becoming less weak

You know what's overwhelming? Seeing all my weaknesses, shortcomings, and failures. Some weeks it seems like every one of them pops up in a 7 day span. And believe me, there are a lot of them, so when they all start to show up at once, I get pretty overwhelmed. 

Usually at that point I'm ready to give up on all the things in my life: 

Homeschooling (because seriously, how do my kids not have all their math facts memorized yet?!) 

Teaching piano (if the kids aren't practicing, it's because the teacher's horrible, right?)

Exercise (time! Where is the time for such things?!)

Writing (there's a thousand other bloggers out there; why read mine?)

Eating healthy (I don't feel like eating carrots! Spaghettios are easy to make...)

Keeping the house clean (see excuse for exercising.)

Mommying (yeah, I'm making that word up and yeah, sometimes I send my kids to voicemail: "Mom's not here, find someone else who wants to listen to you whine.")

Relationships in general (do you know how many birthdays I have missed?!)

And 75 other things that if I sit and think about them too long, I'll get depressed. 

So

Many

Failures!

I must segway now into what brought this topic up in the first place. My 10 year old daughter came downstairs last night after a tough day, completely frustrated with herself and her behavior. "I try so hard to change, but I'm a bad person and I just keep doing the bad things!"  So we had a conversation about how she was a good person who had weaknesses that she could work on. But instead of trying to change all of them at once, we set a goal for her to work on one weakness at a time. She asked to work on two (because at this point, she was feeling pretty terrible about how she had treated her brother earlier in the day.) 

We wrote out her two goals on 3x5 cards and set them throughout the house as constant reminders for her. And we will leave them in noticeable places for the next couple of weeks until the positive behaviors have become habits for her. 

(Maybe this is a good method, maybe not. But it's something to try and I'll let you know how it turns out. Today was great! But it's only been one day soooo.....)

This little exercise with my girl helped me realize that I often want to fix all my struggles all at once. That's a lot to work on all in one week! And perhaps I need to focus on one or two things at a time. Honestly, trying to fix everything is just going to make me give up and fail even more. So I'll pick a couple of my shortcomings and focus on making them strengths before I bite off anymore.

I guess I can't become perfect in just one week anyway... 

😝

KC