January 12, 2013

I’m spending a lot of time working out what serves me and what doesn’t across the gamut of my life. Obviously the most important analysis has to be the stuff going on in my head. This is something I’ve been doing for years, but I’ve found the renewed focus on it these last few weeks has helped me identify some bad ‘thought habits’ that have crept back in and as such, I need to explore and let them go. As part of this process, I asked my hubby Steve: what are my good qualities that are also bad qualities? (note: I’m not a believer in the definition of good and bad, but it was the easiest way to define it.) Steve’s feedback concurred with my own, with a couple of additions – he’s a brave boy huh? Here are six of the key ones I/we identified Stubborn – I’m bloody stubborn, no doubt about it, and always have been. The thing is, my stubbornness has seen me pursue and try new things while all around me I was discouraged. As a result of going ahead, I believe my life has been richer either because it succeeded more than I ever dreamed it would OR it didn’t and I learnt a valuable lesson. On the reverse side, my stubbornness often sees me pursuing things beyond their sell-by-date, and that is my real lesson. Let it serve me in a positive way but don’t hold on for the sake of proving something to myself. Taking the time to stand back and recognise that a direction I’ve taken isn’t working is OK too. No failure there, which leads to my next “quality” Pride – I’m a proud person and this is a good quality. It drives me to be better, do better and work harder, not for anyone else’s approval, but because I want to be proud of myself. However, pride makes me shy away from situations too. I don’t like to be mocked, and spent my 20s working hard to laugh at myself – which I’m pretty good at now. But pride can hold me back and I need to recognise when that is the case and say to hell with it, because the truth of the matter is, I really don’t mind being a fool. Fool is good. Screwing up sometimes is OK too, as long as I learn from it I love people – I’m a people person and love all sorts around me – all races, religions, etc… I don’t care where people come from, how much money they earn or if they can do anything for me. As long as they have a good heart – I love them. Seriously, my true joy from life is the diversity and complexity of people I have in it. I love trying to work out what makes people tick and where they’re coming from, because us humans are such interesting creatures. That is the coolest part of being alive for me. However, sometimes this also means I attract people into my life that are not good for me – the energy suckers, or the destructive forces who I know are only destructive because they’re hurting inside. I don’t have the time or energy for everyone, so sometimes I must make the decision to let people go who are not good for me, because I’ve got to take care of me and my family in the mix. Steve has definitely helped me to see this Very focused – I’m so focused its ridiculous sometimes. I can get so absorbed in what I’m doing, people can talk to me (well Steve) for 20 minutes and I won’t hear a word. I think it comes from the early days of working in open plan offices – I just had to shut the world out to do what I needed to do. Being focused is a good thing, but it drives Steve’s nuts. He wants me to lessen this quality a bit and perhaps stop and listen to him when he’s got something important to say? I can do better at this Ruled by my heart – I am quite happily ruled by my heart because it’s the place from which I make my best decisions and get the best advice. I listen to my heart and intuition above all, but sometimes my brain has a good point to make, and I need to get a little bit of balance back in there Easy going – one of Steve’s thoughts is I’m incredibly easy-going about much of life, which is true. I believe it is how it’s meant to be, most of the time things work out for the best, and 99 per cent of the things we worry about don’t ever actually happen. Therefore why waste energy worrying about that 99%? Steve is a worrier and a planner, so sometimes my easy-going nature and his “got-to-be-on-top-of-things” nature clash a bit. That’s marriage. The thing is Steve often needs to act on things long before they are a priority for me, so he’ll do them. There’s no denying it, I don’t like the admin side of life, but I did manage before I met him, just not in the same time-frame he manages things. My conclusion is my easy-going approach actually makes him stress, so I need to act a bit earlier within Steve’s time-frame  because that will help him and all it means is I’ve done it earlier anyway. We’ve agreed that this is something we need to work on, because our approaches are SO opposite, we need that middle ground to ensure we’re both at ease in this mix called marriage There’s a sample of mine, although control freak should probably be in there too? I’d love to know what you think are your good bad qualities? While you’re at it, join me on the Without the Bollocks Facebook page if you want to continue the discussion! Yours, without the bollocks Andrea