Gray Wolf Productions

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  • Sharing My View

    moorage

    Today’s video is difficult to hear so just enjoy the views. I was outside and giving you the view plus the ambient noise we have in the summer…when we have windows open. You hear the wind, a power washer, traffic [road and air] etc……

    This morning as the cacophony of sounds was coming into my house, I was thinking that I am so glad I can work with all of that in my auditory environment. It would not be good if I were recording a video for a course and needed to be a bit quiet but in general for my editing and doing my 1000 words a day writing it’s fine.

    As this video is not for a course but rather for your enjoyment and my keeping up with my habits you get it with the ambient sounds that are louder than my voice.

  • On Day 11 I Ask: Don’t You Wish You Had The Energy Your Puppy Has?

    Puppy Energy

    Okay let me make an admission I really did not not not feel like doing anything today. I thought yesterday would be my recovery day but it spilled into today and I just am flagging in energy and brain power.

    But since my dog needs a daily walk and loves to play with her tennis ball – I thought okay let’s at least do the video while I take the dog out so the one minute video is about the dog and saying I did not feel like being on the camera today.

    And actually being out and watching her energy helped!

  • I Can Do It! I Can. I Can!

    push through

    On day 10, it cooled off, I got a good nights sleep, and I realized I really can push through a heat wave. 

    And, if I can push through a heat wave while feeling pretty yucky – I am sure I will meet my 90 day challenge. And who knows? It may become such a part of me at the end of 90 days that it will no longer be a challenge it will just be my life.​

    Admittedly, I have learned over the years to not push really hard the day after a heat wave but to give my body a little bit of time to get back to feeling normal; whatever “normal” is​….

  • Even The Heat Can’t Stop Me On Day 9

    heat exhaustion

    My last habit post was on day  5 – then came the heat wave…. I did post videos on days 6, 7, and 8 but I did not post anything about them here because everything felt like it was too much trouble to do I was exhausted from the heat. Maybe that is why they call it heat exhaustion.

    ​I think in the video I say I look washed out. I feel washed out. I am washed out! But I have learned that I can be washed out I can be tired I can be cranky but I still have ability to continue with the habit building projects.  And that makes me feel very good.

    All the habit building projects take more time because I have a headache, my computer gets hot, I feel not very peppy, and I really do need to rest. Part of it is that I don’t sleep well at night until the temperature really drops and that eliminates getting up very early in the morning.

    Yes, I could get air conditioning, but that creates other problems for me – and so I have learned to cope with a short duration heatwave.​

    Next stop in the video making is to start using the videos as I would use them for online courses. That requires my practicing with Screenflow and frankly I have too much of a headache to really get into fiddling that much with video​….

    Stay tuned …. ​

  • Another Ephiphany: Day 5

    epiphany-eureka

    Today I am finally getting smarter. I know that people tell me things I know people tell you things and you’re either not ready to hear it or you’re just not in the mental space to hear it and maybe that’s the same as being ready.

    I know when I teach I repeat myself because students don’t hear it the first time, maybe they’re not ready for the second time and sometimes it takes three times. I know from advertising data that it takes seven contacts to have you actually think about buying a product – so that’s the way your brain works.

    Getting back to my learning of the day – I know from mentors that you’re supposed to do the thing you don’t like the first thing in the morning to get it out-of-the-way.

    I hate editing and therefore I leave it till the end of the day. But today I was also involved in a little online group project where we were spending 4 hours getting a book done.

    I can’t do anything for 4 hours straight and especially on a hot day [because I had to take the dog out and do other things before it got really hot] but it did get me working on the editing first thing in the morning and guess what? Editing got done.

    I got the table of contents organized so that it flows for me and I got chapter 1 finished. It didn’t take that long to DO the actual work, as most of it was mental – not typing.

    And as I know the way my brain works for books- now that those two things are done, the other chapters will get done more easily.

