Productivity

How to focus on what matters most. 3 things that actually work

February 2, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 4 Comments

Sometimes do you find yourself in a season where you feel like you’re busy, but you’re not productive?

Your schedule is full, you’re busy, you’re doing things, but you’re not moving the needle. You’re not doing the things that matter most.

Or maybe you find that a lot of the things that really do matter to you don’t end up on your schedule.

Some of you know that the fourth of January, was my birthday. Stevie and I took a little trip together, and we did some hiking, and we just had a great time together. We got away for a few days just by ourselves. We haven’t done that in a long time.

We got out of the driveway and I started crying. Just unexpectedly tears filled my eyes. That might be the first clue that something has gone wrong, when you find yourself instantly in tears and you didn’t expect it.

I was thinking about it as we were driving. Why did tears come so fast?

We had such a great time together. It was so good to reconnect, but what I realized was, because we’ve been on this adoption journey with Thomas, who’s eight years old and has been through so much loss and trauma, and the process of trying to help him heal, and help him through his loss, and his grief, we just let things go.

You might be in a season of your life where whatever you’re dealing with; maybe it’s a health problem, maybe it’s loss of job, or maybe something with one of your kids, and you feel like a lot of important things you just let go, because you were in survival mode.

I don’t think I fully realized how much it was affecting me, and how much it was really a burden that I was carrying, and we’re only human so we can only carry so much. Some of the things that you drop along the way are important things.

I realized that one of the things that I had basically dropped or let go, was just the priority of that most important relationship to me.

It was really amazing to have time together. I can’t even tell you how it has changed our outlook over the past few weeks, just knowing that we can reconnect with each other, and that we can hold on to each other while we’re holding onto him. It has just been a really, really good reminder.

If you’ve been following along with my live streams, or maybe you did our Live your Dream Challenge, you know I love setting goals at the first of the year. I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions.

What do I really want?

What do I really want this year?

What’s most important to me?

How can I make time to actually do the things that matter, to actually focus?

I really do want to get to the end of the year, and have done the things that really matter. I’m sure you do too.

1. Decide what really matters and write it down

I think a lot of times we assume that we know what matters, and we assume that we’re living a life that’s focusing on the things that really matter. But if we’re not actually deciding it on purpose, and writing it down on purpose, I think sometimes we really do forget.

If you’re going to fill a jar, and you have big rocks, little rocks, sand, and water, there’s a certain way you have to do it or it won’t all fit.

You want to put the big rocks in first, and then you’ll have room for the little rocks, the sand, and the water. But if you fill it up with sand and water at first, you won’t be able to get the rocks in.

The rocks are the really important things in you life.

When I’m making my calendar every week, I put the rocks in first. For me, I have to prioritize my own spiritual, mental, and emotional health. Then I’m actually able to take care of the people that I want to help take care of, that I want to be a blessing to, and that I want to serve in my life.

The things I put there FIRST are the ways I can make sure I really am prioritizing health and sanity, and taking care of my mental health.

One of the things that I started doing at the first of the year that I hadn’t been super consistent with is the relationship piece. I’m now making sure I put that piece in when I’m figuring out what I want my schedule to look like for the week.

Ask yourself:

What is my main priority?

What are the things for me that are non-negotiable?

What are the things that really, really matter?

Am I living my life as if they matter?

We can say they matter, but if they don’t make it into our actual lives, then we’re really not living up to the things that we say actually matter.

What are your big rocks?

What are the things that are the big things that you want to make sure you focus on?

What do you want to make sure you pour your energy into?

How can you add those to your life first?

How can you take your calendar, or your planner, and put those things in first?

Somebody asked me the other day why I put sleep in my calendar. Because sleep is really, really important, and if I’m not taking care of myself in that way I start to suffer, and the people in my life start to suffer.

I put things like sleep, make a healthy dinner, and go to the gym and lift weights. I put my church time in there. I put my quiet time. I put all these things in my actual calendar first.

I run two businesses from home, and the things that I put in my calendar first are the ways that I can make sure that I’m fit to serve. Those things give me the energy and vitality so I can do the things I really want to do.

2. Decide who matters most

This is where I was finding that I was lacking a little bit, and not out of not prioritizing the other person, For us, we were just trying to make sure Tom Tom was ok. He has taken priority, obviously, as it should be.

The thing I want to remind you of when you’re making your list of who matters most, is not to throw a bunch of guilt on there. Stevie and I have been doing the best we can. We’ve been taking really good care of him. We’ve been taking good care of our other kids. We’ve been trying to take good care of each other. We’re doing the best we can.

We want to look back with kindness to the season that we’ve been in.

We’re all in different seasons, and we want to look with kindness to the season that we’re in, and just give ourselves a little grace, and a little bit of a break. We’re all doing the best we can.

When we think about who matters most, this may seem obvious to you. Of course, it’s my spouse and my children, it’s my faith, my relationship to God. It’s the people in my community. We all would probably say the same things.

Here’s my question. Is that actually how we live? Do we live as if those people and those things are really important to us? How do we know?

It shows up in the way we spend our lives, the way we spend our energy, the way we spend our time and our resources.

I think what happens to us if we’re not careful, and if we don’t do this with some intention, is that we end up spending time trying to please, or arguing with people we don’t even really know on the internet, sometimes to the neglect of the people we actually love and want to be spending our time with.

How are we actually spending our time? Are we spending hours a day scrolling through, reading about people’s lives that we don’t even really know, or are we really investing in the relationships that we know we want to be investing in, that we know matter most?

One of the things I’ve been doing that really helps me is to pick a person of the week. You could pick a person of the month or a person of the day. I tend to do this by the week.

I kind of try to figure out whose birthday it is, or who in my life really needs my love and attention right now. Then I write it on my actual calendar, and for that week, I really try to be super intentional about how I love on that person.

It’s so easy for us to take the people for granted that we love the most. It’s actually almost always the people who we love the most that we take for granted.

I know that a lot of times for Stevie and I, we will have a busy week, taking care of all the stuff we need to take care of. He’s doing his medical practice. I’m running my businesses from home. We’ve got Tom Tom, we’ve got our other kids. We have all the responsibilities that two people building a life together have, and sometimes the only pause I feel like we get is when we’re at church together.

It’s almost like we both just kind of collectively sigh, and he’ll put his arm around me at church and rub on my shoulder. It’s a moment of, “Oh yeah, this is what really matters.” I want to build in more times like that.

