Daily Gratitude: Have you ever fallen prey to this? “I hope I can finish this __ (you can fill in the blank).” You keep saying and thinking this – over and over and over. But you never really sit down and figure out what it will take to “finish this”. You know it will be a lot of hard work and that’s scary. When people are scared they tend to freeze (that’s why it’s not just the Fight or Flight response but the fight, flight or freeze response. When I “decided” I had to keep walking at vol state this year, all I could do was “hope” that when I was doing the 60 minute miles that maybe I could get there. By the way, I put “decided” in quotes because I didn’t really decide anything. Jan did. I just went along with it. Anyway, hoping I could make it to the rock was not going to do it. I knew I had to rest and preferably sleep but I didn’t know how much time I could take doing that so I was pretty much immobilized- what if it’s too much down time? What if it’s too little? What is the Goldilocks amount of time so I could rest enough yet not too much. All these things were running around in my head. Nothing was being accomplished. I didn’t have any plan. Enter Ray K. He took the info I gave him which was just a bunch of estimates clouded by emotions and he ferreted out what he could and told me how to accomplish this even walking so slowly. In essence he made the decisions for me. Bottom lines are: you need facts to make decisions and you need to remove emotions from the decision making process. That’s hard but doable. You can talk to that side of your brain and tell it that you’re not ignoring your emotions. You just want them to wait in the wings while the decision making side of your brain takes over “for just a little while.” I find talking to the parts of your brain like this helps you separate the facts from the emotions. Try it some time.