Are you feeling like you are moving slow getting the New Year and your Best Year Yet started? The first couple of weeks of the year are always rough. Either we overcommit to new stuff to create our new life, or we just can’t seem to get it together to get moving… Either way we are not properly approaching the changes we want to make to get the results we want… But there is a better way and that’s Embracing Self-Management and Flow…
Self-Management is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love:
Self-Honoring and Being
Self-Management and Flow
Self-Care and Resilience
Self-Connection and Radiance
Self-Management has to do with taking full responsibility for ourselves- with learning how to properly manage ourselves and strive for excellence and high performance. It is about flowing through our days creating our Best Life…
Embracing Self-Management in our Self-Love Practice allows us to truly have our own back and support ourselves in our Journey…
Self-Management is a multifaceted endeavor, it includes managing our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, energy, time, space, and everything else…
For the purpose of our Self-Love Practice, I’m honing-in on how we set up and go about our days to effortlessly achieve our goals, experience joy and fully live our life.
Watch the video for 5 Tactics for managing yourself… Enjoy!
MONTHLY THEME GUIDE: Identifying Core Values
APPLICATION: Self-Management is a super skill. When we manage ourselves well, we are unstoppable! Here are tactics to help you easily start better managing yourself for more high-performance, productivity, and flow… Let your Core Values guide you as you work through this exercise.
Set some time aside to Design the Life You Want to Live…
🌟Time Mapping – Decide how you want your weeks to flow… Design your Ideal Week. Designate days with themes and part of the days for different Life Areas. For example:
–You can have writing or content creation days, client days, meeting days, admin days and such.
–You can have Self-Love/Me Time, Couple Time, Family Time, Chores Time, you get my drift.
This guides where you add your commitments in your calendar, where you focus your attention and what you work on, and helps you manage how you use your time, energy, and bandwidth… This is a one-time exercise that you tweak as you see fit.
🌟Time Blocking – Now, within your Time Map, you get to drill-in how you use any given time. You designate time chunks for tasks and commitments. This is a weekly task where you plop in what you want to work on and accomplish into specific times of your week.
Be sure to judiciously block time including buffer time and transition time. We want to allow for context shifting and build in grace for when things don’t work out as planned. This ensures more flow and ease in your days…
–This is a great activity to do on Friday before the closedown for the day, so you are ready for the next week and avoid the Sunday Scaries (AKA Sundaynitis in my home). Or, a Saturday Morning Reset activity, or a Sunday Afternoon Reset activity. Whatever makes sense for your life.
Decide when you’ll do your weekly Reset with Time Blocking. Add it to your calendar as a recurring event…
🌟Routines – This is my favorite. When we create rich routines, we can make any change we desire in our life. We don’t change in a vacuum. Creating change is very challenging and routines provide the context where the change can happen. It reduces friction, creates support and motivation. The things you are trying to do happen automatically without you having to white-knuckle your way.
–Choose a time of day where you and your family experience the most stress, where most conflict happens, where everyone ends up crying, yelling or both, or where you’d like to add more richness for a better life… This usually includes mornings, evenings, and bedtime, and other transition times like Friday evening, Sunday evening, before and after vacations or trips, and such.
–And, in terms of adding richness: Self-Care/Love Routine, Bedtime Routine, Skin Care Routine, Food Prep, Family Night, Couple Time, Date Your Partner, etc.
–Select your time by activity to improve, richness to integrate, most stressful to eliminate, by whatever you’d like to tackle first that will have the most immediate impact in your life…
Then design a routine that will address the friction and issues you encounter. For example, choose a time to start transitioning to the evening routine and what does that entail- daily review, organize for next day, closedown technology/work, connect with family members, discuss timing of next activity, start meal prep, etc.
Once you design the look and feel, tweak your schedule/calendar and your environments (declutter, layout stuff, set reminders, send notices, and such) to support your design…
🌟Habits – These are the ingredients of your routines!
Depending on what segment of the day or routine you are targeting to create more ease in your life, you can implement new habits to make that routine or time of day work better.
AND, to achieve your goals, you must have repeating targeted behaviors, tactics or habits to go along with them. Goals are achieved through taking consistent action…
To establish new habits, add them to a routine…
—Health/Wellness Habits do very well as part of a morning self-care routine and part of weekend reset routine (meal planning, food shopping, food prep).
—Connections Habits do well as part of transitions, evening routines, and weekend routines.
—Success Habits do well as part of targeted work time blocks…
🌟Special Days – These are the exceptions to your routines and the sparkle sprinkles! Think of different ways of playing hooky if you may. LOL These are theme days to take care of things and enjoy things outside your regular routines.
–Specials days can be used as: Fun Day, Me Day, Mommy-Daughter Day (or other family combos), Adventure Day, Admin Day, Reset Day, Shoot Day, Lazy Day, and so on.
Make a list of all the Special Days that would make sense and that you would enjoy in your life. Then add them to your calendar as recurring events or keep as things to be scheduled during reset or planning days.
And that is the powerful way of taking charge of your days and creating the flavor of your life.
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
