How many times have you woken up and said to yourself, “meh, I’ll start this tomorrow.”
“I have all the time in the world to start this diet, to start this painting, to start cleaning out my dumpster-fire of a basement, so why start today when it’ll be there tomorrow?”
Lord help me, I was the QUEEN of tomorrow. What helped me over this hurdle? I recognized the constant lie I was telling myself and started writing down my goals where I couldn’t help but see them. Sticky notes on my laptop, sticky notes on my nightstand, stickies on the refrigerator – the house was riddled in stickies. In the beginning, it truly had to be a small goal if I was ever going to get over the, “I can do this tomorrow” BS so I started with small tasks that needed my attention but I had kept on the very bottom of my list because I had apparently deemed them “non-essential-never going anywhere.” I cleaned out my email. You scoff now but when you’re storing more than 20k emails of pure junk you feel the biggest sense of relief when all that space is cleared, organized, and color-coded. By the way, Google – simply letting me select “delete all” would have been great and a huge time saver. You truly made me work for my electronic postal freedom.
Once I completed the daunting task of organizing and eliminating electronic clutter, I started letting my goals grow bigger one by one. I did a 3-day juice cleanse and survived, I began to read more books and finish them (that is the key takeaway, I finished them), I grew my website statistics by more than 88% in less than one month time, and so the baby steps continued.
Working from home means the Amazon Delivery Driver lives at my doorstep. Here are some of my favorites that make my life a little easier!
Some things that helped me along the way were:
- I’m huge on making lists. I’ll make lists on notepads, sticky notes, my phone – anywhere I can remind myself of something I need to do or something I want to get done I am going to find a place to write it down. This is something I recommend to anyone because it has always been beneficial to me. It doesn’t matter where you write it as long as you write it.
- I used to allow other people’s opinions to change my goals because I took their criticisms, suggestions, and what I didn’t see as jealousy to heart. This was not beneficial to me because they were taking my goal and making it their own. At this point, it wasn’t my goal anymore-it wasn’t special to me, so I stopped working for it, stopped believing in it, and as shameful as it sounds, I stopped believing in myself. Do not allow other people to shape your goal for you. These are not your people.
- Hope is not a strategy for success. Hope is wonderful and keeps us moving but it doesn’t pay the bills, okay girl? I want you to be clear about what your goal is, what your plan is on how you are going to achieve it (not hope that somehow you will just get there) and what it will look like once you’ve achieved this goal.
- I’ve struggled with the idea of my weight, not my actual weight, for most of life. So any new diet-fad, pill, or trending celebrity exercise routine has found it’s way into my daily routine. #babyfooddiet – yep, I’ve been right there with you, Jen Aniston. From this I’ve learned the amazing skill of tracking my progress with almost anything I do. From counting macros and micros, journaling everything I eat, recording daily caloric intake along with a million other things; tracking progress is the name of the game. I hope you stayed with me up until this point because the point I’m trying to make is that tracking your progress is the best way to make it across the finish line when working toward achieving your goal. Being able to look at how far you’ve come and how much farther you need to go is the ultimate motivator toward your reward.
You have the same amount of time each day as Beyonce, how are you going to spend yours?
