Tag: #inspiregreatness

Habit Tracking Helps!

emyminzel

Tracking my habits and keeping a food log has really helped me to see exactly where I need healthy improvement. It’s helping me so much that I’d like to share it with you! I have created a simple grading system that lets me see how I’ve done during the day and for the week. This trick helps to hold me personally responsible for my grade and the outcome.

After a short time of skipping some parts of my self-care schedule, I see it’s time to get back to making healthy changes in my dieting and fitness routine. Taking this healthcare hiatus has served the purpose of a potent reminder that I feel much better when I am consistantly taking care of myself! I found that I do have healthy habits, and I eat wholesome food for the most part. Yet without more scrutiny and habit tracking, I was not meeting my goals.

Writing down what I eat every day and counting calories help me to be more accountable, especially when I see it down on paper. Keeping a food log helps me plan healthier dinners and stops me from snacking when I’ve reached my calorie limit. It also helps prove that If I am a solid C student, I see that I get C results! Viewing my first week’s grades makes me want to improve my habits to get my desired results.

I won’t go on and on about how to eat or what to do with your fitness routine. Those things are all personalized and really none of my business! I am going to share a picture of the Habit Tracker I use, and if you are interested, I would happily send you an email with the excel file attatchment. My Habit Tracker is not fancy, it’s simple and does the job. I hope you find it helpful too!

Here is my personal email for you to send your request for my spreadsheet, making it easy to copy, paste, and customize.

Send request to: EmyMinzel.AdventureSister@gmail.com

After using my habit tracker for a few days, I felt that I needed to add some things and change some of them too. I’ve shared my Habit Tracker with Adventure Sister Stacy, who added more relaxation and meditation habits, while I added more activity requirements. You know what you need to improve, so do it up!

Are there any healthy tips, tricks, or advice you’d like to share that may help our Adventure Sisters community? Supporting and learning from each other helps us nurture the world around us and ourselves. We all have wisdom that will help someone, so don’t be afraid to share yours!

Sending you love, blessing, health, and happiness!

Emy Minzel ~ Adventure Sister

EmyMinzel.AdventureSister@gmail.com

https://emyminzel.com

@EmyMinzel

www.AdventurewithEmyandStacy.com

Follow the Adventure Sisters on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/BWCAdventureSisters

Stacy Crep ~ Adventure Sister

https://stacycrep.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self-sabotage: Do you do it?

emyminzel

I consider myself a continuous student of life. I love to learn about the world around me, and even more mysterious, the world within myself. Self-growth has been an important catalyst to get where I am today. Having the guts to look in the mirror and call myself out on my BS, has been life-changing for me, in the very best of ways. However, I know that I will never really be done learning about the world or myself.

There are habits I have that are clear as the noon sun glaring in my eyes. I figured I better pay attention to these signs. Often when I am feeling uncomfortable about a situation, this is when I know it is time to do some growing. Lately, I have been focused on changing some very ingrained habits. If you have ever tried to do so, you know how hard it can seem.

This got me thinking, are these habits just self-sabotage in disguise? Because I love to learn, and Google knows everything, I did some research and found a great article on Psychologytoday.com that laid it all out in black and white. According to Ellen Hendriksen Ph.D. article, “Why do we self-sabotage?” There are several reasons! (I will share the link with you in references) In short, this is what I learned.

  1. Self-worth – Not feeling worthy of success, or confident enough to try.
  2. Control – We are controlling our failure. In our minds, a controlled dumpster fire is a better option than publicly failing, so we sabotage.
  3. Perceived fraudulence – Not acknowledging our growth and view others to think of us a fraud or fake. We may reach our goals while secretly worrying about the judgment of others.
  4. Scapegoating – The blame game. Saying, because of one mistake, you chose to scrap the whole thing.
  5. Familiarity – If we are used to being overlooked, put down, underestimated and even dismissed, the feeling of attention is uncomfortable and success or accolades feel weird!
  6. Boredom – Stirring up drama and conflict, to use our power in some way to cause disturbance for a distraction.

She even states that; “the root of all self-sabotage is the fear of failure!” What a coincidence! I just wrote a blog about free falling through fear (https://emyminzel.com/2019/04/05/free-falling-through-fear/)

I was so caught up with the fear of the unknown, that I recognized it was stunting my growth where I was working to improve. These habits I wish to quit, are my very own weapons of self-sabotage! Indeed, I was on to something here!

I finally see that I am a great warrior. All the unhealthy habits I cling too, are just the same ones that keep me stuck. Ellen’s article states these behaviors spring from a subconscious fear that, trying my best, won’t be enough.  Whoa… busted.

I find it comforting and magically synchronistic that I happened to see this article at this exact moment. While I am acutely aware of the persistent pestering of demanding negative habits, that keep racking my brain, I am working on letting go of these habits, though I seem to want to keep them as badly as I want to let go.

Doing my daily exercise of Kundalini Yoga Nabhi Kriya, I got an idea for a mantra that I plan to use when feeling the tug of these old habits. It wrote it down on a note card and taped this mantra in a spot I see often. I may even put it in the bathroom with the others. It says.

“I keep the promises that I make to myself. Because I am worthy of the life, I desire.”

