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“Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep it flourishing and growing.”
-Jim Rohn
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A little more about the IDC Project:
The I Don’t Care Project = 1 “Uncomfortable Situation” Every Week
We’ve realized how much what we do, say, and the decisions we make are influenced by what others may think.
The I Don’t Care Project is our way of counteracting that. We intentionally put ourselves in “uncomfortable situations” in hopes of overcoming this fear. These “uncomfortable situations” may include things like doing something other than what is normal and expected or voicing our opinions and beliefs more often.
The Purpose:
To train ourselves to take a stand for who we are and what we believe without worrying about what others may think.
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View our completed “uncomfortable situations”
If you have suggestions for “uncomfortable situations,” leave them in the comments.
I opened one of my journals from a year and a half ago. The entry that caught my eye was, “How the days fly by! Oh time, where have you gone?” Do you ever feel like the year that just passed went by so fast that maybe the rest of your life will pass and you’ll be 80 before you know it wondering where your life went? Is life flying by at a speed that scares the heck out of you? I remember thinking this all the time!
It felt like I was trying to start REALLY living each year, and meanwhile, life was passing me by. Life wasn’t how I had imagined it would be when I got to where I was. I was supposed to look like… I was supposed to have done… My marriage was supposed to be… bla, bla, bla.
So why is this? We all live each minute of each day that we are alive. Why do some people look at their lives and feel fulfilled and time seems to be on their side, while others of us seem to always be playing catch up and time passes way too quickly?
I think the difference is goals.
Without goals we are like a ship sailing around the ocean with no compass. How will it ever reach it’s destination? It won’t!
I used to baulk at the idea of setting goals. It seemed too confining, “I just want to live life freely,” I would say. And I did. And I got pretty much nowhere. Mind you, I had ideas of what I wanted to do and what I thought the future would look like, but no plan of action as to how to get there. I was the ship sailing without a compass, and I felt like it too.
We all want to have lived a full, meaningful, purposeful life, right? That’s what goals do. You want to live so that years don’t just fly by? Set some goals and be amazed at what you can accomplish in a short period of time. No longer does time seem to steal life from you. We are in control of navigating the time we have been given. Each day, each minute.
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people that get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them!
– George Bernard Shaw
Resolving conflict.
This has kept me awake on multiple occasions for too many years. Why do we put this type of stuff off? Push it away, try to forget about it? It sits there in the back of your mind every minute of every day.
You try to tell yourself it isn’t a big deal, but it is. It is there and it eats away at your peace of mind. It’s like a constant drip of a faucet or a big exam you need to study for and keep putting off.
This past week I addressed a conflict/misunderstanding that has been at the forefront of my heart and mind for years. And do you know what happened? The words came out, “I am sorry, can we start over?” And it felt like a dam was broken. It was wonderful!
Why hadn’t I done it years ago? Maybe I didn’t want to… I didn’t know how to… I really don’t know.
It was like I knew I should, and I knew I would, but I just didn’t. For years I didn’t, and for years I hurt.
How very deep some hurts go. Too deep. But I have found the beginning of healing and forgiveness, and how wonderful it is!
Do you have any unresolved conflict/misunderstandings/hurts? Something that plagues your heart and spirit? Something you know, that you know, that you know, needs to be resolved and you just keep putting it off?
May I humbly offer that having been both places… life is much, much brighter over here. On this side, the side of letting go, extending forgiveness and finding beautiful life-giving healing.
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Read more about the IDC Project
View our completed “uncomfortable situations”
If you have suggestions for “uncomfortable situations,” leave them in the comments.
Have you written your goals for 2012 yet? If you want to, but haven’t yet, I bet it’s because you’re feeling like you don’t have the time. Now that Claudia and I have set goals a couple of times, I now there’s one thing that is important to keep in mind: Your goals don’t have to be perfect.
It’s not the point to figure out exactly what you’re going to be able to do for the next 365 days and then write that down. Instead, it’s to dream and think about what direction you want your life to take. What are the possibilities and where do you want to be in a year from now?
So, if you’re someone who wants to set goals but hasn’t, I urge you to make it happen! Don’t worry about blocking out a huge chunk of time and having everything just right. Work with what you have and spend a couple of hours here and there to plan what you want your life to look like.
If you’re not sure where to start, I’d highly recommend using some sort of worksheet. Here are two helpful resources from Dan Miller that I’d recommend:
“The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we hit it.”
-Michelangelo
Michael and I got married 8 years ago. I got Mono while on our honeymoon, and that’s when it started. Watching TV. For weeks on end, my days consisted of dragging myself out of bed to eat breakfast and flop onto the couch to take a three-hour nap. Eating breakfast was exhausting! Then I would shower, and take another nap to recover from the energy spent showering.
I was lonely and bored and TV was something to keep my mind occupied during the many hours of laying on the couch. Michael would often find me comatose as he came in from work in the evenings. Too tired to talk much, we would spend the evening in front of the TV and then go to bed.
I recently heard a statistic that said the average American watches 7 hours of TV a day. I believe it.
As I slowly recovered from mono, I thought my days would no longer include watching TV. I was back to work and around people more, but somehow Michael and I still ended up in front of the TV every evening. It just sat there staring at us… calling us to turn it on! I mean, what else was there to do with our time, right?
Years passed and our evening routine was to eat dinner while watching our shows. There seemed to be something on that we just “had to watch” every night. Time flies when you watch TV. Before we knew it, we were spending 2 or 3 hours a day glued to our TV.
Michael and I recently added up the time we spent watching TV over the first 5 years of our marriage. We figured if we spent an average of 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, we had spent 1 whole year of our waking hours just watching TV. 5,500 hours! Are you kidding me?
What could you do with 5,500 hours? I can think of lots of things:
I can think of tons more but I’ll leave it at that.
Michael and I phased out of our TV watching by putting it up on the third floor, and then got rid of it all together this past summer. It changed our lives.
Want to change your life? Oust your TV and replace it with… Well, what would you do with an extra 5,500 hours?
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There’s a lot I’ve learned over the past year. Things like, what to do to treat people better, what to do to set goals, what to do to have a healthy outlook on life, and what to do to start a business.
However, I was reminded today that knowing what to do is the easy part. The challenge is, doing what we know.
For example, I can tell when I’m spiraling down the negativity spiral of doom and I usually know what to do about it. That’s not the challenge. The challenge is doing something that seemingly every fiber in my being doesn’t want to do!
It’s during those critical times when I seem to be rapidly spinning further and further down, that I need to muster up the willpower, and just do it! FAST!
So, how do we “just do it?” For me, I break the know down into a few simple steps and then close my eyes and force myself to follow through and break the habit. Then, after the dust settles, I look back, reevaluate, and acknowledge what worked.
On a normal day 4 years ago, my husband Michael and I realized we weren’t living the life we wanted to live. We were living a boring life! So, on a hot weekend in July, we started a new life.
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