It doesn’t matter if you are a CEO, stay at home mom, life coach, truck driver, horse trainer or enjoying the golden years of retirement…learning to manage your time will create and expand your time.
What you do with your time matters. This is the ONLY life we get!
Thoughts about time, all by itself might, send you on a quest to just fill up your day with things to do, and that isn’t the point of managing your time.
Once you really understand how you feel about time, you will know where to take action and clean up your thoughts around time.
Once you clean up your thoughts…then what?
The next step is to decide what you want to do with your time.
You get to decide what to do with your time.
You get to decide if you want to work or play with the kids or garden or shop, or eat, whatever your heart desires.
You get to decide!
Now this is the time that my students will let me know that they have to work and they have to take care of the kids and they have to clean so NO…they don’t get to decide.
This is where they would be wrong.
We DO get to decide.
Now, we will be responsible for the consequences of our decisions, but the truth is that we “get to do” whatever the heck we decide that we want to do.
For example; I decided I do want to work, I like money. I like having a nice home and visiting my family often.
I decided that I want to ride horses and earn a bronze medal in dressage.
I decided to marry the man of my dreams and I decide every day that he is amazing and beautiful.
So often we think that life just happens to us.
When you think life is just happening to us, we aren’t aware of the opportunities we do have to affect our lives, to cause the effect we want to experience in our lives.
We don’t stop to think how about we got here. We got where we are by deciding.
When I started doing this work, I had a reality check and woke up from my own train of thought that said “I don’t have control of my time..my boss did or my daughter did or my husband did…”
So, after working with my coach and learning a few things about how things really work… I decided to decide how I wanted to spend my time and how I spend my time was going to be things that “I get to do” not things that “I have to do.”
It’s a subtle shift but it changes everything.
What do you want to do with your time? Decide where you don’t want to waste your time on any longer?
What are the things that light you up and ignite you? What are things that you spend your time on that drain you.
It’s important to be aware of the things that suck your energy because it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking about these things in a way that creates resentment.
Resentment is draining.
When we become aware of things that drain our energy, we have three options…
1. Decide they don’t add value and stop doing them.
2. Decide they do add value but you aren’t going to be the one to do them.
3. Decide to work on a different thought about these things so that they don’t drain you.
Here’s an example of my list of “life sucks” as I saw them.
- Getting groceries
- Walking the dogs
- Emptying the dishwasher
Don’t judge me or laugh at my list people, I am trying to be vulnerable here.
Stay with me…
Now, I got to decide that all of these things had value, so I wanted them to get done. But, did it have to be me? Did I want it to be me?
I decided that I did not want to spend two hours a week or more getting groceries. I thought about the travel time and the shopping time and the experience of shopping that I don’t like AT ALL…nope, not for me.
Groceries are now bought on line and I either pick up or they deliver.
Totally worth it!
The rest of it, I decided I decided to work on how I was thinking about it so that it wasn’t an energy suck.
The thought work I did around walking the dogs and doing other chores changed the way that I looked at those things.
When you change the way that you look at things, the things you look at change.
These things that drained me, now energize me and I look forward to the task and I am thankful I have the ability to walk and bend and I have amazing dogs and who doesn’t love a dishwasher after all.
But the point is that as long as I was looking at the chores from a place of dread, it was draining.
Thinking that something is a drain on you, makes it a drain on you. If there is something that you decide that you are going to continue doing, I strongly recommend that you work on your mindset about it.
Life is too short to have “energy sucks.”
By the way…
Tired of committing to a goal only to quit the goal year after year after year?
Join my free “Break the Commit and Quit” Virtual Workshop!
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