4th post

So today at 5:45 AM I was at the airport dropping off my brother as he is also heading back to china but for him its to teach english in Hefei. My life will go back to being busy and I will get some relief from insanely busy. I am planning to catch up on my kicks and get some serious practice in for the tiger challenge competition now that I am not running to calgary for visa's, taking my brother for his medicals, helping with last minute things that always come up when you are travelling etc...although now that I don't have all these people to take care of my acts of kindness is going to be harder to achieve. As of yet I have not had time to figure out how to get this blog posted on the ubbt site ... I will work on it this week. It has turned out that I am really enjoying this training ... sure I'm behind on some things but even what I have gotten done has been alot more fun than I expected. My kicks are looking much better ... my form is getting much better! It feels really good right now!

3rd post

This past week has been pretty good except for the migraine I had on the weekend. I bought some chocolates on thursday night when I went grocery shopping and it appears that the "may contain peanuts" statement in this case meant they did. I ate a couple on friday night (junk food night) and by the time Saturday afternoon rolled around wow a killer headache and a rash. So stupidity did me in! I'm not much of a pill taker but there are times ... and this was one of them. Did not get my situps or pushups done (the change in elevation for these make the headache excrutiating) on Sunday but managed a tai chi rep, a couple very slowly done forms and my two hundred kicks done at tai chi speed with my fingers braced on the wall for balance. Other wise things are going okay and I am somewhat amazed that I am actually getting alot of this stuff done. My kicks have improved alot already and I really enjoy doing them ... even 200 at a time. My husband has been helping huge with my goal to eat healthy ... HE makes us smoothies every morning with some sort of healthy greens mixture, fruit & juice & yogurt, all organic and it tastes great. In addition he drags me past the chip aisle at the grocery store without stopping, chips are a real problem for me. So for now things are still mostly on track. The hardest part of this is keeping track, so now I will head off to physout and update my numbers.

2nd week

Wow some of this is complicated but now I have it all ironed out I think ... Sifu Brinker and I have worked out the goals and I figured out how to use the phys out site and posted my stuff there. I am already behind on some. Yikes! The only thing I have left is to get this blog stuff on the UBBT site which I will try to accomplish today ... it depends on work though. I am having trouble with the acts of kindness, so far my daughters have been pointing out nice things I have done for various people and in various situations but its hard actually acknowledging that it is an act of kindness. I keep thinking well thats just what you do! Nothing special, merely polite or considerate and its weird how difficult it is to actually record it. I feel somewhat embarrassed that I would dare to write it down. I actually hide the page in case someone opened my planner and read it. There is probably some strange issue associated with this that I do not have a name for. So physically ... my neck hurts, my shoulders hurt, my hips hurt, and my knees hurt. So far its just sore muscles and a few aching joints, hopefully it will all hang together till the end of 2011.

Goals are as follows:
20,000 pushups with 80,000 kicks to supplement
50,000 situps
4160 lengths swimming
1000 mile walk'
150 reps of the tai chi long form
1000 reps of mu long kung (spelling defeats me)
compete in tiger challenge and achieve a medal in musical and hand forms
perform and record 1500 acts of kindness
journal weekly
healthy meals 6 days per week
complete the master gardner workbook
go to china to see the girls in the fall
achieve silver 2 in ballroom dancing in 9 dances
3 spotlight dance performances

talk at you next week.

The first week!

So Sifu Brinker and I have gone round and round about my very careful goal setting. I like to plan things, make lists, suceed at the goals that I set, you know weird stuff like that. I have been setting goals for the past couple of years and playing along with the UBBT game plan. Truly even though I wasn't part of the UBBT Team I still got alot more accomplished than I thought I might have. So this year I decided to join the UBBT Team and with Sifu Brinker giving me several pushes have set what to me are completely unrealistic set of goals to accomplish for this year. The careful planner in me is totally freaked out! So to date because I spent so much time carefully planning my orgininal submission it was just under the wire. Good thing I did so much extra for situps and pushups on Jan 1st or I would be really far behind ... right now I am hanging on by my fingernails for most everything. Still working on a photo of the real me ... the picture is just an example of how I feel right now.

Terry Beckett

Priorites

I have outlined my new goals for 2010. FINALLY!

I have planned out my training and started the program. Last year although I was not successful at everything I set out to do, it really brought the lesson home about setting priorities, making a plan, definining how to achieve the plan and follow thru.

The daily routine for me is the hardest ... doing the important things every day! I get caught up in the urgent things, and with a life as busy as mine its pretty easy to get buried under urgent and important gets put off again and again. My husband is probably the best example of a person who can manage his life, once you know his priorities/goals well you can pretty much predict how everything is going to go. Its rare that he deviates ... true its hard to get him to commit to something but once his interest is caught well its all over but the doing. I have always envied him this ability/trait/characteristic to set his sights and then go get it (whatever it may be).

