Gold Star

I had an interesting perspective pointed out to me today...  In order to motivate kids, we give them gold stars for encouragement and to keep them motivated.  But as we grow up, we no longer receive those gold stars and often lose motivation.  If we don't lose our motivation, we can often lose that "spark" that makes us wonderful individuals that we are.  I don't know about you, my dear readers, but I'm tired of my "spark" being lost and I am going to work on getting it back.  How am I going to do that?  I'm not entirely sure yet to be honest but I know I need to do something...

Why do I need to do something you may ask?  I feel as if from day to day I am losing parts of me along the way because I am so worried about helping those around me.  I know that there's nothing wrong with wanting to help others but it does make things exhausting to always put what I perceive others need from me over what I need to do for myself.  If that's a little confusing, let me explain...

I am relatively new to the management world at work and because I want to help people, I don't always hold people accountable to the jobs their supposed to be doing so I take it on in order to help them out.  Because I take on the work of other people (and since I know the work that needs to be completed, I don't always wait for them to ask for the help, I just take care of it for them) and I still have to do my own work, everyday I have to put in extra hours just to try and get everything accomplished that I have to do.  I know that I need to get better at holding people accountable to their own work so I can get things done that I need to as well as not having to put all of these extra hours into work (it would be a little different if I got paid for all these extra hours but I'm now salary so I don't).

Rather than going into work early every day as I'm doing currently, I want/need to get back to my original goal of working out in the morning before going into work.  When I became the manager, my hours switched from working the early shift to working a closing shift (because my building doesn't open until a little bit later in the AM) but I've been going in early to get some of this extra work done.  I have noticed all of this added work/stress has been taking a toll on my health.  I'm still sick (and even had to go on antibiotics this past week for it) and I know that I haven't been sleeping as well as I should.  With the extra pressure I've been putting on myself, I really don't want to have to go to the doctor again (because doing that brings up all sorts of other issues for me) but I know that I need to do things in order to take care of myself.  For as hard as it is to admit, one of the things I know I need to do for me is to lose some weight.

Last weekend, I told you I got one of those wrist activity trackers and I have been surprisingly excited about it.  Seeing the number of steps I take daily has been very enlightening and I have tried very hard to increase that number each day.  Two of the days this past week, I even passed 10,000 steps!  The app on my phone that links to the wrist band gave me a smiley face on those days -- it was like getting my own gold star!  Even though it might be slightly silly to be so excited to see those little green smiley faces, I'm hoping to get more than two of them this upcoming week.  Every little piece of motivation helps, right?

I just took a little bit of time to reread some of my posts from last year.  About this time last year was when I started to write about the concept of reclaiming my muchness.  I know I have worked on it some this past year but I haven't worked on it like I've wanted to.  I'm hoping that another year doesn't go by without me working on it.  Maybe what I need to do for myself is to create a muchness chart and give myself a gold star everyday that I do something for my personal muchness development.  We'll see...

Well, my dear readers, I think it's time to bring this to a close and to head to bed.  My wrist activity tracker also tracks sleep (including when I'm sleeping and when my nights are restless) and I have had lots of restless sleep over the past week.  Hopefully tonight will have fewer restless moments and I'll spend more time in restful sleep.  With some of the things on my plate at work, good sleep will be very helpful...  I hope you have a wonderful week full of your own personal gold stars and I will write more next week!  =)