Letter #51 - Patience is Power

To everyone, at any stage in life,

I’ve been thinking about my life a lot recently, about how I’ve gotten to where I am and the various detours that the universe threw my way. I think I’m at my most self-aware but confident in that self, than I’ve been since I was a teenager I think. A big part of that has been patience and practicing it daily. 

Patience is this virtue, up on a pedestal, and I think that that can make it so inaccessible when people need it most. When someone says they aren’t a patient person, generally I’ve found that that means they haven’t learnt how to be. Patience is on par with self-control. And in civilised society, the majority of people have self-control. For example, we don’t go running into stores and stealing everything we want; instead we have the patience and control to get to a point where we can fund our purchases. We don’t walk out of meetings that aren’t going our way or lash out when we dislike something. So we have indeed got control and one step up from self-control is patience. Or at least that’s how I see it.

It makes the act and even the art of patience slightly more understandable. It isn’t a virtue that only the best of people can obtain. It is like any other ability. We practice until we’ve gotten better at it. It’s like a muscle that needs to be worked.

For me, this was a daily practice. I love my lists and so I would list the things that would make my life amazing if I had them/could achieve them. Then I would state what I had done that day to work towards that aim. If I hadn’t done anything, then I knew where I was going wrong and it was usually then that my patience would wain. But seeing it on paper would help.

 

If I hadn’t worked on that goal, how could I expect it to magically manifest?? Whenever I was working towards something, I felt patient because I knew I was putting something in and as a result, eventually I would get something out of it too. Soon the practice of patience became almost second nature and I could judge how I was feeling based on how patient and grateful I was on any given day. 

Seeing the way my life is in this present moment, has made me really appreciate patience. There are things I’ve been working on or hoping for, for close to a decade and only now can I see the results coming to life. Even now, they aren’t the finished results and I’ve got a long way to go with the things I’m trying to perfect or achieve. But I keep marvelling at time and how it passes when you have the patience to just let it happen.

If it wasn’t for those patient moments that I cultivated and learnt to master, I would have given up on some things a long long time ago. But doing so, wouldn’t have taken me to a better place, or rather not a place that I would have wanted to be in.

So I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who told me to be patient (basically my mum...constantly). Life ebbs and flows and if you’re in a moment where it’s not really flowing your way, keep going and be patient that your hard work will pay off.

It really helps when we think of how long our lives could be. Thinking of that always grounded me. There’s so many more years ahead, hopefully, so if you’re not there yet, doesn’t mean you never will be.

But none of that means that I don’t have my moments! I have many many moments where I just cannot be in a positive and patient place. I want to whine and have a bit of a rant. But all of that is fine! You don’t need to be saintly to practice patience. All it does is give you a bit more power in your life. All it means is that you don’t spend every moment looking to a non-existent future, while forgetting the present in which you need to work to make it a reality.

I just work on not letting the bad moments consume my day or my life, like I used to. I need to give an honorary mention to Gary Vaynerchuk, who preaches so much positivity that you can’t help but take it on board! And another mention to the friend who introduced me to my first Gary Vee video that started this whole thing. You started an upward spiral that just makes me more self-aware.

Anyway, clearly I missed blogging because this post got away from me entirely! Enjoy this nearly 1000 word post and I hope you can find a way to cultivate a bit of patience into your life. Those bad little things, once they stop seeming like the end of the world, everything opens up, the good things become great and the bad things don’t seem as world-crushing.

Do you have any practices that work for you? Things that make the day better when it’s awful, or ways to just change your perspective?

Until next time, be inspired...

Z 

Letter #38 - Plan For Your Goals

So I've spent the week, having a fresh start and organising the things in my life that needed organising and after seeing just how many other posts there were relating to New Year's resolutions, I thought I'd wait a while and approach it a little differently. 

First of all, I hope everyone had a good holiday and new year. So I know it can be a touchy topic when I say it's a new year and time for a fresh start. The cynics among you will ask, "why now? If you wanted to start fresh, why was September not good enough, or October 23rd? Why does the new year require change?" In short, it doesn't. You can start with a new idea or lifestyle or any other alteration you need to make, whenever you want to, but there is something sweet and rounded about the first day of the year. It gives a solid starting point. It's like when you're procrastinating and you think to yourself that you'll get to your homework at 5pm and then before you notice is 5.24pm, so now you have to wait until 5.30pm or 6pm before you start. Because it just feels right. That's all it comes down to. A feeling.  

