October 8, 2010
Last night I gave a talk at a community center for a small group of people – a support group called RAPP (Relatives Acting as Parents Program.) I had been asked to give the talk a few months ago, back when I was working at my other job and had readily agreed. All week long I’d been dragging my feet on prepping for it, and was really just not feeling it. It’d been a hectic week, and I was mentally drained from work and the last thing I wanted to do was put on my happy face and my high heels and talk.
However, as soon as my PowerPoint flashed up I felt it – the little butterflies I get in my stomach whenever I start talking about something I’m passionate about. In this case, I was giving a talk I’ve given a few other times – about how people who are caretakers often neglect themselves. It’s a talk I gave about a year ago at the NC Association of Volunteer Coordinators – that time I was in a ballroom with 50 people behind a podium with a microphone and oh, man I was digging giving that talk. I was on fire. But, I felt the same thing last night though – even though I was in a community center with an aluminum table, my PowerPoint flashed on a cement wall with maybe a dozen people, expectantly looking at me.
When I first started working in wellness, I was really in touch (as my life coach self would say) with the reason why I wanted to do this. It’s a complex bundle of my past experiences – my own struggle with my weight and eating through high school and college, mixed with the experience of becoming suddenly aware of how easy it is to take health for granted when I was diagnosed with colitis – that provide the kindling for my passion for wellness. I know that for me, if I’m not healthy, I’m not anything else. I’m not a good wife, I’m not a good sister, a good friend, a good doggy-momma, a good person when I don’t feel well. Being healthy, for me, gets the junk out of the way so that I can be my best self.
There’s a quote – cleanliness is next to Godliness – and whenever I hear that, I think “no, scratch that… healthiness is next to Godliness.” Being clean is lovely, but being healthy – feeling your best, feeling unlimited by your physical state – is so powerful. I really feel that being healthy allows you to be your best self and to fulfill whatever purpose it is that you’ve been called to.
Teaching people about wellness feels like something bigger than myself – it feels like I’m giving people a tool to get closer to being their best self, and ultimately, to find their own purpose. I know that sounds a little lofty, but on the days that I’m “feeling” it, I know it’s because I’m doing something greater than myself. I consider my understanding of motivation of behavior, my complete lack of competitive nature (which allows me to be a good coach, slowly easing people along to their goals), and my ability to innately hear things that people don’t say out loud to be gifts that I’ve been blessed with. There’s some days I don’t want to do my job. Honestly, it’s hard. It’s hard and it’s exhausting sometimes, to encourage and lift up people who are entrenched in unhealthy patterns. But every now and then, I get one of those blessed moments when I realize it’s not about me – doing this job is not something I chose to do, it’s something I was chosen to do.
I didn’t feel like going to that talk last night, but sometimes it’s the things that you don’t feel like doing that you need to do. I left feeling reconnected to my work and grateful that I have a purpose I feel passionate about.
October 5, 2010
Life is starting to settle into a routine again (ahh, sweet sweet consistency)… just in time for the weekends to get busy with tailgates, trip to the mountains and soon enough, holiday preparations. Last week Matt had to work 12 hour shifts (night ones too) so we’ve been high fiving on the front steps as he comes home and I take off, and having about an hour together after work – sometimes long enough for dinner, sometimes not.
There’s one person who’s been quite happy about this – the Budster. After spending 8 hours asleep with me, he gets a walk and a bowl of breakfast and then he’s back in bed for another 8 hours with Matt.
After a busy Friday and Saturday – pizza/movie/vino with my friend Lauren, a 5k in the morning with Heather and her boyfriend, and rushing around getting ready for and going to the tailgate – I crashed hard on Sunday. I’d been feeling hints of tired all weekend, and then I think I got dehydrated on Saturday (running followed by Gulp-size diet coke followed by tailgate beer… not so brilliant.) Every time I tried to go vertical on Sunday, my head protested vehemently.
As delightful as spending another 8 hours in bed was to the Buddy, it was frustrating to me. Didn’t my body know I had dishes to clean?! There was remnants of artichoke dip plastered on every pot I owned. Laundry to fold! Floors to be swiffered! And then there were blogs to be written and papers to be filed – I still haven’t put away 4 years worth of an office that I brought home from WFU and dumped in my guest room. My blessed hubby has not taken up my dad’s strategy of dealing with annoying piles of crap – that is to say, I have not found my stuff dumped in the outside garbage can.
