Four days off in a row. How awesome is that? This is the first year we didn’t spend with family. Usually we end up spending one or two days at my dad’s but this year we’ve stayed home in Montreal for all of our holidays except Christmas. I never knew how awesome four-days-in-a-row is when you aren’t obligated to do things other people want to. I was telling my dad this yesterday when I called him to wish him a Happy Easter. It was really relaxing to not have to visit family, even though I love them. They totally understood, which is very nice.
I spent a lot of the weekend writing. It was wonderful!
I’m slowly moving ahead on some of these smaller goals that lead up to (I hope) getting published one day. This one is the easy first step: an ebook related to this blog. Now, I know, it maybe doesn’t sound thrilling (or does it?), but I promise you it’s actually pretty not bad!
As I took all the most-popular posts from this blog and the other posts that are very key to what I think will help someone define goals and move towards them, over the course of the long weekend I wrote an ebook. It is meant to be short and to the point. It is meant to be given away freely. I think it does a really good job of streamlining what I’ve learned in the last several months about making life changes to structure your life to reach your goals.
So the next step is to get it edited and reviewed by a few people and then release that bad boy.
Last fall I was forced to sit through a seminar at work about Leading with Data. I was about as excited as you were when you read the above title. As it turns out, it’s really helpful. I’ve applied this to my personal life and again finding it useful. What am I talking about?
Unless you’re a data analyst or took a business degree, you probably are going through life a little like me: you have an idea of what’s going on but you’re not sure. As I’ve learned, real data is helpful because it’s raw facts. You can’t argue with facts. This spring I wrote about how I didn’t do a good job in December of using my light therapy because I didn’t feel like it. The facts said: if you don’t use this you will feel worse. I trusted my feelings instead of the facts. Guess which one was right? The facts. I ended up having a crappy Christmas again because I just felt really blah. That could have been prevented if I had trusted the facts (“No, I need to do my light therapy whether I feel like it or not.”).
Why real data helps
Data helps in achieving goals because we have real information about how we’re doing. It helps us to evaluate and adapt based on how we’re actually doing. Am I eating veggies every day? More or less. I have that info tracked in LiftApp. As I begin to track it, I become more aware of it as we talked about in my post on Keystone Habits. Now I can say, “I’ve flossed once a week for the past four weeks” because I’m tracking that behaviour on LiftApp. If I scour my memory for those occasions I can remember one or two. If I rely on my memory, I wont have the full picture of what is really happening.
Take the info, adapt
After you have a bunch of data about the habits or goals that you’re trying to track, take some time to consider what it says. Are you having a hard time getting out of bed on Mondays and so you never manage to go for a run or write or do whatever it is your goal is to do that morning? You maybe haven’t noticed this pattern before, but you see it in the data. I never wake up on time on Mondays. OK, so what are you going to do to make sure you do get up? Maybe you need to go out and buy a coffee maker that will automatically turn on. Monday morning you’ll smell that coffee when you wake up and all you need to do is stumble out of bed and get it.
How to track?
There are several ways you can track your habits and goals. In your personal agenda, on your calendar, in a small notebook like a small Moleskine or FieldNotes that you carry with you. Maybe just a note on your smartphone, or perhaps in Evernote, or LiftApp. Think about what it is you want to know more about and think of a way that will be simple enough that it wont be a bother to input the information every day.
Respond
Ok guys, I know this is a really nerdy post. I want to know what your immediate reaction is: ‘I’ll never do this’ or ‘I don’t see why it will help me’ or ‘I’m skeptical, but I’ll give it a whirl.’ Go ahead and leave a comment here.
Today my friends Tim and Olive Chan are launching their book Then Came the Baby: The Wonder, Mayhem, and Hilarity of Our First Year as Parents this week. I had the opportunity to read an advanced copy which I really enjoyed. My husband, Willy, heard me laughing from across the house on a few occasions. The way they open up their lives to the reader, showing the highs and the lows, the funny and the difficult is really refreshing and helpful, especially for a not-yet-parent like myself. Tim has kindly agreed to an interview. As someone who also wants to publish one day, I was thrilled by the opportunity to learn from them
So without further ado, here’s the interview:
Describe how you guys decided you were going to write for a living. There were a few factors involved. The first was that both Olive and I felt like we could not authentically live out our callings in our previous jobs, and were looking around for something else to do. The second was that the blog we started in November 2011 had been getting positive response from friends, family, and even people we didn’t know.
