Self Improvement

The Balancing Beam

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Do you ever feel like everything in your life, or almost everything is out of balance? Things are inconsistent and it feels like you are always falling on your ass?

Maybe I am the only one. I would like to say I have been only feeling like this for the past few months but I would be lying. Reflecting back on the years in my life it has ALWAYS been a problem. Does that mean it has to be? I do not think so. We just need to be mindful and intentional about life and learn how to get into a place where we feel like somewhat balanced.

Life is a little bit like a balancing beam. A balancing beam is a narrow wooden beam supported by a horizontal position approximately 1.2m off the ground.

While doing some research on balance beams which are generally used in gymnastics, I came to the conclusion that like life, using a balance beam correctly is a discipline, it requires work but if you are consistent, it will become second nature.

I found an article titled ‘4 Tips to Better Balance on the Beam’ on www.thevegagym.com. In this article, the writer notes that in order for a gymnast to successfully balance they need to be able to focus on staying centred. It requires dedication, precision and discipline to master this difficult beam. Do any of those words ring a bell?

In life we have two choices, we either live intentionally and succeed or live on autopilot and fail. Sounds harsh but think about it, it’s true.

Balancing life has always been difficult for me, but if I really think about it, it is because I have been on autopilot. So how can we change this?

As usual and probably a little cliché I think the first step is to admit you have a problem. This usually does not happen in a kind way, it usually smacks you in your face whether it is because of something someone said, something you read or watched or listened to. But there comes a point in everyone’s lives, whether that be in their 20s, 30s or older where they sit and think “WTF”. I am at that point.

So according to the article mentioned earlier in order to better balance on the beam we need to do four things:

  • Have proper form
  • Start on the ground
  • Look ahead
  • Breathe deeply

Let us unpack these 4 things in relation to how we can better balance this thing called life.

“It is important to make sure that you have the right form to maintain balance”.

The right form is vital in order to succeed and it is one of the first things that need to be adjusted. How is your form? Obviously, I am speaking metaphorically here. Do you slouch around all day negative and unhappy? When you lift ‘heavy’ (emotional/mental) things are you doing it in a way that will hurt you?

We need to start off by looking inwards and understanding where we are at in terms of the right form. If we cannot do that, then the rest of the steps aren’t going to help.

I recently downloaded an app called ‘Daylio’, it is a cool app that allows you to track your emotions, activities (or lack thereof) write entries for the day, multiple times a day and even add photos and voice memos. This is a great way to start identifying whether your form is good or not. Plus, it is on the phone so you can use it whenever you want and it doesn’t have to take more than a few minutes to sit and reflect.

“Master your balancing exercises on the floor before moving up to the beam”.

This one can be difficult because we rarely have opportunities to handle one thing at a time, which is why we have a problem balancing it all but hear me out. Sometimes in life, when something good or bad happens we tend to just charge at the situation, and sometimes that works but most of the time we are the ones that get charged and end up where? On our ass.

So how do we go about doing this the correct way? We need to understand our strengths and weaknesses so that we are more in tune to understand WHAT we can handle and HOW MUCH we can handle at the same time. This step might take a little long but the most important thing to remember is to take it one day at a time, it is a journey, not a race. Tune in to your thoughts, emotions and body so that you feel more comfortable in situations that do not require you to balance everything at the same time. The Daylio app or anything similar can help you do this too.

In therapy it is suggested you do this: it is almost practising things in small doses to see what you can handle. Do you have anxiety? Once you understand why you have anxiety and you have in theory learnt certain ways in which to get through it, you need to do it practically without expectations. So going to a public place for example where you would experience that kind of anxiety and testing if your methods of getting through it work is a simple yet meaningful way to understand where you’re at. Once you are able to master your balancing on the ground, you will most likely know how to do it on the beam.

“Focusing on a single point across the room will help you stay upright”.

Keep your chin up and look straight ahead. This can only happen when we have set goals for ourselves, and not just goals like ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years’ but smaller more manageable goals. This will help you navigate through each day for perhaps a month or so and that way you will be able to stay focused. I would say the best way to do this is to split your goals up according to the areas in your life, one goal per area and limit it to a month or two, remember this is a journey so we will come back and reflect often.