If that feeling is that you're going to have a fantastic year, then by all means, go ahead.

So I debated whether or not to talk about resolutions in general or my personal resolutions. I decided on the latter. I have a lot of goals for each year and I very rarely meet them all but I give it my best shot. This year, however, I really do feel that this is it. I'm going to smash this year and feel amazing about it. The reason I know this is because while every other year I set vague resolutions that I had no set plan to accomplishing, other the last year, I've learnt about goal setting and the preparation that goes into any task with a goal.

I mean, you wouldn't just jump in and attempt a 10,000 word essay, without a plan, right? (Okay, that's a bad example... I actually have done that and it turned out great haha). Either way, the majority of tasks require preparation of some sort before we can undertake the commitment.

Say that you wanted to go to the gym more. One, that's a vague goal to begin with. How do you quantify "more"? And two, you can make excuses far too easily. You don't have the right gym top, you need a new sports bra, the gym simply isn't cost effective right now... the list can go on and on and before you know it, it's June and you haven't even taken one step in the right direction.

So as I said, I'll name a few of my goals, simply as a way of holding myself accountable. I've already had my goals written my bullet journal since the 1st of the the month and now I'm using this post as a means of accountability while also drilling it further into my own mind. I always set learning goals, and they are important to me but this is the first year in a while where I'm not in education so I can choose to prioritise the things I want to learn. By the end of 2017, I am hoping to be fluent in Spanish, have a basic grasp of Italian, take a certificated sign language course and to understand the basics of coding. These are not things that I decided on a whim and I took my time, researching each of them because as I said before, preparation is key.

I've always loved languages and I did study Spanish to A-level but let it all get forgotten after that. So when it comes to learning Spanish and Italian, I am going to use Duolingo. 

This is an app that's been around for a couple of year and I've had it downloaded on my phone pretty much as soon as it was a developed application. The great thing about it is that it's free. If you want to try a language and you're not too sure whether it's for you, there's no harm in trailing an app that costs you nothing. It caters for a broad range of languages, and it starts of very simply. It uses repetition and audio and even tests your pronunciation as you get further into the lessons. The app is advertised as needing just 5 minutes a day, and that is absolutely all you need. It also gives it the option to set a notification so that it can remind you once a day and I really do love that feature. 

So this isn't a new app to me and I do know that I love it and the way that it helps you step by step but I also know that sometimes I get lazy once I'm in a routine. So this time, I'm keeping a notebook for all my new vocabulary and the gendered nouns so that I can feel as though I've taken a more active role in my learning. Five minutes a day for a year is just over 30 hours of study. That is minuscule in the grand scheme of things but it's still something that most people could find time for.

The coding is again, something I've loved from afar. I'm always so in awe of all you can accomplish with knowledge and as we travel further into a technologically aware society, I feel like I need to understand the basics for myself. Honestly, I just hate feeling like I've missed out and for me FOMO is never more real than when I feel I don't have a piece of knowledge that I should have. 

For this, I've found so many online learning systems and it is going to take some trial and error before I can feel confident that I've doing it right. I've subscribed to a programme called Skillscrush as just one way of introducing this topic to myself. There's also codecademy and Khan academy that claim to have great teaching resources for my needs. I think this is something that will take much more time and focus and for now, I'm setting that out as one day a week, for as many hours as I can stomach.

Lastly, a learning goal that I have wanted to achieve for so long is to learn British sign language. With a brother who has had to use signing systems as he grew up and a mother who worked in a special school, I've been around the practice of communication through signing for most of my life. But I've always wanted to actually learn the basics and more if I can. I think it could be an invaluable skill and even if it isn't, and I never have to use it, I think it casts an awareness of how other people have to live their lives and that's too important of a lesson to pass up. 

For this goal, I didn't want to be left on my own and to end up doing it wrong. So I've found classes that I can take in my area and I hope to be able to gain some kind of certification for the learning that I will do other that time. Again, this is just something I want to do for myself, to prove that I can and because I think it should be common practice, in the same way that first aid skills now are.

Anyway, those are just a small handful of my goals for this year. What are some your goals and how do you plan to achieve them? (I'm only really asking because I love getting new ideas that I ucan use myself!) 

Until next time, be inspired...

Love, Z