This morning I've got a serious case of procrastination.  Right up to the moment I starting writing this, I was engaged in my usual distraction: news, emails., facebook posts and on it goes.  This is not my usual morning practice.
Then I realized what was going on: 

I was living up to my own expectations. 

Given that the past two weeks were very challenging, yesterday I had a discussion with Me Inc. (thanks Theresa) and came to a decision.  I was giving myself today off.   This seemed like a great idea: A day of relaxation, a bit of binge watching and other nonproductive activity.

But then I woke up early this morning, went for a run and thought I wanted to work.  Until I sat down to work and realized I just couldn't get into it.    Somewhere in my subconscious I had told myself to just chill today.  

I tend to live into my expectations in other venues too.  Something very similar happens with my running.  If my training calls for five miles, I'm mentally ready to run those 5 miles - but not much more.  Yet, if training the next day calls for 7 miles, no problem and the five miles I ran the day before seems like a breeze as I had into 6 and 7.  This plays out in other venues. 

Here's my big point:   I can't speak for you the reader but I have a hunch many of us tend to live into our expectations.  It's something we have control of.   The beautiful thing is that we always have the freedom to change our expectations: raise them, lower them or even completely redefine our expectations for ourselves.    

If you're even an occasional TV watcher you probably recognize this line.  It's from a clearly memorable ad for Capital One.  Now, the point of today isn't to sing the praises of that bank.  Quite simply, I sat down to write this post and it popped into my mind.   So I decided to go with it.

All the sudden I was thinking of the wallet metaphorically as our "bag of tricks".  I'm referring to those unique set of practices we all have.  Whether we're aware of it or not, we tend to respond to situations with approaches to life for we've developed over time:

My simple suggestion to today is to do the following:

1) Take the time to become aware of What's In Our Wallet
2) Consider whether what's in our wallet is serving us as well as those we want to serve in a positive and impactful way and then;
3) Figure out if there are new things we want to put in our wallet

This is a practice that can add to the richness of life - pun absolutely intended!