You’ve faced challenges. Solved troubles in your own special ways. Dare to use all that! When you allow yourself to engage right now in growing, it can be from whatever’s happening in your life. For example, hard lessons you learned from. Especially areas where you move forward with hope, adding to and fine tuning your ways of handling this and that.
When you keep on developing habits about how you respond, that helps you live well in the present moment. Dare to set your own ways to do stuff. Save time and energy. It’s easy to slip into remembering the past or worrying about the future. But that doesn’t help you grow.
Because growing is connected in many ways with right now choosing to act. When you’re focused on the present moment, you’re in a mode where action is more natural. Easier to accomplish! Treat yourself to that ease.
Developing habits about how you respond helps you live in the present moment. Start with the simplest things. That’ll help you build your way to staying in the now in more emotionally difficult circumstances. For example, you can set a habit of starting your work day with what feels to you to be your best choice of a creative task.
It’s important that it be your choice of something that matters to you, that feels good to get done. That’s going to get your day flowing off and away in a direction that tends to make your day full of accomplishments. That might mean outlining a chapter for that book you wanted to write, or typing out a few pages.
Or it might be that you delight in morning grocery shopping and it feels better able to tackle the day when your home is well organized, so that you’re simply giving yourself permission to slip out, grab the groceries, and put everything in place before beginning the day. Or that morning run. Or your dash off to the gym. Or to church.
Whatever! You’re unique. Your desires and needs are similarly unique. Once you get that habit in place, no matter what it is, getting yourself into that burst of taking action each time you start work is easier. Because it’s more natural. Because it’s what you do. Because it’s who you are becoming.
As you prepare to start, you mentally get in the space where you’re more likely to allow your skills and all of you to flow into that work. Imagine what you’ll be able to accomplish next year if you had a one year habit of getting started each day with a task that got you flowing and glowing with the thrill of accomplishing that thing that matters to you. Yes, imagine yourself getting that particular task in to the top of your day, effectively, efficiently and with the flair of fun. Making it real. Making it part of who you are and what you choose to do.
Imagine starting each day just knowing deep down that you’d do THAT. Indeed, you’d do it with delight. In a way that fits you and makes you feel great each day because that’s simply your natural habit of who you are and what you do.
Now imagine something similar. Imagine your habit got ingrained throughout the day. Imagine if you were able to respond in emotionally charged circumstances with such a habitual response. You’d react better, wouldn’t you? That’s the power you’re building when you focus on building habits.
Set your own ways to do the stuff of everyday life. Let’s stay with the simplest stuff of everyday life. Consider what happens when you first return home from work. For example, where you keep each set of keys can be your own little habit. You might want to keep a set of keys by the door so you’ll have them readily accessible. A backup set of keys may “live” somewhere else. Again, in building habits, you’re setting yourself up. You’re setting yourself up to treat yourself to the ease of a desired response.
Save time and energy by setting up your own ways. Practice with simple things. Timing is one example. The time of day that you do a task can save you time and energy. Simply knowing that you’ll do an important task first, before the day gets away from you, can help you stay focused on now.
Let’s apply that for real to your life now. I invite you to choose one kind of task that’s important to you. Something you do regularly, perhaps even daily! Allow yourself to give that task your first priority.
How? Simply decide. Then start. Today! Do it. Evaluate whether you feel you picked the right task.
If you picked the right task, do it the next few days. If not, simply start fresh tomorrow. Get in the habit of doing this little experiment as soon as practical each day. That might be right after breakfast or right before lunch or mid-morning, depending upon the “fit” of that task to the timing of your day.
Those first few days you’ll figure out when feels the right time for it. Then you’ve got three in a row. Evaluate again whether you picked the right task. If so, continue. If not, try again.
There’s power in giving timing priority to what matters to you. When what matters most gets done, you get an encouraging sense of accomplishment that lifts you up. That lift helps you to encourage yourself to keep moving forward.
Allow yourself to develop your own way of living that gets you growing by creating habits. Those habits will get you engaged in personal development to get more of what matters to you into each day of your life.
Having habits about how you respond to living a day helps you focus on living in the present moment, in the way you wish you would be able to flow and glow. Set your own ways to do the things of your life.
Create focus, time and energy by the power of accomplishing what’s important to you. Choose to start early enough in your day for you to jump off from that like the Olympic runners push off from starting blocks. You’ll set your day heading in the direction of making your hopes and dreams happen.
Cynthia Ann Leighton inspires you to encourage yourself to keep moving forward.
While you're here, do you want to learn more about this topic? If so, here's help moving closer to the life you want to be living by way with a bit of resilience.
By the way, here's a YouTube to give you a quick burst of innovation now.