Last time in my post Why do I talk about self-mentoring? I briefly talked about my journey on how my personal development practice otherwise known as ‘self-mentoring’ had brought me success in seeing Not All There published, and how I was continuing to rely on it.
As I have just had February’s monthly meeting I wanted to talk a bit more about my relationship with self-mentoring and how it has changed.
Last year during the editing and rewriting process of Not All There, I began setting up what I now know as self-mentoring and this included creating the resources I have for it to support me in achieving my goals. Things that I can do everyday to support myself in achieving my life long dreams. When it was announced back in December by Castle Priory Press that I was going to be published by them, it was quite literally a dream come true and a solid success for my self-mentoring practice.
The reality however of a dream come true has been having to re-balance my life as I go from being an unpublished writer to a writer/author, I am now putting out social media content every day and preparing for a book launch in March. It’s a huge adjustment.
This also meant that the plans I had in place as a mentor and as a mentee were no longer suitable firstly because my dream had been achieved. Secondly because I was living a completely different work/work/home life balance with the introduction of a new job as a professional author.
I attempted to use the self-mentoring resources I had been using whilst working towards finishing Not All There and although this did work to a certain extent I soon realised I wasn’t ready for most of these resources, I wasn’t working towards a new dream yet.
I needed something simpler.
Crisis management.
With my life completely changed I knew that before I could start to work towards my next goal or even work out what that next goal was, I had to focus on the here and now. So I refined an old resource I had used in my late teens and early twenties, a way to prioritise my problems and solve issues of stress. [I will explain the process of how-to at the bottom of this post.]
In January’s monthly meeting, I gave myself a list, and acted on this. When I came to reassess at the end of this month I found that I had tackled problems on the list without even knowing it. The smallest of problems had been tackled the next day and some of the larger problems are well on their way to being sorted.
In some ways, I had worried about resorting to crisis management at this part in my life, I thought that it would be taking a step backwards after all the positive work I’d been doing the previous year. Luckily I had my mentor to disabuse me of this notion. This might be one of the biggest adjustment periods in my life and it was only natural that I needed a new course of action whilst I found my feet. This February I am again finding new ways to self-mentor as I transition from crisis management back to achieving my dreams by focusing on my short term goals.
I am not worrying about my long term goals, as by focusing on my short term goals I am always improving my opportunities to be able to work on those future dreams, by improving myself!
Thanks for coming on this self-mentoring journey with me.
The How-To Guide:
Unlike my sparkly new resources which are all colour-coded and ready to be printed off at a moments notice. This plan was one I was lucky enough to have from years worth of experience, and it doesn’t have a cute nickname but I call it ‘If tomorrow never comes’.
Here is how to use it:
1) Simply write down everything stressing you out, from the largest things in your world to the smallest thing bothering you right now.
2) Then you need to think if, by tomorrow, you made no action to this problem would it a) become worse b) no change c) become better
3) You might want to go through your list twice once with as much positivity as you can muster, and the second time more realistically.
4) Identify the two priorities that will get worse by tomorrow if you don’t act on them today. Often times they are issues such as sleep deprivation or something you thought was a small annoyance but has larger repercussions.
5) Take care of these immediate issues. If you can’t do it yourself, ask for help.