We felt it was a good time to take a risk, and trying writing full-time for a year. Writing allows Olive to be able to interact and influence people while having to expend too much social energy (which she does not have much of as an introvert). Writing full-time also gave me a chance to launch our own business, which was something I’ve been itching to do. Lastly, writing gives both of us the flexibility to work part-time and take care of our daughter part-time.
What has been the highlight and the lowlight for you guys in the process? The highlight has been the chance to work together. Many people say that they cannot work with their spouse, but we’ve found it to be a positive and enriching experience so far. Working together has allowed us to see each other in a different context, and appreciate the strengths of the other person. As new parents, it gives us something to do together that does not revolve around our daughter.
The lowlight has been the stress and worry of attempting to make a living through writing. Often I struggle with the fear of failing. Though it’s difficult, it’s given me a chance to exercise living courageously.
What is one thing that has surprised you (good or bad)? One thing that’s surprised me is the impact we’ve been able to make through writing. We’ve had many people tell us that they like reading our blog, and that it’s helped them with their marriage or as a parent. We’re humbled and grateful knowing that we’re making a small difference in the world.
What is one thing you would go back and do over if you had the chance? One thing I would have done differently is to work on our blog sooner. Olive and I have been blogging for over 8 years, but it’s been something we do in our spare time. We’ve never really worked on building it until a year and a half ago. If we had started earlier, our impact might have been so much more today.
What advice (if any) do you have for someone who wants to publish an ebook like you are? Write a little every day. Writing a book seems like a daunting task, but if you spend time every day to write, soon your book will be done.
Another piece of advice is to get people to help you edit the book. I’m not talking about someone to find grammatical errors (although that is important too), but someone to give you feedback on the direction and message of your book. We’ve been blessed to have many friends help us with this. The first draft of our upcoming book had 52 chapters. The final version of our book has 41 chapters. Through the editing process we cut out 11 of the weaker chapters, and most of the chapters that remain we rewrote. Our book is many times better because of the input of our editors.
What’s your next goal?Our next goal is to apply for the Aikman Opportunity Award. It is a book writing competition where the winner is awarded $20,000 and the opportunity to work with a publishing company. Our goal is for both Olive and I to submit book proposals for this competition. More details here: http://aikmanaward.com/
Big thanks to Tim and Olive for answering these questions!
To celebrate their launch Tim and Olive have graciously given me two copies of their book to give away in Kindle format (which you can read on your tablet or smartphone if you don’t have a Kindle). Details of the giveaway are below the interview.
The Giveaway
Entry method #1: leave a comment saying you want a copy.
Entry method #2, 3, 4+: Share about the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, G+ or on Pinterest (by pinning the book cover linking to this post) and come back and leave a separate comment for each social media share.
Be generous! This book may not reflect where you are in your life now, but maybe you have a friend who is planning to have kids soon, trying, or about to pop! Share this with them.
I’m looking into getting a self-hosted WordPress site so I can actually use Rafflecopter and none of this annoying make-you-comment-a-lot stuff.
The last week I’ve been mulling over the concept of vision and how it can motivate us as well as give us drive that we might not otherwise have. In connection with this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shift that happened in my life that led to me starting this blog. I think it really has to do with a renewed vision of what my life could be. It was through that heart-capturing renewed vision that motivated me to make important changes in my life. Here’s what I mean:
Last fall I blogged these words,
A few weeks ago I was reading the ebook You Are A Writer by Jeff Goins. He wrote something that really got under my skin.
“Not too long after the race, I woke up early one morning, drank some coffee, and went for a five-mile run. After that, I wrote a few pages for my book and went to work.
That evening, I looked back on the day and I was shocked by all I had accomplished. Getting up early, running five miles, writing over a thousand words — where did all this discipline come from?”
Those words really agitated me. I stayed up late that night talking with my husband about it. I hated that I didn’t have the discipline to have the discipline to run. I hated that I cared so much what people thought of me. I hated that I wanted to pursue writing, but there were things holding me back and I couldn’t figure it out. That night as we were talking I realized that my personal idol of acceptance/caring what people thought of me was the biggest problem standing in my way.
“I don’t want to be this person!” I exclaimed. Willy thought I was concerned with my weight, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was letting things get in my way from getting what I wanted out of life, from achieving my goals. When I was a teenager I decided that I wanted to accomplish some things in life and I was going to do what I could in my power to make those happen. It’s one thing if Providence moves those things out of the realm of possibility, but at least I could say I did my best with my circumstances. That’s what I want to be about.
