Trucking down the highway

Ok, so I'm feeling a little stressed out these days, for a number of reasons.

Bieng the proactive gal I am, I decided to not listen to the news this morning and instead listen to nice calming tunes from Jimmy Buffett.

Here's how that went:

Ah, I'm on a warm beach somewhere, tropical breezes, palm trees swaying, some BASTARD CUT ME OFF!!
KILL! KILL! KILL!

Ok, calm down, you can't really kill him.
But now I want to drive REALLY FAST!! I'M ANGRY!

But that wouldn't be nice to all the sane drivers on the road, now would it?

No, but life is SO unfair! I'm already stressed and I'm trying to relax and now some jerk cuts me off and makes me slam on my brakes and gets me all riled up again. Waaaah! Sob. I can't handle this, I really can't, it's too much!

Listen to the music, listen to the music.
Ah, back on the beach. Whew! Whatever happens, I'll handle it.

Ok, so it's hard sometimes to stay on track when I'm already feeling stressed. Sometimes I'm not so much relaxed as just in-between-trigger-points.

I can laugh about it now, and be all "moving towards joy-ish." Recognizing the patterns is the first step.

But if any of my friends reading this make a joke about it, their asses are grasses.

Who's the boss of me?

Boss Me: You said you were going to have your taxes finished today.

Slacker Employee Me: Well, I got to the good part of this book I'm reading and I couldn't stop.

Boss Me: You're fired!

Some days, it's all I can do not to resent reality. I mean, it's a good idea and all, but it can sure be a pain in the butt!

I guess I don't realize how spoiled I am. I have no kids, no hubby, no one to be accountable to. I can do what I want, whenever I want, except at work.

One thing that a lot of the self-help books talk about is managing yourself. I'm still working on that.

As a personal manager, I suck. I'm too easy on myself, I don't plan ahead, I never give constructive feedback or coach. I have no personal development plan.

While I actually cringe at the thought of a personal development plan at my day job, it's not a bad idea for my whole job, the toughest and most dangerous job out there -- being me.

But the thing is, I need to do it my way, in ways that cover all the things I think are important --exercise, finances, diet, all that stuff, but fun, too, and time for thinking, reading, and just enjoying the day.

I'm not the type of person who can march through the day like a soldier. I have to be able to skip and dance, too. My PDP and my manager-me have to accommodate that.

Otherwise, why bother?

Affirmations?

Don't shoot me, but I've started using affirmations. EEK!

I don't belive, like Scott (Dilbert) Adams does, that saying something a bajillion times is enough to make it happen.

However, they seem to help me be less stressed, and more positive.

My life seems to go like this -- something goes wrong, like getting sick. It depresses me. Then I get depressed at how hard life is and how rotten it is that I have to keep doing stuff even when I'm feeling sick and depressed. Life sucks, and it's not fair and I need a vacation and waaaa!

It always ends in tears.

I go along like that for some period of time. Then I get tired of being depressed and start remembering that I can do something about it.

So I take a step or two, like remembering to relax now and then, and to not make such global statements as "I can never...." That reminds me that I can change how I feel. That reminds me that I haven't done any affirmations for a while. Then I add some into my routine, and start feeling even better. Pretty soon I'm humming along.

Now, it may be that affirmations have nothing to do with feeling better -- that just doing something positive is what turns the corner on the gloom and doom thinking. That's fine.

But for now the positive thing I choose to do is to say a few affirmations to get me going.

Nothing fancy, nothing unrealistic.

My favorite one is an uber-affirmation I got from Susan Jeffers, in her book Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway -- "Whatever happens, I'll handle it."

That one says it all, really. It says, "No need to panic and get depressed; whatever happens is handle-able."

I have to admit, that I don't actually spend a lot of time repeating these affirmations. I recorded myself saying them ten times each, put it on my Palm T3, and now listen to them from time to time.

I mean, let's not go overboard on this stuff.