Hey friends! You’re listening to This Quote Changed My Life, a podcast about inspired action. My name is Tracey and I’m the host of the show.
Thank you for joining me for what might be a really quick episode – I had another quote lined up this week but I wanted to finish reading the book that it’s from but the week has run away from me, so I will talk about that quote & the book another time. I hope you’re doing well and the weather where you are is treating you kind – it’s still cold here in Sydney but we’re creeping into Spring and I can’t wait to go check out the cherry blossoms that are popping up everywhere now 🙂
So I was thinking of a quick quote to share with you this week – and this one always comes to mind.
The quote this week is
What do you want and why aren’t you working on it?
I wanted to share this one with you because it’s something that I am asking myself a lot lately – what do I want and why aren’t I working on it. It’s a question that pulls me out of a rut, when I’m bored and don’t know what to do – or even when I find myself procrastinating, doing other things that maybe don’t matter as much, or I start to feel like I’m not getting anywhere. What do I want and why aren’t I working on it?
These questions lead us to thoughts about what challenges us – what do we feel is in the way, why are we struggling and I think that it’s important to reflect on the things that come up when we think about why we’re not working on the things we really want. I think I’m guilty of this – setting our goal, setting the steps towards our goals but not really thinking of the obstacles that we might encounter along the way. So when we meet an obstacle, we try to overcome it but we don’t go deeper into why we’re finding it hard. Which is fine, a lot of the times it’s just lack of motivation or we haven’t yet formed good habits around our intentions yet – those kinds of things just need repetition.
But I think what I wanted to point out is that while we work on the repetition, and probably even before we set our intentions, we need to look at the issues that might come up that stop us from taking those first steps and the next steps.. We might already know what stops us from taking action, we’ve tried losing weight before but something came up and we went back to old habits. We’ve tried learning a language, but we didn’t understand dialect or how to form sentences so we never learned much more than that.
The way I like to work with my challenges, is to have at least 1 rational solution to a challenge. Whether that’s ones that I can predict when I’m in the planning stage, or it’s an issue that pops up as I start to work on my goal – if I can get into the habit of asking myself what do I want, why aren’t I doing it *and* what is the main issue I’m having right now – I can start to see that the steps I take aren’t black and white and that the expectation isn’t just DO IT, DO IT NOW. It’s more like – I’m going to do this, and to help support this next time I also need to be mindful that I need extra help, or I need to spend more time working up to a certain point.
An example that I have is my ongoing lower back pain, this kind of thing takes time to heal and then to strength. So I know I have to work on building up that strength. That’s my intention towards my goal. But the challenges I’ve been facing are – not knowing the proper form and exercise to first not injure myself even more, secondly to rehab the injured area and then to build back the strength. There’s so much to it than ‘go stretch’ and ‘use weights’ – I also need to build good habits around when I am doing my strength work and the challenges I’ve faced is being too busy in the morning to set aside 30 minutes, so I tend not to do anything and then forget at night. So time is my obstacle, and like I’ve said before in a different episode – the obstacle is the way! I need to not run away from my obstacle – I need to focus on it and again ask myself – what do I want? Why aren’t I working on it? And what is the issue I’m having right now? If my issue is that I am too busy during the day – which I am, then I need to clear time in the night for myself. If I really want to reach my goal, then I can’t rely on motivation, I need to set good habits while I also tend to my other responsibilities. So for me, it’s 8:45pm at night, put on my playlist of music that I love and just get it done. And then it’s done.
II think this is really important to say as well – There’s definitely a fine line when we think of showing kindness to ourselves – sometimes kindness is letting yourself rest, cutting yourself slack and treating yourself. But the other side of kindness is knowing what you NEED to do, even when it feels too hard. Of course, everyone needs rest. I love a good sit down on the couch, watching Disney walking tours on youtube but the work that I need to do to reach my goals needs to be done by one person – me. And I am the one who will be in charge of my success. So show yourself kindness with full honesty of what you need to do today in order to be happy. Kindness is knowing yourself and what you value right now – and like I said, maybe it is deep rest and relaxation, but maybe it’s also doing the hard work and giving yourself a pep talk to face your challenges so next time it won’t feel so hard. Kindness in an obstacle may be just giving yourself 1 solution to your challenge so that you don’t give yourself the opportunity to flip flop around. It might be giving yourself a serious talking to and trusting yourself that while it might feel tough to get through it, it will be worth it in the end and this is what you’re doing now, to become the person you want to be later.
So again the quote this week is
What do you want and why aren’t you working on it?
What do you want? What do you really want? And why aren’t you working on it?
Remember that often our goals require a lot of passing time and a lot of effort – effort that might be effortless but most likely will feel like pushing a boulder up a hill, every day, inch by inch. The things we really want – we can have, but it takes that inch work to get there. It takes us looking at obstacles and not stopping when something gets in our way. It takes problem solving and some kind but honest words to ourselves to remind us of what we want and where we are going.
What do you want and why aren’t you working on it?
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast – I actually think it’s longer than I thought it would be so I do hope you found some inspiration from it.
Come and find me on Instagram @makesunshineco and let me know now what you think of this week’s quote – I’d love to hear what you’re working on inch by inch! Don’t forget to share the quotes I talk about each week and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode.
Thanks again for joining me this week on This Quote Changed My Life, I’ll speak to you all again next week!
Bye!!