I don’t have enough fingers and toes combined to count my best intentions. Perhaps you will join me in acknowledging that there are many things I have intended to do, even begun doing with much gusto only to a huge road block. The road block I am most faced with comes in the form of the a wrinkly grey brick between my ears.
When I first realized this I began to wrestle with my state of activity. That is I often beat myself up for being lazy and this created an unhealthy “work till you drop” mindset (which I still give into a lot). Working harder and being hard on myself still never seemed to help me achieve what I had set out to do. That was when I really started listening to my internal conversation. One thing kept creeping back up over and over.
My mind consistently misrepresents the tasks at hand. Let say my intention is to blog once a week. I start off with this simple goal and have a plan to write my post each Monday. Monday roles around and my to-do list is quite full. I know I have set out to write a blog post, but it seems to be the easiest thing to bump on a busy schedule. A normal frustration for me would be to stress out and say “I am way too busy.” Or on the other hand to say I am lazy. Surely there is something else I can give up to get that blog post written. I get tired of all of this and give up on writing the blog post. Lately, though I have been trying to listen to really what is being said. Instead of the previous conversation I find I am saying “It will take an hour to write a blog post think of all the things you could do with that hour.” Others might say “It will take 3 hours to clean the house or 4 hours to mow the yard.” Ridiculous amounts of time to do what I set out to do. Most of my internal excuses deal with time there are some others.
I find it quite a relief to realize I am not as busy I thought and also that I am not lazy either. Have you ever caught your thoughts sabotaging your productivity?