We’ve been trying to be more intentional about how we can spend time together, how we can connect, even in small moments like moments together at church, or taking a hike together. Like the trip we took together. Really prioritizing what we say is important, and not just saying it’s important.

3. Decide when you will focus

In my coaching program right now, Life Mentoring School, we’re talking all about how to create pockets of focus.

Decide when you’ll have your focus time each week and decide what the most important things that you can put into that time. Planning that time will really help move you toward the life you want.

Maybe it’s a goal. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s some dream that you have that you’ve been wanting to do.

Set aside time to do it, and decide when you’re going to do it at the first of the week. Then put it in your actual calendar. For me, that’s almost always those two hours in the morning before anybody else gets up. I call it my dream time, my sacred time.

I have gotten so accustomed to that time that I can barely stay in bed. I look forward to that time that I know I’m going to spend doing something worthwhile, making some dream come true, working hard at something that’s really important to me. I want you to figure out when you could do that.

Be ready! If you’re not used to sitting for two hours and doing something, you’re, or for however long you decide your focus time is going to be, you’re not going to be great at it at first.

You’re going to get restless.

You’re going to want to be distracted.

You’re going to work for literally 30 seconds and think, “Yeah, this is not as much fun as I thought.”

It’s not that easy to sustain focus and to do something that really matters to you. You’re going to have to practice. You’re going to have to be willing to be bad at it for a while.

I know when I first started doing this, I thought, “Man, where has my attention span gone?” I had set aside two hours, but literally after three minutes, I’m was thinking, “Okay, I don’t know if I can do this.”

So just expect that it’s going to take you a while to be able to get into the groove of really creating some focus time where you can do the things in your life that really matter.

There’s a secret in life: What you focus on, that’s where your energy go.

Even writing it down is powerful. Even if you do terrible at it the first seven times you try to do it. Just continually create that pocket of focus, where you’re going to spend some time working on the things that really matter to you.

Maybe you know you need to write a book.

Maybe you know you need to get your health in order.

Maybe you’re working on your finances.

Whatever it is, dedicate some time every week where you can really focus on that.

There are a lot of things that I have in place to make that time really precious to me, and make it the most productive part of my day. But if you haven’t been in the habit of doing it, I just recommend that you set aside at least two hours a week and focus on what really matters to you.

We’re going to decide what to focus on, and we’re just going to write it down. We’re going to decide who matters most to us, and then we’re going to give ourselves these pockets of time where we can really do the things that matter.

We as women, we as doers, we as dreamers, we really do want to help. We sometimes get lost in doing things for people, in spending our time in ways that are not actually congruent with how we want to be doing life.

It’s never too late to start. I’m so excited that we get second and third and fourth and millionth chances. So don’t tell yourself, “Oh, I’m not good at this. I’ll never find a way to be focused and make my dreams come true.” Yes, you will.

You just keep starting, and you let yourself be bad at it for a while, and then pretty soon you find that you’re consistently showing up for yourself, and you’re consistently showing up to your life in the ways you really want to.

Keep Commitments to Yourself Starting Today

January 27, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 5 Comments

Do you have trouble keeping commitments to yourself? Do you set goals, make resolutions, and then feel like you’re so bad at the follow through?

I’m going to give you 7 simple and powerful ways start keeping the commitments you make to yourself.

So many times we set a goal, decide we’re going to do something, then we fail, we don’t do it. Pretty soon we think we’re so bad at it that we just stop trying. We don’t even want to set a goal anymore because we think we never follow through with what we say we’re going to do.

One of the things that I’ve really struggled with, especially the past year, is my nighttime routine. I would get sleepy and angry (I call it slangry) in the evenings, and I felt like I’d done so much good stuff during the day that I didn’t have one more ounce to give. I would just shirk off things that I really wanted to do.

I might leave my kitchen a little messy. I might be on my screen before bed instead of doing reading. So I’ve set a personal goal to not leave the dishes in my sink at night and to not take my computer to bed.

Now those might sound like easy things to do, but not for me lately. Because I work from home, and because I work on my computer, I always feel like there’s a few things I need to do.

I’ve been able to make some real progress and headway just in a few weeks on this goal, and I’m hoping that what’s been helping me might translate into what you’re wanting to do.

Maybe you’re wanting to lose a little weight. Maybe you’re wanting to save some money. Maybe you’re wanting to start an exercise program. Maybe you’re wanting to beef up your morning routine, maybe it’s work on your relationships.

1. Decide it

Decide what you want to work on, even if you’ve felt like you’ve been a failure before. I want you to just decide something, and not just the thing you want to work on, but how you want to talk about it. Here’s why.

I had this nudging that I needed to do something about my nighttime routine. I don’t like being so crabby at night, and I don’t like just going to bed and not doing things that I feel like I should do. But then there’s this other part of my brain that thinks, “You get up really early and you’re a morning person, and you don’t have to be a nighttime person too.”

My thoughts were, “You should, you should, you should.” I don’t want you “should” yourself with your decision. Shoulding yourself isn’t very inspiring.

Instead of saying, “I should do these things at night,” I decided that my statement was, “I love being the kind of person who reads poetry at night, instead of being on her computer. I like being the kind of person who leaves her kitchen spotless.”

Reframing the statement of what you want to do into a positive, will really help you. Thoughts, and the things that we speak, generate feelings inside of us.

If your thought and statement is, “I should want to lose weight,” that probably doesn’t give you a great feeling. Come up with a way of saying it that makes you really feel inspired and excited!

2. Feel it.

Make sure the way you’re talking about your goal, or your commitment, actually inspires you. You want to feel motivated by it. When I say to myself, I am a person who reads poetry at night,” that’s very inspiring to me. Now that might not be inspiring to you, so you have to figure out how you can talk about your goal, or resolution, or commitment, in a way that inspires you.

Don’t talk about it in a way that shames you into doing something, but in a way that motivates you and inspires you. Our feelings are the fuel of what we actually do in our lives.

If we want to take better actions, we’re going to have to have better feelings.

This might be a newsflash for you! I hope it is because this will change your life!

YOU’RE IN CONTROL OF YOUR FEELINGS.

Your feelings come from your thoughts, so you just decide what you want to think and say about your life, about your goal, about your commitment. You get to control your thinking, and when you change what you think, those thoughts will give you feelings that motivate you.

