by Aileen Journey

It’s an honest truth, people want to feel good. They want to feel good always and want to avoid feeling bad at almost all costs.  The problem is that people don’t always know what will help them feel good and avoid feeling bad.  The other problem is that there are long-term and short-term solutions. Alcohol may make a person feel good for a few hours, but generally it won’t solve any long-term problems.    The somewhat ironic answer to helping someone feel good more often is to let themselves feel bad whenever necessary.

What? Feel bad? That seems insane. How can feeling bad help make you feel better?  Well, for one thing, if you accept that feeling bad is okay and you don’t just try to find some short-term relief, you’ll have more chance of being able to stay focused enough and learn enough about what’s bothering you to find a long-term answer.

For example, I was feeling lousy every day. I was tired and sad and irritable.  I didn’t want to just take caffeine or sleep a the time, those were short-term solutions. I wanted to feel better long-term. I wanted to find out what my core problem was.  I let myself feel bad.  I also created hypotheses of what the problem was and tested it . I went to doctors and had myself checked for everything we could think of.  When all the test came back negative, I went on to talking to anyone about what I felt and got their  ideas about what it might be. This went on for months.  I started tracking my different symptoms. That meant that I had to let myself feel them.  It sucked. I have to be honest. I was miserable and working was incredibly difficult.  I felt that it was important, though, to finding the root cause and not just letting myself feel lousy day and night.

I finally found a combination of interventions that let me feel comfortable most of the time.  The issue, though, is that I let myself feel miserable. Sometimes I just have a strange, down mood or feel unmotivated even though I’m not tired.  Instead of ignoring it or trying to eat my way through it, I let the feelings exist in me.  I try to sit quietly and let the feelings bubble up to the top of me and even take over my whole body.

The way I see it, it’s like the negative feelings want a voice. They feel shut out and angry if you don’t listen to them. If you try to drown them out with food or drugs or sex or even activity they feel hurt and abandon and angry. They start to yell louder, making you feel worse and worse.  If you continue to ignore them they start to act like angry and hurt teenagers, they start to lash out at you.  Perhaps instead of feeling  a little lousy, you’ll start getting physical symptoms, headaches, insomnia, etc.  If you sit and listen to the miserable feelings, it’s like giving them a voice. They’re part of you and they just want ta say.  When you really sit and listen without judging then these hurt feelings and discomfort can find a way to communicate their pain to you.

Sometimes I recruit my dreams to help me understand what’s going on in me. I try to remember my dreams and write them down. There’s  a web site called dreammoods.com that I look at to help me figure out what the symbols in my dreams might mean. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not so much.

You don’t necessarily have to figure everything out consciously to help reduce the pain, you just have to truly listen to your own pain and discomfort.

by Aileen Journey

Work is miserable for many people, even those at the top. There is a concept that things have to be done a certain way and limits and criticism and often fear are the way to get people to do that, otherwise they would be working only for their own interests, not the company’s. Sometimes this makes for many miserable people in one company. There people may be doing only what their bosses want, not daring to step foot outside the rules or expectations, but they’re not offering anything extra, they’re not involved or satisfied with their jobs or the company and they often provide as little of themselves to the organization as possible in order not to get stepped on.

Many decisions I hear about are based on “fairness”. So and so doesn’t get to work from home so you can’t, forget that the jobs may be completely different and/or so and so doesn’t want to work from home OR there’s actually no reason that so and so can’t work from home. There’s some element of “work has to be difficult” or else why pay for it.

When I was a foster parent we were supposed to be doing it for the “joy it brought to our lives.” But the agency also wanted to dictate exactly what we did, blame us for anything that went wrong, and dismiss any opinions we had on the best interest of the children in our care. We weren’t supposed to want money for this. I did enjoy many of the children in my care. I adopted two of then and adore them with all my heart, but just because I enjoy a job doesn’t mean I shouldn’t get paid to do it well and attentively.

No matter how fantastic a job is, there are always elements that are not appreciated. I loved having babies, but I didn’t love diapers. Companies need to change their attitude about the people they hire from one of “we’re exchanging undesirable labor for money” to “we’re providing a situation for a person to add value to our organization while we add value to their lives.” that value is in both money and satisfaction.

