Hey Team,
Today, I would l like to remind us all that it is ok to adjust plans our plans as we go along.
When you first create a plan to enhance or expand some part of your life, you are working with limited information.
Perhaps you know exactly where you want to go and kind of how to get there but the details are fuzzy.
Or maybe you aren’t sure where you want to end up but you have some practices you want to incorporate into your day to day.
You may have a plan for a destination and a set of practices but maybe you aren’t sure whether you will like them or how you will fit them into your schedule.
Either way, we generally start with some things that are very clear and others that are a bit blurry.
And that’s totally fine, that’s the nature of planning things for the future.
The challenges arise when we forget that as we gain more experience, as we learn more about the process, as we actually try out some of our ideas, we are actually gathering useful information about our practices AND that it is a good idea to use that information to adjust our practices to serve us well.
We are not always stuck with the decisions that we made at the beginning of this process.*
It’s ok to change things to simplify or streamline your process.
It’s ok to change the order of your activities.
It’s ok to decide to drop something you hate and find another way to accomplish the same thing. (Or to just drop it and not replace it.)
It’s ok to do a shorter version of your activities on busy days (or on that day of the week when the traffic is always worse for some reason.)
It’s ok to change how you organize your activities.
It’s ok to change your plan entirely and seek out a completely different life-expanding activity.
(Sidenote: this principle applies far beyond fitness and wellness activities.)
If you are working towards something and some aspect of it is not serving you well, you are free to adjust any and all parts of the process to make it work for you.
After all, your practices are not about the practices or about the results, they are about you and the things you want in your life.
The practices and the results are the external representations of the way you want to feel, the things you want to experience, and you can find other ways to feel or experience those specific things.
So, Team, today I am inviting you to adjust any part of your practice that is getting on your nerves, causing you distress, or just not working the way you wanted it to.
And here are some gold stars for your efforts, no matter what those efforts are and no matter how you decide to adjust them, and no matter if they are the same as yesterday or something completely different.
Go Team Us!
A note about today’s stars:
This little painting is a good example of the process I am talking about in this post.
I started with the idea of painting a bunch of rectangles with one big gold star in the middle but after I painted them, I realized that a big gold star would cover up the yellow rectangle entirely and I didn’t want that.
I decided on a bunch of small stars instead but they looked kind of weird on the rectangles. So I trimmed the rectangles in black but then I realized that the edges of the rectangles looked weird because they weren’t close enough to line up but they weren’t far enough away to be offset. So I made the lines thicker in some places to make it more interesting. Then I decided to add outlines to the gold stars to help them stand out but I was a bit messy with the edges and things went a bit awry. So I decided to add some black dots to make the messiness less blatant.
Basically, I had an idea where I was going with this painting and every time something turned out a little different, I made an adjustment and carried on. It’s far from perfect but it works just fine for what we need today and making adjustments as I went along helped me to stay on track with the project.
*Yes, I know that, in some circumstances, we have made commitments to a certain length of time or a certain set of activities but, in general, we do not have to stick with things because they seemed like a good idea at the beginning. And even things we committed to may have some wiggle room in them if we decide to look for it.
