The Lazy Perfectionist gets imperfectly active

While googling "lazy perfectionist" (because I just read the Elizabeth Gilbert book Big Magic, and that idea really cracked me up/resembled me), I came across the website of a Christine Carter. I started poking at her 90 day Habit Program, and realized, I have found my newest project!

I'm on day 5 at this point, and I always feel reassured when the program I'm currently doing is reinforced by programs I've already done. (I believe that's called confirmation bias?) So yeah, I think it's going to be good. Plus, I get to be in another Facebook group, and there's text reminders (which is a new one, but less annoying than getting texts about coupons from retailers, so I guess I'm cool with it), even accountability buddies (which I am stubbornly going to resist).

So what habit to pick? She's got that covered. The one that supports the feeling you want to have. Whoa, confirmation bias via Danielle Laporte too? Luckily, I have already made my desire map, so I focused on feeling Resilient. I would like to feel loose clothing all around me. I would like to be bouncy and able to recover from illness and setbacks and overindulgence like a rubber ducky in a duck race.

My photo from 2015 Art Prize, of the Great Race by Michael Peoples.

Since this sounds a lot like feeling healthy, I decided to focus on my health. By remembering that food and drink can support my resilient health goals or undermine them. By finding the key stone habit and the trigger and following the program. 

So I am going for a walk every day. And the tricky part is that it can be a very short walk, as short as around the block. If it can be longer, that would be fantastic too, but around the block is nothing to discount. I wanted the trigger to be getting home from work, but here it is Sunday night, and I realized I only responded to that as the trigger, well, 1 out of 5 days. But I didn't start until Wednesday, either, so maybe next week will be a better test. 

I'm already envisioning this going so well that I'm making lists of other habits to implement or break. Maybe I can plan my meals! Clean my house! Meditate! 

But first, I have to walk around the block. 

Aw. Awe. Awesome.

So, for a woman who does performance improvement for a living, reads self-help books for fun, and writes about self-improvement because she can't NOT do it, New Year's is IT. It's the time. The best time.

(To be truthful, I have also set Valentine's Resolutions, Easter Intentions, Memorial Day Meanings, et cetera, because I can find a way to start over whatever time of year it happens to be. But this is New Year's...)

So we're obviously a few days in. As you saw in my last post, resolutions can be frustrating because if you don't achieve that exact outcome, it's easy to feel like you've failed, even if other valuable lessons were learned on the journey. This was my conclusion after reading 1 billion articles and snippets about other wayfinders picking their Word of the Year. I did the same last year, and I think it was helpful to focus.

So after advice from Martha Beck, Anna Kunnecke, Danielle LaPorte and somehow I found Christine Kane as well, the advice was to focus on an adjective, on what you wanted to be as opposed to do, and a whole tool.

I'd had a discussion with a friend about a month ago about how annoying it was to read misuse of the word "awe". Honestly, I don't know if this is a grammar rule, or just our own issues with phonetics, but I'd always thought that "aw" was the noise you made when there was an adorable kitten present, and "awe" was a sense of wonder. Therefore, it's not wrong to write "Awe!" under a picture of a cute baby, but it's not exactly correct either.

(Sidebar: My cat is named Mr. Awesome partially because I was rambling aloud to a co-worker about this cat I'd seen on Petfinder named Sam and I was going to adopt him and it was going to be awesome because "Aw, Sam!". On my 3rd attempt to adopt this cat, it actually worked. So his name is Mr. Sam Awesome.)

Cat, on some hats. It's Mr. Sam Awesome!

So, I'd picked those words because they were sounds that encompassed what I wanted to be this year. I wanted to be empathetic and compassionate as well as restore a sense of wonder in the world. and as even the Foodist, Daria Pinto Rose says, I wanted life to be awesome.

But then I had my crisis of faith. What if it wasn't the right word? Also, isn't it breaking the rules to have 2 words? Even if one of them is more of a sound?

Enter BFF Lindsey. We don't always exchange Christmas presents but for whatever reason, this year we'd both found the perfect thing for each other. Of course, we don't always exchange them right on Christmas. So she brought it for me to the New Year's Party we were both attending. And it cemented my choice for Word of the Year, because it's this coffee mug:

So, here's the ritual: drink my coffee in the Captain Awesome mug. At the end of the day, assess what was Aw / Awe / Awesome during the day (I'm considering doing an Awesome journal for a while. Maybe the month of March, which is not always evident in awesomeness.) And stand back in awe...