Author: Mandy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how it can be hard to see growth when we don’t track it in some way. I don’t think growth is all about getting another gold star on your chart, but it is encouraging to know when we are making progress and moving in the right direction of our goals.

Today, I am going to focus on one area where I need growth, and I am going to try to come up with a plan to ensure that I actually remember to work on it.

No complaining or whining or being negative. This is one that has been added to my list of “areas to improve” recently, and an area where I need a lot of help. I don’t think most of us realize how easily we fall into the trap of complaining or being negative–at least I never did. I struggled with depression for years, especially in my twenties, and it wasn’t until I was around 30 years old that I started to realize that the thoughts that played in my head were much more negative than positive as a whole; it was also around that time that I began to believe that I could shift my thinking and help myself become less depressed generally. And it worked.

In the beginning, I simply tried to be less negative, meaning I didn’t allow myself to focus on every little bad thing that could or did happen in my life. Over time, I was able to actively look for good things and it has made a huge difference in how I view my life. At 25, I thought I was and always would be an easily depressed person, but now I no longer embrace that identity.

Despite that, I am still quick to notice when little things go wrong and focus on the negative. The dog threw up on the carpet. Someone cut me off in traffic. My toddler threw a ball at the soap dispenser for the fiftieth time and also knocked over two water glasses in the process. My daughter woke up from her nap after twenty-three minutes, just as I was starting a workout. In all of these cases, my first response tends to be negative, to complain.

Even when I call my sisters or friends and we ask each other how things are going, my tendency is to note the negative first. Mention how my little one woke up three times last night and I am so tired, or talk about how to house is a wreak and I haven’t vacuumed in a week. I’m not saying that I can never mention things like this, because life is filled with frustrating moments. But the simple act of speaking about those frustrating moments gives them more weight than the moments that I might not mention–like how my daughter has started pulling herself up on her feet now, or how my son is starting to say his sister’s name. I don’t want to lose the opportunity to speak about and thus reinforce the beauty of those moments.

About two weeks ago I came across a snippet of a woman talking about how she created “No Whining Wednesdays.” She started creating accountability for herself to not whine or complain or be negative on that one day of the week and I love that idea. Start small (although it might not feel so small when I try to spend an entire day without whining or complaining) and obviously that start will hopefully lead to reducing negativity and complaining every day.

What we think about and speak about creates, to a large degree, the lens through which we see the world. Not only do I want to focus on being a strong and positive force in my small sphere, but I especially want to teach my children to learn these skills, and I can’t expect anything of them that I am not willing to do myself.

Tomorrow might be Friday, but I am going to implement the “No Whining Wednesday” to my day and report back on how it goes.

Yesterday I talked about how it is important to recognize your strengths and weaknesses. I am currently listening to a book (The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD) that is all about finding the best time to do things based on your body’s internal clock–and the author argues that there are four different types of bio-times that a body operates by. He has spent his career studying this and feels notes that many people fight against their natural body rhythm.

As I mentioned, I am a slow mover. I am a deep thinker. I am cautious. I won’t lie and say this doesn’t disappoint me a little to admit, but it is true and I must embrace it rather than pretend it isn’t so.

My main goal now is to understand how create and implement the best system for time management that I can. I am not a high-energy person and I am not able to get five things done before the sun comes up. Naturally, that is. I still believe there is great room for growth, but I also feel that at this point in my life, it is detrimental to put myself down for not being a certain way. Rather, I want to meet myself where I am and work on growing from here.

One system I have started to implement recently is to get up by 6am and write my blog in the morning. If I get up earlier, that is a plus because I have more time, but when I am up by 6am, it gives me enough time to brush my teeth, make my decaf coffee, grab a snack, and then open my computer to start writing. Since I am slow moving and I value a morning routine that isn’t rushed, I find that this gives me just enough time to do those things and finish my blog post around 7am, which is when I go upstairs and shower. Since my daughter is often up around 7:30, this has proven to be a nice routine for me lately, and it helps me feel accomplished because I complete one of my top priorities–writing a blog post–before my kids are even up.

This is a start, but once my daughter starts sleeping through the night, I intend to move my wake time even earlier. For now though, I value my sleep over getting up super early. I have to resist the urge to classify this as a failure because shouldn’t productive people be getting up at 5am (or earlier)?

It isn’t helpful for me to fall into this trap of comparison and negative self-talk. As I struggle to figure out how time management will look in my life, I think it is important to strive for growth while also giving myself grace to move into new levels of improvement.

So yesterday I was talking about how I feel like I never have enough time. Welcome to life, eh? So many of us struggle to find enough time to get done what we need to and then, if we are lucky, even some things that we want to do.

