It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! I invite you to join in the fun. If you would like to share a story from your own journey, please drop me a line. If you’d like to find out more about my online class on living with intention and my upcoming e-book, visit craftingmylife.com.

I’m just getting over a cold. It’s not a particularly bad cold, and it hasn’t really slowed me down. And yet, as colds are wont to do, it arrived at exactly the wrong time. Which begs the question: when is the right time for a cold? I’m not sure there is one, especially when you have two little kids to take care of. If that’s the case, then pretty much every time is exactly the wrong time for a cold. And I am now completely off topic. Let’s see if we can get back on track here, shall we?

When you get sick and you have about eleventy-billion things that need to be done, people like to say things like, “Oh, you’re worn down. This is your body’s way of forcing you to take a rest.” These people may have a point, because research confirms that both lack of sleep and stress can weaken your immune system. Or, to put it another way, when you’re worn down you really are more likely to get sick, because your body can’t fend of bacteria and viruses as well.

At the same time, this well-intentioned wisdom is not particularly helpful for that person who has eleventy-billion things to do. It’s even less helpful if a good portion of those things could be summed up with the phrase parent young children. When I have a cold, my kids don’t cut me any slack. They don’t stop eating, and they don’t start sleeping more. Unless they’re sick, too, which is a whole other kind of stress. My point here is that no matter how many signs I get telling me to take a break, I’m still a mom, and moms don’t get sick days. Sure, they may get a little time off work, but there’s no time off from being a parent, regardless of how snotty your nose is.

I’m working hard to live a life of intention and purpose. I have to tell you that getting sick is about the least intentional and purposeful thing you can do. And yet, even as I chafe at instructions to “take it easy” when my kids won’t let me, and my work on my e-book gets delayed yet again because I’m feeling under the weather, I can see that maybe there is a message in a stuffy nose if I look hard enough. I don’t think it’s that I need to stop and slow down, though. I think it’s simply a reminder that I’m not entirely in control of my own life. Things happen. People get sick. Weather doesn’t cooperate. Car batteries die. Little things crop up all the time to disrupt your plans.

When you’re faced with something unexpected that’s messing up your plans, you have a few choices. You can get angry at it. You can throw up your hands in defeat. Or you can accept it, and build a little bit of space into your life to deal with the unexpected. If you’re feeling really evolved, you may even welcome the unexpected. Because while it’s rarely convenient, sometimes it brings delightful moments of serendipity, chance encounters with greatness or even deep transcendence. The unexpected lives in the dark and secret places, popping up when you least expect it, bringing a mystery. And mysteries can have surprisingly fabulous endings, if you let them.

My cold, sadly, does not appear to have a fabulous ending. Although I’m always happy to say good-bye to a virus, this one isn’t leaving great things in its wake. But maybe the next unexpected thing will. I’ll just have to wait to find out. Until then, I’ll be waiting over here with a tissue.

It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! I invite you to join in the fun. If you would like to share a story from your own journey, please drop me a line. If you’d like to find out more about my online class on living with intention and my upcoming e-book, visit craftingmylife.com.

I am not good at accepting help. In fact, I am so bad at accepting help, that I often view offers of help as requests for help. If something needs to get done, and someone is talking to me about how to make it happen, I sort of assume that I am the one that must do it. There’s a whole lot of type A, delightfully neurotic baggage that has created this behaviour pattern of mine. But at this point in my life I’m much less concerned with why I’m this way, than what I can do to change.

To help myself get better at accepting help, I’ve started doing two things:

1. I’ve stopped jumping in to rescue people when it really doesn’t work for me. If someone is sick and has to bow out at the last minute, but I have other plans, I’m not filling in. There was a time when I would have dropped everything to help out, regardless of what it meant for my schedule or my own life. If I’m going to accept help, I can’t be constantly trying to help others, especially when I don’t really have the time or resources to do it.
2. When someone offers help, I don’t automatically say no. Or, at least, I try not to automatically say no. Instead, I try to think of something I need help with.

(Confession: I am really uncomfortable typing that I can’t be constantly trying to help others. I want to be helpful – don’t we all? But I am leaving it there, despite my discomfort, because it’s an important point. We must help ourselves, and take care of our own needs, before we can offer real assistance to other people.)

The problem that I’m encountering now is that when someone asks how they can help me, I can almost never come up with an answer. Like I said, I’m bad at accepting help. I have some control issues. Giving up that control is hard for me. This makes it difficult for me to think of tasks that I want other people to complete on my behalf. I’m working on it, but I also have to meet myself where I am. I can make progress, but I’m not going to change overnight. I need an answer that works for me in my current mental space, but that also helps me to make progress.

