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.
