My book is at the printers and hopefully will be shipped shortly! It’s fun getting new products from my art, but this is a little different feeling. It almost seems like a bigger part of my heart, because it is so much more personal than art in a lot of ways. I am super excited to get the proof copy in the mail and to actually be able to look through it in real life! At any rate, until then, I will be posting the last of the chapters I will post here on my blog today, then you’ll have to purchase the hard copy of the book or purchase the eBook to read the rest. The eBook however will be available in 2 days! I will post a link to that here as well when it’s available.
As you may remember, or if you haven’t read the first chapter, it was titled: Where Am I Going, and you can read that one in a previous blog post here. This chapter is called:
How Do I Get There.
Often when we start noticing things in our lives that we aren’t particularly proud of, or things we want to change, we wonder where to begin. We set goals, we look to the future, maybe we even write a few things down. As time passes, we lose interest in what we wanted to become. Sometimes it’s because we think it’s too hard, or we fall off the wagon and decide we’ll never be able to get back on. Maybe the goal we set was too big for us, or maybe the steps getting there were so tall we couldn’t even reach the next step on our tippy toes. Whatever the case may be, we need to stop. Our mind is the first thing we need to learn to control. Maybe there is some validity in some of those excuses, but they aren’t a reason to quit, just a reason to reevaluate.
I love to exercise, and I like to be fit. There was a time in my life when I was exercising hard, at least 60 minutes a day, 6 days a week. I was a young mom, so I was chasing kids around all day, I was physically active all day long besides my workouts. I could tell that something was off, as I was not gaining energy any more from my workouts, but I felt like I was slowly deteriorating, becoming more and more exhausted. But I wasn’t losing weight, which was my goal. I was at the point of wanting to quit, because who wants to keep beating up their body for no results. But instead of quitting, I stopped; I reevaluated what I was doing. I prayed, because I do that a lot. I started to pay attention to what the fitness experts were saying. Eating healthy was a priority, but quantity of food was not something I had thought of. I set a goal to maintain a certain calorie count. I started to see results, measurable results. I didn’t quit exercising; I adjusted the other part of my life that needed attention. I was able to reduce my exercise, and do it smarter when I ate more correctly. Then I got my energy back. So often different parts of our lives are interconnected, and when we work on one, we may have to visit a different area and work on 2 simultaneously. Sometimes getting one area of our lives in order will propel another area forward without even trying. Sometimes we realize we were focused on the wrong thing all along.
I hope that as you work through this book, you can identify areas of your life that need work, different areas that can maybe be together, and which ones are the most important. After all, we only have so much time in a day. Making sure we start with what’s most important and then working our way down the line will help us manage a smaller list, but get things in the correct order to begin with. That way we aren’t working on the pennies all the time when we should be focusing on the dollars. Remember also, we are all a work in progress, once one goal becomes a habit, we can move on to the next. We don’t have to do everything all at once, because we have a lifetime to get better.
We all have reasons we stop working toward goals and change. You rationalize quitting. These really only equate to rational lies that we use to convince ourselves we don’t need to go on. But seeing them for what they are will help us avoid using them in the first place. Write them down here so you can avoid them.
Stephanie Richey Art 