Yet.
After I roiled around for a few hours being mad at the world that the ONE DAY where I had nothing on my agenda, I couldn’t even stay upright, I finally accepted the situation and took a nap.
A five hour nap.
I know, poor me, right?
(Before I fell asleep, I desperately Googled "emergency housecleaning service" thinking MAYBE just maybe if I could find someone to clean my house while I slept MAYBE just maybe I would feel less guilty about sleeping. It’s not as my house is usually eat off the floor clean, and I’m super particular about it, but it was a bomb, y’all.)
So I slept. I slept, I slept and I slept and I woke up intermittedly to text my mom or answer a phone call from Matt and would test my upright powers.
"Can I stand up yet with no headache? Nope. Okay, back to bed."
Finally around six, I felt functional and was able to clean up the kitchen, do a few loads of laundry and blog. (Priorities… the floor can get swiffered lately, I had to blog, yall.) Matt came home a few hours later with dinner/lunch and a big ol’ Gatorade for me.
Of course, after sleeping most of the day awake I was wide awake at what should have been bedtime, so of course, I fretted about that and how I would already be starting the week with a sleep deficit if I couldn’t fall asleep soon.
Go with the flow is not really my specialty – are you picking up on that?
I finally feel like I’m starting to find into a routine with my work schedule, which is most excellent as this week somehow became jam packed with extracurriculars. I haven’t felt "ready" so to speak to take on the extras the first couple weeks, and I still feel a little bit overwhelmed, but I’m getting there. I mean, if ever there was a week to take! on! the! world! it would be right after a 5 hour nap, right?
Does everyone take so long to adjust to new routines as I do? In college, I often felt like by the time I got a hang of my schedule – it’d practically be midterms. I guess the problem isn’t so much that I take awhile to adjust to a new routine, it’s that I berate myself for *not* having adjusted yet. As if, somehow in my 28 years of routine-loving-living, one day I might wake up and find oh hey! I rock at flying by the seat of my pants now! Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if I just accepted that this is who I am, and anything new makes me wonky for at least a good six weeks?
Acceptance. A novel idea. Something that a life coach might encourage people to do? Weird.
January 6, 2010
Yesterday, January 4th was the worst day of the year, according to my sister’s Facebook status. Immediately after she posted this, every single teacher she is friends with agreed, including my mother and my high school English teacher.
The “dreading going back to work” statement was all over Facebook the night of January 3rd. I can’t say I was doing backflips about going back to work, especially because that meant I’d actually have to brush my hair and get out of my pajamas … but I didn’t find myself dreading it either.
I truly enjoy my job. Even the more tedious parts, like paper work and data entry, give me a sense of accomplishment when I finish them. Monday was just a typical day for me; it didn’t really feel at all like the “reality check” I was expecting. I got to the office early, treating myself to a chai latte along the way. I prepped for the week, getting my schedule ready, reviewing notes from my pre-holiday calls, and getting handouts ready for classes. Mid-day I taught my first post-holiday class, and was pleasantly surprised to find that only a small percentage of people in my group had gained any weight over the holidays. Most had either lost or stayed the same over the three week hiatus we had had.
Today started off with three coaching sessions, all very motivating and fun and productive. I spent the rest of the day doing some paper work and reading, including snuggling up with a very exciting 10-journal-article packet on supplements. Not exactly the same as cuddling up with the fourth Twilight book, as I had been doing over the holidays, but Twilight doesn’t exactly pay the grocery bills.
Tonight, Matt and I are having dinner with the emergency medicine department and then I’m dropping dinner off for a girl in our resident-spouses group who just had a baby and is wrapping up maternity leave. It’s been right back into the swing of things, but I can’t say I’ve really minded. I have a lot on my plate this year and some pretty big plans for 2010, but I’m ready to see them into action.
If yesterday really was the worst day of 2010, then it can only get better from here.
Totally unrelated to post content. But a picture-less post seems so wrong.