So, if we split it up according to the areas of our lives it would probably look a little like this:

  • Health
  • Finances
  • Spirituality
  • Personal growth (mentally, emotionally, physically)
  • Relationships (spouse, friends, family)
  • Career
  • Recreation

It seems like a lot when you list it out but it does not need to be if you break it up into manageable goals like this:

  • Health – a ‘snack’ after dinner only on a Wednesday and Saturday night instead of every night.
  • Finances – Write down the things I want to buy or put it on a wish list and leave it for 30 days and if I still want it after 30 days and have the money, I can buy it.
  • Spirituality – say a little prayer and thank God every time I hear a bird chirping.
  • Personal growth (mentally, emotionally, physically) – allocate 30 minutes in total in the morning or evening and spend some time reflecting, engaging with my emotions and doing some stretching or light exercise.
  • Relationships (spouse, friends, family) – message 1 person a day to check in, organise to spend time with my husband and or friends and family and commit to it.
  • Career – get to work on time, come in with the right attitude and just remember that I am working for God and not man.
  • Recreation – read a chapter of my non-fictional book every morning and a chapter of my fictional book every evening.

When we break it down like this you will notice that some of these things you already do and others just need a little more intention to make it work, you just need to be willing to put in the work to create the system, eventually, it will become second nature. Revisit these goals weekly or monthly to see if you have achieved them, need to extend them or even if you realise it is not something you want to focus on anymore. Again, a great app to help you do this and feel accountable is Daylio.

“Clearing your mind and breathing can help narrow your focus on balancing”.

Life is messy. I think everyone knows that. But if we are better prepared then we can handle more and sometimes the things that used to put us in a blind panic will not anymore. Once we have looked at what issues we have focused on methods of how to overcome them, put them into practice and made little goals for ourselves we will become better prepared to balance life.

But as a disclaimer, this is not going to fix your life instantly. As mentioned before, this is a journey. Sometimes, you will fall off the beam and that is okay because if you have learned the steps from above you are able to get back on and try again.

When you’re at a point where you think you just cannot take anymore, stop, breathe and just clear your mind. This will help you realign your focus on what you are trying to do. We need to remember to stop and not quit. Do not jump off the beam or go back because things are hard. Things will be harder if you keep going back to your old ways. You need to learn to trust yourself and what you have learned and just keep going.

I do not have all the answers, in fact, I am desperately trying to find them so I can change my life, BUT I do know one thing. One step forward is better than nothing at all.

You’ve got this!

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Self Improvement

Uninspired

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Have you ever felt like nothing or no one can ever get you out of this hole that you have dug for yourself?

You listen to people talk about what they are currently doing to achieve their goals, you watch YouTube videos and read blogs, and you even WANT TO WANT to do something but you cannot. Have you or are you currently feeling this?

Life is busy, I get it. No argument here. I have almost every part of my day scheduled and there always seems to be a long list of to-do’s that need to be ticked off before you even think of doing anything for yourself. Therefore, you are so uninspired that you just go through the motions of every day, wake up with just enough time to get ready and perhaps not even that, go to work which is also not as enjoyable anymore, and when that is all done you get back home and you cook, clean, and so on and so on. You autopilot your life and before you realise it, it’s been one month, two months, or even more since you did anything for yourself.

Let me tell you, I GET IT! I would not have written this post a few months ago because guess where I was? My self-sabotage couch (if you have no idea what I am talking about, see this post)

Now you might be thinking it is easy for me to sit and write about this topic and how to overcome it but I do not know you, I do not know what is going on in your life, and you are probably right. But I can tell you this much, I have experienced enough in my life, gone through the motions (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually) to tell you there is a way out. You just need to be active in your own life.

I have so much to say on this topic that it could go on forever, but I won’t because you will probably get bored and leave. My aim in every post I do is to give you two or three simple tangible steps to get you going, you will find after that, things will just start moving.

Do not think I forgot that if you are reading this you are probably sitting on your self-sabotage couch, so the steps you need to get moving need to be minimal. I know everyone is different and not everything works the same for everyone but I hope that my steps help, even a little bit.

The first thing we need to do to get out of the “I WANT TO WANT TO” do something to the actual doing is to:

REFLECT

This needs to be intentional, so you need to get a piece of paper and a pen and sit at a table, no not sit on the couch or in your bed, at a table. Remember we are trying to be intentional. Yes, you can use your phone but there is just something about physically writing that just makes things more ‘real’.

When you have a piece of paper and pen I want you to set a timer for 10 minutes and I want you to really think about and answer the following questions:

  1. What is making me feel uninspired?
  2. What is being uninspired doing to me?
  3. What do I want to change?

If you finish before 10 minutes that is fine, as long as you intentionally and honestly thought about and answered the questions above. If you go over 10 minutes, that is perfectly fine too!

Once you have answered all the questions spend a few minutes reading and reflecting on them. Ideally, this should be done out loud but if you can only do it in your head then that’s fine too.

Read out the question and then your answer, as you are doing this think if there is anything else that comes to mind that you may want to include, if not, then continue to the next question. Do this until you have reflected on all your answers.

