simplerich

Once upon a time I created a monkey list and it was ambitious but doable… It never got off the ground. Well, that’s not true. I did buy the calendar… I just never put any check marks on it as I did the things. Which left me with the feeling I wasn’t getting them done. Stupid screaming monkeys in the back of my head nagging me, pestering me, giving me this feeling of “You’re not doing the things you’d publicly committed to doing! You’re a failure! You suck! You’re a pretentious faker with your fancy pants blog and your blah blah blah…” My inner voice is kind of a jerk sometimes.

I’m reading the book, The Spark, from the creator of Sparkpeople.com.  One of the first things it says to do is to write your goals, physically write them down and put them where you can see them. This is important for two reasons. One, so you remember to stay focused on them, and in my case, so I can remember that there IS progress being made. I started this post as an apology. I couldn’t remember my list and in my head… with that voice up there talking to me I felt like I’d dropped the ball and had this chronic public failure thing going through my head. It was really bugging me. So, I came on here to apologize and start over with a smaller list. Then I looked at the list.

• Half an hour of yoga at least five days a week.
• At least 3 crossword puzzles a week.
• Read at least half an hour with an hour being better for relaxation. Not work related reading.
• Start running again.
• Get down to 165lbs and stay there for a while. I went from 205 to 175 but want another 10lbs.
• Cook and eat at home at least twice as often as I eat out… at least!
• Get my bike running.
• Finish my novel.

Holy crap! I’ve done most of the list! I’ve put the ones in bold that I’ve completed… “Get my bike running” is half in bold because I’m almost there with that one. lol The Crosswords & Yoga. I haven’t done them at all. I also quit smoking, something I hadn’t added to the original list because I was ashamed to admit I’d started again after having quit for five years.

My goodreads goal of reading 40 books this year is still on track. I’m ahead of schedule and that’s OK. Some of my books were short so probably shouldn’t count. I think some ppl doing this are only counting those really cool books that they don’t care if ppl see they read. I’m counting fiction too… really good fiction in some cases. Dan Wells’ “I’m Not A Serial Killer” series is really good! But not something I’d want to read in an airport. Also not one I’d take with me if I were meeting a mentor so they’d see what I was reading. Reading’s funny that way isn’t it? There are those books we all think we SHOULD be reading… and then there’s our guilty pleasure books. Why do we feel guilty for having a good read? Get over it! It doesn’t ALL have to be “Saving The World in 3 Easy Steps!” Sometimes it’s OK to read about the Zombie Apocalypse, and since my goal was escapist non-work reading I’m actually following my goal on that one!

For the weight loss thing, I’m back on Sparkpeople.com managing my fitness and trying to stay on track there. I really like that site. The articles, the stupid points you can get… the spark-streaks (like the seinfeld calendar, but online). I call them stupid points because they’re stupid… and I love them. It’s a constant stream of positive reinforcement for doing things I should be doing anyway. It makes it a game almost to score points. Life as a game that I can get points in I like. The more I work out the more points I get. The more food I log the more points I get. (Granted, the part where I want to log healthy food is on me. I COULD log bags and bags of chips and get as many points as if I logged a salad and some fruit. The important part for me is the logging. Just paying attention helps me make better choices.)

Maybe I’ll get on the Crosswords and maybe I won’t.  Maybe I”ll keep up with the yoga on the non-running days, but the five days a week I know won’t happen. I won’t make the time for it. I’ve taken them off the list by lining them out. They don’t get erased. They can still be there to remind me for later maybe… but the lined out part means they’re not on my list so no pressure to doing them or not. When doing yoga becomes a stressor something’s gone horribly wrong lol.

So, instead of apologizing for being a failure on my Monkey-list I’m going to say to all of you who have long to do lists… Write them down, remember to re-evaluate them periodically, and that David Allen Guy is right… out of your head and onto paper. If for no other reason to get the stress thing out of your head. I feel SO much better now that I look at the list and realize that my inner jerk is a rotten liar! My next blog post will talk a bit about my inner jerk and a teacher I had that made a huge difference to me. She’s dead now so no chance she’ll see this, and that’s too bad.

The Chinese New Year isn’t for a while yet, but I’m going to stick with the Tiger imagery anyway.

I’m reading The Spark right now, a book that I will review in much more detail later. It will be a weekend post since I agreed to do book reviews on weekend posts. One of the primary themes of the book is that lifestyle changes, whether they be fitness changes, dietary changes, business changes, motivational changes, any kind of personal, internal change, is best made incrementally with a string of small victories building to a larger change. The pyramids aren’t climbed in one step. They’re made up of many steps that are, by themselves doable goals that lead to something magnificent.

