I’m writing this in the first week of November but am going to backdate it to sometime in September so that it appears in the right order on the blog.
Week #35: Pronoia
This value, along with compersion, would definitely fall in my list of top five values I’d like to make a part of who I am. I always feel like my world lights up when I make this value a priority. It was certainly one of my better weeks of the year. I feel like pronoia is the antidote to anxiety as it reinforces a feeling of safety and trust in the world at large and how this reality works.
Week #36: Discipline
On September 3rd, I started the 77 hard challenge which is my personal adaptation of the 75 hard challenge. The idea is to, for 77 days, do the following on a daily basis:
- Meditate for at least 15 minutes
- Exercise for at least 45 minutes
- Work for at least 5 hours
- Eat a bowl of fruits, eat one salad, and drink 1.2 L of water
- Record the progress made work-wise in my journal at the end of the day
It made sense to pick discipline as the value of the week. I wanted to make sure that I got off to a great start so that the rest of the weeks would flow easily. After the week was up, I was glad that I didn’t choose any additional actions to take apart from just doing these five things because they felt like a lot in the initial few days!
Week #37: Understanding
I was having a few issues in my relationships, so I chose this value to get a deeper understanding of what was going on (especially my own reactions and emotions) and also be an understanding person. I don’t want to go into the details, but I’m so glad I decided to not act rashly. I perhaps had one of the healthiest conversations during this week and what I consider a personal breakthrough in my communication in a conflict situation. Yay to growth!
Week #38: Alignment
Earlier in September, I had created a few books as an experiment and while creating them was fun, I didn’t feel like they were fully congruent with the sort of books I wanted to put out there. I like my books to be personal-growth oriented and these were more generic. I decided that I wanted to focus on alignment as the value, especially in my business. As I go about this value exploration, I’m thinking about what the most important values are for different aspects of my life. Seems like alignment will make it right to the top as my work value.
This value influenced other areas of my life too, of course. I found myself asking, multiple times a day, if the task I was doing was aligned with who I was or the most aligned thing I could be doing at that point in time. While it didn’t change my actions too much, it did lend more meaning to whatever I was doing which was an interesting thing to experience.
Week #39: Rest
Ever since I started doing the 77 hard challenge, my sleep went quite out of whack and the deficit started building up. It got so bad that I felt the need to choose rest as the focus for the week so that I didn’t work like a maniac at the cost of sleep and restfulness. The idea was simple: to get as much rest as my body needed every day.