My hubby describes me as a hummingbird ... busy busy busy, dart here, dart there, multitasking like crazy. I get alot done but the question is ... was it worth doing? Do all these tasks I accomplish take me farther down the road to achieving my goals? Unfortunately for me ... not always. So its all about keeping my focus and sticking with my priorities.

Some pithy remarks to keep me on track,

You have to start something before you can finish it
Slow and steady wins the race
If you don't succeed at first, then try try again
You can only fail if you quit
When the going gets tough the tough get going

Feel free to contribute any one liners you believe are inspiring.

Summary for 2009

It was really a busy year, and I actually had to go back to my original list of goals for 2009 to remember all the things I had set out and checked off.

• Create and perform my own form @ the Tiger Challenge - done and performed Spring of 2009.
• 50 pushups (real ones) a day for a total of 18,250 for the year - failed miserably on this one ... it looked good until July of 2009 then I had two car accidents one in July & one in October and was reduced to knee pushups at best.
• 50 situps a day for a total of 18,250 for the year - set this one way to easy ... increased it to 100 a day ... so I blew this one out of the water.
• Anger Management Course - done back in April of 2009 ... learned alot
• Silver level in 8 dances (ballroom dancing) - completed in Nov 2009
• Compete in ballroom dance competition - completed in Oct 2009
• Know Tai Chi long form by Sept 2009 - so I know it better than I did before but its not ready to show Sifu Brinker ... needs more work.
• Leadership Project ... crashed and burned ... good idea, the implementation was the problem ...

Read:

• A New Earth - I've started it three times this year, having a hard time finishing, can't speed read your way thru this one.
• No Impact Man - great book, learned alot
• Three Cups of Tea - great book, this guy knows how to stick to his committments
• The Peaceful Warrior - still collecting dust on the bookshelf
• Being Peace - small book ... big messages ... I will be reading this a few times over as I have a tendancy to speed read and miss things and you don't want to miss anything in this one.

What I learned ... daily routines were the hardest to implement and stick to, I got what I got done in starts and spurts, the pushups, situps and tai chi suffered the most from my failure to commit to a daily/weekly routine of training. I am disappointed in my performance on this ... it wasn't even that hard to do 50 pushups a day or go thru my tai chi form, I just failed to make these things a priority and rearrange my schedule to incorporate them as part of my day. I got caught up in the urgent tasks and not the IMPORTANT ones.

Still I got alot more accomplished than I would have had I not set these goals, which is I guess the point and it made me aware that I need to rework my planning for 2010 to eliminate or at least reduce my tendancy to get caught up in busy work

I attended an Alpha Mind Course this weekend that included some work on Goal Setting so I should have new year goals all set out by the end of the month.

The last 45 days

Let me diary somewhat ...

At the end of October my husband and I went to Las Vegas and competed in the largest dance event of the year. This was part of the requirements that I set for myself, to overcome my fear of performing. So we entered to perform 96 times! That is 8 different dances (vieneze waltz, waltz, foxtrot, rumba, cha cha, samba, mambo and swing) in two different age groups (the over 50's and the 35 to 50s') both as a couple and with our instructors it was pretty exciting/scary. So by the end of this I was getting pretty blase about getting up in front of judges and crowds and can now essentially not know they are there, which may sound weird but it works for me. How did we do ... well we made the finals in the majority of the events and even got some silver and bronze in a few ... not to bad I guess. Once I figure out how to load some of the video clips up to the site you can even watch a few. Shortly after that Dean and I tested for our silver qualification and passed and did yet another performance (samba) at an event here in Edmonton called Medal Ball. This silver qualification was another requirement that I set for this year so strike another thing off the list of things to accomplish in 2009.

In November the boss decided it was time to apply for our external safety audit to achieve COR for the company. That one sentence does not begin to define the scope of whats involved. The number of ducks that need to be lined up for this to happen, well it was never boring. Our auditor was very nice don't get me wrong, but there are site visits, interviews, masses of paperwork ... endless questions and explanations ... as the safety officer for the company its all my responsibility. So I was busy to say the least but it was a learning experience and although this one was not on my personal list of requirements I'm still feeling a serious sense of accomplishment. The auditor will come back for the close out meeting on Dec 18th so I am not sure if we got it yet ... I will keep you posted.

So its December, the girls will be home late on December 23rd and not leave again until January 19th ... I am pretty excited about that. Last year we were renovating at this time and didn't really have a christmas so all the stops are coming out this year and I plan to spend Sunday Dec 13th decorating and rearranging to my hearts content. The girls will be dazzled when they get home.

Hope everyone else is having fun with christmas stuff ... its my favorite holiday.