Getting your shit together. Identifying the habits I wish to adopt.

Have you ever met a person who seems to have it all figured out? Not just the grand scheme of their life, but the every day mundane tasks too. Why can they manage to brush their teeth without spilling toothpaste all over themselves? Why do they have a sparkling clean house when they work twice as many hours as me? How do they have the energy to do chores straight away instead of leaving them for their future-selves?

In an attempt to emulate these super-people ways, I have spent many hours googling things like “How to have more energy”, “How to be cleaner” or “How to stop procrastinating and just do things”. Throughout my google trawls and life observances, I have come to realise that these super people I so desperately want to be, aren’t super people at all. They are, I daresay, ordinary people. What separates these people from myself is that these people have good habits. Habits are things you do without thinking about them. You have done them so many times before, and they are so familiar, that now you no longer need extra brain effort to do them. Eg. Brushing your teeth how you’ve always done it, so that you get toothpaste everywhere.

Super people, that is, people who are efficient, productive, creative, organised and generally have their shit together, have good habits. That’s what makes them so super. But how do I have good habits? Well, I think the first part of this is identifying which habits do I want to have.

Habits I want to adopt:

I want to automatically go for a walk after dinner. Not something arduous, just a leisurely turn about the neighbourhood after a meal. There are many benefits to this and yet each night after dinner I do the same thing, open up my laptop and start reading blogs or emails, I have yet to go for a short stroll.

I don’t want to snack. When faced with a plate of nibblies I want to automatically NOT snack on them. Currently, my hand knows what I want before I do and soon enough I’ll find chip and dips coming towards my mouth and there is nothing my brain can do to stop that hand of mine. I swear, the extra pudding I’m carrying lately is a result of my habits, not me.

I want to clean up after I’ve made a mess. I seem to leave it all until later, but later never comes. I had eight coffee mugs in my bedroom on Saturday. A weeks worth of coffee mugs all stacked up on my bedside table, awaiting someone to take them to the dishwasher.

I want to save money. A habit I think many of us want to adopt. Achieving an excellent savings rate of over 40% of my income can only be achieved through good spending and saving habits.

I want to be a better friend. Calling and checking in on the people I love is something I’ve neglected lately, but this is a habit. Catching up with people regularly can become effortless if I do it with some regularity and with a reward. The hermit inside me is screaming.

I want to put on body butter before I go to sleep.

Now what?

So I’ve identified some habits that I want to adopt, or stop, now I aim to incorporate these into my daily routine. First, I’ll focus on one or two things over the course of the week. Tonight I have already cleaned the laundry and put away my towel after my shower (I usually don the laundry floor with old, smelly clothes). I’m well on the way to becoming the clean freak I aspire to be. No more piles of coffee cups on my bedside table for me! Overtime I’ll report back on how I am going, have I managed to integrate these habits into my life? Or will it will become just another thing I want in my life, but never quite seem to have?

Time and experience will tell.

Formulating a dream

A dream of mine is starting to formulate in my mind, something different to the “I will be pretty, skinny and have a large house” kinda unproductive dream I like to muse from time to time.

No, I feel like this is a dream I can grab by the horns and throw myself into. Something I can commit to 100% that will challenge me and my lifestyle. It excites me, yet I feel too ashamed to admit it to any of my closest confidantes. It’s my little secret desire that’s just starting to ignite, will it persist and I will find myself chasing this? Or is it whimsical and fleeting? I don’t know.

As I have a tendency to be reckless and impulsive at times, I’m just going to think about my dream before I let it out into the open; that is until I declare that this is my dream and this is what I’m going to do.

So, what is this little dream of mine? As nerdy as this is, I want to go back to university and pursue a career in mathematics and/or physics. I may go back into teaching, or travel down the path of academia. I feel guilty because I just started my career as a teacher, I feel like I can’t go back to uni now! At the same time I still want to be a teacher, I just want need to learn about these areas more in depth. I am absolutely enamoured with the topics and am personally pursing them as side hobbies.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time outside of school to devote myself fully to learning about scalar and vector quantities. I also don’t have the experts on hand. I’m also fully aware of my own personal attributes and the likelihood that I will change my mind in a matter of months and no longer seek a higher nerd status.

