For the July One Little Word class, the theme was to celebrate the small wins. I liked this idea in place of a gratitude practice as celebrating small wins relates to acknowledging the good or great things you have personally achieved. It feels different to gratitude, where there is an implication that you are indebted to the universe, a person or things and while I keep a gratitude journal to remind myself about the good stuff in life, there are times when my cynical side of me does not want to feel grateful. While research shows that gratitude can have a positive effect on your happiness and self esteem, as a person who has been raised in an individualist society I tend to have an internal locus of control, so prefer the idea of listing wins that belong to me. Having said that, once I sat down to write my small wins so far this year, I really struggled to come up with the positive stuff. It showed me that I still focus on what I haven’t done, still have a very tough inner critic and that I have some work to do on self-compassion.
Because I was struggling with this practice I carried the topic forward to August and combined my July and August wins in my Ideas journal (August, Get Messy topic). Most notably, I had a couple of really great wins in late July and August around work. After deciding to put myself out there, I applied for a grant to offer training to parents around employing staff in the home using individualised funding. To my delight it got approved. This month I am now running zoom training for parents about employment basics such as differences between types of employment, how to calculate leave, tax and some basics of advertising for new staff.
Typically, I have these ideas in my head, but they don’t launch – so actually getting something going has been a real achievement for me and I believe that keeping my values at the forefront this year (from what I set last September for my seasonal journal) has helped. One of my 5 values was achievement, and this success, feels like an achievement.
On top of that, after advertising and sharing in various support groups my name was suggested as a person to speak up in a media interview about the state of caring in New Zealand. That didn’t eventuate as they chose someone else, but it was nice to be considered. Then, the Complex Care Group approached me to ask if I would consider joining the Board. This got my pulse racing – does this make me weird? I have since met with them and been invited to be a Board member. I’m beyond excited to join this group as it is where my passion lies – helping families with complex children/adults.
It has been a series of events related to me finally putting myself out there and it feels good.
I haven’t yet completed the page about the wins for July/August but at some stage I will get there. In meantime here are some pages from my Ideas journal:
Not sure what is happening with my style of late, but I am feeling more comfortable just splashing a bit of paint, making marks, and sticking down random images. Not making a lot of sense, but for some reason it makes me happy.
That’s all for now.
Cherie
Yellow Azalea 