The concept that work is horrible and is done solely for the money it provides needs to be eliminated. Human beings work on far more levels than that.  Plus, there’s not necessarily a need for all jobs to be miserable.  Honestly there probably are some, but even the armed services, which may seem like a job where you are worked hard then have a chance of being killed is one that the people involved often experience  a great deal of satisfaction.

by Aileen Journey
I went to see Harry Potter last night. I loved the series and read most of the books to my kids. I thought the movie was great and it felt so satisfying. I was trying to figure out why this huge, trying adventure felt so satisfying even though the idea of a boy going through all of that mayhem and misery would be horrifying. I realized (perhaps the last person on earth to get this) that these adventure, “holy grail” stories are a metaphor for our own lives, but set at a distance so we don’t feel so distressed by them. While watching the movie, I was thinking, almost unconsciously, about my new business and the goals I have for it and what I need to do first and next and so forth.

Building a new consulting business certainly seems a bit more mundane than searching for horcruxes and destroying evil in the world, but the element of the unknown and reaching goals is still the same. I have an idea of where I want to be (successfully earning money doing a job I like), but I don’t really know what obstacles I will be encountering. I don’t plan on having to slay any talking snakes or deal with actual evil, perhaps just with ideas that don’t work and cause me to have to start again.

In some ways it feels just as anxiety provoking to me as watching Harry battle the army of the Dark Arts. I knew he’d succeed. I certainly hope that I will. I do now plan to think of my work on my future as a great adventure. I will try to consider each obstacle as a new chance to triumph over my opposition. I’m not sure it will make the path seem less anxiety-provoking, but it may help me keep going and see obstacles in a more positive, if not exciting, light than I might have previously.

A couple of years ago I did NaNoMoWri. For those of you who don’t know about NaNoMoWri, it’s an online group of people who spend November writing a novel.  The goal is to reach 50,000 words in the 30 days.  I had heard about it a couple of years ago, but was working two jobs.  When I had  more free time I figure I’d try.  I do very well with deadlines and a bit of pressure.

It made me think, though, about small goals and how they grow together to become something big.  To write 50,000 words in 30 days you have to write about 1667 words a day or more one day and less another.  It’s not that many words really, but if you do it you end up with a novel-length manuscript in the end. That’s not to say that what is written will be good, but the fact that so many big things can be approached with such little effort is amazing.  If someone wanted to write a novel and take a whole two months instead of one month, that’s just under 900 words a day.

One of the reason that many people can achieve this 50,000 words goal or even more is that they have chosen a goal and chosen a deadline.  These two things work together.  it’s important to have a goal so you know where you want to go, but it’s also important to have some kind of timeline.  Without a timeline, even one that you do not make, you are free to just continuously put off your goal or even the tasks required to achieve that goal.

Procrastination is what keeps almost all goals from being achieved.

We put things off, we make excuses. We assume that we can’t do it.  We find other tings that are not uncomfortable to do instead of doing the tasks that will take us to our goals.

Right now, I have huge amounts of free time.  I can earn enough money in a relatively short part of my day and then I can do what I want.  The problem is that I haven’t set any time lines for myself.   I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do and what steps will get me where I want to go. The problem is that I haven’t set any dead lines.  I’m just meandering along without doing much towards my goal.  I know that if I would put deadlines on certain aspects of the task, I would get far more done and achieve my goal faster.  The problem is making myself do it, especially when I don’t have to.

NaNoMoWri gives me the incentive to move ahead.  It only happens in November, so I can’t really put it off unless I want to wait for next year which doesn’t make any sense.  It’s flexible so if I don’t get it all written I’m still fine.

The point is, find some way to motivate yourself.  Find someone or even yourself to give you an incentive to work on your larger goals.  My initial writing goal was to have a writing career by the time I was 50.  I still have many years left to achieve that, but maybe I should shorten the timeline.  Maybe I should make financial goals for next year and the year after and so forth.  One thing that’s becoming clear is that I need to impose some clarity about goals, tasks and deadlines for myself if I want to transition to a writing career.