I find myself utterly confused with myself. Do I just lack the confidence to pursue the hobby of an armchair physicist? Am I making excuses? Am I trying to find a way out of adulthood because I just want to be a perpetual student?

 

 

From student to teacher: A rough transition

The transition from uni life to adult life was rough for me. Perhaps because last year I was the ultimate slacker, finishing up my masters project haphazardly and spending the majority of my days sleeping and doing whatever the hell I wanted. It comes as no surprise that I would find the full time slog a challenge.

“Is this really what adults do all the time?” I think to myself as I chant Rhiannas “Work, work, work, work, work, work” in my head. How is this in any way sustainable?  I have not had a solid routine in my life since I left high school 7 years ago so waking up at 6am every morning because I have to was quite a challenge at first. I resisted it and it stressed me out. Now reality has set in and I’m no longer fighting the adult life. I can get up to the daily grind with a spring in my step, Sunday’s don’t depress me so much because I actually do like my job and I’m starting to figure out my hobbies. Something I haven’t had in years!

Adult life is abrasive at first, a real punch in the face when you realise you have to do this same thing for 40 odd years and all you want to do is turn off the morning alarm and sleep all day. But hey, it’s not so bad after all. Here are some things that have helped me cope from the transition of a free and fruitful lifestyle to a highly routine, vanilla seeming day-to-day.

Injecting some colour back into my life: Spontaneoity, laughter and trying new things. It took me a while to turn away from sleep-eat-work-repeat lifestyle and carve out time to do things that were fun and made me laugh. Lately I’ve been making this a priority and I feel like my life has turned from a saggy old boot into a pair of moccasins with some sequins attached. Comfy, daggy and a little bit interesting. I’m working on becoming a stiletto.

Being grateful for the work I do: It’s so important for me to feel like I contribute to something. I’m eternally grateful for pursuing a career that allows me to feel this way. Some days I question how much of a contribution I actually make, but I do know that sometimes I may just happen to make someone smile. I love that.

Practising mindfulness: When you spend all Saturday dreading Sunday because Sunday is the last day of the weekend and the day before Monday, you know you have a problem. I’m not saying I don’t like work, I’m saying that I would like more me-time. Really, I’m just super lazy. Lately, I spend a lot of my weekend doing marking, lesson plans or other work related activities that when I get to Sunday I feel like I haven’t had time off at all. Staying present helps me to get out of that mind frame that I need time off. My time is my time, whether I’m at work or snuggling up in a warm bed. I need to enjoy this moment, not look forward to the next time I have some freedom.

Finding a hobby: Hobbies aren’t really something I had before my adult life. I had uni and part time work and that was about it. Now that I have designated chunks of time carved out just for me, I have the opportunity to pursue hobbies. I don’t watch TV much anymore and this has allowed me to sit around bored until I thought of something to do. So I started reading, I started writing, I started yoga and I started scheduling time to see my friends and family. Now, I have something to look forward to at the end of the day instead of thinking about what I need to do tomorrow at work.

Getting fat: Not an ideal coping strategy, and I need to look into better options. Alas, my waist is expanding. I attribute this to fantastic food and wine, friends, family and date nights. Now I need to work out some sort of balance before I no longer fit through my front door.

Making sleep a priority: Most nights I make a commitment to go to bed at 10pm, allowing me a solid 8 hours in bed. I believe this helps immensely. Every so often I lay awake all night and then proceed to teach on just two hours of sleep the next day. It’s manageable, I’ve done it, I didn’t die. It was, however, painful. I feel emotional, headachey, short tempered and complainy. A generally horrible person to be around. Don’t be that person. Get some sleep.

Being passionate about my work: My job is still overwhelming at times. But now that I’ve had some time to adjust, can breathe a bit and enjoy what I do, I have become even more passionate about the work that I do than before. Yes, education is important. My students lives are important and I care about them as people. I love that I get to see them grow each day. True, some annoy the shit out of me. But I still care for them. I don’t think I could be in a line of work I didn’t care about. I’d probably be struggling to cope with the change even more.

Learning about finance: I want to be a mother within the next 10 years. I would like to take enough time off work to raise my babies. I would then like the option of working part time. This is only possible if I get smart about my money.

