Each Monday, Tiffany posts a message that provides positive energy and tips for eating more mindfully. The purpose of the weekly message is to reinforce the ideas from the talks and classes that are a part of the Como Water Membership, and to further support those living the veg-centric lifestyle. To receive our Mindfulness Mondays posts, Become A Member today.

 

It’s OK to Recalibrate

My friends tease me because I’m that girl who writes “draft new to do list” on her existing to do list. The only thing I like more than a plan, is executing a plan, and the only thing I like more than executing a plan, is executing a plan ahead of schedule.

So, when after a totally exhausting week and an equally exhausting weekend, you can imagine how I felt when I realized that I had forgotten to draft this week’s Mindfulness Mondays post. I went into self-judgment-mode. How could I call myself a business owner if I couldn’t even make deadlines? Blah, blah, blah. After a couple of these rather toxic and completely unhelpful rhetorical questions, I literally stopped, took a deep breath, and the phrase “it’s ok to recalibrate” came to mind.

For some reason, this idea–it’s ok to recalibrate, to adjust the relative weights of importance of any thing, of any deadline–is extremely hard for me to embrace. And it’s not just hard for deadlines that others set, it’s also hard for me with relatively arbitrary deadlines that I set for myself.

Like, no one ever said that I had to have my Mindfulness Mondays posts out by 5am. That was a deadline I set for myself. In actuality, there are 24 hours in a day, and I could make my post live at any point during those 24 hours and I’d still be true to my Como Water deliverables.

I was bringing the stress on my self, just like I’ve been bringing the stress of expanding Como Water on myself pretty much every step of the way.

Not one aspect of expanding this business has gone according to the plan I originally set. Not one. And yet, here I am plugging away, making slow progress and experiencing small triumphs here and there. How much more proud would I feel if I viewed my progress as just that–progress, rather than benchmarking it against a business plan and set of deadlines that I devised myself? How much more peace would I feel if I embraced the fact that I am trying the best I can to do the best that I can, and that’s all really anyone can ever ask?

Sometimes I feel like this entire exercise to expand Como Water is one big lesson in the importance of mindfulness. At least from here on out, I’ll try to move through it realizing that recalibration is an important part of the process, rather than an indication of something I’ve done wrong or badly.