Yesterday I had the greatest drive ever to Ocala and Cassadaga.  Yes, I was just there last week but, as I wrote about on May 26th at Pinning Myself In And Getting Myself Out Of it, I had miscalculated and not had enough magazines with me the first time.  Oh, what a grumpy last trip that was!  This time, I’d gotten caught up on work and created the day off for myself.  I thought of it as a vacation day drive rather than a delivery run.  Thinking about it differently made me feel differently about it.

I love the drive to Ocala, and this time I got to enjoy the scenery.  Usually my drive time is filled with taking and returning business calls (I love my handsfree headset!) but this time I got to chat with a friend for a short while, and that was fun.  I seldom do purely social phone calls, since I spend so much of my work time on the phone.  I notice I’ve trained myself to think of the phone as work.  But yesterday the phone was fun, and all it took was a change in my perception.

I love it when I newly notice some habit or routine I’ve unconsciously created for myself, and I just noticed another one.  Each month I send out bills to all the advertisers.  Billing is not my favorite thing to do, so I typically stretch out what could be a 4-5 hour job into sometimes a week.  I use different techniques to motivate myself to bill; one of which is to use that time as spiritual practice, to send a blessing to the client whose name is before me.  That sometimes segues into prayer and creative visualization time, and that’s when I let the time begin to get away with me.

One trick I do is to, when I create my To Do list, I break up the billing into manageable bites.  Abraham-Hicks says we can eat an elephant one bite at a time, so instead of the daunting item “Begin Billing”, my list says:

Bill A – G
Bill H-O
Bill P-Z

Then Sunday I found myself dreading even seeing the reminder to begin billing.  I had other things I wanted to do and I just didn’t want to do it.  Then I reminded myself that I was giving too much importance to the task and I was making it loom larger than need be.  So, on my To Do list, I crossed out Begin Billing and changed it to Whip Through Billing.  I’ve done that before where I’ve simply sat down, stayed focused, got the work done in 4 hours and was on to whatever else I wanted to do.  As soon as I wrote the words, how I felt about the task changed.  All I’d done was change how I perceived the task, and I felt instant relief.

I like the feeling of whipping through my chores to get onto whatever else I want to do afterward. It makes it seem like such a small task – which it really is – and so easily doable. What a difference a change in perception makes.