Yes, the miracle has occurred… The despised to-do list has done a complete transformation, and is now my most treasured wish list.

The last article I wrote “I hate my to-do list” really highlighted the agony that I was putting myself through with my to-do list.  If you haven’t read that article yet, I suggest you read it now before going on, as it is the antithesis of what time management experts suggest that we do.  I was feeling disappointed and manipulated by my to-do list.

Last month, I was lucky enough to enjoy a work/life balance coaching session with Bill Lee Emery, where I raised my hate/hate relationship with my to-do list.  He asked me to read out some of the items on my list.  When I read it out aloud, it really hit home… My to-do list was like a screaming, nagging parent… “Buy this.. Organize that.. Finish this.. Clean that.. Write to him.. Phone her..”  It is no wonder that I was feeling like the manipulated robot.

I thought that I was helping myself out, by telling myself what I needed to do.  Obligations, demands, responsibilities… they all made me think that I was doing the right thing.  After all, isn’t time-management vital to a successful life.

After this revelation of the demands that I was making on myself through my to-do list, Bill Lee Emery, asked me what it was that I really wanted from my life.  I said “This may sound silly, but I want to have fun.”  He identified that I  flourished under something he called ‘free play’.

Let me just tell you how this worked out…

I bought myself a new notebook…  Bright pink… and stickers…. Not boring old stickers with gold stars, but princess, birds, frogs, diamonds.. etc.

I titled it my Wish List and wrote everything that I wanted in it.  Not what I wanted the later me to do, but what I wanted for my life.  For example, the old Lynda would have written “Pay Electricity Bill”, while the new Lynda writes “I want to feel the freedom of having the Electricity Bill already paid”.  Yes, I know it uses more ink to do that, but it really does help me to understand that the things I do in my life are because they make me feel better… because they make my life run smoother… because I want them.

The next step I took was to stop this ‘cross it off once it’s done’ technique.  What reward is there is crossing something off?  That’s not much of a reward for giving yourself something that you want, is it?  So, I took a highlighter and my stickers, and for each wish I fulfilled for myself, I highlighted it, and gave myself a beautiful big sticker.  The only items left in just plain text are the wishes which I haven’t yet fulfilled.

And now???

My wish list is a treasured possession… I just three weeks!  It is full of wonderful things that I have given for myself.  It is colorful, exciting, and is a constant reminder of my progress.

I have been battling with my to-do list for years. I have read so many books, attended webinars and seminars on organization, and, primarily, totally abused and degraded myself with this vicious tool.

I don’t like the word ‘hate’ and do not accept it’s presence in my life. Something has to change, because I hate my to-do list.

‘They’ tell you that your to-do list will help you in getting things done and you will feel really great about yourself and experience limitless success. Well, I must be the exception to the rule because it has had the opposite effect on me.

I write these completely unrealistic to-do lists, then find myself sitting at the end of the day, with my head in my hands, and chastising myself for being such a failure. Never mind the other 54 items that I had managed to complete that day! The to-do list only ever told me of what I had failed to do, rather than patting me on the back for my achievements. Have you ever experienced this phenomena?

It just seems completely stupid. You cross out all the things that you have done well and completed. All that is good and encouraging is crossed out, deleted, ticked away, and erased from your life. You are then left with all that you have yet to do. That’s enough to get even the most heartened person down.

Maybe you are guilty of another self-defeating behavior which I also engage in..? I write these long to-do lists which are written in a moment of inspiration. This list contains what I want for my life. As soon as the vision is written down in to-do format, it becomes a list of chores. The ‘I want to…’ somehow changes into an ‘I have to…’ between my brain and the to-do list.

The naughty child in me then sees this list of chores as something which should be avoided at all costs. I will find any and every excuse possible, and make them seem important with lots of use of the word ‘too’. I am too tired, too busy, too sore, too sad, too bored….

Oh, my friend, I get even worse. It’s time that I admit that I don’t have a to-do list, I have a to-do BOOK. In some lucid OCD moment I began this form of self-torture where I write down absolutely everything that I should be doing in order to be the perfect person. Yes, I have a whole book which tells me how far from perfect I am.

