Thinking Outside the Box
If what you are doing isn’t working why keep trying to make it work? How certain are you that this direction is going to work? Do you have history with it working? What is telling you to move in this direction? Are you continuing to do it this way because you don’t know any other way? I am going to guess that a) you haven’t really thought about it and b) you don’t know any other way. There are easy fixes to both of these.
A) my dentist always compliments me on how great my teeth look. I floss everyday and brush frequently. The last couple of times I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned she’s spent a lot of time on my four back teeth. I suppose because she’d said how great my teeth look I didn’t think about the fact that she’s really had to work on those back teeth a bit more; at least until after the second time. She didn’t say it but I realized I need to brush those four back teeth a little bit differently which meant being aware of how I currently brush them and changing it. I have.
B) I was talking with a client yesterday who’s studying for a big exam. She’s dealing with anxiety and fatigue. Although we’ve talked a lot about her study habits yesterday we realized that while she’s changed the material she’s studying she hasn’t changed one very important part of her approach: how much time she spends worrying about and studying. We’ve been working on her worrying but I explained to her yesterday that the worry is not only taking an incredible amour of energy but that it is adding to her fatigue. The other big contributor to her fatigue was spending all day Saturday & Sunday studying. She worked all week and spent all of her time off studying. She didn’t have anything to look forward to. She had no balance. I asked her what she thought about studying half days at least some weekends. She liked it. I asked if she took breaks durning long periods of studying (i.e. I’ll study for 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break) and she said no. I explained the proven benefits of this and she liked it too. I suggested that she figure out the amount of time she needs to put in between now and the exam, divide that by the number of weeks she has left and spread those hours over the entire week of her remaining weeks. She hadn’t been able to think of any of these as solutions because she a as so trapped in her anxiety and how she’d done it before. All seemingly small but things that can make a huge difference.
Take a step back and ask yourself is this working? If it’s not ask a friend how s/he might do it. Plunk around the internet and see what you can come up with. There is so much info on the internet. There must be a couple of options that’ll resonate with you.
Happy day!
Dr. Michelle
Photo credit: en.wikipedia.org
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