SISTER WISDOM : build a better life

It's a funny thing about life, especially when you have kids involved: just when you start to figure things out, everything changes. If you're in the midst of babies, diapers, and frequent feedings, if you're juggling toddlers and finger foods, if you're trying to teach phonics and make dinner, if you spend more time in the car than at home...it doesn't matter where you are in the process of life, work, and mothering. Change comes.

We might welcome change, but it always causes a setback in terms of knowing how to deal with the new day-to-day. Sometimes the setback is small and you adjust without really thinking about it. Sometimes it takes a few weeks before you realize that what did work isn't working any longer. And sometimes it isn't easy to figure out what will work now - new routine? New schedule? Drop something? Add something? More restriction? More freedom?

Whatever the change you're dealing with, there's a way to start getting back in control instead of scurrying through your day confused and overwhelmed. This series will walk you through the 8 essential steps of dealing with your life, figuring out what works, and making it happen. Go through the steps one at a time; you may have the initial enthusiasm to take them all on, but that will quickly become overwhelm and fatigue. I'll give you recommended starting spots, and you can adjust to match your own priorities.

The articles will be appearing over the next week in the order listed below; once they're all live, however, feel free to choose the one that makes most sense for you. What area frustrates you the most right now? Pick the step that deals with that area and make that change first, give yourself a few days, and then tackle the next. You'll find as you go that you gain momentum, so though you may need a few days or even a week between steps 1 and 2, by steps 5 and 6 you will have gained more enthusiasm and energy, and you'll progress through each step faster.

The first article is a primer on how to apply these changes so they make a real difference; the last article is the final step - an overview of how to successfully establish a habit - as well as tips, ideas, and reminders to help you succeed in these changes you've just made.

• Getting Started: How to Make Changes that Stick
• Regaining Control with a Morning Routine
• Making Progress with Specific Work Goals
• Keeping House with a Daily Minimum
• Simplifying Food, Chores, and More with Repetition
• Getting Things Done with Designated Days
• Making Life Fun by Incorporating the Extras
• Ensuring Success with a Nightly Routine
• Following the Plan: Turning Steps Into Habits

Image courtesy of Crystian Cruz.

The Basics

1. It's about character, not personality.
2. You're a responsible creator, not an (un)empowered victim.
3. Your choices today determine your life tomorrow.
4. There is justice in the world.
5. Hard work isn't just a fad.

Quite the Character, Aren't You?

<1> It's about character, not personality.

Stephen Covey explains this well, so I'll just let him do the talking: "...shortly after World War I the basic view of success Read the rest of this entry »

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Coaching, team development, and personal growth are a big part of business now. I'm not sure I buy into it: seems like a corporate extension of what is often a self-help racket. Can coaching and leadership development really produce increased productivity, magically cooperative team-players, and employees so motivated they beg you for extra projects?

Maybe. Maybe not. As with most broad-sweep solutions to common problems, what you put in is exactly what you get out. A corporation can't force you to develop yourself any more than you Mom or Dad could. It's up to you. That said, choosing to exercise discipline, smooth out your rough places, and gain skills is beneficial whether you work in a corporate office or a drive-thru window or from a laptop at your kitchen table. Read the rest of this entry »

Life becomes dangerous when we walk blindly in the paths others have laid out. Why? Because nobody has ever had it all figured out. But we love the ease and comfort of the familiar. It is easier to follow the well-worn groove than to make the effort to get out of it and forge ahead for ourselves.

We want others to like us, to emulate us, to approve of us, to admire our decisions, our lives. We want a pat on the head. We want the general consensus of others around us to be that we've got it pretty well figured out. So we take the paths that seem familiar because we know instinctively that, like us, others tend to approve of what is familiar without ever questioning it. We get the approval. But do we ever get the life we really want?

As women, we are especially susceptible to seeking the approval of others around us. Something in our emotional construction longs for the security of knowing we have pleased, we are approved, we have somehow met the mark. But how often do we stop to ask whose mark we are so desperately trying to meet? Is someone else's standard my only measurement for a successful life?

I seem traditional to some people, but the catch is that the traditions I uphold in my life I have chosen consciously, recognizing what they are and the value they hold for me. The traditions that have no validity and no value I choose to reject: not because I hate the past or because I want to rebel against my family legacies, but because blind adherence to tradition never improves my life. I am a stay-at-home mom and a work-from-home writer. I enjoy traditional "domestic" activities like cooking and gardening; I also love playing guitar, traveling, meeting new people, and going to skateboard parks with my husband. I spend a lot of time trying to improve how I do what I do, and probably an equal amount of time trying to improve who I am. Personal growth is a big part of life improvement for me.

Take adventures in seeking, constantly, to improve your life by questioning assumptions, examining cultural norms and traditions, and taking time to think through both your daily habits and your lifelong beliefs. Such activity is not for the faint-hearted or the close-minded. We all have strong emotional attachments to our assumptions. A defense system we don't even recognize most of the time jumps into action as soon as something dear to us is questioned, even if the questioning will lead us to a better, safer, and freer life. Questions frighten us. We have made decisions based on assumptions and we fear that questioning those assumptions will cause our lives to crumble around us.

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." (Semisonic)

Without questions, without honesty, without risk, our lives will crumble. At best we will live and die in mediocrity. The atrophy of a mind and heart never fully used will cause our lives to deteriorate into something passionless, useless, and pointless. Life was not meant to be lived without purpose and freedom. It is only by asking difficult questions and seeking real wisdom that we find both purpose and freedom, and in finding them we find a passion for life.

I hope you are open-minded enough to seek more than the rut you have been walking. I hope you are willing to take risks, to ask questions, to examine your own life honestly, to put aside assumptions, to seek true value. Do you want comfort, or do you want real wisdom? Do you want familiarity, or do you want freedom?

Improving your life is more than sitting around, theorizing about the big questions in life. Our lives are composed of a collection of small things, mostly, and thinking about those small things is how we make our lives richer and better. All the little things - from how you cook a meal, or organize your desk, or shop for birthday gifts to how you implement frugality, change your morning routine, or choose what book to read next - make the big differences that take us from mediocrity to excitement.

I said before that no one has it all figured out; I certainly don't. My mission is to find out what I can and continually change and improve my life with every day. Many of the things I write about are very simple, practical applications for the daily business of life: how-tos, recipes, life hacks, tips, methods. Some are more theoretical, my own process of examining the "bigger" things in life.

Take risks. Let life be an adventure and not a drudgery. Trade in those assumptions for something real. You may walk away with the same basic lifestyle and beliefs, but they will be grounded on your own decisions, not on a past that you may or may not want to become your future. Reject the fear and the passivity and seek what is real. "Say to wisdom, 'You are my sister.'" (Proverbs 7:4)