    Since it actually was quite easy to do I again had to ask myself why do I tend to leave editing to the last thing of the day? or put it off until who knows when?

    It has been almost a year since I finished and published my last book. But I have a lot of them almost done on my computer especially almost done since I started this writing 1000 words a day back in January.

    I have somehow convinced myself that I don’t like editing and maybe I should take my own advice and think positively about things. So from now on I love editing and will do editing as the first task of the day.

    And also as it was hot today or going to get very hot and as some of you know if you follow me on Facebook I have a two-year-old Labrador retriever. Retrievers have one job and life guess what it is Yep retrieving. Except for when it’s pouring rain when neither of us really wants to go out, we go out once or twice a day to retrieve tennis balls. I have one of those throwing sticks and I walk out onto the field it’s actually the levee that keeps the Columbia River from letting Portland and I throw the ball she runs I throw the ball, etc, etc, etc.

    She has developed her own routine of wanting to go swimming when she’s tired or hot. And then she brings the ball back, sits down, and waits for me to walk with her maybe 3 feet before she goes down the bank in the river. But the grass was mowed yesterday and I think she is a bit nervous about the bank path, and maybe doesn’t want to go into the river because since the mowing she hasn’t taken her swim.

    Note here, if you read any of my psychology books or courses, you have seen or read this. We all tend to anthropomorphize our pets. I have no idea if she is nervous, or can’t smell her way down, or what. But I feel she for some reason was a little perturbed by the mowing.

    Anyhow, I’m off track – but that’s the content of the book I’m working on….

    So what have I learned on day five of this trying to create new habits trying to get my brain challenged to do things normally rejects.

    I’ve known for a while that my brain my body me I’m not sure it does not like consistency. I have never been able to stay at a job, working for someone else full-time, for more than two years.

    I also know that if I get into a routine like going to a health club every day, it too dissipates after two years. And then it’s hard for me to go again. That was not true when I went to a club to play squash. I think the difference was that squash was an activity I loved it and I liked the people I hung around with. One of them is still my best friend. But going to a club, just to work out, just wore out after two years.

    Maybe today, because of the heat and the online book writing thing I got into I had to do things in a different order. I did the editing. Then because of the upcoming heat wave I took my dog out. I have these great thoughts while I was walking the dog, so I took out my phone and dictated several hundred words of this article which meant that I was getting the thousand words a day partially out of the way. And when I am done writing this, I will shoot the video and then I will have the editing the writing and the video all done. And I still have the whole rest of the day.

    Maybe I can get a few more chapters of the book done and that would be great as I will feel even better than I feel right now. And of course, the book will be on its way to getting even more done and soon I can upload it onto Amazon and hit the button “publish.”

    And then what comes next? Another book to be finished.

    That’s the point of my 90 day challenge: Finish! Finish! Finish!

  • In A Funk On: New Habits Day 4

    I knew a bad day [or two or three] might come – but I did not expect it to happen on day four. Although when I tried to add a whole bunch of new habits when I first started doing the 1000 words a day it was difficult. But that was January and it was cold and rainy and I figured oh heck I could do it now when it’s warm, sunny and drier.

    Remember I was feeling so great that I posted about how good I felt? So yesterday afternoon I had errands to run decided it was cool enough out I’ll do it and I’ll take the bus to where I had to go.

    I did not stop to think of all the activities associated with the Rose Festival. It’s a big event in Portland. And a friend had already commented that he was stuck in traffic in the morning and had to cancel appointments. Did I put two into together? Nope. I won’t go into all the wet dreary details, but I got home late and was tired and cranky. And as I skipped yoga yesterday I paid for it with very achy legs today.

    Then this morning I looked at the weather for the next few days and decided I better go food shopping because I hate when it’s over 80 and it’s going to be over 80 sometimes way over 80. 

    Normally this would be enough to have me say okay I give up. But then I remembered I am a survivor, and a tough cookie – and I am going to stick to this so here is day 4.

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