Don’t Self-Help Yourself into a Frenzy
“What to do while Quarantining” “10 things to do while social isolating” “How to sustain your relationship during self-quarantine” “Self-help Tools During the Isolation”. There’s a trend of articles outlining ways to keep yourself busy or tools for self-help during the COVID-19 pandemic. With tools like YouTube, Coursera, self-help books, and articles, you can go down a rabbit hole and “self-help” yourself into a frenzy. Creating prisons by designing standards that you can’t reach or standards that don’t quite fit your lifestyle.
Not only can you create unrealistic standards, but you can also develop low self-esteem by measuring who you are now with the ideal person you have in your mind. In an effort to stop this sort of spiraling, I’ve outlined habits to address early while going on this journey:
· You can get distracted by taking on too many problems at once, completing nothing and trying to work on all.
· If you are an overachiever, you can apply the same work ethic to your self-help making it a job or a strenuous task not and not a process to get to know yourself better.
· You may become overwhelmed. By signing up for too many things to address your issues.
· You can create unrealistic goals that aren’t conducive to your life. For example, deciding to workout at 6:00 am every morning when you are a late owl and work mostly during the night.
· Overscheduling yourself into exhaustion. Many people will choose a place where they are lacking and over commit to things so that they can improve as fast as possible. The key is to enjoy the things you are doing, instead of creating such a discipline practice that it seems like an obligation and not a joy.
· Ignoring your voice in favor of the author, coach, or course. What you’ve been doing hasn’t been working; however, there are some tools that you’ve developed that are beneficial. Instead of scrapping your whole identity, why not take your strengths and use these tools to improve or support what you already have.
To get yourself out of a self-help frenzy, I’ve outlined some tips to still your mind and develop a practice that will support your own identity.
· Choose one thing you’d like to change and give yourself a timeline to focus specifically on that. For example, I will give myself three months to develop a solid exercise foundation.
· Choose things that you will enjoy. For example, if you are interested in dieting to write down a list of your favorite foods and come up with healthy alternatives. I enjoy burgers so I eat black bean burgers with plantains instead of burgers with fries.
· Write down your philosophy and beliefs and find coaches, videos, or books that align with those ideas.
· Remember that 95% of your problem is within your head and once you anchor yourself with a philosophy that supports your goals, your actions will follow.
· Your childhood has a lot to do with how you attack and understand your goals. Often it is your family’s words who impact how you see and achieve goals. If they did not show you hard work ethic, told you were nothing, you are more than likely to not have it. However, don’t be alarmed you can develop this skillset as an adult.
· Goals are hard to complete, but they aren’t if you ground the goal. Understand that regular everyday people have achieved your goal. The only difference between yourself and them is that they did small daily actions that lead to an end.
Social distancing has primarily assisted in slowing down COVID-19. Inadvertently, it has provided us with a bit more time to delve into the problems that we’ve neglected. Use this time to heal and self-help, but don’t overwhelm yourself and purchase books, seminars, or courses that you have no interest in and will never finish.
“What to do while Quarantining” “10 things to do while social isolating” “How to sustain your relationship during self-quarantine” “Self-help Tools During the Isolation”. There’s a trend of articles outlining ways to keep yourself busy or tools for self-help during the COVID-19 pandemic. With tools like YouTube, Coursera, self-help books, and articles, you can go down a rabbit hole and “self-help” yourself into a frenzy. Creating prisons by designing standards that you can’t reach or standards that don’t quite fit your lifestyle.
Not only can you create unrealistic standards, but you can also develop low self-esteem by measuring who you are now with the ideal person you have in your mind. In an effort to stop this sort of spiraling, I’ve outlined habits to address early while going on this journey:
· You can get distracted by taking on too many problems at once, completing nothing and trying to work on all.
· If you are an overachiever, you can apply the same work ethic to your self-help making it a job or a strenuous task not and not a process to get to know yourself better.
Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash
· You may become overwhelmed. By signing up for too many things to address your issues.
· You can create unrealistic goals that aren’t conducive to your life. For example, deciding to workout at 6:00 am every morning when you are a late owl and work mostly during the night.
· Overscheduling yourself into exhaustion. Many people will choose a place where they are lacking and over commit to things so that they can improve as fast as possible. The key is to enjoy the things you are doing, instead of creating such a discipline practice that it seems like an obligation and not a joy.
· Ignoring your voice in favor of the author, coach, or course. What you’ve been doing hasn’t been working; however, there are some tools that you’ve developed that are beneficial. Instead of scrapping your whole identity, why not take your strengths and use these tools to improve or support what you already have.
To get yourself out of a self-help frenzy, I’ve outlined some tips to still your mind and develop a practice that will support your own identity.
· Choose one thing you’d like to change and give yourself a timeline to focus specifically on that. For example, I will give myself three months to develop a solid exercise foundation.
· Choose things that you will enjoy. For example, if you are interested in dieting to write down a list of your favorite foods and come up with healthy alternatives. I enjoy burgers so I eat black bean burgers with plantains instead of burgers with fries.
· Write down your philosophy and beliefs and find coaches, videos, or books that align with those ideas.
· Remember that 95% of your problem is within your head and once you anchor yourself with a philosophy that supports your goals, your actions will follow.
· Your childhood has a lot to do with how you attack and understand your goals. Often it is your family’s words who impact how you see and achieve goals. If they did not show you hard work ethic, told you were nothing, you are more than likely to not have it. However, don’t be alarmed you can develop this skillset as an adult.
· Goals are hard to complete, but they aren’t if you ground the goal. Understand that regular everyday people have achieved your goal. The only difference between yourself and them is that they did small daily actions that lead to an end.
Social distancing has primarily assisted in slowing down COVID-19. Inadvertently, it has provided us with a bit more time to delve into the problems that we’ve neglected. Use this time to heal and self-help, but don’t overwhelm yourself and purchase books, seminars, or courses that you have no interest in and will never finish.
charliestoolbox.com
twitter Charlie’s Toolbox