This is going to come as no surprise to many of you, but I believe one thing that will help me is to get laser focused on what my top priorities are. It sounds easy but this has been difficult for me at times. I come from a long line of, what we refer to in my family, putterers. My grandma had the tendency to putter, my mom does, and I do.

We are slow movers and enjoy quiet moments of reflection. We are very thorough in our undertakings (even if we don’t always get a task completed at all once) but we can get easily distracted. And again, we are slow moving. My mom has often joked that my dad can go three times her speed. Case in point, they once helped my sister paint her house and my dad completed multiple rooms in the time it took her to finish one room.

Now, I have resisted this label for myself most of my life because I wanted to be a mover and shaker like my dad and my grandpa, but deep down, I always knew the truth.

For many years, I berated myself for not being more like my dad or my sister or my husband–or whoever I looked at as having better qualities than me. Usually, what I envied most in my dad, sister, and husband was their apparent natural drive to excel, their seemingly endless self-discipline, and their ability to complete tasks with precision and speed. But I do not have the same natural makeup as them. I also have qualities that they struggle to achieve–like empathy, patience, and understanding.

I think we all have certain natural-born tendencies. And please don’t take this as my excusing any negative behaviors, because I think we can all improve on our weaknesses and grow our characters. But we are all different. Since the time I was very young, I exhibited certain characteristics and those were either strengthened or weakened through nature and nurture, through my repeating or repelling certain behaviors.

I guess what I am saying is that perhaps one of the first steps to take when we are trying to improve upon something in our life is to take into account our nature and philosophies and tendencies. Even before focusing on our top priorities, we should be aware of who we are. From there, we can figure out how to accomplish our top priorities in ways that utilize our strengths.

Time is a limited resource and there are only 24 hours in each day. No matter how I work things out, it feels like I never have enough of it. I know that sounds cliché and it is, but it’s still what I am struggling with in the here and now.

I tend to want to write about things that I think (key word, here) I have somewhat figured out. It’s easier to do that, right? And it might not be the best thing in the world to try to build a blog based on regular and consistent cluelessness. We all have areas in which we excel and areas in which we are still weak, but we all have something unique to offer the world.

Anyway, I digress. The point I was trying to make is that I am struggling with time management. A lot. Some days I feel like I am grasping my fingertips around the concrete that will lead the way out of my disorganized fog. But most days I just feel like I am in the fog.

I’ve heard that people shouldn’t try to focus on too many priorities at once because then all those priorities suffer. That makes sense, but I still feel like I can’t keep up with any single priority consistently… unless one of my other few priorities suffer.

For example, I just put both my toddler and baby down for a nap. To have them sleeping at the same time in the day is a rare treat so I immediately thought about what I wanted to do with the few precious moments I will have. And here is the list that came to my mind to get done:

1. Write blog post
2. Exercise (25-35 minutes would be ideal)
3. Order a few Christmas gifts for my nieces and nephews
4. Go through the huge stack of papers sitting in the study and begin filing or tossing
5. Clean the kitchen from lunch
6. Research mattresses and check for Cyber Monday deals (my husband and I have been wanting to get a new mattress for about four years now)
7. Clear off the dining room table, which has been full of odds and ends for weeks now–everything from socks to candles to old batteries (sad, I know)
8. Call and schedule the pool gate installation
9. Start cutting vegetables for dinner
10. Take a nap! (I’m always tired but lately my daughter hasn’t been sleeping great again and I’m up multiple times a night with her, which is making me more exhausted than usual)

Let’s face it, a nap will never happen at this rate, but neither will half the things on that list. Not today anyway.

So how to I choose what gets done today and what doesn’t? Clearly, the first thing I chose to do was write this blog post. I’ve been writing for exactly twenty minutes now–which means I need to wrap up–but my daughter is already moving a little in her crib. She will be up any minute and I have gotten exactly one thing done from my list. ONE THING.

Obviously, not all of those things have to happen right now and today. The problem is, I’ll have new things to add to the list tomorrow and the next day. And if I don’t get some of those items done today and tomorrow and the next day, they will just continue to pile up. And what about the ones that need to happen every day (or should be), like exercise and cleaning the kitchen and blogging? How do I make sure those happen every day without fail while still finding the time to do the other things that are just a part of life–like cooking and occasionally bathing the dogs, and vacuuming, and doing laundry, and going to the grocery store, and on and on?

I would really love to hear some tips and tricks from others out there because I’m drowning here a little bit and I want to do better. I know that life is busy for everyone and that some people manage to take care of their top priorities consistently. I need to hear from them. I need to learn from them.

