The longest month….
I thought I was the only one who thought that January was going on forever….but yesterday I saw several of my friends posting similar thoughts about how LONG a month it was. It’s so curious to me how the months of November and December seem to blaze by and we can’t even catch our breath with how fast everything is going….we are so excited about a new year and a new decade, and then the first month of that “new” seems to take a decade to pass by.
About the middle of the month I started having these feelings that things had just come to a screeching crawl, so I started to investigate why I was feeling that way….what was up? I have a couple three- word questions that I use to figure stuff out these days….the first one is “isn’t that interesting?” I learned this from one of my mentors when he was teaching me how to think differently about my life. I love that question because it forces me to be curious instead of judgmental. It’s hard to find blame when looking at things with this lens. When I find myself feeling like I’m walking in sticky mud, or engulfed in the “sameness” of the days, I can check in with an “isn’t that interesting”….which immediately sets me into investigative mode, instead of into blaming, frustrated, angry mode. Investigating leads me to my second question…. “what’s going on?” There are two ways I use this question….what are my circumstances…what’s happening around me, and also, what’s going on inside….what are the emotions I’m feeling? I find that when I can connect my circumstances to my emotions, I have a lot better chance of understanding the triggers, the misguided thoughts, and the assumptions I’m making that are leading to my current state of “feeling”.
I’ll give you an example of how this works….about the middle of the month, I started to feel anxious and unsettled about life, and I was surprised when I looked at the calendar and realized I wasn’t even three weeks into the new year yet! So, I got curious….isn’t it interesting that the pace of life seems to have stalled out rather dramatically…..what’s different, what are my current situations? With this simple reflection, I was able to figure out fairly quickly that my “anxiety” was really a mixture of uncertainty and excitement. My youngest daughter is in her first season of travel volleyball, and the first tournament was approaching…..I have never been a travel team mom, and I didn’t know what to expect. I had also volunteered to be the team chaperone, and taken a bunch of training on the rules of volleyball, scoring, etc…..and I was feeling uncertain about whether I knew enough to be able to be of any use in my role. This uncertainty was mixing with the excitement of being able to spend time with my daughter traveling and watching her do something she loves. Getting curious, instead of being frustrated, gave me the opportunity to recognize what was going on. And once I knew what was going on, I could take action steps….because for me, action steps reduce anxiety. The added bonus was that I could talk to my daughter about what she might be feeling about the tournament….and it turns out she was feeling some of what I was feeling, and it led to a really cool conversation about what we do when we feel anxious about something.
Sometimes I feel like this process of reflection that I now use is so simple that certainly, I’m the last one to the party to discover it. But, I’m finding that there are others who can use help learning about these tools. I love that I decided this year was going to be the year of reflection…..of taking the time to stop and process what’s going on, instead of just reacting to it and “trying” to make the best of things. It’s only been a few weeks of this new year, but I’ve found some victory in this process. If you want a tool to help you with this reflection process, I have a free reflection guide that I believe will help. It will also help if you’re wanting to make changes in your life. It’s a tool you can use anytime to assess where you are in relation to where you’d like to be. The great part about it is that when this method of reflection becomes your “go-to” for problem-solving, you can use it anywhere, any time!
The guide is free and you can download it at https://miwreflectionguide.com/optin