Insights Into Me - The Road to a Paradigm Shift - May 25, 2015

The story of the Golden Goose... do you remember it ?  The poor farmer who discovers one of his geese is producing eggs of pure gold.  Initially he doesn't believe it until he has the egg appraised.Once he has had the value validated, he cannot believe his good fortune and day after day he returns to the nest to find another gold egg. He becomes fabulously wealthy; it all seems too good to be true.

With his wealth comes greed and impatience.  He is finally unable to wait  any longer for the goose to produce and he decides he will kill her and take all the eggs at once. But when he opens the goose, he finds it empty.  There are no golden eggs - and now he has effectively in one moment of sheer insanity forever changed his ability to get any more. The goose is gone and so are the golden eggs.

This story turned on a light for me in several areas of my life. First, my job.

I love my job. I come to work each day with a sense of purpose, with energy, feeling happy and ready to go. There hasn't yet been a day when I have not felt that way. It is a definite positive in my life. I also spend many hours at work.  And when I spend 9-10 hours a day at work, what I bring home is
not nearly the same as what I brought to work in the morning.  I am bringing home fatigue, exhausting, lack of desire to talk to anyone, no desire to cook or do any menial tasks, occasional irritability... I sound like a blast to live with, hmm ?   With all of the "pros" I get with my job and from my job, there is a price I pay on the flip side.

I am the goose. I am the one who brings home the bacon, makes the golden eggs. And I am happy to do it for myself and our family.  But is this overworking because of external forces or is it that validation that I get personally from the long hours that eventually takes a toll in my home ? Is it my boss telling me I "must" stay ?  No...it's not his voice I hear in my head.  I cannot tell you the countless number of times he would tell me to go home, only to have me tell him, " I only have one more thing to do...", which never ended up being one more thing.

I need to own up to being a workaholic and that I work with other workaholics. We don't see it as a problem because we make up our own truth about it.  It is perfectly okay in my mind to responsible, to work hard and even work long hours as needed,but that is not every day OR ever week. By owning up to my underlying intentions about why I work long hours i.e., getting a break from being at home, needing time that is just for me, getting interaction with other people, handling the stress of living with someone who is chronically not well, avoidance, procrastination, I can make a different choice about how I spend my time and what my days look like.

If I burn myself out to the point I am unable to be healthy in all aspects of my life, then I become the farmer. I will effectively have nothing left for myself, my family or others   And I cannot blame anyone for that happening. The control is 100% mine.  I can make a change that keeps everything alive and in balance.

So which one are you ? The goose or the farmer ?

Insights Into Me - The Road to a Paradigm Shift - May 18, 2015

Growing up, women in my family didn't exercise on a regular basis. I remember years ago Mom swam, but that stopped once her head/neck would get too cold.

I loved gymnastics as a child. The energy, the drive, the challenge, the friends. We didn't have the money for me to go very far with it. And eventually, I was drawn away from it by people who were better at it than I was.
My self held belief is that women in my family are curvy and it's hard for us to lose weight.  The truth is that I lose my drive to commit myself daily to good health. And it frustrates me when I bump into the results. This is entirely my doing.

Underneath that lack of commitment is the belief that I am not really worth taking care of. It's a self esteem piece that is attached to a very old abandonment tape.

I will not give up on myself. Even if you walked away from me, our family and your responsibilities, I am no longer carrying that "map".It has had me "lost" for too many years.  I have to create a new map of the territory of my life. I don't know what it looks like, and today I am not going to figure it out. All I care about is that today that I am shedding light on a corner that has been dark and under cobwebs for a long, long time.

Today, I found a flashlight. Today I start to clean house.

Insights Into Me - The Road to a Paradigm Shift - May 17, 2015

I was talking with a friend about an entirely different topic and the book " The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" came up. I had read it about 10 years ago and truthfully, it wasn't life changing at all for me
at the time. My head/mind/heart wasn't into it. 

Fast forward to May 17th, 2015.  This book was going to become a door that needed to be opened, corners that need to be explored, and some dusting was probably going to be happening in the rafters. And I'm not talking about a Swiffer. I mean some serious cobweb removal!  Except I had no idea any of that was lingering in the pages of this book. Now that I think about it , I am pretty sure my friend was silently laughing at my innocence of taking on the task of reading it in 6 weeks. Because he knows I don't just read... I digest, devour, dissect, inquire, tear apart, unearth...

Because I know my own struggle in keeping my commitments, I said, as if it was no big deal, " Give me a deadline. "   I thrive on deadlines. The procrastinator in my knows just how much time it will take me before I am in panic mode to finish the book.  Fortunately, he gave me June 30th as a finish date.  That is quite literally an eternity in a procrastinator's life ! 

And so on Sunday, May 17th I read my first 51 pages. It was like I couldn't get enough. There was so much that was resonating with me. Honestly, there was a voice inside my head that said, " Are you sure this is the same book you read 10 years ago ?" I had highlighted key words, made notes of important stories and really took note of the "aha" moments that happened in my first night of reading.

It became clear that as I learned more about Character Ethic and Personality Ethics, I could see where my path had lead. I could see that quite possibly my weight and all the ups and downs I have had with that could be buried in all of this. The story that lingers in my head about not being financially stable, about not having enough, lack of abundance. Yeah.. all those creatures came out for a moment into the light. And I realized that next 6 weeks were going to be work. 

I put my highlighter away and closed my book. 

And I wrote in my Impressions book: I am curious and afraid to open Pandora's box. For today, that says it all.