Hey @powerfulwonders, thank you very much for mentioning me in your post, I feel so honered;-) I really enjoy reading your high quality posts and it's obvious that you are a good writer as you can clearly articulate your thoughts and have a talent for choosing the right words;-) Besides that I can relate to many of your thoughts. The voice of my ego telling me stories about how my life should be and that I am behind my life goals etc. often keeps me from feeling happy in the now and in this sense constantly postpones my happiness into the future. Also the problem with tracking the progress of my goals is that I can get really caught up in outcomes that I don't have much control over and I often don't recognize progress because perfectionism warps my vision. Often "accountability" is not getting me where I want to be. After all the reason why we want the things we aspire is because we think they will bring us some variation on happiness/peace/love/contentment etc. Therefore I concentrate on measuring my progress by the degree of self-compassion I can practice when I inevitably fall short of my "over-the-top-expectations". Letting go of measuring my worth as a human by external barometers (approval, weight, success etc.) is at first disorienting and frightening but it frees me up to be responsible (able to respond to myself) in the truest sense. To accept myself just as I am but still move towards change that makes my experience even better I practice some forms of awareness practice like meditation, journaling etc and focus on doing micro-actions with full awareness. Also I stuck a post-it note on my mirror with the message "What, if nothing is wrong?" Hope this helps you a little bit;-)
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Such a fantastic and thoughtful comment @zuckerzombie thank you!! I'm so glad that something I posted has resonated with you in these ways. It's an ongoing conversation - with you, with me - and I get clearer about what is actually going on the more I am willing to open up and talk about it like you just have in your comment. So thank you!
In the grand tradition (well, mine anyway) of 'taking responsibility' I am going to add that when I feel that accountability is not getting me where I want to be, I have an opportunity to step back and think about how I am using accountability to create the outcomes so far, and how I might use it differently in the future to change and refine my outcomes into something closer to what I want.
I often don't see the issues in myself, or even in my own writing, and I often do see myself in someone else or in their words. What you've written here is immensely helpful to me :-)
And I love 'What if nothing is wrong?' and I think I will be adopting that into my accountability bag of tricks, if that's OK?
Many thanks!!! :-)