So, towards that end 2010’s goals are going to be many, short and medium length goals, that will set up a chain of successes leading to a bigger over all destination of larger success. The advantage is if there is a set-back it’s not a set-back on the huge, overall goal. It’s a set-back on one tiny portion of the goal. That’s not as soul-crushing as blowing a giant goal. As someone who quit smoking 5 times before having one stick I know what it’s like to slip once and blow the whole kit and kaboodle!

When I quit smoking (6/15/2005) I didn’t quit forever. I quit cold-turkey and quit for the rest of the drive home. Then I quit until the following morning. That next morning I quit until lunch. (I didn’t smoke in between those quits, those were just my goals… like getting a first down rather than going for touch down every play.) You can see the pattern. Mentally staring down the barrel of a forever quit was too daunting. I’ve said before I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner and that is still true today, even when I run (Not that I’m a sprinter either as it turns out. I raced a 16 year old a while back at the campgrounds and he beat me like an old rug. I should have tripped him. He’s young. He’d heal!) So I’m going to follow The Spark’s advice and make a chain of small achievable goals.

Just because a goal is small and achievable doesn’t mean it’s a gimme goal. We recently had an Ownership Thinking workshop at my work and someone set forth as our first goal to do something that was not only 70% complete all ready it wasn’t something we could fail on. It was an assignment. There was no challenge to it. It was a gimme goal and it didn’t mean anything when we accomplished it. It was like having every team member get a trophy after a game where nobody kept score. We didn’t care about it as a first step in the Ownership Thinking program because it was as much an accomplishment or challenge as putting on our socks. That’s not what I’m talking about by small goals. (Things improved after that by the way.)

My Goals for 2010 follow, in no particular order:

• Minimum 10 Minutes of cardio every day with no days off. (Yes it’s low, but it’s doable and constant and I will do more most days. Do YOU do this much a day outside of basal movement?)
• Finish SparkPeople’s 28-day bootcamp that starts January 3, 2010.
• Run a 5k road race in spring in under 30 minutes.
• Run a 10k road race in the fall. (Time to be determined when I know what’s reasonable)
• Make at least two positive blog posts a week in any of the three blogs I’m currently maintaining. (simplerich.com, simplerunner, and my fitness blog over on SparkPeople.)
• Hit and maintain a healthy BMI by February and keep it through the year. (BMI = Body Mass Index)

You’ll notice an absence or work related goals on there. That’s no entirely an accident. I’ve asked my managers, I have 11 of them now rather than 8. I got three more stores to manage last week. I’ve asked them to get me a list of their goals for the month and year. I’ve also asked them to let me know what areas we as a company most need improvement, what areas I can help them the most, and what they would do if a) They owned their store and what they would change on the first day it was theirs, and b) what they would change tomorrow if there were no rule or policy against it. I’m going to use these to formulate my goals this year. It’s going to be a somewhat bottom up approach to managing this year, but I’m going to try it and see what happens. I’ll still be their manager obviously, but I’m definitely not going to be the only one driving this ship this year. I’ve got to do my job differently than the way I have been. I’ve got too many stores for me to continue doing it the way I was doing it. I finally realized the reason I was so burning out was that I was trying to manage the 8 stores I had the same way I was doing things when I had 5 stores and it was just too overwhelming. Then add to it the insane policy changes and I’m not alone in thinking they’re insane but there you have it… Anyway. Things had to change.

So, my goals that you see here are mostly about me and my fitness. My assumption is, if I take care of those things that work will take care of itself. That’s not as sloughing off work as it sounds. I just believe that I need these things to get me out of the death spiral I was in most of last year with work when I focused on work more than anything else and it wasn’t a healthy balance at all. By the end of the year I would have said “Thank you” if I’d lost my job. I’d have handed my boss the keys and hugged him in appreciation. I would have changed my phone number and never missed those calls again. That is NOT a healthy place for someone to be who is as high up as I am in the company. Attitudes are contagious and it was exhausting to try and be upbeat and positive when all I wanted to do was go home and lay under the covers and hope it all would just go away. I don’t feel like that now. But I did.

So, by focusing outside the spiral, by taking my eyes off the thing that was making me crazy I’m going to work on non-work goals as a primary focus and let work be my job again for a while and not my life. Because you know… as lives go… it wasn’t terribly rewarding there for a while. I think it will be better now that I’m remembering it’s a job, not a wife or husband. It’s a career, not the way I define who I am. I’m not my job. That’s I guess my only work related goal in 2010. Remember that my job is not me.

You’re wondering what this has to do with Tigers.  Tiger’s symbolically are representative of Power, Generosity, Illumination, and Energy and my goal in 2010 is to exemplify as many of those as I can in my personal and work life. To me personally the tiger is all about movement, and the energy of a coiled spring or the pent energy of a crouching tiger about to unfold into a long, lithe orange and black missile aimed at something. Their muscles ripple under their coat as they run and their eyes are fixed on their prize as they tear across the landscape. 2010 I want to have that kind of energy, that kind of feel to it. I envision 2010 as the year I reaffirm myself as interested in myself and developing myself and not just trying to go through the motions.

