Resiliency and Forgiveness

I've been incredibly guilty of the opposite of what I propose today. Creating new healthy habits and being disciplined is incredibly hard. These days we are targeted with attention seeking strategies to pull us away from what matters the most. I remember being in a meeting with some product folks, the main intent of what we were building was to create an addiction to the app (not even joking, it was a "are we the baddies?" moment). I left as soon as possible and didn't realize it would hit me this hard that I never wanted to be a part of something like this. While that might be a topic for another day, I want to discuss how to stay disciplined. Realistically.

As you read books, watch videos, listen to podcasts and whatnot, you're exposed to many different approaches and ideas on what's going to help you stay disciplined. It's quite common to talk about being consistent as a driving factor. While I agree with this I don't think the message is made very clear. Being consistent doesn't mean doing a thing every single day. It means doing it regularly and create a sustainable change in your life.

Committing to workout every day it's going to burn you out fast, and it's not sustainable. Start incrementally and find a balance that works for you. There is no trick, you have to try different approaches until you find something that works for YOU. You can read all you want but until you start something, anything, you won't know what helps you stay disciplined.

A key factor for discipline is recovery. I like to think of it as riding a bike (I wanted to say "horse" but realized that's not relatable since I've never done it), you might hit a bump, push yourself too much on a turn and fall. The best thing you can do is picking yourself up, hop on the bike again and resume. Don't take "bumps" as failures, holding yourself to impossible standards. Be kind to others but most importantly to yourself. The road for growth is not made of perfect daily steps and learning how to recover is going to help you stay the path long term.

Thoughts

I don't have a secret guideline to this but I tried to build new habits that I can "attach" to existing ones. I wanted to commit to writing every day and tried this several times in the past. This kept happening until I found out How To Trick Myself to Write More, but most importantly I learned that some days it's ok to take a break. Nobody is going to chase me with a bat if I don't have a perfect streak and "stats" don't matter as much as creating a healthy and sustainable path to what you want to achieve. Forgive yourself if you hit a bump, try to get back on track as soon as possible and leverage existing habits to build new ones.