Pardon Me While I Elevate: Tips on how to push beyond bad habits!

Pardon Me, While I Elevate!

By: #STUKGIRL STEPH

If you’re any measure of an introvert, then having life drain you to the point of Netflix and Seclusion is 100% on brand. Extroverts, with their penchant for socializing, will go and live an introvert’s worst nightmare when they’re feeling drained. Happy hours, day parties, concerts, yew name it.

EXTROVERTS BE LIKE: “It’s the end of a long week, I’m gonna go out and shake all this stress off on somebody’s dance floor.”

INTROVERTS BE LIKE: “It’s the end of a long week, I’m gonna turn on my TV so it can watch me drink wine and lurk on IG for four hours.”

But very rarely do we come away from these resuscitation acts with anything other than enough energy to mosey forward, no worse for the wear. So what if there was a way to bring ourselves to an even better place than we were before life balled us up and threw us in a corner, just barely missing the trash.

Here are a few methods to effective recouping and regrouping:

GIVE THANKS AND GET CRYSTAL CLEAR

Anybody with the desire to live a life of purpose has to constantly evaluate where they are against where they wanna be. Moments of intense stress can be the perfect time to do some in-house inventory, and it’s important to be gentle with ourselves while we’re doing this and not go flinging things around because we’re tired of looking at them.

Two hours of negative self-shittalking is a long road to nowhere, so while we’re looking at what we have, even if it’s all gone to hell, we have to give ourselves permission to be grateful.

Gratitude can be difficult because the ego likes to put it in the same box as contentment. For example, according to the ego, if I’m grateful for my little bucket that gets me from point A to point B, then that means I must not want anything better because... I’m fine with what I have, right? Wrong. As fuck.

According to the ego, gratitude means telling all your future blessings, “I’m good luv, enjoy.” (See what I did there?)

But gratitude is appreciating something as simple as having an electronic device to read a blog post on, and having a life worth improving.

We all have areas in life we wanna do better in, but we rarely ask ourselves that honest Why. “Why do I want a new job? Is it because I want to make more money or because I hate my boss and the job they hired me to do?”

Sure it might be a little of both but figuring out which one means more (because it’s always one) is the difference between finally landing that dream job, and getting a new job that pays more but you wind up wanting to quit in two years because the newness wore off and your fine enough office bae went back to their ex.

Expressing gratitude for what is, all while getting clear on what’s feeding the passion for something better, means moving away from “I’m bouta do…” and into the realm of “I’m doing...”

TREAT YOURSELF TO SOME NEW NEW

If you wanna go out and splurge on something you’ve had your eye on, do you lil boo. You deserve it, and even if you don’t, nobody can tell you what fountain to throw your coins in.

Something new can also be reading that book you bought last year and only got through the first chapter of. Watch that movie your friend told you was bomb but has been sitting on your watchlist since 2017 because nothing beats a good rerun. If you’re a true life extrovert, try going to a new event that you normally wouldn’t go to, or one you’ve been putting off going to.

As crazy as it sounds, we do a better when we learn to relax outside our comfort zones. Scientifically speaking, new experiences help train our minds to work around it’s innate fear of the unknown.

This makes it easier to call fear on it’s bullshit when it shows up uninvited to once in a lifetime opportunities to whisper, “Nah you ain’t ready yet. You ain’t even done ABC sooo how you tryna get to XYZ all of a sudden?”

New things also help us practice being in the present moment. When we’re doing something we’ve never done before, and enjoying it, our brain has to slow down to process these new experiences and sensations.

In moments like this, time ceases to exist and nothing else matters except what’s in front of us., making our frequency ten times higher than when we’re doing something monotonous.

And if you’re an artist, let me tell you, new things are our holy grail. New experiences mean filling the well, as Julia Cameron calls it, because nothing’s worse than a creative who feels like they’re out of good ideas. So whenever you’re feeling plateaued, get out and do something brand new, it’s like rainstorm in the middle of a drought.

OLD HABITS TRY HARD

There’s confidence to be gained in self-work, and self-love is the protein that builds the confidence muscle. An empath and introvert like myself needs to close off a few times a week to keep it together. But some people probably only need (or can afford) to do it once a week, or once a month. Either way, making it a point to shut down and check in every so often is mandatory for any measure of growth.

Self-doubt is an ailment we’re all familiar with, and as soon as we think we’ve destroyed it, somehow it reinvents itself with twice as much bad bitchery and half the amount of fucks to give.

Without a firm grip on our identity, our desires and some basic gratitude, we’ll wind up numbing out to useless distractions. Practicing gratitude, clarity and openness can do wonders once self-doubt starts sticking its “Mother knows best” in your business.

We can pretend that by not taking that leap, we’re saving ourselves from some horrible fate. But deep down, we know spending years giving our desires the Augustus Gloop treatment is gonna fill us with unbearable regret. Don’t watch your wildest dreams fall into a murky river and be sucked up into a big ass pipe, eventually being written so far outta your story that it’s barely a memory once the credits roll.  

Be grateful, find your WHY?, try some new shit, then rinse and repeat as often as possible.

If it seems too simple it’s because it is that simple, but we tend to overlook simplicity in favor of something our brains can overanalyze, present company included. I’m not saying don’t turn on an old episode of a VH1 reality show after a long day of wanting to quit your job. If that’s gonna take the edge off then by all means.

But we have to limit the shiftless recouping if possible. In times of stress, it’s better to try and magnify our aspirations than to try and pacify our woes. So give yourself a A for effort and stay focused on what’s important… You.