Escaping Mediocrity

It all started as kind of a joke. Because I tweet about napping almost as much as I tweet about coffee, people started asking me when I was going to write a post about it.

Then @WarrenWhitlock decided that I could make a career out of being a Napping Coach. (He was kidding, sort of.)

After that, I started getting more serious questions about napping and I found myself saying, more than once, that napping is my Number One strategy for Escaping Mediocrity. And I’m really not kidding.

See, when we are storming the beaches of mediocrity, we have to dig down into our reserves and push ourselves harder than we ever thought possible.

But here’s the critical thing: we MUST have the reserves to call on. If we don’t, that critical moment will come and no matter how badly we want to dig in and push, we just don’t have the steam to do it.

And believe me, I’ve learned this the hard way. More than once. And I never want it to happen again.

So I take naps. Often. And it helps that I live with a seven year old who expends such enormous amounts of energy throwing himself into life that he needs naps too (and sometimes I score an invite!).

(Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/catikaoe/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I also make serious choice about where to expend my energy. I exercise almost every day; I try to make decent choices about what I eat; I get massages; I take care of health concerns. My job is to protect my energy so that I have it in abundance for the things that truly matter to me.

And for me, nothing does that like crawling under the blankets if it’s cold or turning on the fan if it’s hot and letting my mind drift off to sleep.

If you need a really good reason for giving yourself permission to take a nap, remember this: that moment on the beaches will come and you won’t get much warning. If you want to be ready, you’ve got to have a full reserve tank. Think of your nap as pulling up to the gas station and saying “Fill ‘er up!”

See you when you wake up!

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Tags: napping, self-care, strategies

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 10:51 am and is filed under Uncommon Business, Uncommon Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.