I want to share something with you.
Something that will help let you know that what you are currently experiencing is normal. It’s completely normal to have struggles, it’s completely normal to have bad days and it’s completely normal to have worse days where you feel like you are dragging your arse through the mud. I have had many of these days throughout my healing journey of experiencing domestic violence.
It’s ok to not be ok.
It’s ok to not want to feel like doing something.
It’s ok to not want company today.
It’s ok to not want to clean the house today.
It’s ok to not to want to hoover today.
It’s ok to not want to do the laundry today.
It’s ok to not want to do your to-do list today.
We all have bad days, even some people have worse days! But no matter what kind of day we are having we tend to fall into self-blaming for all the big things we haven’t done that day, rather than celebrate the tiny things we did do.
As human beings, we place far too much pressure upon ourselves to get things done and to get them done now! You see, placing your life back together after it has fallen apart takes a lot of energy, time, repair and healing and means taking baby steps and setting small goals daily to reap the rewards of a more positive future.
There is no magic wand you can wave, there is no magic pill you can take. Healing takes time and change takes time to adapt. That’s why accepting that it’s ok to not be ok on some days is completely fine. Accepting that you are not ok stops you from instantly going down the self-sabotage route and leads you away from pulling yourself down. Acceptance is a major powerful skill to work on because once you accept something there is no room for blame or anything else. It’s accepted and that’s that, it’s a done deal.
So how can you move forward after accepting that you are not ok today?
Well, firstly give yourself a pat on the back for accepting that you are not ok. Then start to look at what you achieved on a “not so ok day”.
Did you get yourself up?
Did you get yourself dressed?
Did you brush your own teeth?
Did you make your own breakfast and eat it?
Did you get the kids up?
Did you make the kids breakfast?
Did you get them off to school with everything they needed?
If you answered yes to all the above questions, then guess what? You are far from being a failure, in fact, you did a lot in one morning and you didn’t credit yourself for doing it all. You have achieved more in one morning than some people do in an entire day, and that was just in one morning!
So who cares about the rest? Why self-sabotage yourself? What will it actually achieve? Apart from you hating yourself more for not being perfect? Well, NEWSFLASH! Nobody on this planet is perfect and if they say they are then they are talking out their arse. Believe me, even celebrities and influencers are not perfect and I know because I have worked with enough of them on my coaching journey.
When we focus on want we “should be doing” we tend to cancel out what we have already done. The stuff we should really be celebrating is the tiny wins of the day that we HAVE achieved. When we direct too much energy to the “I should be doing” we stress ourselves out and our anxiety rises which then instantly our brain goes straight to self-blame.
Well, stop it. Because it’s ok to not be ok.
When a life coach takes their first year of training they are advised to work on SMART goals for their clients. SMART is a mnemonic/acronym, which can mean two things, depending on the coach who teaches it.
SMALL, MEASURABLE, ACHIEVABLE, REALISTIC, AND TIMELY.
SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ATTAINABLE, RELEVANT, TIME BOUND.
Basically, in English, this means that in order to place change into anybody’s life you need to first be prepared to set small achievable goals with them in order to have success in them actually being completed. So even professionals are taught to not push their clients to the point that they can’t handle easily.
So why push yourself any harder than you what you can realistically achieve? The end result of trying to push ourselves unrealistically is just disappointment and then that just circles back around to self-blame.
So how do you break the cycle?
You can break this cycle by scheduling in advance what little goals you are going to do on your “not so ok” days. When you wake up in the morning and you don’t feel so great and you know in yourself it’s going to be “an not such an ok day” I want you to push aside what your original plans on your to-do list were for the day then decide on 5 small tiny goals, that’s it.
These 5 goals are tiny! They could be little as:
1, Get up, get dressed and get the kids out the door for school.
2, Picking one job that needs to be done in the house (washing up, or something on the lines that are a daily must)
3, Read some pages of a positive and inspirational book
4, Have a chat on the phone for 20 minutes with a friend
5, Greet kids from school, make dinner and settle them for the bedtime routine.
The above 5 things don’t seem a lot, do they? In fact, they seem to like you wouldn’t do very much at all with your day. Well, that depends on how you look at it……
By doing the 5 manageable goals on a “not so ok day” you have just got yourself out of bed, gotten dressed, eaten breakfast and then moved on to sorting out your kid/s. You made sure they were up, dressed and on their way to school with everything they needed for their school day ahead.
Then you got to work in the area that is used the most in the house and you spent the time cleaning that area so it’s nice and clean ready for the next daily use. After that, you worked on your self-care by listening to your body and delivering what it asked for which is a sitting down to relax. Yet, at the time of relaxing, you educated your brain by reading a book and learning something new.
After your reading, you then rang a friend for 20 minutes to take the complete focus of yourself and how you were feeling to help lend an ear to somebody else. So by making that call, you helped somebody else feel a whole lot better about themselves which in return you felt better about yourself.
Then after your call, you start to get prepared for the kids coming home from school, you make dinner sit down with your children and let them tell you about their day. When they ask you what you did with your day you can tell them everything above, because suddenly this new way of thinking makes you realise that even on your “not such good days” you still do SMART goals and STILL complete them.
That really you don’t have to beat yourself up because as long as you are moving forward at some speed, no matter how slow, it’s still moving forward. When we keep moving forward the clouds eventually brighten up and the fog starts to disappear which allows room for the sun to shine again.
Even a snail gets to his destination eventually!
So be less harsh on yourself and start to see that it’s completely fine to have not-so-ok days.
Leave a comment in the box below and let me know how this blog post helped you and feel free to share how you deal with your not-so-ok days.
Your friend for this crazy journey called life,
Kate x 🙂