You decide, on purpose, how you want to talk about what you’re doing in your life. As you decide, you will generate feelings for yourself that will motivate you to keep going.

Make sure the emotion that you’re generating is actually motivating you to take action, that it’s inspiring you, not shaming you.

3. Write it

Writing it down is so powerful. When I started to work on my nighttime routine, I started to think about how I wanted to think about the whole process.

I was one of those people that if I was super, super tired, I would mostly clean up the kitchen, but then leave stuff in the sink. Then I would think, “Oh my gosh, if something happens to me at night, my poor sister is going to have to come clean up my kitchen.” I would have these kind of shameful feelings that I SHOULD do better.

Should never motivated me to do better.

I started working on how I wanted to say it to myself, what feelings that generated, and then I physically wrote it down. I physically wrote it in my calendar every night, and it was really kind of cool. It gave me a sense of looking forward to it!

“Tonight I’m going to be a person who reads poetry and a person who doesn’t leave dishes in her sink.”

Your brain gears up for things that you write down.

4. Habit stack it

This comes from a book called Atomic Habits. Pair your new thing with something that you already enjoy.

Here’s what I noticed. I love YouTube, and I love watching the uploaded videos of people that I follow at night. I would kind of save those for when I would go to bed at night. What I decided to do instead is watch those while I’m cleaning the kitchen because I decided I didn’t want to take my computer to bed.

It worked out kind of like magic. I wasn’t really in a super hurry to get done in the kitchen, because I knew when I finished in the kitchen, then I’m ready to go to bed without my computer. I knew I better watch what I want to watch here while I’m cleaning the kitchen, because then the computer is getting put away.

Now cleaning the kitchen is becoming something that I look forward to. After dinner when everybody else scatters, and I’m in the kitchen working on the dishes, it gives me a good time to catch up on podcasts, and catch up on YouTube channels. Then when I go to bed, I don’t take my computer. I don’t open it again.

I can’t even tell you how much it has blessed me, and how much easier it has been, because I paired the thing I was struggling with to something that I really enjoy.

5. Fail at it

We think failure means we’re not good.

We think failure means we’re never going to do that thing.

We think failure means we never were meant for that.

Be willing to fail. Accept that failure is part of the process. Failure is part of getting better at something. A lot of times what we do with the failures is, we make it mean that we’re bad people. WRONG.

Ask yourself what you can learn from the failure, not what does the failure mean about me. THE FAILURE MEANS YOU’RE HUMAN. Let’s ditch all of the shame and guilt that we heap on ourselves when we say we’re going to do something and then we don’t. Let’s just learn from it.

6. Get back at it

So you fail at it. So what, what did you learn from it? The question is not, IF you will fail, the question is, WHEN you fail, what will you do then?

You’re going to fail at it, then you’re going to get back at it. You’re just going to learn from the mistakes that you made and get back at it.

7. Celebrate it

Make it fun!

For me, making it fun was deciding I really wanted to be a person who reads poetry at night, so after I get my kitchen tided up I get to read my new poetry book. I got a couple of new books, and I have something to look forward to, since I’m not going to be on my computer.

I have to say the first night I felt a little deprived. It was hard. I knew it wasn’t good for me, I wasn’t sleeping well with my computer in there. I would get sucked into news cycle stuff at night, and then my mind was going crazy. It just wasn’t good for my rest, and it wasn’t good for my brain. I needed to find something to replace that with.

Taking something away in your life, you’ll feel the void, so what can you put in there to make it fun, and to celebrate?

Replacing it makes it seem like I’m not losing anything. I get to go upstairs and read my books now!

You can think you’re not good at keeping your commitments to yourself, but that’s just a thought. If you want to change that thought you can. You can just decide today that you are good at keeping commitments to yourself.

What will happen is, you will prove yourself right either way. So be careful little mind what you think, and decide you’re good at keeping your commitments to yourself, then watch yourself get good at actually doing the thing. It’s really exciting!

Pick one way, even if it’s a tiny small way, that you can honor your word to yourself today. Pick something that will make you excited for yourself that you did it!

Maybe you decide that you need to walk more.

Maybe it’s something with the way that you’re feeding yourself.

Maybe it’s something in your relationships.

Maybe it’s your bills.

Maybe your taxes

Maybe it’s that book you want to write.

I want you to decide that you’re going to do something, and then I just want you to practice thinking about how you’ll keep your word to yourself. As you build trust with yourself, and increase your capacity to keep your word to yourself, you will also increase your capacity to keep your word to other people.

With practice, you just get good at honoring your word.

Write it down first, and then decide what you want to think about it so you can generate feelings that are motivating for you. Then habit stack it and make it fun!

Set yourself up in a way that you can actually follow through with the things that you say you’re going to do. You’ve got this mama!

3 Powerful Tools to Design Your Life On Purpose

January 20, 2021 by Edie Wadsworth 11 Comments

I think a lot of us have been struggling in the last few months. This has been a weird turn of the year. And a lot of us want to have a goal, or want to have hope. We want to make a resolution, we want to have a dream, but we feel like maybe it’s going to be so much more of the same.

If that’s the way you feel, you’re not alone; 2020 was a tough year. For most of us, it changed our lives, in one way or another, and has thrown us for a loop.

One of the things that we’ve learned, is that there is so much that’s out of our control. But I also realized, that’s always been true! We just never felt it to the degree that we felt it last year.

The one thing we can control, that we’ve always been able to control, is how we respond, and how we show up. We can control how we interact with what’s happening to us, no matter what that is.

I want to create more of what I really want for myself in 2021. I really love using this time of year to kind of get back on track, decide what I really want to create, and then go about creating it.

What a lot of us are doing right now is not controlling the one thing we can, which is how we show up to our lives. Instead, we’re trying to control everything else, and everybody else. That can send us into a spin of negativity because we can’t change so much of what’s going on.

We can’t change how things are unfolding in our world. But what we can ALWAYS do is, and what we have only and always been able to do is, control way we show up.

1. Create a vision for your life

I want to give you your power back. You still have so much personal power and personal responsibility. I want to help you cultivate a vision for your life that inspires you. You don’t have to spin in negativity.

What is your dream vision for your future?

If you could design your life perfectly, what would a typical day in your life look like five years from now.

What would need to happen to begin to design your life the way you actually want it?

