Sunday Night Success

Have you ever wondered why you find something that works really well, and then quit doing it?

Maybe you start going to the gym three times a week after work, and then decide that switching to the weekend might be better and stop going.

Or, you switch to drinking one cup of coffee a day, feel 100% better, then one day decide that you can have two, which leads to three, then four.

Maybe you set time aside each day to write, start getting a ton of writing done, then switch to a different system, and it all falls apart.

Something was working really well in your life and you decided to change it.

For me it was meditation.

Sufi Remembrance

At the start of August I took Mark Silver’s “Remembrance Challenge” to give meditation a try. The Remembrance is a Sufi tradition involving getting in touch with the Divine. You can find an excellent description by signing up for the challenge at Heart of Business.

I had never meditated previously, and to be honest, I was of the mind that meditation was a load of “hippy garbage” that had no value to offer my life.

Well, I was wrong. Big time wrong. Carrying out the Remembrance made a HUGE difference in my life: I was more in control of my emotions, I felt less stressed, I was having some amazing ideas, and I was making some really great decisions about my business.

The Remembrance worked.

Switch to Shahmbala Mindfulness

My eyes were opened to the world of meditation and I wanted to experiment more. I decided to give the Shambhala tradition of meditation a try. I bought some books, read the books, and signed up for a weekend retreat.

In the end I was unable to attend the weekend retreat, but the books were very interesting and I started to practice meditating the “Shahmbala way.”

I didn’t like it. It just didn’t work for me.

So, I did the only logical thing I could: I stopped meditating.

Quitting what works

All right, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I had a very successful support environment in my life with the Remembrance. I experimented with Shambhala meditation, which didn’t work. So I stopped using a meditation environment all together.

Not my brightest moment I admit.

Months have gone by since I practiced the Remembrance. I have been feeling more stressed. I have felt blocked in moving forward with my business. I have been less patient with my family. Every benefit I was feeling from practicing the Remembrance was gone, and yet I still pushed forward, never making the link between stopping the Remembrance and the way I was feeling.

This past week I started using the Remembrance again.

It felt fabulous. I am now working my way up, once again, to a daily practice and it is already doing wonders for how I am feeling and how I am thinking. I am thankful that I have found this environment again.

Why do we quit?

I think maybe, once we create a helpful environment for ourselves, and begin a supportive habit we get overconfident. We attribute the success we are having to something inside of us, instead of something in the environment we created for ourselves.

You think it is willpower that makes you go to the gym, not something as simple as selecting the right time to go.

You think your self-control is strong enough to not have three cups of coffee, so two seems safe.

You believe you now have the ability and skill to write whenever you want, and don’t realize it was the structure of how you were writing that helped you be successful.

Willpower and effort are great, but they are not enough. It is the environments you set up to support yourself that lead to your success. So, next time you are having some success in your life, don’t just give yourself a pat on the back, acknowledge everything that surrounds you and has supported you in being successful.

Think of a time when you were successful and try to identify some of the people, things, and structures that helped you be successful. How could you incorporate these success environments into a project you are currently working on?

Check out Jocelyn’s post on vision boards for another great way to build up your success environment.

Here are my actions for the week:
1. Investigate mailchimp
2. Work with Dad on Blog theme
3. Plan out SNS changes
4. Make pencast of SNS changes
5. Change coach website to subdirectory
6. Point URL to new “under construction” coaching site
7. Download Ecto trial
8. Download Fastpencil documents into Writeroom
9. Pack business necessities for Calgary trip
10. Write 30 minutes 7 times for NaNoWriMo
11. Write “Homepage”
12. Write “Is this you” page
13. Write “How it works” page
14. Write “Last Ditch” page
15. Write “About” page
16. Write “Sign up” page
17. Write “Contact” page
18. Write “Archives” page
19. Write Coaching Model
20. Write Power Tool
21. Reorganize goals for end of year

Check back on Sunday to see how I did.

I belong to a book club. About once a month, we choose a book, read it, then get together to discuss it. The idea is to expand our horizons, and read books we might not normally choose. I joined of my own volition.

I constantly get razzed by my success partners because, quite regularly, actions related to my book club end up on my list: getting the book, reading a certain number of chapters or pages, etc. And it frequently ends up coming down to the wire whether I actually complete the book by the deadline. The others give me grief, wondering why I joined a group such as this if I find it so difficult to keep on track and get my reading done.

I can see the irony, but I defend it by saying that even things we enjoy doing sometimes are challenging to get done. And often, things we would like to do for ourselves fall by the wayside in favor of other things that seem to be more important. Sometimes it is important to make ourselves do things that are just for us. Otherwise they may not happen at all. I put reading on my actions list not just because its good for me to read new books and expand my horizons, but because if I didn’t schedule that time for me, I know that I would probably not make time for it. It would fall to the bottom of the pile of a list of other actions that seem to be more important than something that is just for me.

Do you find that you tend to neglect yourself in favor of others, or actions that seem more important and less selfish? Do you also find it difficult to do something for yourself, to the point that if you didn’t put it on your action list it would not get done? I think a lot of us tend to put our own needs at the bottom of our priorities list. I would like to know if you agree, and how you deal with it.

I am notoriously bad at setting my actions for the week, and then not reviewing them until much later in the week. I have, of course, a general idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but sometimes I will forget about something I wanted to get done until I actually go back and look at what I wrote down.

Today, while trying to complete an action that I had left to the last minute, I was reminded that I could have saved myself some time and energy if I had only reviewed my list earlier. I had an action down to scan some documents and email them to someone. This would have been a task that would have taken all of 2 minutes and cost nothing if I had remembered to do it earlier in the week when I had access to the office scanner. But I left it until Sunday, leaving me with the options of either going to the Staples to get the documents scanned, costing me time, energy and a little bit of money, or not completing the action. In the interest of getting it off my list, I did go to the store and get the action completed, but it was a lesson I will remember.

Procrastination rarely pays off, it is my intention to be more conscious about checking in with my list more frequently during the week.