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Hello, and welcome to the autism in real life podcast. In each episode, you'll get practical strategies by taking a journey into the joys and challenges of life with autism. I'm your host, Ilia Walsh, and I'm an educator and the parent of two young adults, one of which is on the autism spectrum. Join me as I share my experience and the experiences of others. So that we may see the unique gifts and talents of individuals on the autism spectrum, fully recognized.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome. This is Ilia. And I welcome you to the new year. And I realize this, this podcast topic is probably a little behind, but honestly, maybe not. So, you know, I have this no resolutions kind of policy, and I kind of learned a little bit from friends over the years. And instead of, you know, kind of looking at all the things that I shouldn't do, maybe I should, you know, have less sugar or I should, you know, try to not do something, which is such a coming from a kind of a deficit place. I've been trying MIT over many years to kind of look at it more of like, what could I add in? And what could I do you know, better in or what could I improve upon, and I had someone else, you know, say, just the other day, I heard someone say, instead of resolutions, we now have intentions, right? Intentions only. So I kind of like that. So I ran with it a little bit. And I think though before I want to set an intention, and sort of, you know, again, this kind of tags into some of the creating the life that you want, and creating the future that you want, I think I need to look back first. And number one, acknowledge all the things that have gone well over the last year and acknowledge all of the accomplishments. And that could be a small thing. It can be a big thing. Maybe I've perfected the, you know, my cup of coffee, or maybe I've you know, learned a new skill or something, you know, smaller how to make a new dish. And I'm just, you know, pulling from some of the things that I have done over the last year, and acknowledge ourselves for those and say, Wow, I did that. And that was an awesome accomplishment. And then, you know, show gratitude for that. And, you know, think about maybe the people who help supported you to get to those places, perhaps, maybe it was something you did to help support yourself through that. And then from there, I could say, Okay, now that I know what went well, and what worked, what, what maybe didn't work so well. And what are things that maybe that I would like to improve upon. And that's sort of where this intention can kind of come in. And, you know, I sort of like to think of it as sort of micro micro intentions. And I've talked about this before, like just baby steps, micro steps to, you know, build upon to get to the next place and get to whatever, you know, your future goal is. And if you start sort of coursing yourself in a direction, I think that you will start to notice that and you actually read the other day is sort of like, if you are interested, like in orange Mustangs, right, you probably never noticed an orange Mustang before on the road. But now that you're sort of interested in them, you see them everywhere, right? This happens often with different things. And I think the same is true for intentions or for goal setting. When you think about something and you start putting your energy towards it, sort of you know things you start to notice the things that support that goal and support that intention. Now, the same can happen for things that are negative in your life as well. So if we always look through a filter of something that is negative, if we always think that you know someone is out to harm us, or if we think that a particular environment is never good for us that we might add that filter to everything that we do, right? So we need to be mindful of not adding those negatively

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but also just kind of looking for the positive. And then if we have that positive filter, and we also have this intention only positive intention only filter, we may draw that sort of energy. And we might draw that sort of focus. And we might notice those things that support what we have intended and support what our goals are. And oftentimes, I have found that people kind of surface to help support me in my goal, and in my decisions, circumstances, seem to surface just in getting this recent position, that sort of surfaced in my thinking that, hey, you know, I really would like to expand my skills and use more of my skills and work with a wider group of people. And this opportunity in this role presented itself. So I truly believe that if we open ourselves up and put out into the universe, what our intentions are, things come to support that. And sometimes, as I said, it can be really small things I remember reading somewhere. It's a, it's a Tony Robbins sort of analogy, but it's the two millimeter rule. And the idea is if you improve something, just by two millimeters, and whether the example they use is a golf game, but I don't play golf, so I can't actually use that. But it can be, you know, something I thought about is, sometimes if you're, if you keep a wallet in your pocket, that can actually throw your back out, right and your gate out, even if it's the smallest amount. And that can have a negative impact on your posture and on your back pain and those kind of things. But if we improve it by those two millimeters, and we do these little micro steps, over time, these little baby steps build into full accomplishments. So you know, another thing I thought of that was similar, is years ago, Andrew Weil, who's a physician and also is a holistic practitioner. So complementary medicine, he talks about, he wrote a book called eight weeks to optimum health. And it's, it's a long time ago, so I'm dating myself. But his his suggestions were for every week, you would add a new habit. And you would do that for the seven days, but they were small things like one week would be I'm going to increase my water intake, then you would add the next week, I'm going to increase, you know, eating green vegetables, let's say. So it would be something specific for you. But they were basically building blocks and scaffolding to get you to the ultimate goal of optimum health for yourself based on your body. And so I kind of thought of that this here as well. Because I think if we think about breaking things down into smaller manageable chunks, which I've talked about before, it's sort of the same concept, right, we look at small little things that we can do that add up to a bigger goal. So with that, I figure, you know, showing gratitude for where you are now, in this process of the journey of life, and seeing what little micro steps you can make for this year. And again, maybe it's not for the whole year, maybe it's for a couple months, half a year, whatever makes sense for you. And so, I look forward to chatting with you again, and talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening to autism in real life. This is Ilia Walsh. And if you like the show, please hit subscribe so you can get notified each time a new episode is released. You can also join my email list to get more information on the podcast, receive blog posts, and my newsletter. If you have suggested topics for the podcast or would like to be a guest, please reach me on social media or through my contact page. Talk to you next time.

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