The Bistro

Catherine’s Hope & Vision 2022

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  • #12860

    I resonate a lot with what Catherine’s saying here about focusing on building habits and the opportunities right before me. I had this wild summer job in my 20’s for 7 and a half years selling books door to door. Some days it felt insurmountable that was how I was going to be making a living, but a lot of what we did to survive (and thrive) was built around sustaining habits…focusing on how many households we talked to a day instead of how many sales made, as an example. I was relieved when coming here knowing that there was a prescription of habits to follow, and new ways of relating, reflecting, working to make me safer for Black and Brown people around me. Since then I’ve also learned those habits have to continually be re-evaluated, that it’s not a one-and-done, and that my ‘relief’ at the idea of having a formula or prescription of sorts really said more about my own desire to collect gold stars, and focus on veneers rather than meaningful change. That’s been another important layer for me to learn.

  • #12861

    I used to have really good habits when it came to Lace on Race participation. My life has changed a lot in the last few months and so I am working to build new habits to fit with my new life which includes quite a few more living beings and all the unpredictability that comes with them. My new habits are needing to be a lot more flexible than the old ones, and perhaps because they will be more flexible, they will be quicker to adapt when new changes arise.

  • #12865

    Oh, habits. My default habits definitely don’t do my values justice. Yet, it is my comfort, safe place. I would say it is hard for me to really consider my daily setup as habits because my first instinct is that habits are synonymous with routines and actively trying to create structure. This has been one of my biggest struggles, to set up my habits to reflect my values, specifically North Star values. I think the main habit that keeps me trying and in some level of consistency over time is that I almost always have Lace on Race community and racial justice concepts on my mind. It keeps me very aware of where I need to be headed towards in order for my habits to reflect my values. I did a whole project on this last summer which helped me to at least visualize what my day or at least morning could look like if my habits were more aligned with my values and I have to overhaul everything and stay consistent which is really hard for me when there are major changes like starting my new full-time job. Ive been struggling with extreme fatigue so that is hard to fight but I know that step by step I can build healthy habits back up to maximize my energy and give myself the chance to show I can do something that seems hard or seems like it takes a lot of energy. The North Star keeps me motivated and gives me strength to keep trying when I feel like I have reverted back to my comfort habits and am struggling to build the effective habits back up. I think I really just need to adjust my midset so that it doesn’t seem like it takes as much energy as it feels like it does in my head.

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