How Are You Feeling?
Are you feeling it? With everything going on in the world, most of us have hit a point where we have felt it. Sadness, anger, fear. Going headfirst into the unknown and everything feels out of control. We have been there right along with you. The accumulation of the last few weeks has caught up with us and we have felt it too. In one episode on her new podcast, Brene Brown talked about the 80/20 percent rule that she and her husband practice. When one person in the relationship is at 20% capacity they see if the other person can pick up the other 80%. If the combination of the two doesn’t equal 100%, they try to see where they can make changes in their week or month to make up for what they are lacking in energy. Paul and I have started practicing this in our marriage over the last several weeks and have been having a nightly and weekly check in to see where we are at. At one point last week, Paul came to me and said I am at a solid 40% right now. After I listened to him, I told him that I was only rocking 30-40% as well. It felt good to be honest with each other and then come up with a plan that we could make up for the last 20%. We decided to follow the advice of our topic of tiny habits this month and find what small changes could we make that could help us make lasting changes.
In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he says that if we don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, we won’t make the long term changes to achieve our goal. Improvements are only temporary until they become a part of who you are. He says that when starting a habit you need to do four things for it to stick. You need to make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Don’t look at the big overall goal, but boil it down to its individual parts. In the last few weeks, I have gotten off track on several things that I normally do and just felt chaotic. So, with the start of the new month, I am creating several habits to get back on track. One habit I am going to work on is journaling. To get back into my routine, I am going to set a timer for 2 minutes every night before I go to bed and write a few sentences about my day. I want to make it easy to get back into the habit of my self-care. Anyone can do something for themselves for one minute. When sitting at a desk all day and you want to move more, set a timer for every 30 minutes and just stand up. That gets you into the habit of moving without creating a lofty goal that goes by the wayside in a few days or weeks. Find the small one minute task in a habit you want to create and master it. Once you master that task, start adding more layers to it. You will reach your goal in no time!
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