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about Commitment: What’s a resolution anyway?

January 3, 2010 at 11:46 pm

…the number of pixels per square inch on my monitor? …finding a solution to a problem? …the pretty chords you hear following the dissonant chords that sometimes make my skin crawl (that song from Phantom of the Opera comes to mind at the moment)?

Every year at this time you hear this phrase floating about: New Year’s Resolution. In this context:

res-o-lu-tion [rez-uh-loo-shuhn] noun
a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner

There’s a debate that exists on whether one should or should not declare a New Year’s Resolution. I heard (being a geek statistician and all) that roughly 97% of New Year’s Resolutions are not kept. (This doesn’t surprise me since I also know that about 3% of folks are natural-born leaders – the rest of us have to get trained.) So why bother if odds point to fail?

“A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.”
– Oscar Wilde

This is the #1 debate that goes on in my head every January 1ish. Upon reflection, here are some points that I argue (with myself).

  • A resolution is goal-setting which is always a good thing. Throwing the dart when there’s not even a target will always be a miss. I feel like I’m moving forward when I finally make a decision about something. Ever heard “Indecision is the Devil’s playground” or “Sitting on the fence hurts”? When I’m stuck, I actually feel like I’m going backwards.
  • A decision isn’t a strategy. Too often I set a goal with absolutely no idea of how to do it. Without strategy, its hit or miss. If you’ve never been to the destination before, a map would come in handy. This is when I have to make sure I set a realistic start date and deadline. January 1st ought to be my first planning day instead of the first day I’m expected to do a 180. Hmmm…maybe the END of the year should be the deadline.
  • The goal means nothing without the effort. Perhaps my resolutions were broken because I never actually believed that I would accomplish them. Therefore I never committed to them. ‘Nuff sed.
  • Efforting is hard. I have a bad habit of keeping goals to myself and then forgetting about them trying to accomplish them. The more people I tell the more I get excited about my goals. Those endorphins kick in and I don’t seem nearly as fatigued. But the best help is asking someone to hold me accountable which is usually the missing ingredient for me and then I get burned out.
  • Staying motivated is key for commitment. If I’ve learned anything in the last 3 years, I’ve learned that motivation does NOT come from accomplishing a goal. Motivation comes via the REASON the goal was set in the first place, whether it be for joy, health, spirit, or [insert core value here].

So do I have a New Year’s Resolution? I do. And a New Year’s Strategy too! I resolve to make time to write, beginning with my blog. I unexpectedly announced it to myself in a reply to Lori @spinningyellow’s tweet about HER resolution. My goal is to post at least once a week, however seeing that once a month is rare, I’m going to start with at least once a month. (January…check! Guess I can move up to biweekly now!) I am motivated by feedback because I learn about people, I learn about myself (usually that I’m too hard on myself or too full of myself), and the more I can learn the more open-minded I become and the better I can teach my kids how to navigate through this world. After all, they are the REASON I do about 98% of the things I do. From ‘Gotta eat so I don’t snap and throw one out the window’ to ‘Gotta hug and kiss The Hub so they don’t think they are the center of my universe all the time.’ (Yeah…I haven’t figured out how sudoku or bubble shooter benefits them yet. Guess that falls under the 2%.)

Now I’m asking my readers and ex-readers who thought I fell off the edge of the planet, to help hold me accountable. How? Comment often? Subscribe to my blog? Tweet/FB this post? Send me chocolate? Your resolution to share however and whenever will be most appreciated by me and will likely have a greater impact than you probably think.

about Blogging: A purpose obliterates that “wasting time on the computer” feeling

September 14, 2009 at 7:50 am

It also gets rid of that guilty feeling I get when I see how long it has been since my last post! Yes, I know that my blog has been super stagnant due to an apparent drastic decrease in the number of hours in a day and days in a week. Or the inability to clone myself. But my wish is to return to blogging because I love to network and share, especially if it can help someone, even if just a chuckle or a smile. The adrenaline rush I get personally get when someone else makes me smile can usually sustain me for a while (until I have to amuse myself somehow – which in my household isn’t too terribly difficult). But while I hope to uplift a reader (y’all come back now, y’hear?), my blog has always been a therapeutic journaling exercise for me. Therefore I will continue to focus on my life experiences, which 99.9% of them revolve around autism spectrum issues. However, due to my inability to conduct daily journaling and my wish to avoid 3000 word timelines to catch up 6 months of mayhem, I am going to be choosy with what to share. My preference will be a story that, overtime, has unfolded into a beautiful learning experience for me.  But I won’t be able to resist the one-liners and the “moments I might have missed if my child didn’t have autism.”  I will continue to regularly update facebook and twitter so feel free to follow me.

