Monday Motivation, 7.27.2020

Written by: Dawn Paciocco

Every Monday, The Rogers-Long Team meets for one of its two weekly meetings. The Monday meeting always ends with “Monday Motivation” in which a few minutes are spent listening to one team member presenting a quote, a quick reading from a book, a scene from a movie, or anything else they find motivating to provide a “spark” to the whole team on a Monday morning.

This weekend felt like normal.  Well normal for the PacMan family.  Divide and conquer.  While Scotty was here in RVA with Mason playing in a baseball tournament, Landon and I head to C’ville for a Lax tournament. Harper was lucky enough to spend the day in the AC with her Godmother.  Text back and forth giving updates on who’s doing what. After a very long Sunday, both boys come home champions and we have some motivation leading into Monday. We unpacked the cars, and remember to lock them up ? and I sat down to prep for the week ahead.

I sat on the couch trying to figure out what in the world can I write about for Monday Motivation.  I scroll through my phone looking for screen shots of saying I have saved for just these moments….I GOT NOTHING! I forgot how tiring a “normal” weekend can be. I am exhausted from standing and pacing most of the day, speeding down 64 to get to the last 15 minutes of Mason’s game. I am so tired, and then tell myself, “go ahead and cancel your OTF class in the morning.  You can use that time to write your Monday Motivation then.”

I have a couple of accountability partners who are holding me accountable to hitting my goals.  So here is what went through my mind last night:

Well Ben’s out of town so he won’t know if I didn’t go….

Then there is Sam, I have to send him my “proof” of a workout, but hey maybe he will understand that I had a long weekend and I am tired……

Landon normally asks me each day if I got up and went, but maybe he won’t ask me tomorrow….

Oh yeah, Lauren will text me and say she missed me in class, but she had a long day at the ball field too, so she will understand or maybe she won’t go either….

So I pull up the OTF app and click to cancel, I am out of my 8 hour window and I will have to pay $12 to cancel.  DAMN IT, I guess I am going. So I go to bed, still having not written anything, shame on me.

As I am walking out of class this morning, talking with Lauren and the other ladies about how tired we all are, and how we all wanted to cancel, one of them says “but how good does it feel not that we did it”. That’s when I knew what I could write about.  Last night when I was contemplating canceling I was worried about upsetting my accountability partners. While that is the point of having them and certainly works, as you can see I came up with excuses I could give each one and reason for not going. I would have gotten the crap from each one about not going and I would have gone about my day. But the bottom line is I should want to do it for myself. I am the one that needs push myself when I want to turn off the alarm, or press cancel. I am the one on the treadmill pushing myself to run a little harder. I am the one who has to continue to look at the stupid scale. If I can’t motivate myself to get up and do it for ME, then what’s the point.

We all have goals and we all have people to help us reach those goals.  Those people help drive and push you to hit those goals. I thank those people I have in my life and they are great!  But YOU have to WANT it more for YOURSELF.  If you are doing things just to please others, it’s never going to make you happy.  You set the goal and you’ve got to be the number one reason to get there. No matter how small or how big, whatever the goal, who are you really doing it for? The answer should be YOU! So as I stand here before you and you see me this morning with my curly hair because I didn’t have the time to dry it, know that it’s only partially because of procrastination but ultimately it’s because I didn’t quit on myself and I got it done for ME!

Dawn Paciocco joined The Rogers-Long Team in September 2018 as the team’s Client Care Coordinator. Dawn spent 17 years in the financial services industry and much like Stacy, was first a client of Ben & Kevin’s before joining the team. After a couple years discussing the possibility of Dawn joining, The RLT excitedly brought her on due to her fun-loving attitude and belief in the team’s mission to build an army of people that does good, becomes better, and strives to be the best.