March Daily Practice Wrap Up – Send Your Peeves Packing

So, it’s the last day of Sending Your Peeves Packing. How did you do? Are you now peeveless? Has everything that has been bugging you for month’s been sorted out? Did you make a list of things that were irritating you and spend the month kicking them into touch? I hope you did…and if you didn’t quite go that far (as I didn’t), I hope you at least made the list and started to kick a few of those annoyances out.

I only half committed to this practice this month – gasp! I know, right, I should be perfect?!! But I’m not – it’s a funny thing…even if you pick the practice, even if you WANT to do the practice, even if you have a daily reminder from your friendly Donnaonthebeach facebook page, sometimes if you don’t really commit to it, it just doesn’t happen. And the reason I am sharing with you that I didn’t do it ‘perfectly’ is that imperfection is NORMAL!

If you try to take up a Daily Practice and you do it 5 days out of 30, how do you think you’ve done? Did you fail? Are you inspired to keep going? Or do you just dump the practice? Like most people – think of New Year’s Resolutions that get dumped by the 9th of January! Most of us will see 5 days out of 30 as a failure. Most of us will at that point give up. But I would like to present an alternative plan – treat it as an experiment. Evaluate your experiment. What worked, what totally didn’t work, what could you improve on to make it easier for yourself to succeed?

It’s not what most of us do. We try something. We perceive that we fail. We stop trying. We try again (often doing exactly the same thing as last time). We perceive that we fail again. We stop trying, now beating ourselves up for being 50 shades of useless. And so the pattern continues. Maybe we start to notice (after the 8th failed experiment) that there is something we could tweak that would work a lot better – something we could have picked up on the first time if only we’d been more curious about what happened in the experiment instead of jumping to the conclusion that it failed because we’re rubbish in some way.

Nothing you try is ever wasted because you learn from it…if you allow yourself to learn from it. If you just aim for perfection and fall short of your own unrealistic expectations, you just undermine yourself some more. And that just doesn’t help. So don’t do it. Treat every new thing as an experiment – give the experiment a chance to work for one thing, decide how long you will experiment for, evaluate the experiment when it ends (or when you find you’ve just stopped doing it, whichever comes first!), see what you can do better next time – whether you decide to continue this experiment or not.

So, here’s my evaluation of the Daily Practice of Sending My Peeves Packing:

What worked:
It’s wonderful to be able to see through my windscreen – it turns out that split rubber on your wipers is even less effective than I realised. Hoorah for Halfords. I love looking up from my desk to see the two pictures you see here – one of them had been on the wall for years in a truly hideous frame, the other was a card of a painting I love that had been cluttering up my desk. I’ve sorted out some financial peeves that had been irritating me for a while. It made me happy to clear some things up that had been bugging me for a while – as I knew it would. Now, every time I get in my car, I smile at the new wipers. Every time I sit at my desk, I smile at the newly framed and gorgeous pictures.

What needed tweaking:
Some peeves come back – washing hanging about ‘drying’ (my least favourite thing in spring/autumn – there’s not enough heat on to dry the washing indoors, not enough heat outdoors either. Harumph. And yes, I do have a dryer…but not everything can go in the dryer). The messy desk. That came back again and again over the month. Some peeves are still sitting on the list. Like the pile of CD’s to be sold/recycled/got rid of, and the HUGE pile of shredding. Basically I didn’t spend as much time doing things off the list as I would have liked.

I know exactly why that was though – I have too many Daily Practices that I’m trying to bed in as habits – I started the year with a list of 7 practices I wanted to do every day – yoga, meditation, tidy/clutter clear, get outside, go to bed earlier, eat a piece of fruit and dance. After 8 weeks of trying to squeeze all these things into my day, I got Daily Practice Overload. The Send Your Peeves Packing Practice was too much to add as well!

So will I continue? Yes. It won’t be a Daily Practice – but I’m going to keep the list where I can see it, and every few days, I’ll take the time to do something off the list. As I have the Daily Practice of Tidying/clutter clearing on my list of 7, if I recommit to that practice a few times a week, I’ll clear a few things off the list by doing that every day.

So how about you? How did your experiment for Sending Your Peeves Packing go this month? If you didn’t join in with this Daily Practice, what experiment will you evauluate? Let me know what you discover – leave me a comment below!

And don’t forget to come back tomorrow to find out what I have decided will be April’s Daily Practice (I think I’ll find this one a lot easier to actually DO!)

Love

Donna.x