One Small Step To Sprint

I was a prisoner of my own failures, dwelling on projects I started, in respects to online marketing, yet did not finish, I thought that by doing nothing I would somehow mitigate my shortcoming. Blaming myself for all of my ADD like behavior, blaming my job, blaming my spouse...I did anything but keep myself moving forward. Even blaming "dated planners", but I'll loop back to that later.

The biggest thing I always struggle with, as many do, is not keeping my eye on my goal(s) and allowing my strong desire to be snuffed out, like a burning candle after a long night.  

At times I go through melancholy, due to personal loss I've experienced. You see, in 2004 after caring for my mom for several months, her passing away left me in a state of emotional agony, and having a very active household, 4 kids, a husband and a 1,001 going on at once, my life was sprinting by fast with little time to deal with any grief. So to deal with my grief, I turned to certain lines of work that allowed me to be alone a lot, I did not want to be around people and situations in which I had to smile and pretend to be jovial. I no longer wanted to work in business-to-business sales, my once bubbly personality fizzled out; I needed time to deal with the fact that my mother, my biggest cheerleader, was gone.  

The days turned into weeks, weeks into months and years into...well you know how it goes. Years flew by. 

As my kids got older, I ventured into online work from home, and my desire to work from home was strong, but waned as I still could not snap out of my grief and refocus. All the years I was not able to truly grieve when my kids were younger, grief just resurfaced, backing me in a corner demanding I face it.   

So I allowed it. I cried in the early hours of the morning, instead of working on my website, blog or social media, I'd cry after my husband left for work. I'd go to the beach, and bawl like a baby. It was hard on me emotionally, but I got through the roughest part of it. I forced myself to get unstuck...it was not easy, but it's a DAILY decision I'm forced to make if I'm to reach my deepest desire of, as I mention in my "about" blurb, being FREE!

Don't get me wrong, I still have my days, I just find the best way to cope, fall and get back out there. You see,  I don't want to find myself 10 years older, comfortable in my stucked-ness.

The problem with being stuck in a grief pattern, or ANY pattern really, is that you just start to let life hum along...and as long as the most basic daily events happen, like cooking & cleaning, a complacency sets in...and we're  okay going through the motions. That's what I was doing...going through the motions...but yet there was this ever present feeling of irritatation,  because I was in a rut...working jobs I did not want to do...and not working toward a change.

Jim Rohn once said, you ought to being working full-time on your job and working part-time on your fortune...I was doing the former, not the latter...and only I could put an end to that. 

One sunny afternoon,  I was staring at a beautiful Trina Turk dated planner, I told you I'd loop back to this, that I had bought; one of my many attempts of motivating myself. Dated for the previous year and completely blank, I felt as empty as its pages. I spent good money on it, it was a great planner and somehow my sunny afternoon, in just a few moments, turned gloomy just thinking of all those days and pages I had wasted.

THEN, it struck me. I had white-out corrective tape! I had a spark of hope. I took to whiting out all the dated pages, and created essentially an undated planner.  The very next day, instead of moping in the shower I sat at my computer and began to document my online activities, so I would not forget the next day, what I had done the previous day; this kept me accountable to myself.

 This little step turns out to be the most important thing I could have done...Sometimes all life requires of us is to take one small, but crucial step.

"If you have no goals, 

you will guarantee you'll have nothing."

Can you relate to my story? It may not be the loss of a loved one, it could be a 1001 things...the possibilities of what causes different people to feel stuck or get stuck are endless, but so are the solutions.

Ask yourself, "Why am I so unmotivated?"

Journal about it...write in complete sentences, start your sentence out:

"I feel so unmotivated to work on _______ because _______." 
You will be amazed how much personal discovery that will take place by answering just that once question. 

What 1 small thing could I do to help me out of my rut or help me move beyond this? Once you've identified that 1 thing,  do that 1 small thing.

So here is my advice, if you're life isn't going where you'd like it to go but you are willing to put in the work to get unstuck and get onto the road to your desired destination, grab a hold of your goals and take first baby steps, then toddler steps, then strides and before you know it, you will be sprinting by your goals, achieving them all, one by one.

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” ~Martin Luther King

YT Trina Turk planner walk thru