November 4, 2009
Matt has his first week-long vacation this week and it’s turning out to be a great week for both of us. On Monday I came home to find an award winning yard, a totally organized garage, a really happy (crate-free) dog, a clean house and a beaming husband. Um, wow? I think I like the way this vacation is going. We settled in to cooking dinner together, having a glass of wine (my first in six weeks!) and enjoying the leisurely type of evening that I imagine other couples have who both work 9-5 jobs might experience on a regular basis. We actually do have a sit-down dinner probably three or four times a week, but often I’m cooking while Matt is finishing up charts or shortly after we eat, I’m getting ready for bed while he’s putting on scrubs to heads out the door. Our weeknight routine is irregular at best, that’s for sure.
Although I must say, I really don’t mind – and in fact, enjoy many aspects of – the ED schedule. For starters, Matt’s never on call, and he’s usually home within an hour of when his shift is done. That kind of predictability is rare in medicine, and as much as I appreciate that now, I can only imagine how much more important that will be to me later on. Secondly, it provides us with a unique flexibility that other jobs don’t, especially with the work from home flexibility I have. For instance, while there might be a Friday night that he’s busy putting in central lines while I watch What Not to Wear, chances are sometime during the week there was a random Tuesday afternoon we were both home at the same time. Our time together may not be traditional, but for a medical intern’s schedule, it’s been pretty good. Nonetheless, he’s worked four very long months with sporadic days off here and there, so having a week’s vacation has been a blessing indeed. I know Home Depot is appreciating a man with free time on hands and projects to burn, as well.
On a related note, I had an eye opening moment yesterday in regards to my own vacation schedule. When I started at Wake Forest, my heart did a little backflip during orientation when I heard we got 25 days of sick/personal/vacation. 25 days? A gal could take a month off traversin’ around Spain with that kind of schedule! And, to boot, you can roll over up to half of that… in theory, accumulating 37 days of vacation in one year. Sounds great right? As it turns out, it’s been really, really difficult to use those days. Using vacation days means first finding the cajones to ask my boss for time off, inconveniencing 3 other extremely hard working people and mostly notably, coming back to more work then you left. Nonetheless, there are few things that recharge me more than traipsing around a new place with a map and my camera or a week at the beach with clams, beer and family and so I have done my best to take a few week long vacations every year.
Yesterday I worked on my PTO sheet for 2009 and found that even with a week in Myrtle in April and a week in the Dominican Republic in May and few Fridays off for weddings and other such revelry, I still I had 23.5 days left. 23.5 days!! As it turns out, I could probably much just stay home all December. I’m not sure what to do about this, since as I mentioned, burning through those days like rubber isn’t exactly encouraged or easily facilitated. But they’re my days yall, and if I don’t use at least 10 of them, I’ll lose ‘em.
To add insult to injury, I’ve also keep good records of how much extra I have worked this year. Let’s just say, I love me some Excel sheets. Last October, we had some personnel changes here at work. I won’t go into them here, but essentially a 3 man job became a 2 man job.. It was a very stressful time- there were a lot of tears, a lot of wine drinking and 4 letter words thrown around in my car in between parking spaces and garages. During the course of this event, I began keeping track of my hours in order to document how these changes had affected my work/life balance. I don’t have a punch in, punch out job – I have the kind of job where you do your work, whatever that takes. Sometimes that means reading food logs late into the evening hours, but it also means being able to slip out for doctors appointments or lunch dates without worry, or working from home on Fridays. But my job description does say 37.5 hours a week and I was curious to see with these changes, how close to accurate this was. I found that an average week for me, during this time, was about 50 hours. About 8 months later we hired a 3rd person, which greatly reduced my workload, but I continued to keep track of my hours. Mostly because I’m a little bit OCD and once I make me a good Excel tracker, I have a hard time cutting myself off from using it. In my Excel sheet, I had created a column to keep track of how many hours over my “full time” I went and how quickly those turned into extra days. Over the course of a year, and one month, I have worked an extra 33 days.
Now granted, when I plug in “6 am – 2pm” on my excel sheet, I know I’m not working a full 8 hours. I check twitter, I write wino emails, I go microwave my lunch and end up talking to a co-worker for 20 minutes about Twilight. These things happen. But let’s say – worst case scenario – I worked half of that. That means I worked extra 15 days this year. On top of my leftover 23.5 vacation days, I have nearly 7 weeks of “extra time” this year… just sitting on the back burner.