What would the vision of your life look like if you had more control over it? (Spoiler alert: you do!)

I want you to think about those long term thoughts, and then I want you to ask yourself,”What can I do right now?”

I love brainstorming impossible goals, thinking of things I want to create in the world, and how I want to contribute. I also like to pick that apart and figure out WHO I NEED TO BECOME in order to be the person who can reach impossible goals, and really contribute to the world. That kind of narrows it down to what I can work on NOW.

Ask yourself, “What am I spending my time doing right now that’s really not that valuable? It’s not giving me the life I want, it’s not helping me show up in the way I want to, in order to contribute to the world.”

If we don’t give our brains something noble and good to think about, and to aim for, and to meditate on, they’ll just spin out in negativity.

Our brains will find everything wrong with the world, and you don’t have to look far these days. We’ll spin out in negativity on those things, and we’ll meditate on that day at night; which is called worry. We’ll live in fear.

Deciding how we’re going to show up, and getting curious about what we want our lives to look like, gives our brains something to aim for. It gives our brains something good and noble to think about, to reach for.

When we tell our brains what we want them to focus on, they will do that for us!

Sometimes, we’ll have to redirect our thoughts, and my best tool for helping me do this, is my bullet journal. I do a “lazy girls” way of bullet journaling here I think you’ll love!

Everything that I’ve created in my life for the last 10 years, was written down in my bullet journal first. I highly recommend that you have a place where you can write your dreams and your goals down. I use my bullet journal for everything in the world.

I often find that if I don’t have my journal with me, it’s really hard for me to let my ideas come out. We need a place to brainstorm about what I want to create in the world, how we want to contribute. I would say it’s the one tool I use in my life that has doubled my creativity, and doubled my productivity. It has served me so, so well!

Grab a journal and I want you to take some time today and figure out, “What do I really want in my life? What do I want to create? How do I want to contribute, to my family, to the world?” Let yourself really dream.

A lot of times, we find it hard to do this because we feel like it’s necessary to stay stuck in the fear and the worry. When we do, it’s not good for us, and it’s not good for the people in our lives.

Having a vision for your life, something to shoot for, to aim for, and to dream about, is really important.

2. Cultivate Healthy Habits

Nothing changes if nothing changes. You have this vision, this place you’re wanting to go, but then you have your current habits. I heard John Maxwell speak on this years ago and he said:

“You have uphill dreams and downhill habits.”

What we want to begin to cultivate are uphill habits, habits that are noble, and good, and worthy, and give us a sense of meaning, purpose, and accomplishment.

I’ve been working on habits for a long, long time. I realized, when I was thinking about what I really wanted to change personally this year, that I have a pretty downhill, as John Maxwell would call it, habit in the evenings.

I have a stellar morning routine. I wake up super early in the morning, and I get so much done before 7:00 AM! I’m the truest of all morning people, but at nighttime I cannot function. My family is always trying to avoid that time of night where I get, I call it slangry. I get sleepy and angry. I wanted to change that.

A lot of times I wouldn’t fully clean my kitchen. I would just do the bare minimum, get everything in the sink, some of the stuff in the dishwasher, and then I would call it a night. I also got into the bad habit, of taking my computer to bed with me. I would finish doing work and watch YouTube videos. I got into bad nighttime habits, and I wanted to start to change that.

One of the small little goals that I made was, and this may seem so dumb and stupid, but no dishes in the sink, and no computer in the bed.

I wrote down all the things I wanted to cultivate at night. I wanted to start reading actual real books again, instead of just listening to everything. I wanted to get back doing my meditation. I had a whole list of things I wanted to do, but I thought those two things would motivate me.

When you’re cultivating a new habit, practice the belief that you want to believe. I decided, I cherish my nighttime routine. Now, right at the current moment, that kind of feels like a lie, but I’m going to keep practicing that.

I put some things in place make it more fun.

I had read the book “Becoming Mrs. Lewis” about the life and love story of CS Lewis and Joy Davidman. I love CS Lewis! So I decided to order Joy Davidman’s book of sonnets, and every night I just read a sonnet. That just little treat, and then doing a short little meditation, gets me excited to do the other things that I don’t want to do.

Often pairing the habit you want to create, with some kind of little reward, is really powerful.

Maybe there’s something you know you need to stop doing, that you know is getting in the way of you creating the life you want. I knew that bringing my computer to bed at night was not a good idea, but it’s so hard, y’all!

The first night I did it a few nights ago, so many times I wanted to run back downstairs and get it. I thought,”This is crazy, how I feel so attached to it.” But after just a few nights, I thought, “What a relief? I don’t have to answer emails at night.”

It’s been really, really good. You might think that’s a crazy thing to want to cultivate, but for me, I know I want to be the kind of person who does those nourishing things at night.

I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t have the computer in bed, and who reads poetry. I want to be the kind of person who leaves no dishes in the sink, and who gives herself the gift of a beautiful sparkling kitchen the next morning, the kind of person who goes to bed reading love sonnets. That sounds like a pretty awesome thing!

The tool I use for developing these nourishing habits is Google Calendar. I just put it in my calendar every day to do my nourishing night routine. That’s a reminder to me, and I’ve even started doing it earlier so I leave myself plenty of time. I’m seriously a granny when I start my nighttime routine at 7:30, and that’s okay with me!

“You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” ~Aristotle

3. Keep your promises to yourself

One of the things that keeps us from keeping our promises to ourselves is, we tell ourselves, “I’d never follow through.” Stop saying that and start saying, “I love how I follow through.” What will happen is eventually you will follow through if you keep telling yourself you follow through.

Find ways to make it fun! Ordering a book of love sonnets, to me makes my new little ritual fun.

Being really careful what you make failure means is also a key. What if I don’t do my routine tonight? Am I going to make it mean that I’m just destined to be a person who doesn’t go to bed with a sparkling kitchen, and read love sonnets at night? No, that’s the person I’m cultivating, the person I’m becoming.

I just make that failure mean, “What can I learn from that? Why did that happen? Was that because I went out to dinner and I got home later?’ And if that’s the case, I just give myself some grace. Be careful what you make failure mean, and find a way to make it fun.

What is the one thing you need to change first, in order to begin to create and design the life you want?

For some of you the answer will be a habit you need to get rid of, and for some of you the answer will be something you need to cultivate. What I want you to do is write your dream down.

