One of the exercises this week involved listening to one side of a tape for pleasure. Well, I don’t have any tapes, or cds (or a cd player for that matter), so instead I sat down on my coach, closed my eyes, and listened to a TED talk on vulnerability for 20 minutes. It was almost like a 20 minute meditation. Most times when I listen to my podcasts I am either running, cleaning, or walking somewhere. I rarely (ie. never) just listen to them. So, last night I thought I’d experiment with doing only one thing and devoting all of my energy and attention to the completion of that one task. It ended up being very rewarding. Even though I’ve listened to this particular podcast several times, I heard things I hadn’t heard before.

I am the type of person who always has 10 things on the go at once – the result? I don’t really get anywhere with any one of those things. One of the assignments in my goal-setting group was to pick a skill that you wanted to work on. Being me, I had 12. I want to learn how to speak French, sing, dance, juggle, do a backhand spring. “If we split our focus between too many things, we won’t get anything accomplished 3 months from now” my friend Ren so wisely said. If I want to move forward in my life I’m going to have to focus. Perhaps my need to be constantly busy is another way that I keep myself stuck.

I already knew this, but perhaps the way to actually begin making improvements in my life is to do less… but to do less with more focus. It’s hard, because there is so much that I want to accomplish in my life, but I think I need to just remind myself that I won’t accomplish anything unless I start doing less. Funny how that works.

Oh, and if you’ve never listened to it, I highly recommend listening to Brene Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability. I’ve included a quote from the podcast below the photo.

“We live in a vulnerable world, and one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability. We are the most indebt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult cohort in US history. The problem is, that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say: “here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a couple of beers and a butternut muffin… You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects or emotions. When we numb those, we [also] numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.”