In case you do not know quite how to do this I am going to give you an example:

  1. What is making me feel uninspired? The sheer quantity of work to do every day from work itself to then having to vacuum daily, do washing and pack it away, and the list goes on. Once work ends at 4 and I start doing what needs to be done I do not want to do anything else
  2. What is being uninspired doing to me? It makes me irritated, I get so mad at myself. I have all these things I can do, read, draw, paint, write, and up-skill myself but I am so tired and uninspired and then hate myself for feeling this way yet I still sit and hang out on my self-sabotage couch wasting my life.
  3. What do I want to change? I want to do ONE thing every day that makes me happy but also refreshes me (drawing, painting, writing, learning something new.) I want to stop being on autopilot ad start living intentionally.

Now that you have a better understanding of what actually makes you feel uninspired, and how it makes you feel let us move on to the doing.

Often when we feel uninspired and we WANT TO WANT to do something but we don’t, we sit around and either numb ourselves or we ‘plan’ what we love, for example, I want to get better at drawing and painting so I spend a lot of time watching videos of other people doing it and never actually do it myself. While there is nothing wrong with watching videos or reading stuff, we need to be intentional about it so that it does not become a numbing mechanism. We need to get out of the planning phase and into the doing phase.

The second step to trying to get out of this uninspired phase is going to sound ridiculous but hear me out.

JUST DO IT

Okay, Kayla! So I am on my self-sabotage couch and I do not feel like doing anything yet here you are telling me to do something ((insert face palm here))

Well yes, my friend that is what I am telling you to do. There is no permanent cure for being inspired, it happens to everyone all the time. What I want you and I to do differently is what happens after you feel this way. You almost catch the feelings before it does any damage or any more damage.

We live in a world that says, do it later, we have time. Guess what? We do not. How much time do we waste on feeling like shit waiting for it to miraculously disappear while the world continues? TO MUCH TIME. We need to get over this ‘I need motivation’ thing. No, what we need is to reflect and just do it.

So you have just finished reflecting on what makes you feel inspired, what it is doing to you, and what you want to change. So go on, just do it.

Do it right now, well I mean after you finish reading this ((insert smiley face here))

Reflecting allows you to feel your feelings. Get them out of your head and on paper. Just doing it allows you to intentionally change what is making you feel this way, even if it is only 10 minutes.

Alright, example time.

On my list I wrote drawing and painting, I also write about learning something new. So I am going to count to 3 and get off my self-sabotage couch and go to my craft table and get out my sketchbook, pencils, paint, and all the other necessary equipment. I am going to set my iPad up and head over to YouTube and choose one of those videos I watched and I am going to follow along, draw and paint. Is it going to look good? Probably not. Do I care? No. After 5, 10, or 15 minutes I am feeling so calm and happy that I just want to do this all the time.

Okay now remember this feeling, remember how light you feel doing the thing you love doing. You are going to need to remember this feeling when you are down and in that hole, we spoke about at the beginning of this post.

Can I tell you the secret to stop feeling uninspired? Rinse and repeat those two things. ALL THE TIME. Feel the feelings, get it out on paper and understand why you feel this way, and then just get out there and do the things that make you happy.

You are the only one living your life, no one else, and if you are constantly sitting on your self-sabotage couch trying to numb things nothing is ever going to change.

NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES.

So count to 3 (for real, count to 3) stand up, even while reading this post and go complete steps 1 and 2, right after one another and I pray that you actually do this. Do it for yourself, you need to stop just surviving every day, you need to start living every day.

Now GO!

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Self Care

Self-Care or Self-Sabotage

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Self-care is something I CONSTANTLY advocate for. You can ask my friends, colleagues, and even students (I am a teacher b.t.w). I am always saying things like ‘You can’t pour from an empty cup’ or ‘Do not forget about yourself’.

In class, when I ask my students what they did over the weekend I usually get responses such as ‘doing assignments’ or ‘catching up on school work’ and I immediately respond with, What about you? What about family?

The thing is, yes I advocate for self-care but what does that actually mean?

I am currently reading a book titled “How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t” by Andrea Owen and in one of her chapters she speaks about numbing versus comfort and it really put things into perspective for me.

She said, “Many of the things we tend to use as numbing mechanisms are the same things that we use to comfort ourselves, but when we chuck self-control out the window, we move into disassociating territory”.

She goes on to give this example, “Had a bad day and hopped onto Facebook to forget about it for a few minutes? a month later, you realize you’ve spent more time scrolling through Facebook than you have interacting with actual people in real life.”

WOW… Just wow!

Let us unpack this real quick.

Self-sabotage according to www.verywellmind.com has been explained as such, “self-sabotaging behaviour refers to intentional action (or inaction) that undermines people’s progress and prevents them from accomplishing their goals. Self-sabotage occurs when people hinder their own success.”