I’ll continue thoughts on this topic tomorrow but for now I’m going to try and cross off one or two more items on that list before my beautiful cherubs awake.

My house is a mess right now. Over the weekend, I took down my Fall things and put up my Christmas decorations. I don’t have a ton but I have enough to make the house feel festive and warm. And while I made some progress in cleaning and organizing, in doing so, I uncovered more areas that need to be cleaned and organized.

Have you ever run into that problem? You clean up one space only to find two more that need cleaning, or you purge your closet of old clothes only to realize that you also need to sift through all the old things in the downstairs closet as well.

I’ve also found that when I start clearing out drawers or decluttering countertops, I often just move everything I haven’t found a home for to a different surface. All the junk on my desk in the study? It goes to the dining room table so I can look through it later and determine where it should go. The extra cords and old nail polish and Q-tips? They go in a small bin that goes into a new drawer, which I intend to organize at a later time.

It is hard to get rid of things. I might need them later. I don’t want to be wasteful.

But I think the only way to keep my spaces organized and light is to ensure that every item I own is specifically necessary or desired, and that each of those items has a place, a home.

As one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year rolls to a close, perhaps it is good to ask yourself if all the items in your home have a place and if they bring you joy, to steal a thought from Marie Kondo. Having more things just to have things won’t bring joy, and will actually create more stress because it is just more we have to keep clean and organized.

Our homes are a reflection of ourselves. What does yours say about you? What does mine say about me? Mine tells me that I still need to do a lot of work, but that is okay. There can be joy even in the process of growth.

Well, yesterday got away from me and I didn’t fulfill my promise to myself to write a twenty-minute blog post. I wish I could say I forgot about it altogether, but that isn’t true. As I was trying to help my daughter go to sleep (she was really fighting it last night), I realized that I hadn’t done any writing. It was 8:15 when I left her room for the first time, but I had to go back in two more times before she calmed down and went to sleep. By 9:10, I was completely drained. I know this sounds odd because 9pm is not late, but for some reason, I was exhausted.

Rather than push through the exhaustion, I decided to listen to my body and just go straight to bed. I knew that if I let myself get a second wind, I would be up for hours.

Even though I failed to write, I choose to focus on something I did right. I listened to my body, which is something I fail to do far too often. And even though I was up at 3:40am to feed my daughter and never went back to sleep, I feel more refreshed this morning than I often do and I’m sure it is in part because I went to bed early.

In our society, we see it as a good thing to push ourselves all the time. Work harder, work faster, work longer hours. The more you do this, the better you are, the more important you are.

I would like to argue that sometimes we need to slow down. Sometimes we need to opt for an extra hour or two of sleep. The work will still be there in the morning.

I’m not saying that I’m proud of myself for not living up to my goal of posting every day for a thirty-day period. But I am saying that our well-being is important. I am saying that listening to our bodies is an underrated skill. I am saying that if we fail, we can get back up the next day.

The old me would have scraped the idea of writing a twenty-minute blog post every day for thirty days after the first failure. But the me today believes that I am not a failure if I failed one day. I am going to keep on trucking toward my goal.

It is Thanksgiving. A perfect time to talk about the importance of being grateful. We all know it is important to be grateful, logically speaking, but it is sometimes hard to put this into practice. Of course, this holiday is centered around giving thanks for the good things in our lives, but it got me thinking about how I can make this a regular practice in my life.

Why is it so easy to be in a state of gratefulness on Thanksgiving? And a state of romance on Valentines Day? And a state of patriotism on July 4th? It is because our attention is focused clearly on that thing on that day. Some people gripe about such holidays because they argue that we should be able to express romance and gratefulness and patriotism every day of the year. I love such holidays but I certainly agree that it can be easy to let the simple sentiments slide.

In his short book, As a Man Thinketh, James Allen argues that a man “is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.” If that is true–and I believe it is–then I need to prioritize thinking thoughts that focus on being grateful for my blessing, being kind to others, being romantic with my husband, being patient with my kids, and so on. These have to be a focus because I actually want to improve my character. The actions associated with these things are preceded by the thoughts we allow ourselves to focus on.

As we enter a new day tomorrow, one that sometimes feels like the opposite of a day of thanks–as Black Friday is a day focused on buying–I have two parting thoughts:

1. I have to train my mind to think about good things every day of the year, not just on some days here and there.
2. The actions I take and the words I say are a reflection of the thoughts I think so my thoughts are incredibly important.

We all have so much to be grateful for, even in the midst of hardships, but one of the biggest blessings we all possess is the ability to choose our thoughts and words and actions. Let’s choose wisely.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Okay, here we go again with a twenty-minute post. This is actually a harder exercise than I would have imagined because it really is such a short period of time and once I start writing, I find it hard to stop myself.

