Two months into the year – is progress towards your goals fitful, a cycle of starting, stopping, and restarting? Do you have good intentions but lack the consistency needed for accomplishment? Discipline is more than girding your lions and powering through; promise and patience are essential.
Promise
Ironically, we are far more diligent about meeting commitments to others than ourselves. If someone asks you to speak with a colleague, you will check their LinkedIn profile, review their company’s website, and log into Zoom a few minutes early to ensure you are prepared and punctual for the call. You do all this for a stranger but skip your planned workout even though your wellness depends on it.
Even simpler, we go to dinner intending to abstain from bread, alcohol, or dessert. We then allow our minds to brilliantly generate exceptional reasons to suspend our good intentions – the meal is incomplete without a warm roll, the restaurant has our favorite wine, or we must have a piece of mom’s birthday cake.
If we regard our goals as promises to ourselves, we will accomplish them. Rather than disappoint myself, you may find me hoisting dumbbells after sunset on Sunday to meet my pledge to lift weights twice weekly.
Just for Today
We also fall victim to thinking that maintaining the habit for the period desired is too formidable, and we quit. Or, when we break a habit, we allow the break to gain inertia and become an anti-habit.
Taking a page from 12-step programs, we only need to think and act in daily increments, today, not the remainder of the week, month, or year. If you break a desired practice, return to it tomorrow; do not let the break extend to consecutive days. The expected choice for 12-steppers who break abstinence is to begin a new streak the very next day.
You can use the one-day-at-a-time principle to facilitate “no” decisions by transforming them to “not today.” For example, I seek to refrain from going to the discotheque and dancing with scantily clad women wearing stiletto heels while drinking champagne straight from the bottle. When I have the urge, I tell myself to wait until tomorrow. When tomorrow comes, the urge has passed, or I postpone the escapade until the following day. Yes, this example is (mostly) fiction, but it is more compelling than writing about expectantly eating a chocolate chip cookie.
Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
Patience is required to sustain our efforts when frustrated by a lack of tangible progress.
After faithfully going to the gym for a month, your biceps do not appear any larger, and you do not compare favorably to the guy who has been pumping iron for five years. We know our expectations are unrealistic, but we are impatient, give up, and deny ourselves the unavoidable rewards from accumulated effort.
Similarly, imperceptible regression lulls us into complacency. Missing a workout or falling off the no-dessert wagon does not cause a detectable reduction in your fitness level or measurable weight gain. As a result, we are easily tempted to skip a workout or stray from our consumption regimen despite knowing patient fidelity to inaction or the wrong action leads us down the road to perdition.
Fortunately, gradual progression has a positive side; remaining on the couch one day or eating a donut will not destroy the progress good habits have delivered. They are wrong – a moment on the lips is not forever on the hips.
To hold impatience at bay, measure progress not by the result but by adherence to the habit (i.e., exercise five times weekly). Alternatively, measure results at appropriate intervals. Rather than critiquing your physique every day in the gym mirror, take pictures monthly. If you are loyal to an effective program, there will be a noticeable difference in your three-month photo.
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Can you inspire the action needed for accomplishment by regarding your goals as promises to yourself? Where do you need to add a dose of patience so cumulative actions can yield their inevitable bounty?