Making Adjustments

After a long hiatus from blogging, how do I begin again? Simple-I begin with a lesson learned AGAIN! When I started this blog, I intended to blog every single day. And for quite a while I did that. There are more than enough issues and challenges in living with chronic illness to blog every day for years! I don’t give up easily, so even on nights when I was really, really tired, I would drag myself to the computer and blog. After all, I made a commitment to myself.
Then, life got in the way. One thing after another required my attention and the blog fell by the wayside. But I’m back. When I teach chronic disease self-management workshops, I ask patients to set goals each week. The goal has to be something they want to do, measurable so they know if they attained the goal, and they need to have a confidence level of 7 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10. If the goal doesn’t meet the criteria, the patients are asked to revise the goal until it does. So my goal was to blog daily. Was it something I wanted to do? Yes. Was it measurable? Yes, if I blogged daily I would know if I met my goal or not. Was I confident? You bet I was, I had a confidence level of 10.
When patients come back the next week, the first thing they do is report on how they did with their goal for the week. If they achieved it, great! If not, they are asked to examine how they can modify the goal for the next week to assure their success. They are asked to examine the obstacles and make adjustments. If changes have occurred in their lives or health, they adjust the goal accordingly.
The point is, life, especially life with chronic illness, requires constant adjustments. When we need to make an adjustment, we are not failures; we are reading the signs and practicing resilience. Our goals must reflect our priorities and those priorities change from time to time. We need to be gentle with ourselves and not “should” on ourselves. (After all we are potty trained!)
Decades ago I read Your Erroneous Zones, Wayne Dyer’s first book. I don’t remember a lot about the book except that it made sense. But there is one thing that remains etched in my memory. It goes something like this. If you are 50 years old, would you let a 30 year old make decisions for you? If you are 25 would you let a 15 year old make decisions for you? Of course not! That would be absurd! Then why do you stay stuck with the decisions that the you who you used to be made, whether that is 10 years ago or last week? Life, especially life with chronic illness, is about creating a new normal. And that new normal is always a work in progress. My new goal is to blog every Sunday. I want to do it. It’s measurable. My confidence level is a 10. See you next week!