I’ve talked about SparkPeople.com before, but for some reason I stopped using it. I’ve got a focus problem sometimes. I wander off and then never come back to things. It’s why I’m addicted to the Moleskine Cahiers to keep my brain on task at work. See, I just did it again! Sparkpeople.com is not a diet site. OK. It is a diet site, but it’s a diet site in the same way google is a company that does search. Sparkpeople.com is much more than diet.

One of the things that helps me with focus was recently mentioned by Walletpop.com here where they talk about sparkpeople.com believe it or not. It’s the Seinfeld calendar. The idea is you get a big honking calendar and every day you work to your goal you put a big X through the day. Soon you’ll have a small chain and you won’t to break the chain. It’s a constant visual cue to get going on the goal, and anything can be done if you do a little every day. At least that’s what the folks said who built the pyramids, dug the Panama Canal, and got men on the moon.

But back to fitness! When you’re done with this article go check out walletpop’s five mostly free fitness tips to jumpstart your fitness mission.

I’m forty at the time that I write this and being fit isn’t as easy as it used to be. It takes some effort on my part. Not a supreme amount of work honestly, but it isn’t something that just happens. I’m not the most disciplined person you’re likely to meet and I need reminders. I need something that keeps my focus on task. It’s like the Moleskine cahiers I was talking about earlier that I use for work. They’re low-tech, but they’re fast, easy, and cheap. All things I need in a system for me to stick with it. Sparkpeople is a good system for tracking fitness and things that impact fitness.

I’m not that hung up on weight. I’m technically overweight for my height (10 lbs), but I see me in a mirror and I’m far from a house. I could stand to lose a few pounds. There’s no way I’m in need of a diet site. I’m in need of a reminder that vegetables are edible, exercise won’t kill me, water is free and I don’t drink enough, and all sorts of things I’m willing to do ARE exercise. I don’t have to own elaborate weight machines, and walking, which I love, counts. Not as much as jogging or running, but it counts!

If you’re of a mind to try and get some fitness focus give Sparkpeople.com a look. It’s got a heck of a lot of information on there which is both nice, and supremely distracting at times. Use it for a week or two and see if you don’t like it too. If you don’t, and have a better site you use that’s free please, let me know in the comments! I’d love to try it.

It’s not entirely true I’ve reached mid-life. I’m not even sure when midlife is. I am sure I’m older than I’ve ever been before, and while I prefer that to the alternative I’m not crazy about the up-coming trailing zero my age will soon have.

I’m just now coming off a week long vacation that was perfectly timed. In the days before the vacation my boss said to me that he could tell I just wasn’t feeling it any more. I was going through the motions of the job, but I wasn’t fully vested in it. He was absolutely right. I was burned out and not sure if the job had changed or I had changed or if it was just my impending trailing zero causing me to seek change for the sake of change. I’m still not sure what was going on when I left. I’m not entirely back yet, tomorrow is day 1. But I know now that I don’t want to go back. I talked to him today about demoting myself two or three levels just to improve the quality of my life and decrease stress. It’d add a financial stress, but I’ve got money socked away and I lived on that money before. I’m sure I could again. He thought I was kidding. I’m not sure how serious I was.

All that being said, work ennui happens at times. Work isn’t who I am though. It’s something I do. As I approach the zero-trailing birthday I’m paying more attention to myself, my food intake, and my exercise. The tool I’m using to do this is Sparkpeople.com. I hate all the buttons because they all mention it’s an online diet. I’m not using that part of it. I’m using the tracking tools. Tracking my exercise and tracking my food intake. If it goes in my mouth it goes on this site. Just the awareness of what I’m eating helps me make better choices.

Sparkpeople.com has a great community feature with message boards, built in e-mail for within the system, and a wealth of articles you can read about all sorts of topics from health issues to diet to exercise. I really like the site. I like it enough to recommend it. I used to like fitday.com and suggest it to people. I set up an account there years ago. Sadly, in the intervening years it has not changed one bit. Everything else on the Internet has grown more feature rich and easy to use, but not fitday. It feels old and clunky now.

So, if you’re of a mind to go all fitness minded with me join Sparkpeople.com and add me as a buddy in there. I’d be happy to share what I know of it with you and I remember when I quit smoking, 3 years, 1 week, and 3 days ago as of today the support of a buddy was very important. I’m all about friendly helpful support. I like to give it, and I am the type who needs their positive strokes so give me a shout out if you’re interested. My name’s simplerich there too.