What’s your dream?

My dream for the next few months that I’m working on is to have nourishing nighttime habits.

You could write down your short-term dream, you could write down your long-term dream, but write down something that you think would get you closer to the life you envision for yourself.

There’s so much power in writing it down. Get yourself a bullet journal and write it down. It’s so powerful because your brain kind of perks up, and notices. It’s going to think, “Oh, so we’re the kind of people who have nourishing night routines. Yes, we are.”

The other thing I do is use a sticky note to write the sort of beliefs that I want to practice. I’ll just write them down every day. Or I’ll write them down, and I’ll move the sticky note from day to day in my calendar.

I just keep practicing the things I want to believe, until I create the life I want to create.

Using these 3 tools you can design your life on purpose!

I’ve started doing the Dr. Edie show every Tuesday at 11am EST, live on my YouTube channel. I’d be so honored to have you join me! Click here to subscribe!

How to get your mojo back

October 29, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 4 Comments

Do you feel like you’ve lost your mojo? Are you thinking any, or all, of these things?

What has happened to my life?

My house is a mess.

I haven’t been to the gym in months.

My eating is off plan.

I’m not sleeping well.

I’m scrolling social media too much and getting ragy!

What do you do when you’ve lost your Mojo?

Start with the end in mind.

I find it’s helpful to look ahead and decide what result I want. Let’s don’t drag up 75 reasons why we haven’t done it so far. Let’s just decide the result we want and start living into that space. Start living as if…

What would I do if I was a person who took really good care of her health and was fit?

What would I do if I was a person who had a really organized and peaceful house?

You start figuring out what it is to live in the result. You might even brainstorm it out into your bullet journal. What does it look like? How do you feel?

Let’s say your house is driving you crazy. You’ve got kids doing school from home or now you’re working from home, and you feel like your house is always just a dumpster fire. It’s always a mess. It’s disorganized. You hate being there.

What I want you to do is envision what it would be like if it was organized, uncluttered, peaceful, and nourishing. What would it actually look like and be like? How would you feel when you woke up in the morning if you knew that it was organized? You put yourself into the position of having achieved the result and you learn to live there.

What we tend to do instead is we look to the past and think, “Well I haven’t been doing that so far. My house is pretty much a dumpster fire. Everything is cluttered. Everything is everywhere. I can never find what I want. I hate being here. It’s always a mess.”

That’s living in the past. That’s the way your house used to be. What I want you to do is go to the future. What does that result look like? How can you start living there already? What does it look like to be a person who can easily keep a decluttered house that feels nourishing and peaceful?

Many of you look at the thing that’s bothering you the most in your life right now, and you feel like it’s impossible. I promise you, it’s possible when you learn to take action from a place of feeling like it’s already there.

Then the action feels easy and doesn’t exhaust you. The reason you’re exhausted by the result you’re NOT getting is because the thoughts you think about it are exhausting.

You think to yourself all the time, “I hate how I’ve been eating lately. It’s driving me crazy. I hate my house lately. I can’t keep up.” Those thoughts are exhausting to me even just imagining thinking them! How can you change that and live into the results? Start with the end in mind.

Expect failure.

You’re not going to do it perfectly. Don’t wait until Monday to start, or the first of the month, or after the holidays. The reason you’re going to try to wait until Monday is because you’re afraid of failure, and you think if you just had a little bit more time to get yourself organized then it would be fine. That’s not true.

You need to expect failure. You’re going to start, you’re going to do it fine for two days, and then you’re not going to do it great. This is where the key moment is. You’re going to keep your house organized or you’re going to eat on your plan, or whatever your thing is, and you’re going to do it really really good for two days, and then you’re going to blow it! Am I right or am I right? I’m right!

The question is not whether you’re going to fail. You are going to fail. The question is, what are you going to do about the failure?

What are you going to make it mean? Are you going to make it mean you are incapable of making a change? Are you going to make it mean it’s just not “you” to have a clean organized house or that you’re just not a one of those healthy people?

Or are you going to say, “Oh yeah! There’s going to be failure along the way, so let’s just jump back right in.”

You don’t ask yourself, “What am I going to do IF I fail?” You know you’re going to fail. You decide ahead of time what you’re going to do with the failure, and what you’re going to make it mean.

You’re going to make it mean you’re human and you’re going to jump right back into the thing that you were doing!

Expect failure instead of running from failure.

The reason you don’t want to start until next Monday is because in your mind, that puts off the failure a little longer. No, we embrace the failure. We know what’s going to happen, and when it comes, we know what to do with it because we’re expecting it to come.

Stop making excuses and blaming other people, things, and circumstances.

The reason we lost our mojo is on you and on me. Yes 2020 has been crazy. Yes working from home is different. Yes there are a whole host of things we can blame. Let me tell you why you don’t want to do that.

If you blame the fact that we’re dealing with a crazy virus, or you blame the fact that now you’re having to work from home, if you blame a circumstance or someone else, you make yourself a victim to whatever you’re blaming. Then the only way your situation can change is if your circumstance changes, or if those people change.

NEWSFLASH: those people aren’t changing and your circumstances may not be changing either!

How can you learn to take responsibility and manage you? You take care of the only thing you can take care of, which is how you respond to the crisis, and how you respond to the situation, and how you show up to crazy 2020, or how you show up to the working from home life.

You can only control you.

Here’s the beauty of taking 100% responsibility. You CAN change you. You might not be able to change your circumstances. You might not be able to change the people in your life, but you CAN change you. That’s a powerful place to be!

Don’t put yourself in a place of weakness by thinking you need something or someone to change, and THEN you’ll get your mojo back. Stop making yourself a victim to the circumstances, or to the other people. You take responsibility for you, and decide what result you want in your life and how you can start living into that now.

Get some accountability.

It really helps when you want to achieve a certain result to tell someone, or do it with someone, so you have some accountability. That’s why we’re doing a challenge together in November!

A lot of times the holidays are when it all falls apart. You’re doing your exercise plan just great, or you’re keeping your house nice and tidy and decluttered, and then the holidays come and it all goes to pot!

“Well, I guess now I’m just waiting until January.” No! We don’t want to do that. We want to really get back control of the things we want to have happen in our lives, so that as we go through the holiday season we keep these practices in place.

Instead of just letting everything go, we just keep it in place.

