You might be familiar with this story: you create your vision. You create goals to support that vision. Then, you do absolutely nothing related to that goal or vision, except feel vaguely bad about not moving towards it.
Welcome to the club. I cannot tell you the number of times I have done this. Often, my solution to this is to try harder, fail more, feel guiltier, decide I need a system to help me, research the perfect system, decide I should implement it, do nothing, and feel even worse.
What a huge waste of time and emotional energy.
Image courtesy of aopsan/ Freedigitalphotos.net
If you are ever in a similar place – where you have a vision, and somehow you are not taking a single step towards it – I invite you to try this exercise from Marcia Yudkin’s Inspired: How to Be More Original, Insightful and Productive in Your Work. The idea is to have a conversation with your wise self/intuition/higher self – whatever you want to label that part of you that knows more than you do.
This is easy, fun, and takes five minutes. You need a computer where you can turn off the screen, and a keyboard, and some word processing type of program. You start with a question that you do not consciously know the answer to, and type it on the screen. (In this case, I would suggest something related to your unfulfilled vision!)
Then, set a timer for five minutes. Turn off your computer monitor or screen, and answer the question. Allow the answer to suggest another question. Write it down. Then answer it, and continue with the process until the timer goes off. Then turn the monitor back on and read your conversation.
I liked this idea when I first heard it (I’m listening to the audiobook version), but fell in love with it when I actually did it. I was shocked by my wise self’s answers, and found her to be way cheekier than I expected. In fact, I wanted to include an example of one of these dialogues in this post, and my wise self had so many embarrassing answers to my questions that I ended up doing this multiple times in order to come up with something even halfway publishable.
My Dialogue
Fair warning – when talking to my wise self, I curse:
Why am I not exercising regularly?
Because you never have – exercise has always been some sort of horrible diet/punishment. The only exercise you’ve ever happily done for any other reason is walking to think and dancing for joy.
Okay – how can I bring in exercise into my daily life?
You can make it fun – you can make it its own goal – it has nothing to do with body judgment or anything. It’s for fun.
But you know, lots of times those crappy exercises don’t feel like fun.
Well yeah – that’s why you want to look for ones that feel fun and good to you. Consider how awesome up dog chair push up feels in Jaclyn’s class. That’s fun. If you tried to do it on the floor or whatever, it would be hard and unfun. So a little sexy dance routine daily.
[email protected] – why won’t you ever come up with something I can publish on my blog without being completely embarrassed?
Because it’s not my job to save you from embarrassing social situations – it’s my job to tell you the truth. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know. If you need some sort of publishing editor version, ask a really lame question that you don’t care about.
[email protected] fine. Okay, so you’re saying you think I should do a sexy dance routine in my house daily?
Heck yeah! How much more fun would that be than any other lame exercise you have ever done? Maybe shaking and dance and a decent two songs in lap dance mode and you’ll be perfectly happy and getting fitter. Then walk when it gets cooler. Problem solved. Seriously – next time at least ask me something hard. This isn’t gonna take 5 minutes.
Okay more on exercise. What can I do to make the sexy house-dance easy for myself?
Make it part of your nightly routine – maybe not the shaking part – maybe make the shaking the first thing you do when quitting work in order to change energy – slow sensual moves at night – make it part of your ritual.
Your turn!
What is your wise self going to say? Mine said “Duh!” way more than I was expecting. Yours might be reserved or flowery. I hope you fall in love with this process like I did and find out.
I’d love to hear how it works for you – leave a comment and share what it was like or one of the nuggets of wisdom that you learned.
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sounds like fun. How do I turn off my monitor? Laptop? Desktop? Desktop I can do. Laptop, which I am typing on now, don’t know how.
I am usually on my desktop, so it’s extremely easy. 🙂 However, I found this advice online for turning off/on laptop monitors:
most laptops will have a blue printed fn key and a function key with a screen on it.
fn function keys vary from volume and brightness to monitor switching, monitor off and sleep/hibernate. also the number pad will come up from the fn key.
give them a try and see what happens. not all monitor off’s truly work though. on my higrade it turns the picture off but leaves the back light on which is a bit silly so I also use the power settings to turn it off properly.
finally read this. Found the fn key. Am having fun with it. Thanks.
You’re welcome! Glad you’re playing with it!
I’ve never though to do this on the computer like that…such a great idea. Am definitely going to try this out!
Hope you have fun with it!