Level Up! With Shay

Hello my peeps. I hope you all are doing well. I feel as if my blogs lately have turned slightly into my journal and I have to say – I ain’t mad about it. While I do want this site and Level Up! With Shay to be a place where people can come to learn about ways to improve their life, I also want to let you all know that I am doing the exact same thing. Some people have a lot of the skills down pat – discipline, money, meditation, relationships, etc. – but I am definitely humble enough to say that I don’t have it all figured out. I don’t even have to be humble to say that, it’s just the damn truth. And you don’t have to have it all figured out to start an Instagram account, a blog, or a podcast about leveling up your life. I’m leveling up with y’all and I just want to let you know that.

I was talking to a friend earlier today and I mentioned that I am a control freak – or at least have been one in the past (still one, who am I kidding?) and she was slightly surprised. I guess I tend to keep that under wraps with my chillness that I wear when I am being social. But if you were to ask any of my previous romantic relationships, or even my best friend now, they’d probably say “Yeah, she tries to control a lot,” but probably in a nicer more blanketed way like “Yeah, she does a lot”. Haha. And the truth is – yeah! I do! I’ve also written about this in previous blogs too and as I transition into a new part of my life in Atlanta, GA, I see it more and more prevalently as I try to put the puzzle pieces of my life together. So I just gotta talk about it! I wonder…are other people like this? Do they also try to control everything? Are they really as easy going as they seem? I never get any answers when I wonder that stuff because it really doesn’t matter, but I still wonder!

My best friend and I came up with a motto for 2020, before everything crazy started happening, if that matters, but the motto is “there are no rules”. We were always questioning “Should I do this? Should I do that?” and one time we just decided “there are no rules”.

What kind of restrictions do you put on yourself? If you stepped back and asked yourself what your obligations are and who asked you to put those on you, would they seem silly? If they are important obligations to you then they aren’t silly. For example, if having a healthy body is important to you, then the obligation and expectancy to workout each morning is not silly. It’s important to you, so do it. If reading everyday is important to you, then do it. It’s when we put these other obligations on ourselves like writing 3 blogs in a day to get ahead and then getting mad at ourselves when we only do one or two. (FYI, that’s me!). What’s important to me? Sticking to my 1 blog per day for 100 days challenge. So putting the obligation on myself to write 3 blogs when my head is exhausted after writing one, and being angry because I didn’t do the other two, is silly! It may not be super easy to write one blog a day, and sometimes it isn’t, but I push through my excuses and even my tiredness or foggy head because keeping that promise to myself is important to me.

It’s also very interesting how others will say “Get some rest. It’s ok if you skip a day!” I must warn you, never skip something that is important to you just because it is not important to someone else. It’s not like that person doesn’t care about you or have your best interests in mind, it’s just that they have your best interests in mind from THEIR eyes. What is important to THEM is that you are taking care of yourself and are getting the right amount of sleep you need, not you writing 1 blog per day for the next 100 days. Bless them.

This may seem like just one big word dump that I made into a blog post and maybe it is, but there is one major point I want to pull from this for you to take with you – get clear on what is important to you and never give that up for others or for yourself (your tired self who doesn’t want to get up early and exercise). Life is all about priorities and discipline. While you can’t control EVERYTHING, you do have a power of decision over what you focus on. Whether your focus is on a task or if it’s just to enjoy the day, that is in your hands.

Take care and be kind to yourself. You is all you got ❤
#LevelUp

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