We’re starting the challenge on November 2nd and it’s called The Honor Challenge: 12 Ordinary Days, 10 Life-changing habits. It’s based on this scripture out of Romans 12:10.

Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. ~Romans 12:10

Go here to sign up and get the Honor Challenge Guide. I will be doing live videos every day here on my Lifeingrace Facebook page, and TOGETHER, we’re going to get our mojo back!!!

I can’t wait to get started!

What Emotions Are You Indulging In?

October 14, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth Leave a Comment

So often the reason we don’t have the life we want is because we are operating from emotions that are indulgent.

They don’t move us forward.

They don’t give us momentum.

They really don’t do anything except keep us spinning on a wheel.

I want you to think about the two or three emotions that get you stuck.

Examples of indulgent emotions are: Doubt, overwhelm, confusion, comfort, indecision, busyness, procrastination, self-pity, tired, exhaustion, boredom and blame.

My brain used to love spinning in procrastination because when you’re spinning in procrastination, you’re off the hook. You don’t end up doing anything.

This is not, “Oh, shame on you for spinning in procrastination or doubt or tired or overwhelm.” This is not a moral indictment. This is how our brains work. Your brain tends to look for the easy way out, and if your brain can spin in confusion, and you can tell yourself you don’t know what to do, then you don’t have to do anything.

Your brain would rather have one of these emotions then have a useful emotion, like determination, because if you have a useful emotion like determination, it’s going to be tired at the end of the day. It’s going to have to work hard. It’s going to have to figure things out. It’s going to have to say no to this flesh that always wants what it wants!

This is not a moral thing, and we’re not going to use this to beat ourselves up or to have shame or guilt over the fact that we spin in these indulgent emotions.

Your brain also likes to use any excuse to beat you over the head. “See, you’re so bad, you’re always overwhelmed and you’re always procrastinating.” I like to tell my brain, “Duly noted.” You can have your say for a second, but we’re going to decide how we’re going to think and feel, and we’re going to find useful emotions that will get us out of this spin!

Here’s how you know if you’re living in cycles of indulgent emotions:

You don’t grow.

You don’t progress.

You don’t lose the weight.

You don’t save the money.

You don’t write the book.

You don’t get the job.

You don’t meet your goals.

One of the best ways to know if you’re spinning in indulgent emotions is the results you’re getting in your life. What are the results you’re getting? If the results you’re getting are drama and bitterness, and you feel stuck, and your marriage is not going where you want, and you feel like everything’s out of control, you’re probably spinning in one of these emotions.

Our brain loves keeping us where we are! It takes very little energy, it takes very little fear, and you don’t have to step out of your comfort zone. Your brain hates changing because it likes the routine. It knows how to spin in procrastination. It’s so good at it that you’re an expert! You’ve gotten so good at these patterns that you don’t have to think.

When you spin in these negative emotions, it’s kind of like if you drove the same way to work every day. You just get in the car and you end up at work and think, “I almost don’t remember driving here.” That’s exactly how it feels to be in an indulgent cycle.

When you can recognize it, and decide on purpose that you’re going to generate something else, you can do that. There are emotions we can create for ourselves that do give us momentum, and cause us to take action so we can step into the person that we’re created to be!

What are the emotions that you tend to live in just by default? Before you wake your brain up, before you tell yourself what you really want in your life. We need to recognize this and say, “Oh, I see why my brain likes to be here.” It likes to be confused and it likes to doubt.

If you have paralyzing self-doubt guess what you don’t have to do? That Facebook post, start that blog, call that person, apply for that job, or send your resume!

If your brain can get away with blaming somebody else, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to take responsibility. You can just say, “Well, it’s always their fault, and it’s their fault that I’m unhappy, and it’s his fault that I can’t do this”.

If your brain can settle into a pattern, it’s such an easier way for it to exist. We are going to demand that it doesn’t settle. We’re going to demand the most from it. We’re going to tell it what we want!

I guarantee you that whatever results you have, you have because you have chosen to think and feel these things. The good news is that whatever you want to end up with, you want to be 20 pounds lighter, you want to have 10,000 more dollars in your savings account, you want to get out of debt, you want to organize your home, you want to have a healthy, thriving marriage, it is ALL within your grasp when you decide how you want to think and feel.

You can decide when you get out of these indulgent emotions that are spinning you in a circle.

I had a lot of good reasons, just like you do, to justify my indulgent emotions, and if you want to keep yours you can. Nobody is going to take them away from you. If you want to argue for your limitations and you want to argue for why you spin in these indulgent emotions, you can keep them.

My question is, do you really want to? And ask yourself why? Why do I love spinning in self pity? Why do I always bring this up? Why does my brain love to go there so much? Why is my brain always going to the past to justify the present? You can keep it if you want, but is it giving you the results in your life that you know you want to create? Probably not.

Comfort

Comfort is an indulgent emotion we often don’t recognize as indulgent! We have become creatures who can pretty much have comfort anytime we want. We can eat what we want and we can set the temperature to what we want. My car seats have heaters! We can pretty much cruise through life and stay kind of comfortable, but not really get the life we want.

Comfort is a big one for a lot of us in modern culture. We can easily choose to never be uncomfortable and then 10, 15, 20, 30 years later, we pay the price. Comfort is one that you might not have thought about, but I want you to really pay attention if you’re always choosing things that make you feel comfortable.

We really have gotten to the point in modern society where we can totally avoid discomfort for the most part, and comfort doesn’t get you what you want. We were not built for comfort. We were built to try hard at things, to work hard at things, to be uncomfortable!

The amount of discomfort you’re willing to tolerate will be directly proportional to the life you get to live.

I’m not against comfort. I love taking care of myself, but I also demand a lot from myself. I make a lot of decisions that are uncomfortable in the moment. The reason I put comfort on the list is because it’s so easy for us to be comfortable. The reason I want you to choose discomfort anyway is because it’s the currency to your dreams.

The things you really want in your life are going to require discomfort. I just paid off my house. I wanted to get out of debt and in the process of doing that I had to choose to use the extra money that was in my account to send a mortgage payment, or use it in some way to help get out of debt, instead of using it to do whatever else I wanted do with it.

Choosing discomfort and recognizing when we’re in the indulgent emotion of comfort, is as simple as asking ourselves, “Am I always just trying to comfort myself, to the detriment of myself?” Because choosing comfort over and over again will likely not give you the life that you want.