I’m not sure what to do about this… maybe spend a little more time on twitter at work? (Maybe write blog posts at work? Check.) Unfortunately, if I put my feet up and eat bon bons the person that comes back to haunt the most is me, and then my participants. There’s no “man” to take it out on… the bane and blessing of automonous work is that you get both the responsibility of your schedule, and the responsibility of your schedule. And I guess that’s the truth of many jobs where you don’t clock in and clock out. This is probably one of those realities of being a grown up that you’d rather just not delve that deep into, like compounding interests on mortgage loans or how laundry is never really done because even when the hamper is empty you’re wearing dirty clothes. File this under: Being a Grown Up Sometimes Sucks?
What I’m learning quickly here is that if I don’t respect and nuture my time, no one else is going to. Life is a zero sum game – where you think you’re saving time one place, you’re probably burning it somewhere else. So on that note, I’m punching out at Thursday at noon and I’m not looking back. Matt and I are escaping to the mountains for a weekend – our first and only trip to the montanas this year. I’m not bringing a single food log, weight loss chart or memory or a participant who had 3 apple pies for breakfast with me.
And that is what paid time off is all about.
September 1, 2009
Last night I had a dream that I was able to turn my alarm clock off by only using my mental powers.
This would be a little less ironic if I had not, in fact, failed to turn my alarm clock ON last night in the first place. I woke up this morning and reached for my glasses to look at the clock, expecting to see that my alarm was about to go off any minute.
5:48, the blue lights blinked back at me. An HOUR late?!?
I grabbed my cell phone to be sure I wasn’t seeing things. 5:48, the screen confirmed, sending a blue glow through the room. I cursed, grabbed the phone, and stumbled into the bathroom. As I furiously tried to multi-task brushing my teeth and putting mascara on, my husband called from the next room… “what happened?”
“I forgot to turn my alarm clock on!” I yelled, as I ran through the house, grabbing coffee mug, dog leash, and my laptop.
“AGAIN?” he asked, in disbelief.
Again.
This is, in fact, the 3rd consecutive Tuesday morning, I have either not set my alarm or set it for PM instead of AM. 3 weeks in a row!
I am totally a morning person. There is no time of day I like better then 5 am – 7 am. So you would think, of all people, I would have no problem setting and using an alarm clock to get up. Yet here I am, 3rd Tuesday in a row, sporting unwashed hair and pretending the milk in my coffee is going to substitute for breakfast.
A year ago, when I was asked if I would teach a class at 6:30 am every Tuesday, I readily agreed. At the time, I was just finishing up training for the Baltimore half marathon, and I had been running every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 5 am. If I can run at that hour, I can teach at that hour, right? And in theory, if I started working around 6, I could stop working much earlier in the day, too, right?
Why do theories so rarely stick when thrown against the wall of real life?
The Tuesday class was such a success, capturing a number of full-time-workers who had never been able to do the daytime classes we previously offered, that in June we added a Thursday 6:30 am class.
Yay?
I didn’t realize how much I love my mornings… for me. I miss running during that time, tremendously. I transitioned over to running Monday & Wednesday mornings, which was formerly my early morning office hours where I did lots of planning, writing and development. (Quadrant II…. important and non urgent.) I miss my a.m. writing sessions, tremendously.
When I stop and pay attention, I realize I don’t really want to teach anymore at 6:30, and I think I’ve been, in a way, subconsciously setting myself up to do just that. I want to run, and I want to have my planning periods back on M&W. ::::insert me stomping my foot and sticking my lower lip out as far as it goes::: I know I sound whiny, and I am feeling that way, a little bit. I’m committed to Tuesday group til Feb 2010, and Thursday group til October 2010, and truthfully, I’m okay with that because I just adore the people in these groups. But will I do it again when these groups finish? N.o.p.e.
I am lucky that I have the flexibility to set my one-on-one appointments for whatever time I want – be at 10 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon. I can also read, write, and develop classes any time day or night. So in that sense, I do have a great deal of leeway with how I spend my day and have been successful if working out a schedule that works for me. But from this, I have learned a valuable lesson.
Set the alarm.
Okay two lessons. Know thy self. And thy self’s most functional hours of day. In the future, early mornings will stay on my agenda… but the only commitment I’ll make will involve sneakers or a keyboard.