Since I have shifted my occupation from the sales side of business (still in business tho! yay!) to the coaching side of business, I have felt much more aligned with what I believe is my personal mission in life. Without going into detail, 4 years ago I finally figured what that was…my mission statement…to generate power. (There’s a REALLY cool story behind that too that one day I will publish.) I guess you can say it’s a fancy way of saying “empower.” (In that REALLY cool story there are specifics, like POWER is an acronym and that each letter stands for a core value of mine.) So while my sales business brings home the turkey bacon, being “powercoachjen” brings home the fulfillment and warm fuzzies. One day (when I get an illustrator and publisher) my joy will be my job and I’ll not ever have to work a day in my life! (Oh wait…I’ll still be a mother…lol)

“Don’t be afraid to find your power to make a positive change in your life. Then don’t be afraid to use it.”

Success Sunday (PostID 1305)

November 2, 2008 at 4:31 pm

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“Start by doing what’s necessary;
then do what’s possible;
and suddenly you are doing the impossible. “
––St. Francis of Assisi

I took a little hiatus. Ok, a long hiatus. But I would guess that I’m not alone seeing that this is just a busy time of year, then throw in a election in there too. I’ve had sooooo much to blog on and I’m sure I have already forgotten most of it if not all. I had been logging everything in my DayNotez (love it) but The Hub stripped Vista off my laptop and replaced it with XP (sweet) and my phone kept crashing and I had to hard reset it twice and reload everything on it and try to find a replacement for the applications that were crashing it. So Daynotez is neither on my desktop pc nor my phone. Oh yeah, and I’ve had to take care of The Kiddos. lol. We had Fall Break last week and we let The AP off for most of the week because The Lolo and The Lola were in town visiting. You know how that goes. You think you will be productive because you have built in babysitters but I’m way too social to sit at the computer when I can have adult conversations in the convenience and comfort of my own home.
This week were the Halloween festivities. And of course the month-end deadline – which is always interesting in October. Usually I pretend that the 30th is the last day of the month, but this year the 30th was on a Thursday which is my meeting night, plus I was recently elected president of my networking group and that has me a little stressed out because of technical issues at our first leadership meeting. Technically, I voted by the group to be president, but wasn’t allowed to run the meeting. I was more like a referee which is hard considering that I, standing, am still shorter than the other guys, sitting. On Halloween day, The PaPa and The Girlfriend-in-Law came to visit for the weekend. They are still here and plan to leave on Tuesday (They voted early)
Also, since The Elder is in Kindergarten, they had a fall party and I got to volunteer (so much fun) and I even stayed to have lunch with him at the school. It was fun to meet his friends. I had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the partyI had had a nightmare on Thursday night before the party that all the friends he has been referring to whenever I pick him up were not really his friends, but were bullying and teasing him and he interpreted it as they were being his friends. I was heart broken and at a loss of what I needed to do. In real life, he had hit 2 kids in the lunchroom with his lunchbox and removed all of the clips off the centers board in the classroom because he wanted to do the Blocks Center and there wasn’t any more room for a 5th person. Then he threw his shoes and hit a little girl. I made him write apology notes to them and sent them with him to school on Friday. That made me a little nervous to enter his classroom because I didn’t know what kind of enemies he was making. What if the kids were looking at me with the disappointed look on their faces as if to say, “you are a bad mom.” I was afraid to meet the other parents because what if their child told them how disruptive he is in class and how he hurts people and throws things and behaves badly, etc etc. We always think the worst huh?
Well, to my delight, the friends he speaks of love him just as much as he love them. one even said he wanted to sit beside me at lunch and gave me a hug (he was only about a head shorter them me! yikes!) and then blew me kisses because it ended up that The Elder was sitting between us. The first thing I noticed was how young The Elder looks compared to the other children. He is only 5. There are 2 other girls in his class that are younger than he is, but he is the youngest boy by a lot.
I was however surprised at all the things that I was able to do though. I had very full but very productive days this week, catching up on somethings. Even the Meeting from Hades had a happy ending, and my training meeting went well, even though I didn’t train on what I had intended. I was able to rearrange my schedule to make sure I had my priorities in order. i squeezed in time to do this and I overestimated duration on some tasks and had some free time to do something random (obviously not blogging, but with the downgrade to XP, my web username and passwords were reset and it actually took me a long time to figure out how to get into the Wordpress Dashboard!). The more and more I deferred blogging (not to mention the many times I pushed the snooze on my phone alarm that reminds me to do Success Sunday posts) the more guilty I felt for not documenting the goings-on (and there was a lot going on). But finding this quote gave me some peace. I was busy and I was productive, but I would have never been that productive if I hadn’t been able to recalculate my schedule on the fly. Who would schedule themselves that packed from sun up to sun down? on purpose that is? So in essence I was doing the impossible.
Would it be possible for me to take a nap right now?

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