I was able to complete the novel in those 30 days, but it’s taken me over two years to edit and proofread it.  It’s a smaller job, but without a deadline it wasn’t a priority.

Goals need a pull (the goal) and a push (the deadline).  Find ways to create both so that you can really get yourself moving ahead.

by Aileen Journey

by Aileen Journey

I had some major technical difficulties this week and last week. First, I was trying to update this blog which has been live for a couple of years and my database got corrupted and I’ve lost all my old posts and second I was trying to get some things printed for my new business and the printer, which has always worked fine, wouldn’t work at all.

I felt completely halted. I felt like I could hardly do the things that weren’t even frustrating. Part of the problem was that I would never be able to cross these things off my to-do list (I am all about crossing things off my list) and the other was the fact that I had no idea how long these things might take to fix so I couldn’t schedule time to do them easily.

I struggled with each of them for the better part of several days. I would get to the tip of frustration then stop to work on them the next day. My whole list was thrown off-track. I finally sat down and did a little journal writing to find out why I was so out of whack with these walls of frustration. I realized that if I kept all of my “to-do’s” in the same list of my “can’t-figure-it-out-to-do’s” I felt completely incompetent and like I was doing nothing. I decided to separate them into two different lists. One list was the things that I was easily able to do even though I didn’t want to, filing things, paying bills, ironing labels onto 50lbs of summer camp items and the other list was for the things that I needed to work out.

This helped me feel capable of moving ahead again. I was then able to work to solve even my frustrating problems. I went to a printer store and talked my problem over with the sales clerk. She gave me helpful information so that I was eventually able to solve the problem. As for the blog, I decided to move ahead even with the lost posts and remember next time to check the database backup before deleting it.

by Aileen Journey

I used to hate cleaning with all my heart. Basically, it was a whole lot of work with little reward because once you were done, you had to do it all over again and that went quadruple once I had kids.

When I was a kid my room seemed like a mountain of junk that I could never tackle. I was just yelled at to get it cleaned and I had little idea of how to do it.

When I grew up I hated living in messy places. Just looking around and seeing clutter made me anxious and cleaning made me anxious so I was pretty stuck.

At some point in my adulthood I realized that starting by picking up one thing and then another often got an area cleaner. As I continued trying to figure out how to keep my environment cleaner, I started categorizing things. I would either focus on just one small area and get that clean then move to another or I would focus on one category of clutter, like clothes strewn about or garbage and pick all of that up first.

Another tactic I like is cleaning up a bit between other responsibilities. If I had work to do at home I would break up the chunks of work with bits of cleaning. I would make the cleaning feel like a break from work since there was little thinking involved.

It seemed also that practice helped. Recently, I’ve found that cleaning doesn’t bother me much at all. I know that if I pick up one thing at a time it’ll get cleaned soon. This has helped me clean more often which, in turn, makes it easier to clean each time since it’s not that messy.

Staying ahead of tasks seems to be what helps make things so much easier.

by Aileen Journey

I went to an Indigo Girls concert the other night. I remember hearing them for the first time in 1989 when I first came out. It brought me back to my early twenties. I was so ambitious back then. There were so many things I wanted in life and I felt like everything I wanted required huge amounts of effort. Everything seemed so incredibly difficult. I felt like I either had to jump tall buildings or fall and do nothing. I seemed to have no idea how to get where I wanted to go.

Now older and wiser, I’ve achieved just about everything I wanted. Looking back I realize that if I hadn’t seen the future as this huge rock that had to be lifted up hill, but instead was more like piling ring up small stones, I may have arrived at the same place without quite so much angst.

I guess the angst might be part of the deal, but if I could talk to the me that first started listening to the Indigo Girls twenty-something years ago, I would say, “just figure out your goals and start doing one tiny part of them at time…” Anybody can do almost if they do little bit at time over many years.

by Aileen Journey

I managed this blog for a while then when I tried to update it, I lost my database and lost all my old posts. I felt pretty lost and frustrated. I’ve decided that I’m just going to move on from here. I might find a way to get back my old posts, but for now I am just going write new posts when they come to me.