front loading the holidays

​Lets talk about the holidays.  Yea yea. We all know the deal, holidays can be hard.  They’re supposed to be such a magical time when you are surrounded by friends and family, overindulge and probably have some time off of work to rest.  But as magical as this is, I think those factors can also be a downfall.  After Thanksgiving this year, I looked at my husband and said “sometimes I feel like it’s just us against the world.  I feel like we were totally thrown off course the last couple of days”.  See, the thing is, we’ve both been on a personal development mission.  Both of us have pretty big dreams and we work every day to work towards them.  Knowing this, we have made it our goal to immerse ourselves in the personal development world.  This means that we start our day listening to people who inspire us.  We read books to teach us how to be the best people we can be.  We follow blogs and podcasts of those  who have done what we want to do and take as much inspiration as possible. We work out on a regular basis because we know our dreams are not attainable if we are not healthy.  All of this requires a pretty solid schedule and consistency and when the holidays hit, that can all fly out the window.  We knew this going into Thanksgiving so we did as much prepping as we could.  We knew we were going to see friends and family that we don’t normally see who were going to question our life decisions and we were totally prepared to stand up for our passions and to “not care about other people’s opinions”.  Hahahaha!! Some people didn’t care at all what we were doing, they didn’t even ask. I find that a little weird but moving on.  Then there are the other people that for some reason are VERY interested.  The ones that question all of our decisions and made us question everything about our life.  From parenting decisions to business decisions.  From career choices to friendship choices.  From dietary choices to coping with trauma advice.  All of this made my head spin in circles.  All of my best intentions to “explain” or “teach” about what I have learned through my self-development journey were ignored or glossed over.  And I was thrown off track.  Way off track.  How could I be so immersed in self-development and so confident in my decisions and be thrown off track so easily? Maybe I wasn’t cut out for all this.  Maybe there wasn’t anything to this self-development path. But I had been working so hard and I had felt so good and had a new REAL LOVE for life before Thanksgiving hit.  Here’s what I know after having some time to process this.  The universe, God, whatever you call it, will continue to throw these obstacles in your face until you figure out how to deal with it.  It’s like a cruel joke.  So Joe and I hunkered down and got back to work.  It took a little butt whooping from my own life coach to set me back on course.  We looked back on what had been working prior to Thanksgiving and what I had stopped doing since Thanksgiving hit and I started implementing those aspects back into my routine.  I think most importantly, I looked at why I let all of the questions from others affect me so much.  I realized that these are the people that love me the most, the ones that care about my future and happiness and don’t want to see me fall.  Turns out, I’m going to fall.  I’m going to fall hard and a lot.  And it’s ok. I’ll be fine. My friends and family will need to learn this too.   Guys, it took two weeks, but I got my groove back and am back on track.  I found that JOY and PASSION again.   Right on time for Christmas!!!  Hahahaha!!!