weekly check-in #3, january 15th, 2011.

[erika]

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

Aristotle

Greetings, earthlings! Welcome to WEEK THREE of our amazing resolutions marathon. I'm erika, this is resolving, and here, in this very entry (!) is your check in post for this week.

So how has your week been? Good, bad, just ordinary? Are you working on your resolutions, and what have you been up to otherwise?

Take a deep breath, and let’s let each other know: how’s it going?

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The question for this week is again taken from the Elements of Change, and it's about our dreaded foe, relapse:

Expect relapse — What might trigger a return to a former behavior?

Stumped? Some resources: What to do when your diet resolutions suffer from a relapse, or a PDF dealing with the same issues that's a little more general.

Feel free to answer in the comments, or if you would like to write a journal entry about it—go right ahead, just link it from the comments please.

Comments

[tielan]

Week has been madly busy with a whole bunch of stuff.

1. I have finished all my ficathons with hard deadlines. This is important, because it means I can start sorting out the ones with soft deadlines and working out what's next on the writing front.

2. I am working on two quilts right now, and assorted individual quilt blocks.

...I need to go back and remind myself what I put down for my NYRs, don't I?

[flowerstar]

Your posts always make me want to make a quilt again! I enjoy seeing what you are working on :).

[tielan]

Quilting is one of those things that I'm really digging this year, so I'm glad that people are being entertained and inspired by them! :)

[flowerstar]

:)

Mind if I ask you something? I read in your journal a bit, and that you wrote about auctioning off stuff for charity made me think. Lately, my main problem with crafts was that I didn't have any use for them ... I have tons of tablet-woven lace, for example. Did you make experiences with auctioning craft stuff yet? I wouldn't know where to start :/.

[flowerstar]

This week was bad :(.

- I don't even know why exactly, but food and eating was difficult for me again. You probably should know that I have an eating disorder, Binge Eating Disorder. I'm recovering and the main symptom - binge eating attacks - is pretty much under control but eating and all things around it (cooking, buying groceries, etc.) can be very difficult for me when I'm not feeling well. So I had a pretty bad eating pattern this week, and I expect it to reflect it just as badly on the scales next week as they did this week.

- I also didn't clean a lot, just managed to keep control of the mount of dishes. I caught up a bit yesterday, at least.

- No jobs fitting my profile this week either ;_;. I noticed that my resolution in that aspect was really unrealistic - there simply are not enough jobs for my profession in the area where I'm looking, certainly not enough to manage one application each week. There have to be jobs I can write the applications for!

- Didn't do much art/fic either, just managed to prepare a drawing for colouring.

I hope next week will be better :/.

Expect relapse — What might trigger a return to a former behavior?

Mental problems - see above - and a stretch of lack of success are the most important causes, along with lack of time. I'm easily discouraged and I'm trying hard to tell me that relapses do not constitute failure.

[tielan]

*hugs*

This is going to sound horrendously twee, but: "it's not failure until you give up."

Are there any tasks that can be broken up into still-smaller tasks? Like preparing a drawing for colouring as a subset of 'finishing a full picture'? Perhaps turn it into stages and complete those stages, rather than counting the project as a whole?

[flowerstar]

*hugs* Thank you! I think that's a good saying, twee or not :). And I'm not giving up!

Yeah, I try to do that - spending a bit of time on a resolution is better than nothing at all. So transferring the drawing to the watercolour pad counts as something (and today I started colouring!). I'm working on seeing the small steps instead of just the whole picture ^^.

[silverhare]

Pretty bad, to be honest.

I haven't exercised because the Wii board is broken (and I think I'm using this as an excuse not to try other forms of exercise..)

I got two job rejections and at my current job I was £23 down on my till and had my locker searched, which was a miserable experience. I'm not feeling too optimistic about changing jobs in the near future.

[watersword]

::deep breath::

This week was — rough in retrospect? It felt okay while I was in the midst of this, but I don't really have anything done.

I talked to my therapist in more detail about how to handle transitioning out of "being in therapy" and possibly moving to another city during that transition. I did a very small thing promptly for OTW. I had a really good, hard session of therapy, during which it emerged that (a) my laptop is probably more in touch with its feelings than I am, given that it has an activity monitor, (b) my girlfriend is definitely more in touch with her feelings than I am, and (c) I am capable of learning from the past, go me. Had a networking lunch with a colleague and some people she wanted to introduce me to, and a meeting in-person with the rest of my club's officer board. I sent President Obama a letter about closing Guantanamo (and bitched on Twitter and got retweeted! which is not actually action but was exciting anyway). Completely and utterly forgot to get books about race from the library. Read things but forgot to add them to goodreads (oooops). Talked about scheduling & the first project we want to code with engineer-hacking-friend. Did two days of pushups, walked a lot.

...seriously, that is basically nothing, although small incremental change is good. Yes. ::tries to believe this::

As for What might trigger a return to a former behavior? OMG SO MANY THINGS. Mental health! Burnout! (OMG so much burnout.) Inertia! The desire to lie in bed eating chocolate-covered raisins! ....I didn't say that.

[willidan]

I did pretty well this week. I finally called and made a doctor's appointment, so getting a handle on my health is on its way.

Shopping: also much better. I got some gift money for Christmas and I bought a big ticket item, but did not spend any earned money on it. And only bought stuff I needed at other stores.