Let’s talk about Limits!

It’s February already and this means a change in focus words.

January was focused on Reflection. During the month I looked back over my life and I looked at what I had been able to do since becoming ill almost a year ago now!

This month the focus word is Limitation. This fits well with where I am at in both my health journey and my progress towards my goals for 2014.

Thanks to my January reflections, I have a basic understanding of what I believe my limitations are at this point in time. I will be using February to test whether these limitations are accurate and to determine how I can live a fulfilling, purposeful life even with my current limitations. These limitations fit into several categories; physical, mental, social and financial. I will have to work on each of these categories in order to achieve my goals for 2014 and beyond.

Physical Limitations

Right now all I will say is that I will be working on increasing my activity levels slowly to determine whether the limits I have set are physical or if they are mental blocks caused by a concern of crashing and making things worse. I will focus on this more in my Physical Friday posts.

Mental Limitations

I am still working on building up my self confidence and learning not to second guess myself when I make a decision. This is a major barrier to me moving forward sucessfully in both my health, advocacy and work related goals for this year. If I continue to second guess myself as much as I have in the past, I’m likely to not push the barriers of my limitations hard enough to make any progress.

I also have to be aware that I don’t push these barriers too hard causing relapses in my health.

Determining whether the limitations I have set are actual limitations or mental blocks in my path is something I need to determine. I will be doing this by following a graduated exercise program (to the extent that I will attempt to raise my exercise by 10% each week or two if the current exercise level is manageable) and by doing my best to be active longer periods of time without rest.

Social Limitations

These are partly related to my physical limitations, as I’m not able to get out and socialise with my friends and family as much as I’d like to. I have built up a wonderful social community online (here, Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest) but I need to find a way to increase my ‘real world’ socialising.

This month I will focus on socialising more with my family and friends in a way that doesn’t impact my health negatively, increasing my online social presence and working out how to utilise my social networks to spread the word of the Foggy Frog and the Pain Gang campaign.

Financial Limitations

As you are probably aware by now, I have big dreams for the Foggy Frog and the Pain Gang campaign. The problem is because I currently have no income, and we are living off E’s income, I can’t afford the next phase of the project by myself.

This is why I’ll be turning to all of you to help make the campaign a success. I have created a team of dedicated bloggers to help me get this project going and we have begun the first phase of spreading the word about the project. The next phase is to publish the picture book and get it out to as many people as possible.

Publishing a book is an expensive process, so we’ve decided to use a crowdfunding model* to help us finish the illustrations, design and printing of the first run of books. This means that everyone who helps us in this early stage of the process will, at the very least, get recognition from us for their help and, depending on their level of support, will get their hands on some unique rewards which will only be available through the crowdfunding campaign.

To make sure you’re kept up to date with the campaign, please sign up for our campaign newsletters. I am aiming to send out one or two newsletters a month that will provide more details about the campaign and share some of the unique behind the scenes stories from developing and running this campaign.

During the actual crowdfunding campaign in March, newsletters are likely to be more often, however I promise not to spam you. Any newsletters I send out will have meaningful and timely information that aims to inspire you and keep you up to date with where we are at.

*If you don’t know what crowdfunding is, check out the post I reblogged yesterday for a basic explanation. I will try and explain more over the next month in the lead up to the launch of our fundraising campaign.

 

Do you know your limitations?

How do you ensure you’re living the life you want while being conscious of your limitations?