Those goals acted as a vision for what my life could be. They were things I wanted to be true of me. I imagined the next 60 years flying by and me ‘not having the time’ to make these changes and regretting it. Let me be clear: the things that I wanted to change were accents to my life. They were the pops of colour in a wardrobe, or the jewellery to complete the outfit. I am very happy with my marriage, my work, my life in Montreal in general. It was the “less important” things that I wasn’t happy with: the lack of hobbies (not that I didn’t have ideas of what I wanted to do, I just didn’t have the confidence or self-discipline to start). I will write more on this later.
Vision and belief
The first step was having vision or a picture of what things could be otherwise. This is beyond “wouldn’t it be cool if?” and more along the lines of “this is what it could be!” The next obstacle to surmount was to decide whether it was even reasonable. I’m a pretty rational person. I’m often too rational to the point where it can hurt people’s feelings, or I forget the people within the problems I’m trying to solve. I didn’t want to set myself up for inevitable public failure. I wanted to be somewhat sure that I could do these things. As I evaluated, I realized they were pretty reasonable. The one thing standing in my way was fear.
I refuse to let fear run my life.
Recognizing the obstacles
Recognizing the obstacles helped me find the resolve to overcome them after coaching myself into believing that they weren’t as important as I thought they were. Who cared what people thought? Who cared if people laughed and scoffed? Was their opinion more important than my own self-perception? Not a chance. The fact was, I was not happy with the momentum my laziness was gaining. It was humbling and embarrassing to come to terms with the fact that my laziness wasn’t Who I was but more like What I was allowing myself to be. It’s hard to change our nature, it might be even impossible! What we can learn is discipline and grow in maturity as a person if we identify the areas we’re lacking.
But it all started with a vision of the person I could be.
What about you? What do you want to have accomplished in 50 years? Are there things that require changing in your life now to achieve them? Do you believe you can change ? Share your goals or ideas in the comments here.
A mentor of sorts once told me I don’t celebrate my successes enough. Here are 7 things I’m celebrating from last year:
Quitting
Killing my other blog. That was scary.
Risking
Starting this one instead. Also scary. Both were very rewarding.
Waiting
There were a few things in my life that required me to wait for and be patient with someone else for a much longer period than I felt comfortable with. It was a good thing.
Loving
Last year had some big wins and big challenges. All of which were very much intertwined in my marriage. We love each other more than we did the year previous. It was a very good first year of marriage.
Trusting
Connected with the big challenges of last year, there was a very important couple that we could confide in and trust us to love and accept us when we were well put together and when we weren’t.
Persevering
Remember when I didn’t run and then I did? Remember when I was getting up at 6:45AM and was having great days? Yeah, that was pretty awesome. I’m still celebrating that huge win.
Advancing
I’m celebrating 2013 and naming it as 12 more months of the great successes I had in my personal life since launching this blog.
What are you celebrating from last year? Comment here or post a response on your own blog and then post the link in the comments.
A few summers ago I was working from home full-time for the first time since I had moved to Montreal eight months before. It was enjoyed walking around Atwater Market at lunch and working from coffee shops in Little Burgundy in Montreal where I lived. The summer prior I had written my second novel (neither novels were any good) and the ten months after that I was plagued by the desire I had to keep writing and the longing I felt to become good at it. I wanted to be published and I wanted it badly.
I remember sighing to myself on day and thinking, I sure hope Providence has this in mind for me.
Then I stopped myself. This was something I wanted, didn’t I? Yes. So why would I not take it seriously and work at it?
I wish I could paint a picture of where I was and what I was doing when I decided that, but I can’t. I just remember that being a defining moment for me where I moved from letting life happen to me to deciding to living intentionally towards my dreams.
I know I haven’t done a perfect job of it the last two years, but I’m happy with making that progress from laissez-faire to conscious effort.
A few summers ago I was working from home full-time for the first time since I had moved to Montreal eight months before. It was enjoyed walking around Atwater Market at lunch and working from coffee shops in Little Burgundy in Montreal where I lived. The summer prior I had written my second novel (neither novels were any good) and the ten months after that I was plagued by the desire I had to keep writing and the longing I felt to become good at it. I wanted to be published and I wanted it badly.