Am I alone with this battle, or is the to-do list an instrument of torture for other people too? What do you do?

For more than forty years, I have lived my life on a daily schedule. The clock determined what time I work, ate, worked, ran errands, rested, played and slept.
My regular followers will know that my current situation is quite strange to me. My children have grown and have their own lives. I am also recently single and living alone for the first time in my life. Accompany this with a career that allows me to work my own hours and it shouldn’t be too hard to understand that the daily schedule has gone flying out of the window.
I am still trying to work out if this is a bad thing or not. I mean, it makes me feel out of sync with 99% of people, who live by a daily schedule, yet it also feels nice to eat when I am hungry, sleep when I am tried, and work when I am inspired. Since most of us would never have the opportunity to experience this, I feel a kind of obligation to see where this take me….. like the laboratory rat.
My previous daily schedule has been replaced with a weekly schedule. My old work diary was a day-a-page, and I made sure that it was always filled to the brim. My diary now is a week-a-page that includes only the events with a strict date and time. The rest of my chores, tasks, and to-do’s are kept in another book, that has no times or dates, awaiting the time of the week to arrive when I feel inspired to complete them.
Will this work of will I fall flat on my face?
This very article is a perfect example of what I am talking about. I had hoped that this would be written on Tuesday, but it so happens that inspiration struck on a Friday afternoon, as I sat by the river at the resort where I live, drinking a glass of dry white wine. Normally this time would represent the end of my working week, yet it now happens when and where it happens.
I wouldn’t question the validity of this ad-hoc system if it meant that my life couldn’t function, but so far, it seems to work.
Can I report, without embarrassment, that I slept all day on Tuesday?
If this doesn’t work for me, perhaps I will need to borrow a neighbors children, get married again, or set strict working hours. Then I can return to my dysfunctional relationship with my alarm clock.

I am newly single and currently on a journey on learning how to live a sole life. Since I don’t want to date… yet… the question is “Who is going to take me out?”

“Take me out”… that sounds like “walk the dog”.. Yuck! Should I be standing at the door with my bag in hand until some kind person decides that I need to be taken out for a bit of exercise? Let’s just knock that idea of the head straight away. I don’t want to be ‘taken out’ at all.

That leaves me two options, to either become a hermit and never leave home, or to go out by myself. I’m a big girl, so I think I can open the front door and walk through it all on my own.

Oh, the decisions just don’t end there. The next pressure is to join the other single or husband-free women, who meet up at the bar, the movies, and the coffee shop. Well, a little bit of that is okay with me, but girly chats aren’t my preferred social activity. I like to actually go out and do things. By ‘doing things’, I don’t mean go to a bar, get blind drunk, and roll home with an unknown man in tow.

I like history, education, inspiration, reflection, growth… so to be truly be ME I am just going to get accustomed to going out all by myself. I see now, that this should be a necessity for both single women and those women in a relationship. We make so many compromises in a relationship, that often the first thing to go are those things which interest us, but don’t interest our partner.

Last week, I started Bollywood Dancing. I didn’t beg a friend to come along with me. It was something that I really wanted to do, and it was important that I was independent enough to go by myself. No compromise, no support system… just me and my desire to learn.

When you have been part of a couple for so long, I think you begin to forget what it is that you really enjoy, because in the spirit of compromise you put so many things behind you. Another old feminine coping strategy that really doesn’t suit the modern woman.

I am now re-exploring my likes and dislikes in the most gloriously selfish way.

Those who know me personally, will know that the last few months have challenged me in ways that I have never been challenged before. A relationship collapse has left me alone for the very first time in my life. I have lived a life filled with the types of excitement and adventure than many people would dream of. I have also had my share of tragedy, but at no time, through all of this, was I ever alone.

I found myself unprepared for my new situation. It is amazing how accustomed you become to sharing your life with someone. Luckily for me, the thing that I do best is CHANGE.

For the first time in my life, my attention has been drawn to the millions of people who are also living alone and face the challenges every day. I realized that I need to learn a whole new set of skills.