Now I am not sure which category you fall into, is it intentional or are you simply not achieving your goals due to inaction? Regardless you are still hindering aspects of your life with the choices you are making. Scratch that. That WE are.

I am definitely not sitting on a pedestal watching you fail. I to self-sabotage. Apparently, more than I realised. ((sigh))

HOW TO STOP SELF-SABOTAGING:

I am not going to give a full-blown teaching on self-sabotage because it’s quite an in-depth topic. The website I linked above has got some great resources. What I want to do is help with the first step, and that is admitting you we have a problem, only then can something be done about it.

So we need to ask ourselves just TWO questions to help us unpack this whole self-sabotaging thing.

  1. Is your behaviour aligning with your goals?
  2. Is your intentional action or inaction based on a fear of failure and worry about looking foolish?

Simple questions right?? ((insert face palm emoji here))

Think about these questions, but really think about it. And before you say, “I am tired”, or “I am always so busy”, stop right there. Once you want something bad enough those excuses do not hold the same weight as it does when you are sitting on the self-sabotage couch watching your life pass by you.

Again let me remind you, I am not sitting on a pedestal. I am currently on the self-sabotage couch… But, now that I am aware of my problem and am doing some introspection I am slowly getting off this couch that hinders my progress and cleaning the space around it. (Just remember, the self-sabotage couch is a metaphor but if you literally spend your days on the couch (like me) then it’s pretty literal too.)

After getting a better understanding of self-sabotage I looked a little deeper at what self-care means and I was quite surprised because it is not something people usually search for, it is something people do. We all tell one another that self-care is doing something for yourself to make you happy. It is that simple right? ((insert eye-rolling emoji here))

According to the same site, I read another article, www.verywellmind.com and they defined self-care as such, “Essentially, self-care means a conscious act people take in order to promote their own physical, mental, and emotional health.”

Read that again. What sticks out?

A CONSCIOUS ACT

Would you say that the things you generally do for “self-care” you do consciously? Because despite my going on and on to anyone who will listen about the importance of self-care, after reading that chapter in Andrea Owen’s book and diving into what self-care really is about I really started doing some introspection I have come to realise, that I, in fact, do not do it consciously, there is no self-control and it often does feel very disassociative. So am I really caring for myself or am I sabotaging myself to numb the feelings I do not want to feel?

Perhaps you need to ask yourself the same question honestly.

HOW TO DO SELF-CARE PROPERLY:

Alright, now that we have a better understanding of what self-sabotaging and self-care are, we can conclude that we probably self-sabotage a lot and our self-care ‘routine’ isn’t actually promoting our physical, mental, or emotional health.

But how do we fix this?

Well if you have read this far you probably have already admitted it and you have started thinking about examples in your life where you sit on the self-sabotage couch claiming to be caring for yourself and well, you weren’t. You may even be there right now ((like meeeeeeee)). So let us look at 2 things we can start to consciously take care of ourselves so we can actually start to live our best life.

1. Make a list (on your phone or on a piece of paper) of the 6 categories of self-care listed below.

www.headofthehive.co.uk

Once you have done this write down ONE activity that you have done in the past that makes you feel like you’ve breathed in fresh air and the world has calmed around you. Activities that need to be done with intention and consciously.

2. Slowly start doing some of these activities that you listed BUT with intention so that you can feel the full benefit of them. Some of these things overlap, for example, you could exercise (physical) with a friend (social) or clean space in your home (environmental) so that you can try a new hobby (personal).

Try doing at least one thing a day where you actively spend some time refuelling. Even if it is 5 – 10 minutes.

Remember, you might feel like you are managing and getting through the long to-do list you have every day and you do not feel like you are burning out but ask yourself how often you sit on that self-sabotage couch and watch your life pass by you. Once you start implementing these self-care activities and do them with intention and consciously you will enjoy the feeling of breathing fresh air so much that you will begin to make time for it and eventually you cannot imagine your days without it.

*P.S* When I refer to your ‘self-sabotage’ couch I do not mean that you cannot sit and relax on the couch and watch a movie, but remember what Andrea Owen said in her book, “When we chuck self-control out the window, we move into disassociating territory” so if you want to watch a movie, watch a movie but put your phone away and intentionally watch it if you want to watch series? That’s fine, but perhaps stop watching a season a day. ((uhm, yeah I am talking about myself here))

You just need to ask yourself if you are doing it intentionally and if you still have self-control. If the answer is yes then do the things that bring you joy and fill your cup.

I pray reading this has helped you, even just a little bit. Continue to learn and grow. I do not want you to just survive life, I want you to thrive!

God Bless!

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