Bad hair days! 4 Steps to get from feeling burdened to being productive.

Bad hair day? Well, we are camping in wilderness.

Even now I have my wonderful life there are still bad hair days.

Oh how I wish on those days that somebody just told me what to do and at the end of the day would send me home telling me I have done enough and I could happily relax, feeling very good about myself.

But no, with an interesting life comes responsibility and choices and that sometimes makes me so tired and confused.
I then notice that I am still an apprentice, learning how to carry all that responsibility for having a good life.
On those days I observe how little I have learned to cope with freedom of choice.

And on those days I feel there is so much to learn and when will I finally be perfect?

Now it is no wonder that I feel that way when trying to map out my own life according to my desires and creating a balanced and productive life.
We are not trained to do so.

When I was living life according to ‘the web’, my life was spelled out for me.
I learnt what teachers, parents, society told me to learn and mostly it served to pass exams, be a good citizen and stay out of trouble AND it never was meant to make me think or be innovative.
As a result my skill in learning was not very well developed; on the contrary I had become a very poor learner.
My learning had nothing to do with enriching me.
My mind was set in ‘copy and staying safe in a comfort zone’ mode and not in ‘think, apply, make mistakes, wash and rinse and experiment’ mode.
Learning was to get it right as quickly as possible without getting too much egg on your face and accompanied with great dollops of fear.

All aimed at copying, learning to do certain things in a prescriptive way.
You had to make very little decisions, how you lived your life was pretty much dictated.

And all of a sudden I am here; in a totally different world.
Nothing prescriptive in my blogging world for example, or how I manage my time or what I will do today.
I can do what I like, I can learn whatever I fancy and I have to solve new problems in a way I have to find out for myself, no prescription anywhere and sometimes I don’t know how to handle this freedom.

Help! Where do I begin, what do I do, how do I know I have done enough or that I have done okay.

Where is the boss, the teacher, the examiner to tell me?

Am I all alone in figuring it out. Is there a way for me to learn to cope?

How do I avoid making the same mistakes over and over again?

How do I go from fumbling through the day and wasting time to being really focused and productive?

How can I have the feeling at the end of the day that ‘I did enough and that tomorrow is another day, all is well’ and then relax?

How do I stop myself from being so hard on myself?

How do I find balance in my life, how do I do it all?

How do I dare to take a day off and take time for myself?

On those bad hair days I feel so uncomfortable and so helpless, so confused and so burdened by it all.
It feels there will never be a day I will have done the right thing or be confident that it all will work out.
My mind goes round and round in circles and then blames me for not having done a good day’s work.

The cheek of my mind!

But bliss, there are ways to explore these questions.
Let’s look at what is so in my life.
I have quite a few structures in my life, I play a diversity of roles, I can see the difference between clear and unclear agreements and the new skills I can require if I am serious about coping with it all gracefully.

I am not to blame, there is hope, there is a solution to all my questions and worries and fretting that I will never get it together.

I am unskilled in living a life from my desires.
I am very, I may add very skilled in living a life from duty, obligations, shoulds and hierarchical ‘do this or else’ rules.

I am very unskilled in dealing with thinking for myself and taking responsibility for my own well being, creating balance in life and taking care of my work load.
I am even unskilled in learning!

All I have to do is discover new skills to cope with all this freedom, responsibility and choices and bingo, gone feeling burdened and ineffective and feeling I am not good enough.
Here comes productivity, relaxation and balance.

Now I am a bit further down the track I love these new skills and I can see how they are necessary for living outside ‘the web’ where everything was prescribed.
I have to admit I still practice them over and over again and I am still no master by all means.
I also couldn’t do it on my own.
That also didn’t mean I was weak or incapable of sorting it out myself.
I needed explanations and then I needed the doing, so I could discover for myself how it felt to say “No’ or “Yes” or how making clear agreements would work for me, instead of being vague and apologetic when wanting to have things done.

I still have my bad hair days, but boy do certain skills seem a no-brainer once I got to discover them and I got to appreciate them after practicing them.

And how obsolete my old skills and habits have become and how they held me back.

What new skills are useful to this new life of mine in which I have balance, am productive, follow my desires and in which I am open to and loving the learning the enriching way?
Here are some of them.

• Assessing life according to the enormous amount of structures I have in my life.
  We all have a body, cars, homes, work, family, friends, hobbies and many more things that require our attention and want our energy and input.
  Next thing is to look at ROI (return on investment) and which structures are dominating and which are serving you and wisely cull your structures so you are no longer wasting time with structures that are no longer required.
  This is not so easy as it seems. It means saying ‘no’ to complaining friends when you have noticed they are depleting your energy with their steady stream of complaints.
  It means for hoarders to clean out the garage or basement.
  It means letting go of properties, jobs, partners when they are no longer adding to your well being.
  I had big trouble with letting go of friends, it felt so callous.
  And I had big trouble investing in that structure which is my body by going to alternative health practitioners, doing Pilates and having regular massages.
  This will deal with a lot of overwhelm, I can tell you that.
  .
• Recording the diversity of roles I played, appreciating how many roles I had taken on by default, what their tasks were and then deciding which one to ditch or modify was a wonderful skill to learn.
  Obviously being a parent is one you cannot easily let go off, but you can look at how you perform the role, what you think your tasks are and actually questioning those tasks you have taken on. Are they still valid or it is time to delegate certain ones or actually saying ‘no’ to children and let them sort their own things out.
  I have learnt to say ‘no’ to John, ditch feeling obliged and let go of the guilt.
  It took me some time before I could say ‘no’ to certain roles without feeling the fear of getting fired!
  It is a whole different ball game when you are clear about what roles you suit and want to chose.
  This has given me a lot of confidence and pleasure as I am now doing roles I have chosen.
  .
• Learning the difference between clear and unclear agreements and the value of agreements.
  Before this I saw rules and agreements as keeping me in prison and I felt they were seldom serving me.
  However now I see how important the skill of setting clear agreements is when wanting to get things done properly and efficiently for example.
  Everybody knows what to do, how to do it and things go like clock work.
  .
• Complete what needs to be done today and not fretting about what still needs to be done to get the project finished has been a major skill to learn for me.
  Usually I never felt I had done enough as I never looked at what got completed but at what still needed to be done.
  The skill I learnt was to do the best I can each day and when I knock off, what I have done is always enough.

I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to actually know it wasn’t my fault, I was not stupid or incapable of living a great life.
Really learning in an enriching way, applying and experimenting with new skills in life is such a blast.

I am well on the way to live my balanced life from my desires, doing a lot with ease and grace.

All that because I discoverd new skills and ditched the old obsolete ones.

Okay, I shared my bad hair day experiences, even with photo!, how are yours going?