Self-doubt

Self doubt is so easy to get stuck in. What I want you to recognize about all of these indulgent emotions is you tend to be thinking about yourself. When I first launched Life Mentoring School, there was a lot of doubt. I’ve never done a coaching program before. I feel like I have a lot to offer, but at the same time, are they going to be interested in that?

I had a lot of doubt, doubt about myself, doubt about whether people would respond to it. It’s hard to push through the doubt and just offer yourself . Here’s what I found the key is with self doubt:

Stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about the person who needs what you have. The person who needs your encouragement, who needs your word of light and love.

I realized I have a purpose and I have something that can benefit people, so when I push through the self doubt, it helps me to know that I’m living my purpose and when I do, it helps other people.

Overwhelm

We love to be overwhelmed because when we are overwhelmed, we don’t have to take any action. It paralyzes us and we shut down. The upside is overwhelm is a choice.

Why do we feel overwhelmed? Because of our thoughts. It’s not because of our schedule and it’s not because of what we’ve committed ourselves to. It’s because of the way we think about it. I could take exactly the same schedule and give it to two people, and one person could generate an amazing life and serve the people and do the things. Another person would just shut down, go underground, and go unconscious, basically choosing comfort.

It doesn’t matter what’s on your plate, it’s how you choose to think about it.

Overwhelm is never a productive emotion. I can’t think of an instance where it’s a productive emotion for getting you to the place you want to be in your life.

Confusion and Indecision

We love being confused! This doesn’t make you a bad person. This is not a moral issue. This is how your brain likes to function. It loves to trick you into not doing what you want to do, because when it can tell itself that it’s confused and it doesn’t know what to do, and it doesn’t know which decision to make, it doesn’t have to do anything.

Can I tell you a secret? It doesn’t matter. Make a decision, and make it right by the way you think and feel about it. It really doesn’t matter 99% of the time what you choose. You just choose, and you make the decision right by how you have your own back!

Procrastination

We love is procrastination. It’s deceptive because we think we’re getting somewhere because we’ve got big plans. It gives us the illusion that we’re actually doing something and we let ourselves off the hook. Then, of course, we don’t get done the things that we want to get done.

Self-pity

Self-pity is a hard emotion to give up. It took me so long to let go of this one! My brain just went there on auto-pilot!

I had to decide that self-pity was not how I’m going to get to live the life I was created to live.

Can you be honest with yourself and say, “I don’t really think that’s serving me. I don’t think that this is the way that I’m going to get free, or get unstuck.”

Tired and Exhausted

Lots of us get in the cycle of tired and exhausted. I realize there are some physical parts to this, but when you get into this cycle of tired and exhausted, you’re creating at least half of it, probably more.

You can change it, if you want to, by deciding to think differently. It doesn’t mean you won’t feel physically tired sometimes. It means that you will tell yourself a different story about it.

There’s a difference in being tired from doing our work, and being tired from procrastinating and spinning and being overwhelmed.

Spinning makes us tired, but it makes us the kind of tired that’s not satisfying. You know the kind of tired after you do a really hard day’s work, or you actually write three chapters of your book, or you actually clean out your closet, or you make a big dinner, or you take your family on a long hike?

There’s that kind of tired, and then there’s the kind of tired we get from all of these indulgent emotions. We want the first one, the one that’s satisfying!

Ask yourself if you’re just telling yourself you’re tired all the time.

How am I creating tiredness, boredom, blame, self-pity, procrastination?

How am I creating this in my life, and how can I decide that I’m tired of creating this?

You can decide this is not really getting you where you want to go in your life and you can choose differently.

Your emotions come from your thoughts, and if you are having indulgent emotions it’s because you’re having indulgent thoughts. It’s because you’re feeling sorry for yourself and you’re telling yourself your sad story over and over. It’s because, in your mind, you keep blaming other people for why you show up the way you do, and why you haven’t done this, and why you haven’t done that. It’s because you’re spinning in overwhelm and you keep telling yourself that you’re overwhelmed.

If you continue to do that you get to stay overwhelmed. When you decide you want to change you really have to work on your thinking.

The beliefs you have in your life are just thoughts that you practice over and over.

If you want to think something different, then you have to practice that thought over and over. It’s not going to be second nature.

You’re not going to all the sudden go from overwhelmed to productive.

You’re not suddenly going to go from comfortable, to being willing to tolerate discomfort.

You’re not suddenly going to go from self-pity to self reliance.

It’s going to take some work. It’s going to take some discomfort. It’s going to take being willing to practice the new belief, the new thought, over and over again to generate the feeling that you want. The one that will give you the life you want.

This is true in every area of your life. It’s true with your health, your weight, your finances, your marriage, your parenting, your job, your creative life, and it’s true for the state your home is in.

These indulgent emotions aren’t taking you anywhere. They don’t create momentum. They don’t cause you to take action. They don’t give you the life you want.

I hope you’ll decide what other emotions, useful emotions, you want to create instead of spinning in these!

How to stop procrastinating and what it’s costing you

September 9, 2020 by Edie Wadsworth 6 Comments

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I love the topic of productivity, and I love comparing myself to several years ago. I’ve been able to totally transform my ability to be productive and I’m going to share a few of those secrets, in the hopes that you can shift this in yourself. It will help you get everything done that you want to get done!

I have always been kind of an energetic crazy go getter. I’m an enneagram three. I came into the world raring to go! I’ve also had periods in my life, I think about when I was in medical school specifically, where I would put things off and then work like crazy to get it done at the last minute!

Are any of you like that? You’re going to get the thing done, but what you’re going to do first is make yourself pretty miserable for a week, or two weeks, or three weeks. Then you’re going to crash course, be productive, and get the thing done, but slide in just in the nick of time.

Now I get more done, in less time, than I ever have. I have more time for rest, and for doing all the things I really want to do, like cook and spend time with my family and work out, but I produce more!

Productivity means we produce things.

Productive doesn’t mean that you’re busy all the time, because we all like to say we’re busy. When I think about productivity I think, “What is that I’m producing?” I don’t just work on cooking, I produce a meal at the end that my family can eat.

Often we like to say we’re working on something instead of, this is what I’m going to produce. What I’ve realized about my own productivity is, I produce a lot more than I ever have, but I also have a lot more downtime than I’ve ever had.