(And for the record, I have been on time for my classes, but have sacrificed a few things along the way including exercising my dog, personal hygiene and breakfast. All rather important.)
Sure, feel free to skip my walk. Just know you’ll pay for it later when I give you THESE eyes when you get home.
August 5, 2009
4:26 am. Alarm goes off. I disagree. Buddy pokes his head around the corner to see if I’m getting up. As he sees the comforter tossed back over my head, he flops down on the floor with a heavy sigh to wait ten more minutes.
4:36 am. Ten minutes goes so fast. Shoes are on, leash is in, dog is practically twirling to get outside. We walk. It is dark, it is quiet, it is peaceful and I often look up to the sky on these hushed mornings and wonder what God has in store for me that day. My contemplative state is nearly always broken by noticing that my dog is squatting somewhere, and if I don’t hurry over, I’ll be left to using my cell phone as a light to try and see where his poo is in the grass. From revelry to reality.
We walk until the leash goes slack, and that’s when I know I’ve worn him out, and then we walk a little bit more for good measure. For both of us. We return, we both get food, and then I get ready for work.
As I’m pouring my coffee, Dr. C comes home. I’m fixing an English Muffin while he’s scrounging in the freezer, heating up a Lean Cuisine or microwaving leftover She-Crab Soup. We could not be on more opposite schedules. He updates me on his night, we say good-bye, he goes to bed and I go to work.
6:25 am. My first class starts at 6:30, and they’re usually hover outside the door raring to go. No matter what time of day I hold class, there is always someone who arrives 20 minutes early. I’m very particular about my time – being late is my pet peeve, but being early infringes on my nerves nearly as much, for some reason. Perhaps it’s because those 20 minutes while I’m setting up my class are the last 20 minutes of quiet I’ll have for awhile and I savor each one. I’m teaching a class on portion control, and the front table is set up with enough fake food to delight a six year old with a Play-Skool kitchen.
8:15 am. My two classes are done with, and I begin to make the rounds picking up the room. The adrenaline rush that is with me while I am pouring my heart into each class, and answering questions that I hope will inspire and educate begins to wane. .. I sit down, and my feet scream THANK YOU. For an hour, I alternate between checking emails and following through but also losing myself in the pages of twitter, facebook or someone’s blog I may not even know.
9:05 am. “Am I too early?” My first appointment is here. The next two hours pass by in a blur. I do four 30-minute coaching session in this time. At least one will move me to tears, at least one will leave me wondering what I could have done differently to light a spark that seemed fizzled. There is nothing I like more than coaching people through their challenges, or hearing stories about the lives that go on outside my classroom. There’s little time to think about it, because my next class is gathering out in the hallway.
12:00 pm: I am walking across the tennis courts in high heels. I pray the Rec director does not come out and give me THAT look. But I am carrying a laptop bag, a purse, a backpack full of handouts, food logs, newspaper articles, and a lunchbox. I arrive in the office and have a hard time fitting through the door, without dismantling the bags from my arms and shoulders. For two hours, I enter data, read food logs or do research, updating the classes I’ll be giving tomorrow or the next day. There’s a book on tape on my ipod as I enter data and the numbers fly by as I soak in Tim Ferris, Michael Gerber or Rhonda Byrne.
2:25 pm: I am pulling into the Starbucks parking lot. I am pondering whether I will have an iced skinny vanilla or a light-java chip frap. My client’s car is already here, and I am excited for the hour that will transpire and the transformations we’ll make. Did I mention already that I love coaching?
3:55 pm: Coaching is done, so now I am hustling to the gym. Fortunately, it is 2 minutes away. I arrive and my PT client is already on the treadmill. He waves, and I have a mini heart attack that he might lose his balance. He is 72 years old, and lost 50 lbs working with me on his food intake over the course of 2 years. Now we’ve added in exercise, and for some reason, 3 years later, he’s still putting up with me. I work him through our machines – a serious of leg exercise, upper body and core. I hold my breath as he does crunches on the medicine ball and I am posed to catch him. He notices me doing this and yells at me for making him feel like an old man. I retract my hand and he immediately rolls off the balance ball. We finish his workout, and I begrudgingly say good-bye to him and drag myself over to a stair mill. 5 minutes later, I am deeply engrossed in Kate Gosselin’s bodyguard romance and the timer ticks down on the machine. I repeat the exercises I just took my client through, and leave thoroughly exhausted but happy.
