Giving Yourself Permission to Know Your Limits
You may have noticed that last week I missed making my Thankful Thursday post for gratitude. It was not that I didn’t have anything to feel grateful about. On the contrary, I have many moments of thankfulness in my life. Last week was really a little experiment I tried that I like to call Giving Yourself Permission to Know Your Limits.
You see I didn’t write that post last week because I gave myself permission not to and here is why. I was reading a post from another blog that I truly enjoy. It is the blog by Mary Jane Ryan. You may recognize her name as she is the author of the book Attitudes of Gratitude that I have mentioned before in one of my previous Thankful Thursday posts.
I follow her blog because she is a great writer and her wisdom and insights have helped me on my own path for personal growth. She also was the inspiration for this post and the experiment of taking a week off from Thankful Thursday. The post I am referring to is titled A Lesson Learned the Hard Way. You really should read this post to fully understand what I am talking about here.
This post led me to realize that I need to know and set my own limits. Women tend to have what I like to call a type of “Super Woman” complex. We tend to think that we have to be and do all things for all people all the time. In the mean time the sacrifices we make to give our all to others sometimes wreaks havoc upon ourselves.
Now I am not trying to play the martyr here. I am just saying that we need to keep things in perspective. You need to know your limits and give yourself permission to ease up every once in a while. If not your body and mind will let you know about it just as it was in Mary Jane’s case.
After reading her post I knew that I was in deed on the verge of being both mentally and physically overwhelmed. That week was a particularly stressful one and something had to give. So I gave myself permission to not write a Thankful Thursday post and I also took a few things off my “To Do” list so that I could regroup. You know what? It felt great! I got peace of mind from this experiment because I no longer felt the pressure to push myself to the limit. It actually gave me time to prioritize things in my life.
I am not saying that my gratitude posts aren’t part of my priorities. In fact these moments of gratitude I write about are very important to me. What I am saying is that I learned that it is ok to know my limits of whatever situation I may be in. It is also perfectly fine to give myself permission to release myself from the tension of doing too much at a time.
There may be other times in the future when you won’t see a Thankful Thursday post on gratitude. Now you will know that it is not because I don’t have something to write about. It will be because I am allowing myself to do something else in return. You can be sure of this; whatever I am doing it is with a grateful heart.
Now is the time for you to Give Yourself Permission to Know Your Limits. Rethink your own “To Do” list and allow yourself the privilege of taking at least one thing off the list to ease your tension. Your body and mind will thank you for it.