It’s nice to recognize why we do the things we do, especially when they are harmful so that we can move past them. When I find out more information about myself or my tendencies, I use this knowledge to make the changes I wish to see.  This lesson has come in the right way at the right time, and I am thankful for hearing it.

Stacy and I have dreams and goals that are big and wonderful! Honestly, deep down that does scare me a little bit! The Universe is asking us to level up again, and as wonderful that is, I do worry that I am not good enough. I know I am not the only person who worries about their abilities. I also believe the only way we can find out how able we are, is to do it anyway, even though we are scared. I am willing to do all I can to get to the root of any self-sabotage and defeat my fear of failure.

I trust the Universe to send these Adventure Sisters, lessons through joy, because I know that’s what we truly desire! We both simultaneously practice various personal and spiritual growth rituals. We are both doing our best to nurture better habits for our wellbeing. I tell you what. Making change is hard!

Sometimes, we fail and fall hard flat on our faces. But we encourage each other to get back up. We remind each other how worthy and able we are of achieving our goals if we do not quit. I wanted to encourage you to keep with the promises you make to yourself today. And remind you that you are worthy of all you desire too!

I love you.

Love and blessings,

Emy Minzel ~ Adventure Sister

https://emyminzel.com

@EmyMinzel

www.AdventurewithEmyandStacy.com

Follow the Adventure Sisters on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/BWCAdventureSisters

Stacy Crep ~ Adventure Sister

https://emyminzel.com

Reference;

www.quickanddirtytips.com/savvy-psychologist

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-be-yourself/201710/why-do-we-self-sabotage-0

*Photo taken on the Babtism River, Tettegouche State Park, Minnesota

 

 

 

You’re in the soup.

emyminzel

Adventure Sister Stacy is an excellent friend. One reason for this is that she lets me know when she thinks I should try and step away from a situation to get a clearer picture. She tells me kindly “You’re in the soup. You can’t see everything from the inside. It’s time to step away and out of the pot, so you can see a bigger perspective.”

I love that she cares enough about me to tell me the truth when I am in a soupy situation.

Like most everyone, I tend to complain and vent to my best friend when life gets frustrating. I share with her because I can trust her to give me feedback from a different point of view. It’s like taste testing a spoonful of soup and asking. “What’s missing? What can I add to make this better?”

They say it is the journey and not the destination that we must find enjoyment in. It’s taken me years to figure out that’s because the journey is the process of planning and doing that almost always takes a much longer amount of your time and effort, before we finally get to our target aspirations. There we end only to start all over again towards another destination.

The journey is life! Life is the journey. I love to cook and that’s why I like to use cooking metaphors to express my messages and share my life lessons. My life is the soup and I am the chef on the journey to making the best, most scrumptious soul-warming soup I possibly can!

When I try to add too much to my soup of life, it becomes unbalanced and not nearly as tasty as a simple chicken soup with few tasty ingredients. That’s because the less ingredients and seasonings I add, the easier it is to experience the simple flavors that we savor.

Isn’t this also true of life? When we add too much to our lives its overwhelming and not as enjoyable as a simple, balanced life full of the people and activities that we enjoy.

Sometimes we think if we add ‘just a little more’, that we will be even happier and our soup of life will be all the better, yet that doesn’t happen. We end up wishing we had not added those things after all. But now they are in there… and you can’t take them out and you are stuck with the flavor, even though it just doesn’t taste right. This is when you are in the soup!

Now you’ve learned though, and you are not going to do that again! It’s still okay to eat this soup and so we do; because we invested our time and effort on the journey to make this soup. We may think we need to add just a little more of this or a pinch of that to make it ‘better’. When really, we just need to enjoy our chef’s journey. Learn to enjoy the feeling of contentment our simply delicious, homemade chicken soup truly brings to our lives.

That the best thing about soup! It can be the same or different every single time, depending on how the chef is feeling that day!  I hardly ever make the same soup twice because I don’t like to use recipes. My daughter once said to me, after tasting a delicious homemade concoction. “I am sad because I know, I just had the best soup of my life and I will never taste it again.”

That’s because there was no recipe, same as life, it was handcrafted by the Chef’s spirit that lives inside of me and I don’t even remember what I used. I see our lives as one batch of soup after the other. Sometimes we must try what we don’t like just to figure out what we do.

Sometimes others can see your soupy life better then you can when we’re standing in it. That is why I love my friends and family who love me enough to say to me. “You’re in the soup!”

Maybe if you step back you will see it also. Who knows, you just might be in the best soup of your life right now!!! So savor and enjoy it with all your senses! Remember what ingredients you used and how you balanced those flavors with your attention to detail. (What amount of each Mind/Body/Spirit/Family/Love/Work feels and tastes just right to you?)

Try and remember the amount of attention it took to craft it just right and remember: “You are the chef of your life.” Remind yourself of this whenever you feel unbalanced or overwhelmed, that you can go back to the basics and make your favorite, soul comforting, simple soup. You have the power. You are the Chef of your soupy life.

I love you. You got this.

With love,

Emy Minzel ~ Adventure Sister

https://emyminzel.com

@EmyMinzel

Follow the Adventure Sisters on Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/BWCAdventureSisters

Stacy Crep ~ Adventure Sister

https://stacycrep.com