As human beings we are creatures of habit and most frequently I am a creature of bad habits. This is not news to me and I often nurse those bad habits since repercussions are often few and far between. I will now confess that one of my worst traits is being late. I'm not always late to everything, but I have this complete inability to be on time to work. When I commuted over an hour to work and had to be at work even earlier than I have to now, I was actually on time or even early. Now, I live about 4 miles away and it takes me the maximum of 20 minutes to get here, but I am perpetually late. It's not something I am proud of, but it's simply something that is. Until the past week.
Every time I am late to work it runs through my head that I almost wish someone standing at the door glaring at me when I arrive so that I would feel more urgency in getting there on time. At the same time, however, I want to be able to change my behavior simply because I know I should, not because someone is threatening me...well, whatever they decide to threaten me with to make me change.
Finally last week I decided to make a change, just a small one, and see if that would get me to work on time and guess what? It did! So far for the past 5 days, I have not only arrived on time to work, but I have been early. Yes, early. A small miracle indeed! haha! I'm embarrassed to say exactly what small change I made because it's pretty stupid and piddly, but it worked and has so far been easy enough to stick with. Since I'm seeing such positive results right out of the gate, I think this will be easy enough to stick with. And I must say that I'm pretty proud of myself too.
Since I am always telling people to take baby steps and figure out what works for them to make any changes in their lives, I'm really trying to listen to myself. I've been trying to give up soda cold turkey and finally threw that idea away, but I make every effort not to drink soda each day. I've been drinking a lot of water for years now, so adding in more water isn't going to make a big difference to me in terms of what I drink, but I got to the point of having 2 cans of some form of diet soda every day and now I'm trying not to have one at all each day, but if I decide I really want one, I don't beat myself up about it. Having one every 3 or 4 days is much better than having had 6 or 8 in that same time period! I actually had a soda last night and afterwards thought, "This wasn't as good as I wanted it to be." That's a telling thing to me. I plan to keep going forward, with baby steps.
I test drove another small change last night and that was putting down my iPhone and metaphorically walking away (metaphorically because I was laying on my bed watching TV at the time and just turned the phone over since I was too lazy to get up and move it on the other side of the room) from social media last night around 7:30pm. Lately I've found that I fiddle with my phone and surf Facebook or Twitter until late in the evening at which point I finally realize it's time to get to bed and I never have picked up that book or magazine that I wanted to read. For a while now I've deliberately tried not to boot up my computer at night because I can easily get caught up in reading blogs and checking various web sites if I do that, but the phone has become a big problem for me too, so I'm going to have to start weaning myself off of my evenings spent scanning social media. I want a little to go a much longer way than it has so far.
Small changes. I have faith that they will work. Soon I'll start making more changes to my diet because that's certainly the most confused and messed up part of my life, but I want to get a firmer handle on the soda thing because I start declaring anything else off limits. Just gonna keep putting one foot in front of the other I guess!
Every time I am late to work it runs through my head that I almost wish someone standing at the door glaring at me when I arrive so that I would feel more urgency in getting there on time. At the same time, however, I want to be able to change my behavior simply because I know I should, not because someone is threatening me...well, whatever they decide to threaten me with to make me change.
Finally last week I decided to make a change, just a small one, and see if that would get me to work on time and guess what? It did! So far for the past 5 days, I have not only arrived on time to work, but I have been early. Yes, early. A small miracle indeed! haha! I'm embarrassed to say exactly what small change I made because it's pretty stupid and piddly, but it worked and has so far been easy enough to stick with. Since I'm seeing such positive results right out of the gate, I think this will be easy enough to stick with. And I must say that I'm pretty proud of myself too.
Since I am always telling people to take baby steps and figure out what works for them to make any changes in their lives, I'm really trying to listen to myself. I've been trying to give up soda cold turkey and finally threw that idea away, but I make every effort not to drink soda each day. I've been drinking a lot of water for years now, so adding in more water isn't going to make a big difference to me in terms of what I drink, but I got to the point of having 2 cans of some form of diet soda every day and now I'm trying not to have one at all each day, but if I decide I really want one, I don't beat myself up about it. Having one every 3 or 4 days is much better than having had 6 or 8 in that same time period! I actually had a soda last night and afterwards thought, "This wasn't as good as I wanted it to be." That's a telling thing to me. I plan to keep going forward, with baby steps.
I test drove another small change last night and that was putting down my iPhone and metaphorically walking away (metaphorically because I was laying on my bed watching TV at the time and just turned the phone over since I was too lazy to get up and move it on the other side of the room) from social media last night around 7:30pm. Lately I've found that I fiddle with my phone and surf Facebook or Twitter until late in the evening at which point I finally realize it's time to get to bed and I never have picked up that book or magazine that I wanted to read. For a while now I've deliberately tried not to boot up my computer at night because I can easily get caught up in reading blogs and checking various web sites if I do that, but the phone has become a big problem for me too, so I'm going to have to start weaning myself off of my evenings spent scanning social media. I want a little to go a much longer way than it has so far.
Small changes. I have faith that they will work. Soon I'll start making more changes to my diet because that's certainly the most confused and messed up part of my life, but I want to get a firmer handle on the soda thing because I start declaring anything else off limits. Just gonna keep putting one foot in front of the other I guess!
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