Catching the flue was my first challenge. I realized that I had to prepare for my oncoming illness as I was unlikely to hit the streets once I became fully ill. Questions like “How like did I intend to be ill?”, “How much food do I need to have prepared?”, “What medications may I be wanting?”, as well as a million little minutia, from facial tissues to mail collection.

It isn’t only unusual events that require new skills. Cooking for one, who to vent to, dealing with feelings of loneliness, making decisions without advice, sleeping in the middle of the bed,…. It is all new.

I realize that I have been ignorant of the lifestyle that is lived day-in and day-out by a large part of our community. I have always assumed that everyone else had someone to go home to. How wrong was I!

So, now, I pick myself up, dust myself off, and begin a new journey of learning. I don’t know what it is that I don’t yet know, but I will soon find out and walk this path with a questioning eye.

I will not hide myself away, nor rush into another relationship. I will embrace this new challenge with the same passion and joy that I have always lived my life…. one step at a time.

Wherever there is something decent and pure, there will be some unscrupulous person who will take advantage of that perceived goodness. We call these people “Wolves in Sheeps Clothing”.

I’m sure that you already know exactly the type of person that I am referring to.  She dresses impeccably and speaks like an angel, all while she hides her ulterior motives from you.  When she does strike, she does it with such elegance and charm, that you know you have been played.

Most of you have had experience with this type of person.  There is no ‘best’ way to react to this, as any reaction would be born from a place of anger and revenge, thus giving more support to her attack.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-control to keep your poise under such circumstances.  Here are some tips which help me…

• Write it all down and get it out of you.  If, like me, you keep a personal journal of your life, that is NOT the place to write your hurt and angry feelings in.  It is not something that you want to keep as a momento of your life.  Just use a single sheet of paper which can be destroyed once the situation has passed.
• Do NOT use Facebook or Twitter to talk about your bad experiences.  You may get the sympathy that you are looking for, but you will also get a lot of people who don’t know the full story and may interpret your expression as one of ‘bitchiness’.
• There is a Louise Hay affirmation which has gotten me through the hardest of times. “I forgive you and I set MYSELF free.”  A build-up of pain and anger only hurts you, so forgive the person who has played you and free yourself.
• Keep your head.  On 99% of occasions, the best reaction is no reaction at all.  Let their behavior be the last thing that people see or hear, and people are smart enough to see it for the unprovoked attack that is was.

We don’t live in a fairy tale of princesses and castles.  We are real women, living in the real world, who seek to connect with the beauty in the world.  Let us always be aware that there are wolves who would seek to devour us.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ~ Socrates.

I know that this is a misused quote from Socrates, but I think it can keep us grounded in the understanding that, in comparison to the storehouse of knowledge that exists in the world, our knowledge will always be as a child.  Socrates says that we begin all wisdom with wondering, and therefore the first step is to acknowledge our ignorance.

There is always something new to learn, something that we don’t yet know.  The hard part is knowing what we don’t know, and that requires a keen eye and the humility to accept that we are as a child who must continue to learn and to grow.

There are certainly questions which me may have, which can be answered through the contemplation of our own mind.  More often, however, the case is that we have such questions because we lack the knowledge to answer them.  This requires the ability to be willing to reach outside of ourselves, outside of our comfort zone, and to humbly seek new knowledge.

Our ego does not want us to take in new knowledge.  It wants us to look to ourselves for the answers, and be self-sufficient.  However, we are not an island, and our growth requires us to take in new knowledge, rather than just recycling what knowledge we already have.

It is in this spirit that I have spent the last 16 weeks completing a program of self-development.  It has involved such topics as problem-solving, finding our inner values, and learning to emotionally cope with situations outside of our control.  Even a coach needs a coach, and I feel that I would be selling my clients short if I falsely believed that there was nothing new for me to learn. 

I have learned so much, and I am a better person for it.  I can now apply these new skills to my life, and can share this with my clients as well.

I guess I always will be the eternal student.  It is my thirst for new knowledge and the excitement of paying it forward that drives me. 

For most of us, our sense of self is defined through our relationships with our family.  This has more of an effect in the development of our lives than anything else which we may do, as it is such an important relationship through our formative years.

If our family believes that we are loving, so do we.  If they call us selfish, we either accept it or have to spend a great deal of time and effort to discard such a tag.  Our identity is formed and maintained by our familial connections.

