The other day I woke up nice and early and started my morning routine. Make some coffee, put away the dishes, journal for a bit.
Since I love podcasts, I popped in my headphones for a morning session.
But I quickly found myself distracted and unable to listen. It was too early to hear someone’s life story about how growing up on a peach farm inspired her drive to start a jam empire and yadda yadda yadda.
So I made a rule: no outside voices in my head first thing in the morning.
We all start life with rules, from clearing plates to when to go to bed.
As adults, we simultaneously abandon these rules while making just as many of our own.
We often don’t verbalize our rules or even acknowledge them at all. But they’re there.
There are good rules, like not looking at your phone for the first hour after you wake up on the weekends or not watching Criminal Minds just before bed (kidnapping nightmares are guaranteed, from personal experience).
We also make some bad rules.
Your rules, good and bad, are individual to you. They might not even seem like rules, but if you hold yourself to them, they are.
So I challenge you to notice your rules. Take stock of what you enforce.
Only then can you decide which ones to keep and which ones to dump.
To being better without missing the rulebook,
Elizabeth