Last week a client sent me a message confessing that, as of Wednesday night, her week was shot. She’d fallen off of the workout wagon, had abandoned her nutrition plan, and was nowhere near hitting any of her SMART goals* for the week.
I messaged her back:
The week isn’t over.
Sometimes we forget that. We forget that Wednesday isn’t the end of the week. We forget that if we indulge at lunch we can get back to our plan for dinner. We forget that beginnings don’t always have to come at the our version of the beginning.
I’ll start again tomorrow. I’ll start again on Monday.
We think of beginnings as Mondays and the first day of the month and the first day of the year. Recently I’ve been listening to “To Shake the Sleeping Self,” and one of the observations that most struck me was that we all will hit a point in the journey where we lose sight of the mountain from which we have left and have no sight of the mountain in front of us. We only know the valley in between those two points that seems to go on forever.
There are several sticking points in the journey to making a behavior change. There’s the resistance to get started in the first place – and then there’s the resistance we feel when we hit that first road block in the process.
And we will hit that road block. The question is what we do when we hit that wall. One of the most common answers is that we wait. Often, when we lose momentum – either by missing a workout, a meditation, a session at the gym – we decide that we are going to wait. In part because we are creatures who like beginnings. We’ll start tomorrow, we’ll start Monday, we’ll start on the first of the month.
The thing is, we don’t have to wait. What we have to do is keep working.
Inertia is the enemy of momentum. When we stop because we had McDonald’s for lunch, because we were too tired to get up for our workout, or the day just got away from us, we don’t need to throw out the rest of the day or the rest of the week.
So what do you do when the craziness of a new and unpredictable school year happens?
We keep working.
When the holidays roll around?
We keep working.
When we fall off of the path?
Keep working.
Keep moving, keep doing, keep believing.
And when it doubt?
Keep working.