Do you feel like you’re a professional procrastinator? A lot of us feel this way, and we think we’re just delaying things, and we’ll get them done later. What I want to show you is, what you’re delaying is not just a set of tasks.

What you’re delaying is the person you’re going to become when you do that thing.

When you decide on something you really want to do, and you set your goal, your higher brain, the part of your brain that plans and executes, and has goals and dreams, is the part of your brain that wants those things.

There’s another part of your brain that just wants things to be easy. It says, “Don’t do that right now. Let’s just watch a movie. Don’t do that right now. Let’s just scroll Facebook. Don’t do that right now. Let’s go watch the comments on this post that’s exploding”

We’re often sacrificing what we want ultimately for what we want now.

That sacrifice is costing us the version of ourselves we would be if we actually got the degree, or wrote the book, or started the blog, or learned to cook. When I stopped using procrastination as an excuse, I started reverse engineering my procrastination.

Here’s the thing that’s true about people who procrastinate: we tend to get things done, we just get it done at the end, in a very short period of time! This means we’re capable of getting a lot done in a really short period of time, right?

What I’ve learned to eliminate is the three weeks before where you feel guilty, and miserable, and shameful, and worried, and you’re fretting because you’re not doing the thing that you’re supposed to be doing. What if you could save yourself all those feelings, and reverse engineer your procrastination to get all that work done in a short period of time, at the FIRST of the three weeks?

When we procrastinate and we spend a lot of time worrying about what we should be doing, we feel EXHAUSTED. Procrastination is often the reason we’re tired all the time. Our thoughts are exhausting us, and if we could change it around and reverse engineer our procrastination to get a bunch of stuff done in a short period of time, we would save ourselves the toxic thoughts and the exhaustion.

The first step is to recognize why you’re procrastinating. Your brain is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The reason you don’t want to sit down and write the blog post, or write the book, or learn to cook, is because it’s hard.

The things you really want in life are probably kind of hard.

You want to get fit and start a fitness program and go to the gym,and it’s not going to be easy. You’re brain is going to tell you to watch Netflix and start tomorrow. Here’s the beauty. When you train yourself not to do that, almost nothing in this world more amazing than the feeling of having accomplished something hard.

When I turned my taxes in a couple of weeks ago, I can’t even tell you the joy and the lightness I felt because that huge task is done. There are very few things that are more gratifying than really getting something done. It’s energizing!

Recognizing that you’re not procrastinating because you’re a bad person, or because you don’t have self discipline, is so important. What usually happens is, we recognize we’re procrastinating, and then we talk terrible to ourselves about it.

You’re so lazy.

You’re never going to get this done.

You always just put things off.

You’re just the kind of person who isn’t disciplined.

When we talk to ourselves that way and we have all those negative thoughts about ourselves, it makes us feel awful. Then we make ourselves feel better by not doing something hard and by choosing the easy path. We procrastinate more!

Recognize this vicious cycle, and realize this is just what our brains do. They want to get out of the hard thing and they want to do the easy thing. Then you can say, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there, but no, we’re going to do this thing.”

I spent an hour on Sunday night putting everything on my to do list in my calendar. One of the things I put in my calendar is to record the teaching for this month’s topic in my coaching program, which is on productivity.

When it came to today at 10:30 on my calendar, and I’m supposed to be recording a video about productivity, guess what I don’t want to do? I don’t want to do it! I want to do something easier. I want to catch up on the news. I want to watch a YouTube video. I want to chitty chat. Isn’t that what our brains do?!

I’ve trained myself to know that if I will take the 10 or 15 minutes that it’s going to take to record the video, I’m going to feel like a million bucks. I’m going to be able to check it off my list, and it’s going to energize me. That energy is what I’m going to use to continue being productive throughout the day.

When I get to this afternoon when it’s time for me to hang out, or go down to the dock, or watch Netflix, or whatever it is I want to do, I don’t feel guilty about doing that because I know I got all my work done. And now I can really enjoy my rest time.

What we often do instead is, we don’t focus and get our work done, then we feel guilty the whole time we’re not doing it. Then we don’t really enjoy our rest because we feel guilty that we didn’t get our stuff done.

We live in this really weird, messy middle.

Instead of focus, productivity, and true rest, we have guilt and worry, and we are exhausted. Recognize this vicious cycle and don’t make it mean that you’re lazy, or that you don’t have self discipline. Just say, “There goes my brain trying to get out of work again. Interesting. No, get to work, brain. Here’s what your job is for the next 20 minutes.”

Recognize the cycle and re-decide what it means. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It doesn’t mean you’re not self disciplined. It means you have a human brain.

Your human brain wants to do things that are easy that don’t require much energy.

If you spend your life doing only things that are easy, you’re going to have a life that doesn’t look like the life you actually want. Decide the life you actually want ahead of time, and put those things in your calendar. Then when it comes time to do it, you just train yourself to do it.

Now you’re going to reverse engineer your procrastination. A couple of weeks ago, I was going out of town on a Thursday, and I wanted to be able to get two weeks worth of work done in three days. I was planning all of this on Sunday night, and this was going to mean that my work was done really early.

It would’ve been easy to say, “I’ll just wait until Wednesday. I’ll just work like crazy on Wednesday.” Here’s what I did. I started putting things in my calendar, everything I needed to get done before I left to go out of town. I loaded it really heavy on Monday and Tuesday, so by the time I got through Tuesday afternoon I had 90% of it done and a whole day left!

That’s what I mean by reverse engineering your procrastination. Take the time that you have, whatever your deadline is on something, and reverse it. Use that power to get 90% of it done in the first part of the week, in the first part of the day, or in the first part of the month. Then you have some margin for the unexpected.

I hope that helps you make some changes so you can start getting the things you want done, instead of just being reactive and letting the part of your brain that’s like a two year throw a fit and get its way. It just wants to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it.

That’s the reason why people will say, “These are my priorities. Here’s what I really prioritize in my life,” but when you look at how they actually spend their time, it’s not the same. I want you to get to the point where you can say, “This is what I prioritize,” and when you look at your actual calendar, and the way you spend your actual time, it reflects the priorities you have!

You can do it! I promise you can. You don’t have to be a workaholic either. You can do it and still have plenty of rest time, and plenty of free time, and be as spontaneous as you want to be in those hours that are free. That’s because In the hours that you’re focused, and you want to accomplish something, you really do accomplish it!