Recently, the perfect answer hit me like a ton of bricks: when I don’t know what kind of help I need, I can always ask for space. At the beginning of 2011, I chose space as my word for this year. I realized I needed more space for myself, so I set the intention in January. But I can’t do it alone. If I want more space, I need other people to respect that, and support me in my efforts. And there’s no time when I need space more than when I’m struggling. If a good friend can let me off the hook, or understand why I’m not being as responsive as usual, then I have one less thing to worry about. That is a huge gift.

When I ask someone else for space, what I’m really asking for is understanding and compassion. These are some of the hardest things to give to ourselves. Most of us are far harder on ourselves than on other people, and I’m no different. But when other people give me understanding and compassion, it helps send the message that I deserve these things. Not because of what I’ve achieved, or what I’ve done for others, or how much money I earn, but because I am a human being. All human beings deserve compassion and understanding, including me.

Over time, I am getting better at asking for – and accepting – help. I may not be where I’d like yet, but I’m making headway. In the meantime, I’m learning to ask for the compassion and understanding I need from others in order to make progress. It feels like a huge leap forward, and a true gift to myself.

How do you ask for understanding and compassion from other people? And would you say you’re good at asking for and accepting the help that’s offered to you, or are you a work in progress? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! I invite you to join in the fun. If you would like to share a story from your own journey, please drop me a line. If you’d like to find out more about my online class on living with intention and my upcoming e-book, visit craftingmylife.com.

I have been spending a lot of time lately observing my work habits. It’s been fairly enlightening to see where they’re helping me, and where they’re hurting me. For the longest time, I was convinced they were all good, and that in any case I couldn’t change them. It was just how I operated. I believed, for example, that I could remember everything, and that writing stuff down would interfere with my progress. Other people would suggest using calendars or organizational systems and I would roll my eyes and sigh. They just clearly didn’t understand me, and how I operate.

These days, I live and die by my Google Calendar. In fact, just minutes ago I remembered something I was supposed to do today, but it had totally slipped my mind. I thought it was in my calendar, but somehow it wasn’t, and so I didn’t make it. There was a time when I would have just expected myself to remember, but whether it’s my increasing age or the fact that I stay up too late every night, I just don’t have the memory I used to. And, what’s more, I’ve found that when I use tools like Google Calendar, I’m more productive, and I don’t end up double-booking or forgetting stuff as often. Imagine that!

I’m rambling a little, but my point is that as I spend more time examining the way I work, the more I discover that my habits aren’t set in stone. And, what’s more, many of those habits actually aren’t helping me. My approach to handling my workload is a good example.

Because I am a big Anne of Green Gables fan, I find myself using the expression ‘it never rains but it pours’. In the books, Marilla used it, and it means that everything seems to happen at once. This is how I felt about my workload for most of my adult life. It seemed to me that I either had nothing going on, or everything going on. Now that I work from home and have two kids, it’s more often everything than nothing. Partly, this is because I have unrealistic expectations for myself, when it comes to what I’ll be able to pack into my day. But an equally big part is related to how I handle normal fluctuations in busy-ness.

Let me paint you a picture: I have a to-do list that is miles long. I have no idea how I’m going to get through it, but somehow I (mostly) do, and I come out the other side. At this point, I still have stuff to do, no two ways about it. But whatever’s left isn’t as urgent and pressing, and I frankly need a break, so I take it. I ignore my inbox and avoid social media, until something urgent comes up again. And then I panic and return to operating at full throttle. Meanwhile, all of those little things that I still have on my plate haven’t gone anywhere, even though I know that doing some of them would actually simplify my life considerably.

You could say that I spend much of my life moving from crisis to crisis, and then running for cover when I get a moment to breathe. I’m not beating myself up for taking downtime – we all need some from time to time. On the other hand, though, I can see that if I spent less time in crisis mode, and more time planning what I have to do and allocating a reasonable amount of time time to do it in, I would probably be more productive and happier. I would have more predictable rest periods, and life would be sunshine and rainbows.

Okay, maybe not. But constantly putting out fires simply isn’t working for me.

Since we’re into mid-November now (aside: how did that happen, exactly?) I’m starting to think ahead to next year. One of the things that I’m thinking about is how this year has gone, and how I can improve my life in the year ahead. This year, my focus was on finding space, and I had mixed results. Next year, I think I need to switch things up, and find a way to move out of crisis mode and into a way of working that actually works for me. I don’t know how exactly I’m going to do this, yet, but I think that recognizing the problem and being open to solutions is a good place to start. I’m holding it in the back of my head and I’m working on it, and I’m trusting myself to figure it out.

In the meantime, I’d love your input. Do you find that you’re constantly moving from crisis to crisis? How do you avoid that? And which of your work habits are negotiable, and which aren’t? I’d love to hear!