Dandelions and Daydreams

Have you ever talked to your older self? Have you ever gotten advice from the future 80 year old self? In the winter of your life, what will you see as your greatest accomplishment? When you are 90 years old, what regrets will you have? Right now is the time that you can develop those accomplishments and ease those regrets. Can you make time to listen to your older self?

About once a year, I try to evaluate my life direction. The usual advice is to write your obituary. What do you want people to say about you when you are gone? What do you want people to remember about you? It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t help me much with planning my life out today.

I’ve had a good chance to get acquainted with my 80-year old self. She doesn’t know anything that I don’t know today, but she has the courage–in the winter of life–to tell my spring time self to act now. She knows the pain of things left undone, and only I can ease that pain for her.

She’s the one who told me to write often and write passionately. Today she told me not to waste my life on clutter. There’s not enough time to devote it to things that I don’t really love.

What does your 80-year-old self have to say to you? Stop and listen to the wisdom within your own heart.

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Three can change your life. Four is too many; two not enough, but three is just right. In Biblical numerology 3 is the number of Divine perfection, in your life, the rule of 3 can mean achieving success.

The Habit of Piling On

When I want to change something in my life (get more organized, lose weight, be more productive, etc), I tend to pile on. Take the example of getting more organized. I set my mind to working towards this goal, and I want the house perfect, the menu planned, my desk cleaned off, and the dishes washed, the bed made, the clothes clean and folded, the bathroom clean, the floors swept and mopped (or vacuumed), the bookshelves organized, and the plants watered–all the time.

When I set out with the goal of immediate perfection, my motivation lasts a grand total of 5 minutes. The to-do list that results from this goal of immediate perfection is what I call piling on.

The Rule of 3

The rule of 3 is an escape from the insanity of piling on. You see, when you want to change something, you apply the rule of 3, and set 3 manageable goals. You put all your energy towards achieving those goals before you add more. Adding goals 3 at a time will slowly and steadily get you to your final goal.

Back to the organization goal, I could apply the rule of 3 by working towards having the dishes washed every night, keeping my desk clear, and making the bed daily.

Create lasting success

The real value of the rule of 3 is in creating lasting success as you build habit upon habit and routine upon routine. When your habits and routines combine together, you will find that you have reached your goal without crashing and burning.

Next time you want to change your life, try the rule of 3.

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Do you ever wish you had more hours in your day? I am always running just a bit behind. My day starts out with too much to do and ends with even more left to do. When you look at your day, how much time do you spend doing things with little or no relevance to your work or life goals?

We all have time wasters. You may not like to admit it, but some things are less productive than others. If you could cut out one irrelevant task, you could probably save 15 minutes a day. What would you do with an extra 1 3/4 hour every week?

Now take that challenge one step further? Do you have 3 daily tasks that don’t help you reach your goals? If you could cut out just 3–15 minute daily tasks, you would gain 5 1/4 hours per week.

Those 5 hours you gain could help you achieve your goals in work or in life.

To give you some help identifying your three things, I thought I would share my list:

• Excessive blog feeds. While I use blog’s to find inspiration for writing, I don’t need to read quite so many. I’m going to cut my subscription list by 10%.
• Dealing with excess clutter. Clutter is the stuff that doesn’t have a home. It’s what makes the house messy and makes cleanup take longer. While I can’t eliminate in in one step, I can get rid of a few things each night until I have decluttered my home.
• Nightly movies. Our local library has a great selection of movies. I just realized that we are watching a movie almost every night. I could gain almost 14 hours a week just by cutting that out!

What are your3 things?

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Everybody seems to be talking about living a completely fulfilled life. What does a fulfilled life look like? What fulfills your life? How would you change your life now to be fulfilled? How can you achieve a fulfilled life?

The fulfilled life looks different for each person, and what would be the fulfilled life for you, might be absolute failure for me. Even so, Living the fulfilled life stems from the same root, no matter who you are. The challenge is learning what kind of flowers blossom from your branch.

The Root of a Fulfilled life.

To love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And to love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40)

Love God. Love your neighbor. Love yourself.

What does it look like to Love God?

There are a lot of voices about how to love your neighbor and even more about how to love yourself, but how do you love God? Now there is a loaded question. Loving God means keeping His commandments, but it also means living out His will in your life.

God is like a great storyteller, and you have a unique role to play in the story that He is telling. He created you with passions and desires so that you could use them within His plan. Don’t spend your time chasing the things that drag you down, but look for opportunities to use your God-given talents.

The bad news: There is no such thing as a completely fulfilled life.

After telling you all that, there is no such thing as a completely fulfilled life…

…not on this Earth anyways.

We were created to be in a perfect, unhindered relationship with God, and we were created to be in a perfect, unhindered relationship with other humans.

We can strive towards that perfect relationship with God and the perfect relationships with humans, but while we are on this earth, sin will always hinder perfect relationships. As much as I would like to find total joy, I am thankful that there is a perfect place for the perfect, complete life because the perfect, complete life isn’t suitable for an imperfect world. We just have to do the best we can here.

Photo by Rachel_thecat, cc-by-sa

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Goals are a great thing. They keep you moving forward in a direction you want to go, but too often, in our perfectionism, we set too many goals and lose focus.

I would guess that the average person can only focus on achieving 2 or 3 goals at a time. I’m talking about short-term goals here. Yeah, you should make long-term goals and have a vision for your life, but the goals that you are focusing on this month, this year, today…limit the number.