Just to make life interesting, our family are also the ones that we pay the least attention to.  We all too easily take them for granted and underestimate the important role that they play in our self-development.  We are not an island.  We are connected to these people, whether we like it or not.

At first, I tried to make my own identity, independent of what my family believed.  I was ignorant to the truths that family exposes within us.  Eventually, I saw that family was a very important value in my life.  Not just because I love them, but because of the connection that I hold with them.

I still hold many beliefs contradictory to my family’s conceptions, and that is okay.  Although I am not independent of them, I am still an individual.  Conflict is inevitable within a family, as relationships are created which may not necessarily be chosen.  A similar blood in our veins does not ensure like-minded thoughts and opinions.

My family is such a blessing in my life.  I have a rainbow of personalities of which I am connected to. Some of them I see more than others, but my love for them all is constant.

A woman’s body is a complicated piece of machinery. In order to function in its monthly cycle, the body is flooded with hormones in various doses throughout the month. Add to this the effects of the food we eat, our stress levels, exercise, and it is a wonder that we can even function at all!

All of the above factors play a huge role in the state of our mood. Ask any woman who suffers with PMT and she will tell you the difficulty of staying poised in character when you are travelling on a roller coaster of emotional ups and downs.

I personally can identify quite a few emotional states which regularly make their appearance in my life every month. While PMT and its accompanying tensions is the most noticeable to people around me, the mood which is the most significant to me comes in the middle of my cycle when I am ovulating. I can only relate it to the feeling of ‘baby blues’ (yes, I have had the baby blues). It is that feeling when you wish that you could have a good cry, but just can’t seem to be able to.

Why I am writing about this, is that I am experiencing this blue mood now. Instead of hiding from the world until I can re-emerge full of light and energy, I feel that I am not alone in this experience. As women, we just don’t seem to talk enough about how we feel. Especially on the internet, we want to remain bubbly all the time, but this just isn’t real life.

My instinct is to try to shake the feeling which only leaves me feeling frustrated with myself. There is no particular reason for this feeling. I just feel blue.
At times like this, I have to remind myself that emotional changes are part of being a woman. We should be able to apply self-love and embrace the variety of experiences and feelings that being a woman brings to us.

This is a good time for me to share with you what I do (and am doing) when I feel blue.

• My ‘chores’ need to take on a different meaning. I need a more emotional connection to everything I do. At this time, ‘housework’ is now referred to as ‘beautifying’. My writing is seen as ‘reaching out to be of service to others’. My emails are seen as ‘people reaching out to me. Connecting on a deeper emotional level to what is around me is something that is good to do at any time of the month, but at this time, it is crucial to me.
• I dress and attend to my beauty regime much more focused on doing it ‘for me’, than for those around me. I am more in tune with how everything makes me feel, and doing things which make me feel good about myself helps me to embrace this sensitivity and feed my need.
• This is a good time for me to read a novel. I don’t normally have a lot of time for reading and can find it very difficult to get into a novel, but the added emotional sensitivity that I experience, enables me to truly connect with the characters and to immerse myself in another world

I would really like it if you could share with me the things that you do when you are feeling blue. I genuinely believe that this is a much more frequent phenomenon than we like to admit.

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Every week, I write about my experiences and impressions during the week. After all, it is my blog, so I write about how I view what is happening around me.

Well, what has happened this week is that I have noticed that I get so caught up with my own life, that I stop taking an interest in what is happening to those people around me. This closes me off to building new relationships, which is the very reason why I have reached out via the internet in the first place. To make a difference in people’s lives.

So, in the spirit of what is important to me, I reach out to you and ask:

• Are you happy with your life?
• Are you loved?

I don’t ask these questions because I want to sell you something that will make you happy or loved.  I ask because I want you to know that my heart is opened to you.  Any suffering lessens us all, and any joy increases us as a people.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

~ John Donne (1572-1631 / London / England)

We all can feel alone at times.  There is no prevention to this feeling, but there is a cure.  Reach out to the world because we are all on this earth together.

Friend me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter and share your life with me. 

To feel connected, we need to all connect.

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