Tolerate List

The concept of my life coach book (Coach Yourself to Success by Talane Miedaner) is that there are 2 ways to get what you want. 1) Set goals and go after them and 2) Attract your goal to you. In order to be truely sucessful you need to do both. The book focuses mostly on how to attract your goals and success through 101 tips.

Her first tip was extremely powerful for me. She suggests that there are many things in life that you tolerate. For example, a missing button on a shirt, an unpaid tax bill, an overflowing in-box. All those things you think, I’ve got to do that some day. Tolerating these little and sometimes big things is a drain on your energy and wears you down. It prevents you from attracting success.

Creating a tolerate list is the first step to attracting success. It usually consists of 60-100 items. I spent a week with my notebook and every time I saw something that I “tolerated” I wrote it down. Unraveled hem in pants, dirty window sills, dirty baseboards, the mail strewn all over the entry way bench, dog bones all over the floor, ugly looking kitchen cabinets, unfinished fence around the yard, the soft spot on the bathroom floor, etc. Every time I caught something that bugged me I wrote it down.

The next step is to organize the list- what things can be done in a day, a weekend, what things will take longer. Plan a weekend to take care of all the little stuff that can be done in a few hours or the course of a day; I did this over Labor Day weekend. I took 4 days to do all the household cleaning items around that were wearing me down. I was surprised at how energized a clean house felt even after 4 days of hard labor!

Some things will take longer than a weekend to accomplish. Identify items with a longer timeframe and set goals to get rid of them. For me the fence project required saving enough money to buy the wood, which DH and I were able to do last week and are shooting to have the fence finished by the end of October (DH has a busy schedule working nights so daylight hours our an obstacle for this project). We hope within the next year and half to save enough money to do a bathroom remodel without financing.

The tolerate list seems like a simple task and it really is. There is a lot of power in the act of writing down things that drain your energy. Most are simple little things that you don’t think you have time for. Once you realize that a simple half hour project is draining energy from your day every day, you get the motivation to take care of it. And boy does it feel good!