while learning what we can.

For some reason, we have a hard time letting other people do this. When they do something we consider stupid, we have a hard time letting it go. It may because we want to believe we are better or smarter than these people and we think judging them will make us feel better about ourselves. The truth is, when we constantly judge other people, we don't feel better about ourselves and we look like big assholes. We like to think we would have done something different and better in the same circumstances, but we really don't know because we haven't been there. Your judgment assumes you know everything and you don't.

We are going to do something stupid. Hell, we'll probably do lots of stupid things in the time we have left. Knowing this, we have to remember to not judge other people for the things they do. When you see someone else being judgmental, call them on it. Think about how much better you would feel if you weren't being judged by the people around you. If you would feel better, wouldn't other people feel better if you weren't judging them? It's simple really, just quit being so damn judgmental.

Mountains out of Molehills

Many times, we allow ourselves to make things bigger than they really are. Yes, we are going to do things that suck. Yes, things are going to happen that make life much more difficult while we fix them. Yes, things are going to go wrong. Yes, things are going to be difficult. Yes, things are not always going to be rainbows and unicorns.

But, if we take a second to pause and breath deeply, can we honestly look at anything happening and say this is really the end of the world? Are things ever as bad as we make them out to be? Instead of complaining or floundering or dreading or fearing or worrying or thinking about how hard something is, what if we just rolled up our sleeves and got to work? What would happen if we just went about fixing things that needed to be fixed, without throwing in all the above fear and loathing?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't feel the emotions we feel when everything explodes in our face, but if we acknowledge them and then get to work, our lives will become a lot easier. Five years from now, these problems, the ones that are so horrible now, are going to be nothing more than a small blip on our timeline. When we let things get to us, we aren't able to do our best work and we spend more time complaining when we should be creating. No one does their best work when they are frustrated or angry or upset or afraid.

Things are really never as bad as we make them out to be. Figure out what needs to be done and do it. Leave the emotions out of it until it is time to celebrate. People love to say "everything happens for a reason." I don't know if this this true, but believing it does make the bad things seem a lot more manageable.

Mistakes

People make mistakes all the time. In fact, I'm pretty sure we are all going to make a mistake today. It may be a small one or it may be a huge mistake. We can either dwell on them or we can acknowledge them and learn from them while moving on with our day.

There is a good chance you are going to do something to disappoint people today. It happens. If you are trying to walk the line between learning from your mistakes or dwelling on them, you are also going to have to be careful when dealing with the people who are disappointed because of your mistake. You don't want to seem as if you don't care about it, but you also don't want to dwell on it with them. This is a fine line you have to walk and it isn't always going to come easy. Some people love to point out the mistakes of others and will continue to bring them up over and over again. Don't let these people goad you in to dwelling on them. Learn and move on.

No one likes to make mistakes, but mistakes are no the end of the world. Learn from them and move on. Don't let others pull you in to dwelling on them. Acknowledge the mistake and let people know what you will do differently next time. Don't become afraid to make mistakes. As long as we learn from our mistakes,  we can become better at anything we try to do.

Go out there and live. Make mistakes and learn from them. Do the best you can and if something goes wrong, know you will do better the next time.  Everyone makes mistakes...how we deal with them makes all the difference.