A month of weekday blogging

Today is the last day of September and I've been blogging here every weekday this month. Bottom line: I enjoy writing and I've got more topics I want to write about. However, I want to have some sort of organization to the topics, and that's been challenging because I haven't planned out enough lead time. So I'm going to take some time off and figure out where to go from here.

Boundaries

Do you stand up for yourself and for what you believe? Do you speak up? Do you know where you begin and end? Do you know your boundaries?

Knowing your own boundaries is important and I believe it's a part of self respect that each person owes themselves. Of course, this is often easier said than done!

Gedankenexperiment

The idea of a "Gedankenexperiment" (German for "thought experiment") is to think through the steps and consequences of a scientific hypothesis conceptually, rather than set up an actual experiment to test the hypothesis.

Interestingly, I just wrote about thought experiments last week. Have you ever tried this in your every day life? Take an activity and visualize it out from start to finish. Did you remember something you might have forgotten if you hadn't done this "thought experiment"? Sometimes doing a thought experiment can help you figure out if doing something is a good idea or not.

To compartmentalize or not?

Yesterday, I talked about “one thing at a time” as a strategy for coping with the whirlwind when “everything” is upside down. Another strategy is to compartmentalize by only dealing with the absolute most critical - kind of like triage at the hospital emergency department - everything else gets put into a proverbial box, which you give yourself permission to ignore!

I don’t know if it’s mentally healthy in the long run. In the short run, it’s very liberating.

One thing at a time

There are going to be times in your life when "everything" will feel overwhelming or "everything" is going wrong. If you can think ahead and imagine what that might be like, how it might feel, how you might react, you can work to create a plan now. That way, when "everything" hits, you'll already have a starter plan.

For me, the mantra of "one thing at a time" helps. First do one thing, then do the next thing, and so forth. Though it is not easy, you will get through it.

Self Care

What nice thing will you do for yourself this weekend? Ideally, it is easy and low cost so that you'll continue to do this nice thing for yourself. This is the start of creating your self-care ideas toolkit. It's super important for all of us to take care of ourselves. My favorite self care plan is get to sleep early and sleep in (no alarm clock!)

Knowing the difference

Some things are important to get right the first time, other things are not so critical. How can you determine the difference?

One way is experience (time). I realize that's not super helpful if you are young and you don't have a lot of personal experience. Another way is to ask other people for their advice. Again, I realize that's not super helpful if you don't want to ask a parent, guardian, teacher or other trusted adult. 

A third way is to do a thought experiment where you think a choice through from start to finish. How does that feel? Next try a different choice and think it through. How did that different choice feel? Can you think of another way to do it? As you are trying out these thought experiments, you could also bring curiosity into the mix and ask yourself, Why do I feel this? Why do I think this?