6:05 pm: I arrive home and can hear the barking as soon as the garage door rolls up. I grab the leash, open the door and whisk him out the door before he can say heyyyy you’re home. Nervous energy, BE GONE. A quick lap and he’s himself again, and will spend the rest of the night testing out different spots in our living room as suitable nap locales. I drag out a cutting board and chop, pour oil in a pan, throw in, sizzle and wait. I open the plastic clamshell of triple washed greens, throw on some fruit, some cheese, some olive oil, some pepper.
8:45 pm: My energy is waning, so I pop my ipod books back on and bustle around my end of day routine. Pack gym bag, lay out clothes, pack lunch. Walk dog one last time, brush teeth, turn on TV. DVR-ed versions of Stacy & Clinton, Cesar or Joel McHale lull me into a vegetable state.
9:27 pm: “You in the bed?” When the Dr. calls from the hospital after 9, he knows where I’m at. I’m reading Dr. Kessler’s “The End of Overeating” and it doesn’t take more than six or seven pages before I start to go a little cross-eyed. Flop the book on the floor, throw the glasses on my nightstand and *click*. Lights Out.
To do it again tomorrow.
March 12, 2009
This morning Monica and I slept through the start of the first session (“Better turn my phone to silent so my emails don’t wake me up. OH WAIT. MY ALARM IS NOW SILENCED.” Brilliant.) Once we realized we weren’t going to make the first talk we decided to take advantage of our locale and go for a walk. The resort (a golf club that apparently boasts to having Tiger as a member) is so stunningly green. I am totally sold on the recent claims on “nature deficits” – that less time spent outdoors plays a role in many of present day maladies. There is something to be said about that restorative feeling you get being surrounded by all things green (or blue, if you’re like me with an inexplicable serotonin surge near water.) Our walk ended at one of the resort’s restaurants with a quiet, empty patio overlooking the first tee and we plopped down for coffee, eggs and fruit. Clearly, exercise and a healthy breakfast serves an acceptable proxy for my presence in a conference based predominantly on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. I mean, I’m just trying to practice what I preach!
The leisurely morning was a nice contrast to what proved to be an intense day of presentations. I feel like my brain has just taken a Pilates class. Although I try to keep abreast of the recent research in my field, I’ll be the first to admit that my version of continuing education is some elliptical reading of the oh so laudable Prevention and Women’s Health. (Which genuinely do report research, but in a Crystal Light kind of way – seems like the real thing, til you have the real thing.) To actually sit in a room and hear the most recent, hot off the press research not just presented, but argued, critiqued and debated… there is nothing like it. I got goosebumps today when someone discussed the effectiveness of a health behavior change theory that I use in my program, and I did a happy dance in my seat at a presentation on the ROI of workplace wellness programs. I’m pretty sure what this all boils down to is this: somehow, someway, I ended up in the right field. For that, I am thankful.
March 11, 2009
Today I’m in Tampa for the Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism conference put on by the AHA. I’m excited. I even wore my red shoes. For those of you who know about the 1997 Valentine’s Dance Fashion Fiasco, I assure you my current day red patent leather loafers are totally appropriate and cute. (Red shoes, apparently, look quite hookerish with 3″ heels Who knew.) Anyways, I digress: conference.
I love research. I love learning. I was nearly breathless with excitement reading the program guide. However, as much as I anticipated hearing the latest on vitamin B supplementation and the DASH diet, we are in Tampa. i.e. There’s a beach. I want to be there.
So, come lunchtime my coworker Monica and I mapquested directions to a cafe in Clearwater we’d been recommended. 14 miles? Totally doable for a 1.5 hour lunch.
45 minutes later as we sat in stop-n-go beach traffic with no hopes of finding parking we admitted our folly. Sadly enough, neither of us wanted to miss the presentation on findings about prevalence of vitamin D deficiency that was scheduled for right after lunch. With a wave to our beach front cafe, we turned the car around and headed away from the gorgeous beachside town (see happy feelings inducing photo) to our dark, a.c. blasting conference room.
Research presentation over beach? Nerd status prevails, per usual.
