Sneak Up On Your Dreams

So much of life sucks out so much of our energy. Lack of energy is one of the biggest obstacles anyone can encounter in working to achieve their goals. We need to have some extra energy left in our days to try to build up what we need to get what we want.

Some people talk about time as the enemy; that there’s never enough time, but that is a given. As a parent and all-around busy person, there never seems to be enough waking hours in a day. Finding a fifteen-minute block of time, though, isn’t really all that difficult. I used to have a while between the time I left work and the kids go home from school or after dinner when the kids were getting ready for bed. The problem wasn’t time, but energy. By the time I had a few minutes to do something, I did not have any energy with which to do it.

I have a difficult relationship with my energy. Sometimes I have a great deal of energy and can do lots and lots of things done and sometimes I have no energy at all and hardly feel like being conscious. This variability of energy, which I’ve always lived with, has always scared me. I always thought that I would never been able to get anywhere if I couldn’t depend on my ability to get things done whenever it was necessary.

This lack of energy is perhaps one of the connecting threads for people who might be interested in this blog. We are people who have so many responsibilities that fitting in time to concentrate on creating our own dreams are incredibly difficult. I will spend a good deal of time in posts thinking about and discussing energy, the lack thereof and what to do about it

I have always reveled in my up and energy and been terrified of my down energy. I end up feeling as if I do not want to be doing what I have to do often. When I was a child I felt like I had to force myself to do everything or else I would never get anything done. It was very uncomfortable. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I mostly want to be self-employed. I want the freedom to do a lot when I have high energy and do little when my energy is low.

It has taken quite awhile to figure out why I have such a difficult time, but one reason is that I have a variety of food sensitivities. Many foods make me very tired after I eat them. I did not put this together for most of my life and when I finally did and stopped eating the offending foods, I felt much better, more often. I still have low energy times, though, and since I now am self-employed I’m working on respecting my different energy levels. When I feel down I do just the basics on my to do list and when I’m feeling up I do many extra things. I’m trying to relax about my ups and downs and see if it all evens out in the end. What I find is most important is that I do all the necessities on my list. It’s the tasks lower down on the list I put off. It’s a bit of a compromise between getting things done and respecting my energy level.

Getting started on something new can be the most difficult thing. Most of the time that we start something new we’re pretty bad at it. I’m not fond of feeling like an idiot so I hesitate to start new things. My most recent goal was of setting up this blog and I knew I would feel incompetent.

The best thing to do is to acknowledge that you know very little and let yourself learn. I know now, that people are reading this blog. I know many of you are probably experienced bloggers. I have technical know-how, but I’m a fledgling blogger. Please, please, please add any helpful information or suggestions you can think of on how I could improve the blog.

These are the steps I used to start doing something pretty unfamiliar to me, setting up this blog:

Education: First, I read lots of blogs and then I started reading blogs about blogging. So basically, I started educating myself. Honestly, I feel completely stupid about blogs and blogging. I feel like I’m getting into it blindly, but I know a couple of things from experience. One, is that this is normal. Any time you start something you feel like an idiot. Being an idiot is really where you need to start. In the Tarot there is a a card with a page watching a fish jump out of a cup (I think it’s the page of cups). It’s the card (in what I read) that talks about being a learner, a beginner and keeping that “beginner” mind where you deal with feeling like a fool (that card can also be about beginnings) and keeping your mind open to learning whatever needs to be learned. Two, is that I’ll gain experience over time. The thing that made me feel best about a blog is that there is a community out there. I hope that more experienced bloggers will nicely tell me the things that I am doing wrong or could be doing better. Start with getting some background on what you want. Try to learn as much as possible from other peoples successes and failures.

Break into bite-sized pieces: All big goals need to be broken down into steps. If they could be done in one step then you just do them, get them over with and take them off your list. Any goals, of any size can be broken down into bits. When I founded my retail store, I remember sitting down in 1997 and starting to write down on a piece of paper all the things I thought I might need to do or get. The list just kept getting longer and longer and more and more correct. I just did one thing after another and many steps actually taught me what I needed to do next. I had to find vendors and once I did I had to contact them and get catalogs then order product and so on and so forth. Make a list of any steps that you think will be related to your goals. You probably won’t have them all and you may not even get them right, but start with something.

Do it: Next is to take your first step and do it. If it’s too large to do break it down into smaller steps. If you’re trying to pay something off or save, start with $5 a week or $5 a month. It may not seem like much, but every effort adds up over time. The idea is that the smaller pieces you break it into the better. Find the smallest, most comfortable piece of your goal that you can reliably take on regularly. Save a tiny bit of money regularly, write one paragraph a day, do five push ups a day, or something else. Do what you need to get your regular piece done. Tell me some of the smallest bites that you were able to break your tasks into.

Be patient: Don’t worry about your goal now. Do your task and don’t worry about your goal. You’re taking care of it. Don’t worry about how fast you are getting there. Just focus on the specific regular task that you have set up for yourself.