Call it setting priorities elsewhere rather than failure to achieve
The last weeks have been very difficult for me. My husband and I have kind of experienced the full swing of parenting with a child that was very fussy due to teething, growth spurts and many more things. I knew there would be ups and downs, but sometimes the downs just hit you. Especially people like me who love to control everything are really put to the test here. In those weeks, of course you cannot fulfil your entire to do list. You don’t sleep and quite frankly cannot do everything all the time and fulfil all your expectations to the highest. That for me, is a hard thing to accept. The solution for me was to change my attitude from I failed because I did not complete my to do list to - I just had other priorities that day.
As with so many other things, it again comes down to your mindest here. Many people have rigid to do lists for their days and feel really bad and like a failure when they don’t achieve those. However, there are days and times, when you simply cannot achieve them. Firstly, that’s ok and we don’t always need to achieve everything we want. We can be kind to ourselves and just let it go sometimes. That’s ok. When we can accept that that’s the first step.
As I mentioned for people like me, not completing my to do list is very difficult to achieve. Therefore, to not make me feel like a complete failure, I set myself some homework.
Firstly each day I look at my achievements and write them down. It makes me feel great to look at what I have achieved today and even if it is something like I had a great chat with a friend. Those achievements whatever they are make us feel powerful and that a difficult day was still not a waste.
Secondly, adjust your mindset. I don’t see things I can’t do anymore as a failure - I see it as a fact that I did not do this today because I had other priorities for other achievements. For example I did not complete all my housework today because my priority was to spend a great day with my son and make him feel happy . Rather than looking at not doing housework as a failure, I look at it as a purporting setting and further look at the achievement of giving my son a great day. This is turning something negative into something positive in your mind.
If we can do this, see things we cannot do as setting different priorities we feel good about ourselves, even if we did not tick off all our to dos during the day . That’s not an excuse to become lazy of course but to get out of the hamster wheel in our head.
For me, it worked well and I keep writing my diary. If I have an other rough week - it is so ply a question of setting priorities. Keep that in mind . Life is all about priority setting and we have to make choices. Try your best but don’t feel the need to achieve everything perfectly - perfect I have learned does not exist.
