Disciplined Life Patterns
Planned and organised in managing the demands of life, utilising good habits to maintain physical and mental well-being?
Think strategically. Draw on your tactical skills of organisation and coordination to manage the day-to-day challenges of life existence. But also know when you to need to stand back and ask the bigger question: “why?” Why are you doing what you’re doing? Are your life routines and systems working for you or are they now hindering you from doing what is important to you?
Manage your diary to keep it free for the unexpected. Don’t allow the sensible routines and practical disciplines you have developed to manage life’s activities take over your life and hold you back from responding with spontaneity to the unexpected. Make positive habits work for you but don’t let them run your life. Planning, coordination and organisation are important life skills to keep on top of life’s competing demands. But taken to extreme can stifle the kind of spontaneity and flexibility which is responsive to new life opportunities.
Apply “bum glue”. “What’s the secret of being a great writer? Nothing beats sitting at your desk and writing until it comes out right.” Sometimes this is the way it is. There is no inspirational message, supportive phone call or unexpected cheque in the post to motivate us. There is simply you and the chair and how long you keep sitting to get the difficult job done.
Make your habits work productively for you. Habits are an efficient way of dealing with the day-to-day demands of life. Automatic processes free up our minds to do the important stuff of coping with the new and unfamiliar. But habits also have the habit of taking over and living our lives. Are your familiar routines working for you – making it easy for you to “live the good life” – or are they stopping you from seizing new life possibilities?
Live and let live. Your sense of structure and order works positively for you. Not everyone else you socialise and work with may be as well organised. Don’t impose your working preferences and habits on colleagues who might prefer to achieve their goals in a more freewheeling manner. Allow others to work out their own work style and approach, playing to their distinctive strengths. Don’t insist that your way is the only way.
Don’t become hide-bound. Recognise when you are moving into a different phase of life. The life patterns that have worked positively for you in the past won’t necessarily work for you to meet new challenges to advance to another stage of life. Know which disciplines and routines are still relevant now and which have outlived their usefulness.
Laugh. Keep your sense of humour. Don’t become so caught up in the intensity of your schedule or sense of self-importance about work priorities that you don’t see the ironies and paradoxes of life. Humour requires relaxation and the readiness to see ambiguity and absurdity. If you’re not laughing much these days you might want to loosen up your schedule to give you a chance to “breathe”.
You can’t plan fun. Fun by its nature is spontaneous, occurring in the most unexpected of places and times. Fun, organised to a strict schedule, isn’t fun. It is contrived and stilted enjoyment. Don’t organise fun. It won’t work. Instead, keep in that relaxed and responsive state that sees the possibility of fun in every situation.
Are you driving other people nuts? Don’t be selfish. The adherence to certain disciplines and systems may be working for you personally, right now. But are they working for others? What impact is your life pattern having on your family, friends and colleagues? Are they benefiting from your structured and organised life approach? Or is it driving them crazy? Stand back to ask if your life routines are making life difficult for others.
Loosen up and see what happens. Routines and schedules are effective in managing the “stuff of life”. But what would happen if you loosened things up to vary your life pattern? Would your entire world come to a sudden stop? Or would it liberate you to see new possibilities to live your life differently?
Don’t become a hypochondriac. Don’t obsess about your health, diet and exercise regime. Attention to physical well being is important and a driver of long-term psychological health. But if:
- you’re spending time on the internet checking out medical sites to find out the possible causes of each and every minor symptom you’re experiencing
- buying every diet book that is published and attempting different weight reduction regimes
- boring others with detail of your new fitness programme
you’re becoming a hypochondriac. And hypochondriacs make themselves ill. www.health24.com