In fact, it feels similar to my experience with Marco Polo. I believe I mentioned the app once before and how I use it to keep in touch with a few people. Honestly, at this point in time, I basically use it with one close friend. We leave each other video messages most days and it is a nice way to stay in touch without having to wait for free blocks of time to align so we can talk on the phone (sometimes it is many weeks before we can catch up by phone).

This sounds funny, but on multiple occasions, I have started a message only to feel discontent with it and delete it. This is often due to the fact that I feel like I am rambling or I forgot to address a major point she talked about. I am a huge talker but leaving messages on this app has forced me to take a look at the way I communicate.

One lesson I am learning is that deleting and repeating messages is a misuse of my time. But more importantly, it is teaching me to be more precise about how I speak and what I speak about. It reminds me that not only does what I say matter, but my attitude matters. The things I say have the ability to affect not only my friend, but me as well. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is easy to forget when we interact with others throughout the day.

My goal for this blog is to encourage you and also to encourage myself. In these twenty minute posts I am forced to think about each word. What do I want to say and why is it important? Perhaps if I approach more of my life like this, I will find it easier and easier to hold tight to the things that matter and let go of the things that don’t.

Every morning that I manage to wake up early and sit at my computer to write, I feel renewed, excited, energized. When I am writing, I feel like I am doing what I am meant to do.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to figure out what I should do with my life (even though I’ve been passionate about writing since I was twelve years old). I used to think I was alone in this endeavor and that most people had figured that out by the time they reached their mid-to-late twenties. I remember carpooling to work with a very sweet woman. We both disliked where we worked and would talk about finding new jobs. She used to joke, “I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” She was forty-one at the time, and I was twenty-seven.

Perhaps part of the reason that so many of us struggle with this question is that we spend too much time pursuing what we are “supposed” to do. My co-worker had spent a number of years pursuing high-paying jobs but then she got laid off and took the first job she could get. She hadn’t really asked herself what she liked to do.

Another reason, which is probably my top reason for resisting my life’s purpose, is fear of failure. I was always afraid I would fail at writing. At thirty-seven, I step back and ask myself what the really means. I always though that failure would mean I would write books that nobody would publish. I would write a blog that nobody wants to read. I would write on topics that others think are silly. I would write pieces that people criticize.

Now, I realize that failure would mean I wouldn’t write any books that might not get published. I wouldn’t write a blog that might not get read. I wouldn’t write on silly topics that people might criticize. Failure means not doing what I love to do, no matter the outcome.

Start doing something that you love. Even if it doesn’t turn into your dream job, I believe that it can help you wake up feeling excited and energized to do that thing, even if it is for a few minutes each day. If you’re lucky, if I’m lucky, maybe it can lead to some beautiful “failures.”

I rarely feel like I have enough time to write, and I never feel like the blog pieces I post are as polished as I would like. But I often let that hold me back from posting. Right now, I probably have at least ten blog posts I’ve started but never finished because I want to go back and edit them. While I believe it is important to strive for quality work, I also think there are times when it might be better to act and act quickly rather than crawl at a snail’s pace and get very little done. Besides, I often find that the posts I tell myself I will polish later are the ones I never finish.

So I am going to try an experiment here. For the next thirty days, I am going to give myself a time limit for each post. I can only have twenty minutes to get my thoughts down and then I hit the Publish button. While this might end with a lot of terrible posts and scattered thoughts, my desire for setting this goal is to learn how to become more concise and also learn how to get better at doing (as opposed to overthinking, as is my tendency with everything in my life).

I’ve already been at the screen for fourteen minutes with this post.

This afternoon, I was feeling pretty discouraged about my goal to start a new blog and YouTube channel focused on lessons I’ve learned from books. The idea is to write a blog and post a video for each book I read, giving a brief overview of the book and then hitting on 7-10 lessons that really resonated with me.

But as I said, I also feel like I have very little time to devote to this new project, and to this blog as well. I am a stay-at-home mom with a son who is almost two and a daughter who is eight months. I am still often getting up multiple times a night to feed my daughter. I am always busy and always tired and it feels like I rarely have a moment to myself (I always used to hear parents joke that they couldn’t even have a moment’s peace in the bathroom and now I know this to be true).

While I am busy, I also realize that some of my struggle to find time stems from my lack of planning and focus. None of us can do everything but we can all make time for our top few priorities. I am struggling to learn how to do this, but I know it is possible.

This new goal of taking just twenty minutes a day to write each of my next thirty blog posts is part of my plan to make this blog a priority and stop making excuses for why I can’t write. Who doesn’t have twenty minutes a day to spare?