I’ve been feeling a little less than myself lately and so I wanted to get my thoughts down with hopes of comforting myself and uplifting anyone else that may be in a similar situation. This time of year for me often brings a bit of darkness. Now, I suppose this is natural because it literally gets dark at 4 pm, but something about entering a new season that corresponds with coldness and isolation always leaves me a little bummed out. 

My days become less meaningful because I’m not going out and doing as much and so I enter a vicious cycle. This said cycle includes: Waking up→ becoming acutely aware of how cold it is→ wow I just want to stay in my warm bed forever→ look at how sad the leafless trees look→ maybe today will just be a lazy day…you get the point. Basically all of this contributes to a lack of motivation and results in me doing the least to stay the course rather than dominate it. Each winter I experience difficulty pushing myself and venturing outside of my routine because I am so desperate for it to just not be winter anymore, but wow is this such a waste of potential! I think my realization of my laziness, particularly in the winter months, has helped me understand how necessary it is for me to start maximizing and taking advantage of every day possible, because if I’m doing anything less than that I’m wasting my time and potential. Obviously it’s impossible to be 100% yourself 100% of the time, but the only person telling you that you can’t get as close to that as possible is your subconscious mind…aka yourself.

What I’m trying to say and advise is to never settle. Our lives are a continual work in progress and there’s always room to improve and to achieve so why limit yourself? I encourage you to start today with doing something that makes you feel good about yourself and accomplished, take adequate time to congratulate yourself and feel happy and then move on to the next thing. Accomplish something the next day that’s great. Then the next day, and the day after that and so on and so forth until you’ve done so many great things that you can hardly recognize that person that started the journey because you will have massively improved as a human being. We don’t have to be winning Nobel Peace Prizes or leading nations but progress is progress and any step forward is a step in the right direction, so if you do this you can rest assured that you are going to benefit in one way or the other. 

So if you feel yourself getting down or just going through the motions of life, go out and do something great, whether it be big or small, and with consistency you’ll find yourself living out your true potential soon enough. We have an abundance of opportunities as living breathing humans in this world and to neglect tapping into those is plain wasteful. Just promise me you won’t settle because life is too short for that anyways 🙂