 

Choosing your life

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to shape my own reality. I want everyday to have something amazing to it, I want to enjoy my time here on this earth. So I simply chose to be happy. Something amazing then starting happening, I’ve become happier.

In a matter of a week, I feel myself shifting. I don’t feel such a huge, insurmountable pressure weighing down on me anymore. I feel lighter, I feel like I have more time and I just genuinely feel like there’s more to life than before.

Now I have to admit I don’t find myself feeling blissful 100% of the time, last Friday I found myself in tears after a class went awry during the fourth period. But I didn’t ruminate on it all weekend like I usually do, instead I chose to forget about it on the weekend. I had fun.

Choosing happiness has got me thinking about other choices you can make in your life. I was speaking to my mother over the weekend who is almost financially ready to retire and move down to the beach. My mother is 54, has always earned a low income wage and she solely supported myself and my sister for our first 18 odd years of life. She used to cry over money often and we could never afford nice things growing up. Now, she’s a year away from financial freedom and I couldn’t help but wonder how she’s managed to retire 10 years earlier than normal without being a frugal weirdo. My mother simply told me that she always wanted to retire early. She said that in life, she’s always got what she asked for, eventually.

Hearing this statement was powerful. What do you mean ‘ask for’? My mother is by no means a religious women, so I don’t envision her kneeling down to the gods and praying for financial freedom, rather, she believed herself capable of this happening to her, and she made choices to enact it. To me it sounds like luck, to my mother, this was all her doing. Her bad decisions amounted to being in the right place at the right time, she took meaning from moments and learnt from her mistakes and successes.

Perhaps lucky people aren’t so lucky at all, they just choose to be bold enough to chase their dreams and desires. These lucky people get what the want because they choose to do what they want with their time. My mother made choices that led her down the path of retiring early.

My lesson that I learnt from my mother is that we all have choices, so we can put these choices to good use and choose the life that we want. I’m choosing a fulfilling life; a life full of love, laughter, compassion and freedom. I’m choosing that these permeate my everyday being to make me feel blissful and at peace.

I truly believe that If I choose to live the life I want, not the life I should, then I will get what I want. Eventually, just like my mother.

 

 

July Expenditures-Eeeek!!

Lately I’ve been thinking about money, rightly so. This year is the first year of full time work for me and so I’ve never before experienced having a nice sum of money conveniently deposited into my bank account at exactly the same time each fortnight on a Wednesday.

What I’ve been completely oblivious to for the past five months is how much I’ve been spending.

In July alone, I managed to spend $1600 on miscellaneous crap. Make-up, dinners out, a pair of shoes, a gym membership I don’t use, eBay pre-loved designer clothes, all those other transactions that I don’t remember what I purchased. Oh yeah, top all this off with a $17, 500 car loan with a 9%pa interest rate.

On top of all this is my living expenses. I spent a total of $470 on groceries. Bear in mind that I only buy groceries for myself, this well and truly surpasses my “budgeted” $80 MAX for groceries each week. Unsurprisingly, I throw half of what I buy out. Last week I purchased pre-cut carrots and dip for lunches that were only to be tossed into the bin before I cleared out of the office on Friday.  That was $6 I threw in the bin. It sounds small, but I know that it will add up.

I always feel like I have more money than I am spending and I have managed to free myself of credit card debt and save up some extra cash this year, but even so, my level of spending is unsustainable and just stupid. Nobody needs a brand new car, I know this, but still my spending got the better of me and I impulsively bought a brand new car. I did absolutely no research and wound up with a “semi automatic” bullshit lemon of a car at a slap in the face price of $17 500. I drive around 15, 000km every 4 months and didn’t consider that my car will need a service with a premium price tag 3 times a year.

I have nobody to blame but myself. I can’t even blame ignorance because these are the same mistakes that others around me have made and warned me about. Maybe it’s one of those life mistakes you have to make for yourself to truly appreciate what it means. I will never make a large purchase without extensive research again. I will also track my spending, July felt like a pretty tame month for me in terms of spending, yet I managed to blow $16oo on stuff I don’t need.

This has truly been an eye opening experience reflecting on my spending habits. I didn’t realise they were this bad. I’m going to make some drastic changes to turn this habit of mine around and pay off my car sooner.