Keeping your goals in focus is necessary to achieve your goals. Having just 3 goals versus having 10 or 20 goals is the difference between pen point accuracy and a splat against the wall.

Take some time today to limit your goals, and focus on success.

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I think that I have always been a little bit scared of success. Every time I resolve to save money (for example), my inner brat comes out and we go on a shopping trip. I have resolved to get healthier, so Tina (that’s the name I’ve given to my inner brat) and I go out and eat cake and drink candy coffee.

I don’t like to fail, but I will get almost to my goal and then I trip myself up. When it comes down to it, I am afraid of success. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I think, “If I succeed, others will expect me to do it every time.”

I also fear putting my everything out there only to find out that everything I have isn’t good enough. If I jeopardized my success, then I haven’t put everything on the line. If I am not good enough, it’s because I didn’t try my very best.

Finally, I think that Tina, my inner brat, is afraid that if I start to succeed regularly, I will have to become an adult and take responsibility for my actions.

If I don’t fight for my success, who will? The most important step is recognizing that I am a threat to my own success. If I know to watch out for certain behaviors, I can nip it in the bud. If the result is that Tina the inner brat doesn’t have a voice anymore…success is worth it.

photo: It’s Greg CC-By-ND

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I’ve been trying to write this post all day. It has run around in circles several times even before I sat down at my computer to actually type. Here I am at the end of the day trying one more time.

One of the most important things I have ever realized is that God created us with a purpose, and he gave you your passions and desires to push you towards fulfilling that purpose.

Do you have a personal mission statement? Do you have a vision for your life? Do you know what makes you happy?

I’ve met a lot of people who don’t even know what their dreams are, and if you don’t know what you are aiming at, you will hit nothing at all. If you want to go somewhere in life, you have to aim for it.

When you know your values, you can evaluate any opportunity based on how it lines up with your values, dreams, and passions.

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At the beginning of every year, there is a frenzy of New Year’s resolutions and freshly set goals. The freshness of a blank calendar is inspiring and freeing at the same time. Right now, you probably feel a release from last year’s broken resolutions and hope that this year will be different.

One of the keys to happiness is living by your values. The goals that you make each new year are a reflection of your values. Do you always resolve to lose weight or go to the gym? You probably value your health–whether you live like it or not. Do you resolve to take more dates with your spouse? You probably value a happy marriage.

The third week in January has been called the most depressing week of the year because those Christmas credit card bills come due and 80% of all new year’s resolutions have already been broken.

Eighty percent! Within the first month! Clearly, most people aren’t living by their values.

Over the next week, which is coincidentally the third week of January, let’s take some time to reach out for happiness, make a plan, stick to our resolutions, and start living by our values. Keep watching Dandelions and Daydreams next week for more posts on this topic.

If you’d like to join me on this journey of living by my values, make sure you subscribe to Dandelions and Daydreams in a reader or by Email so you don’t miss a single post.

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“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12

Yesterday I didn’t post. I tried to. I even sat down at 10 p.m. to write instead of going to sleep. The facts are that life isn’t
always rosy and sweet. How do you recover when your hopes come crashing down.

Right now we are desperately dreaming of buying a house.

Yesterday we went in to get pre-approved for a loan. We were looking at a cute little manufactured home that had been foreclosed on. It needs a lot of work, but the price is half of what everything around it is going for.

I got my hopes up. Maybe we will be in a house by this summer. Then they came crashing down, and fell down three flights of stairs when I learned about some new lending rules that make “affordable” (manufactured) housing difficult to buy and sell.

In our area, the lowest price non-manufactured home is listed for almost $250,000! My heart sinks just thinking about that, but this isn’t a post about our quest to buy a house.

How do you move past a huge disappointment?

1. Take time to mourn.

Disappointment is really mourning a dream. While I haven’t completely given up hope of owning a house in this area, current prices are prohibitive. We probably won’t be buying nearly as soon as we had dreamed of, and being sad about hope deferred is okay as long as I don’t get stuck in the disappointment.

2. Focus on living for today

When I face disappointment, I often feel less satisfied with my life as it is right now. I constantly struggle to find balance between enjoying life today and looking forward to tomorrow. Ask yourself, “What can I do today?” I’ve decided to do some more rearranging and decluttering to make more living space in our small apartment.

3. Don’t give up hope

I have to take life one day at a time, and keep on working towards those dreams and goals. My hope rests in knowing that God has a plan for us, and living in His will is the best possible place we can ever be on this earth.

photo: Llima CC-By-nd

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All this work…for what?

We live like each day is a crisis. Every moment we are in emergency mode.

Does it make you happy? Does it make you fulfilled? Are you satisfied with life?

STOP!

Everyone needs to rest.

Look back in time, I’m talking about way back, to the beginning of creation. On the seventh day, God rested. He made the seventh day a holy day of rest. Why? Because humans need to rest.

I work from home, I forget to take breaks, I eat lunch at my desk. Last week, Brenton and I had a talk, and he told me that I am a workaholic. He’s probably right…okay, he is right.

I made a plan, 30 minutes of business, 15 minutes of cleaning, 15 minutes of rest, rinse, repeat as necessary.

It doesn’t sound like much, I mean I’m only working 30 minutes an hour. But my productivity has shot through the roof.

We all need a cycle of rest. To stop working, and stop worrying about the things that need to get done, and just be still.

Have you had your break today?

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