The experiment is off to a grand soul tonifying start…I was so enthralled and felt so with each of you as your comments came in… Thank you!

I’m (yet again) amazed by the power of awareness. Awareness rocks!

What I learned (warning: I learned a lot)

By lovingly being aware of my pattern which was (is):

… jumping into action without asking myself what I want or what feels good,

(otherwise known as speediness)

and by knowing that you were being aware of your pattern and we would come back here and check-in about how our paying attention shifted or didn’t shift things, I learned so much, it pretty much bowls me over.

As you know, I’m working on a slew of stuff around Comfort During Uncertain Times, around fear and change and uncertainty . But last Sunday, I got the wild hair to do this very simple, very quick project… (go ahead, chuckle knowingly) which was to compile and edit the short audios I’ve been doing over the years (I call them Mood Changers), and maybe just create a couple of new ones and record maybe a few of my Comfort Wishes and get these all on to a CD and package with my books for holiday gifts…

I was sure doing this would only take a day, two at the most.

It took all week.

And as the week progressed, I was aware of how my hurry-up-and-get-it-done-pattern is helping to perpetuate the key issues I’m struggling with in my business. But you may say, so what? You still did it. To which I say and I learned so much — which is the main reason, besides loving, we are alive and by the by, the only way we change– so there!

I learned:

• That I don’t allow enough time for projects.
• That asking myself, “Are you sure you want to do this project?” made me do a little due diligence to make sure the project made sense which is good business.
• To accept that doing this project would take longer than I thought and that was okay.
• The link between wanting to be special and original in all I create and hurrying up is huge and important and I will be paying more attention to that link going forward.
• How I have a story that doing a lot fast and working long hours is exciting and interesting and makes my life more meaningful but as soon I’m actually doing a lot and working long hours, I want to be hiking in the woods with the doodle dogs and going to yoga class and talking on the phone with my best friend Barbra. In other words, I actually like balance.

• BIG NOTICE: Speediness contributes to me being all over the map and getting sucked into the lottery syndrome and thus not building the systems that will allow me to be creatively, steadily productive.

… Pause while I breath and pat myself on the back as I really want to turn away from this learning and check email or otherwise distract myself but I’m going to sit still and breath….

…Because I’ve seen this pattern before and that’s why being willing to look at our patterns means we are terrifically brave. I first wrote about this speedy all over the map tendency of mine in February 2006 and again in April 2007.

A lull in writing while Jen appreciates this fact.

Another lull while Jen ponders how awareness of our patterns and accepting those patterns without immediately running to change them are so intimately linked to loving ourselves.

Another lull while Jen wonders about her friend Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s powerful question, “What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?” and what that has to do with loving our patterns.

Whew! That was a whole heck of a lot of understanding going on there… loving myself for staying with it…loving myself for seeing it yet again… hoping you are loving yourself, too.

Because Choosing Your Life Mondays is not never ever an invitation to beat yourself up!

And now, drum roll, the Choose Your Life Monday focus for this week:

This week I will lovingly notice my pattern of wanting to do everything yesterday (aka speediness) and let myself stop and feel the creative urges behind that speediness

(That may sound a little vague and I’m sensing that my speediness and my love of life are intimately entwined and that stopping to feel that link, while scary as all get out, will be very revealing.)

I won’t try to change what I’m doing, I’ll simply stop and feel.

Want to join me? Name your pattern in the comment section. You can name the same pattern from last week, if you played last week. Or you may want to tweak yours a tad. Try to keep it simple. Which I have not really modeled.

And if you wish, join me in sharing your reflections on what you noticed about your pattern this past week. Or not! Certainly I will not be processing this long every week! Trust me on that.

Related posts:

1. Choose Your Life Mondays
2. Life is a Verb
3. You Don’t Have to Choose!