Why is the Now self the hardest? It is the one that gets us into all kinds of trouble. It forgets to do things for our Future self, and often has to ignore our True self. The Now self takes all the flack and incoming from all the things in our lives that seem to heap themselves on us at the most inopportune times.
The Now Self Takes The Blame
Remember when you said you would love to do that project, and you put it on your calendar and that deadline seemed perfectly reasonable and really far away? Except you forgot to thoughtfully plan, and now, while you have been honoring your True and Future selves, your Now self has to get that project done. Everyone else has left the building and Now is standing there holding the ball. Whose fault will it be if the project doesn’t get done? Who should have been planning? Well, Now is always in charge, so Now takes the blame.
The Now Self Creates the Problems
Let me enumerate some ways that the Now Self may cause problems:
- Failing to Plan
- Reacting to Others
- Letting Others Set the Agenda
- Giving Our True Self Too Much Latitude
- Giving Undue Priority to The Wrong Things
- Wanting To Make Everyone Happy
- Failing to Listen to Our Intuition
- Forgetting that Future Self eventually becomes Now Self!
Your list may be a little different. Women tend to see themselves as part of a system and as a result we take too many other things into account when deciding what to do and when to do it. Our generosity of spirit tends to put ourselves somewhere down a list of priorities. And that gets us into trouble.
Balance: A Triad
If we have a True Self, a Future Self, and a Now Self, that could be a perfectly balanced stool. Or it could be a tippy thing that causes no end of difficulties. Finding that perfectly balanced stool within your life is what we all need to do, every day.
Can you list one thing that you could do to each leg to make your stool more balanced right now?
This is how I would fill out that list:
Then how do I implement?
- I’m going to proofread this and publish it before 6 pm.
- I have a very cool idea for a class. I need to think it through as
- For some reason this is so hard for me. I am going to punch my manuscript and put it into a notebook for editing, make notes on the projects on the left side of my desk, and maybe pick up my floor.
How will you balance your stool? Download this to do your own balancing act.
Postscript
I woke up Saturday thinking about this and observed myself all day (it is only mid-afternoon).
First, I can report that I did NONE of the three things I wrote above before leaving my office. The only thing I did do was to shut down my computer because the new one doesn’t take an eternity to start up again.
Second, I planned my Saturday entirely differently. I planned to work on my office tidy-up, but remembered that I needed to update my Link in Bio page, so fired up the computer and did that. As I did that, I remembered that I needed to fix a product page, so I did that. At some point the mail came and there was a notice from the bank that it was not going to reverse the fraudulent charges made on my account. $1200. Mitch was on the phone. I keep working, responding to his queries as they came up. Still not anything I had intended.
This made me realize that this is how every day goes. I do something, then do the next thing that flows from that, and on and on until it is time to leave my desk, where I have rarely finished what I intended to. I think I have identified my problem! As always, it is me, but it will give me some food for thought.
Leave a Reply