Art

I read this on a poster hanging in the art room at my daughter’s elementary school and I think it’s relevant to the way we all live and work:

When you make a mistake:

1. Don’t give up
2. Make a new plan
3. Finish your art
4. Try it again!

Bring your art to your life every day!

WHY SMART Goals

Setting goals is important, right? Why? The reasoning is that setting goals helps us to focus our minds on tasks by limiting distractions. There is little doubt this is true. When creating goals it is helpful to follow a few simple guidelines. To help remember these guidelines, here is a helpful phrase: WHY SMART. SMART goals aren’t new, but they nonetheless provide a path to achievement and a road map to success.

W – Written – A written goal provides a concrete reminder of the task you intend to accomplish. The writing of the goal can help to solidify it in your mind as well.

H- Harmonious – The goal should be in harmony with who you are as a person. For example, if you are a parent, your goal may reflect this by containing details related to building an open channel of communication with your children.

Y – You – In conjunction with the harmonious nature of the goal, the You part indicates that the goal is for you and not for someone else. This may seem obvious, but it is important to remember that you are much more likely to achieve goals that you set for yourself rather than those that others (like a manager, teacher, or department head) sets for you.

S – Specific– The more specific, the greater the impact. If you set a goal to “get in shape”, that’s commendable. But if the goal is to lose 15 pounds and lower your total body fat by 3% in 3 months by eating 2500 calories daily and exercising for at least 45 minutes a day, 4 days a week, that has more of an impact , doesn’t it?

M – Measurable – This is important for a few reasons. First, it helps you to know whether you have achieved your goal, or to keep you on the right track. It also helps to reinforce the specificity of the goal. As in our previous example, if the goal is to lose 15 pounds, that’s obviously a measurable objective.

A – Attainable – It is advisable to challenge yourself enough to make the goal worth the effort, yet you should exercise caution to ensure that you don’t set a goal that is unreachable. If you are at 25% body fat, you may not want to set a goal of losing 15% body fat in one month. That would not be safe or realistically attainable.

R – Realistic – Again, playing off of the previous example, the realistic nature of a goal has a lot to do with its attainability. Using the example of losing the weight and trimming the body fat, is it not realistic to believe that we can do this without exercise and a proper diet.

T – Timely– The time element is probably the feaure that will help the most in keeping you accountable for the completion of the goal, since it sets a clear deadline. It will keep you from dragging your feet.

By using this simple mnemonic, you can begin creating powerful goals for yourself. It’s free to anyone who chooses to use it, and the more you practice this technique, the better you will be able to create your goals, and the easier it will become.

The Moon in the Daytime

I’ve always felt that there’s something funky about the moon being out in the daytime. Why is it’s shaded part sky blue instead of black? Isn’t black the true color of shadows? It appears as though the moon truly isn’t whole; as if it’s crescent is all there is. It makes me wonder: if my eyes are so easily fooled by the sight of a crescent moon in the daytime sky, what else am I not seeing? What else is up there, or down here among us, that cannot be seen because of the physical limitations of the optic nerve? I suspect that most of what I seek is often hidden in plain sight.

Fixing the Leaks

When I was 10 I spent my summer in Rhode Island. While goofing around in the Salt Pond, I found an abandoned wooden rowboat. It was leaky, but the leak was somewhat slow. If I bailed the boat out completely, it would take about 25 to 30 minutes before it would be inundated with water again. My friend, Chad and I would float down the channel and under the bridge in it. The water was only about 4 feet deep, so we were never in any real danger. It wasn’t as though we were out in the middle of the Atlantic, and it was always a lot of fun to see the reactions of the people walking over the bridge when they saw us ‘sinking’. Nobody ever tried to save us, but they did get a good laugh out of it. We eventually got sophisticated, and with my older brother’s help we put a coat of fiberglass on the bottom of that liltte wooden rowboat and stopped the leak. We then added a 3.5HP gas outboard motor, and we were able to travel to parts of the pond that were once too far to be accessible. That effort changed the game and greatly expanded our horizon.
Now that I’m older, I have new leaks to manage. I have children to raise, bills to pay, and a house to maintain, and I’d prefer to think of my current situation as a leaky roof instead of a leaky boat. A leaky boat when you have others depending on you for their survival isn’t nearly any fun. A leaky roof is more of an annoyance, in that it is a seemingly constant barrage of creditors and banks, bill collectors and bills. I opted into this game when I left my old job looking for new, entreprenurial opportunities, so I accept this situation, yet it can be frustrating nonetheless if I let it. It just takes time to fix all the little leaks. But just as we coated the underside of the rowboat with fiberglass, I’ll fix all the leaks in the roof and put a stop to the annoyances. Right now, it just requires a lot of pots and pans to catch the water until I can finish patching. I thank Dave Ramsey for writing the ‘Total Money Makeover’ book, and providing instructions on how to fix the leaks. I’d encourage anyone who reads this post and needs some financial guidance to check it out.

Faith

To me, faith is belief in what is not known. I have been blessed in my life and I owe this to my faith. When I believe in a positive outcome without knowing how it will come to be, it happens. When I think about the ‘how’, I clutter everything up and push against the solution that God is trying to deliver to me. The key is to do what I know to be the right thing, and have faith. What more can I do?

Affirmations

I read an interesting quote recently that mentioned affirmations, and I connected with it, because I’ve often had difficulty whenever I’ve tried using them myself. It’s from “Start Where You Are” by Pema Chodron: ‘Affirmations are like screaming that you’re OK in order to overcome the whisper that you’re not.’
This makes sense to me because the source of the whisper is the ego and my ego is very stubborn. I can see the idea behind affirmations ‘retraining’ the mind to have a different conscious/subconscious connection, yet we can never fully silence the ego. This is not to say that I do not attempt to maintain a positive attitude and an ‘openness’ to the goodness and abundance that God brings into my life. It just means that I am aware of this thinking part of my brain that tries to make me believe that not being alright is a huge problem. As Pema Chedron further states, ‘…none of us is OK, and all of us are fine.’ It’s OK when we have a negative thought. We just don’t need to live there. Relatively speaking, none of it is really a big deal, is it?