A Chic Paris Lockdown – Day 27 – Our Strengths Can Help

 May 16, 2020

Day 27 is “Choose To Look and Feel Amazing” in 30 More Chic Days by Fiona Ferris. Fiona writes about her efforts to make the habit of healthy eating feel fun and exciting.  She also wanted to find a way to make eating junky food much less attractive. She used several mental tools to accomplish her goal: reframing, creating a positive future vision for herself and leveraging an already developed mindset.

“Choose to look and feel amazing”  is a good title for today – I write this tongue-in-cheek – because I do NOT look nor feel amazing right at this moment.  My hair is pulled back into a slightly too-tight, lopsided bun (not cute like Meghan Markle’s trademark “messy bun”) and I’ve a bit of a headache from eating too many dark chocolate covered digestive cookies. I participated in a 3-hour Zoom conference earlier today.  It was productive but tiring. (I feel renewed sympathies for all the kids who are doing full day in on-line video-conference school.)

The thought of getting back on an electronic gadget to write this post was more exhausting than enticing. How could Fiona help me get my lackluster & unmotivated self up and moving? I’ve already written about reframing here and I know how powerful a tool it can be.  I spent a few seconds thinking of ways to put the phrase “crank up that laptop AGAIN” into some form that made me think of beauty or elegance … but nope. Not happening. What about a chic future vision of myself?  I’m too tired to feel visionary right now. Leveraging a past success-skill? Well, that one caught my attention. What applicable past success-skill might I have?

According to one of my chic mentors, Chris Crowley of Younger Next Year, there is one thing that many adults already have a proven track record with – showing up for work. Every day. Regardless of private wealth, (or lack thereof) most of us have built a life around showing up to our commitments. Our commitments might be work or family or something else, but we get our happy selves up & into “work” most mornings of our adult lives.

After enjoying a good long time in the work world and now into my second decade of raising children, I can say that “time and attendance” counts in building a meaningful life. And I had made a commitment to myself that I would write a post for each day of this book. Commitments to ourselves carry just as much weight – and sometimes even more – as commitments to others. So I put down the solitaire card game and walked over to the round wooden table where my laptop lives. Somedays, that’s the best we can do, just put one foot in front of the other.

Fiona comes through with several really useful ideas in this chapter. I can personally recommend her advice to use an already developed skillset in a troublesome or low-motivation area!