Here we are 10 days into a new year and I’m wondering what do you know now that you didn’t know on day one?
Maybe you have figured out some things that you like about the tasks involved in the habit you are building.
Perhaps you have figured out a good time of day to establish your practice.
Maybe you have figure out what you don’t like or what time *doesn’t* work for you and you are figuring out some workarounds.
Perhaps you have discovered that you need to take action first and plan later.
Maybe you’ve discovered that your initial idea doesn’t actually interest you all that much or perhaps you’ve realize that it is much more interesting than you anticipated.
Perhaps you want to change a few things or maybe you want to keep them exactly the same.
Sure, 10 days may not be enough time to do a full assessment of your practice so far but it is enough time to gather good information to shape your plans going forward.
10 days is enough time to begin to determine if your reluctance is due to resistance or if you need to change things a little. (Resistance often diminishes with persistence or with creating a low bar for success – if you need to change things up, persistence and a low bar probably don’t help much.)
10 days is enough time to realize that your approach to planning needs some refinement.
10 days is a decent amount of information.
But, please be kind to yourself in how you use that information.
Gathering information of this sort is NOT about judging yourself or finding ‘mistakes’ – it’s about adjusting your approach, your processes, your systems so they are helping you instead of making habit-building harder.
It’s about using that information to celebrate the good and to support yourself in facing the challenges.
For example – if you love the way it feels when you exercise right after work but you have found yourself getting derailed because you are hungry at that point in the day, that’s excellent information. Getting derailed isn’t an indication that you have failed or that it is the wrong time of day to exercise, it’s information that’s telling you to have an energizing snack late in the afternoon or on your way home from work. By making good use of 10 days of information, you can celebrate the victory of finding a good time of day to exercise AND you can address the challenge of getting derailed.
Your victories and your challenges may be more complex than that example but as long as you are kind to yourself about it, the information you have gathered so far (and that you will continue to gather) will help you to find ways to meet your needs and establish your new habits.
So, perhaps you could take a few minutes today to figure out what you know about your practice so far and how you might want to celebrate, enhance, adjust, or change things going forward.
Here is your gold star for your efforts:
This drawing didn’t really go as planned but it is a gold star and it does look happy about your victory today so I am accepting ‘done’ instead of seeking ‘perfect’ – I hope you can do the same with your efforts today. Image description: A drawing of a very shiny happy-faced gold star that appears to have its ‘arms’ in the air as it it is celebrating a victory. The background of the image is white with small blue and green shiny dots and a shiny green trim.
“I am the cake? What the hell is Christine getting on with today?”
Well, Team, I am in full cheerleader mode and I am about to go all in on an analogy.
(Or perhaps I am going all in on a metaphor, my brain won’t sort the difference right now so you can choose whichever one feels right to you.)
Just roll with it.
Sooooooo…you might be working on new habits, trying to develop new patterns, adding or subtracting things in your life, but all of those things are details.
You are good just as you are, whether you change those details or not.
You, in fact, are the cake and all of those things are icing.
Actually, truth be told, some of those things aren’t even icing, they are sprinkles or those hard little silver balls that you’re never exactly sure you should eat.
Since you are the cake, you have substance, you have worth, and you are delightful, no matter what form you are currently in.
Hell, you are terrific even if you feel like you are a bowl of cake batter at the moment.
You might be a cupcake, a sheet cake, a layer cake, a cake pop – it doesn’t matter – you are still marvellous.
Sure, you can experiment with different types of icing, with sprinkles, or with decorations, with anything that you feel would enhance your life but those enhancements are not required – you have pre-existing goodness.
So, if you try one kind of icing or a specific type of decoration and you find that it doesn’t feel right or that it doesn’t suit you, scrape that stuff right back off and start again.
You aren’t an icing display.
You aren’t a decoration shelf.
You are cake and you are good, just the way you are right now.
Please keep that in mind if those icing details ever start to feel lIke they are overshadowing your wonderful cakeishness.
So, on that note, I wish you ease and self-kindness, my delicious teammate.
Here’s your star for your efforts today.
Image description: A cartoonish drawing of a gold star with a happy face. The background is white with thin diagonal black lines running from lower left to upper right across the page.
Before I get into my encouragement post for today, I want to draw your attention to two of my favourite recent posts here on Fit is a Feminist Issue. I enjoy everyone’s work here at the blog, of course, but these two posts really get into the same territory I like to cover so they were especially resonant today. If you want a great overview on how to set yourself up for success with new habits, check out Martha’s post – New year, new you, who dis? If you, like me, have trouble convincing yourself to start small, check out Tracy’s post – The two minute rule: start really really small.
Okay, so today I’m inviting you to think about why it can be so tricky to start new habits (Martha’s post also covers this quite nicely but I am adding some different layers.)
Most of my posts so far have been about taking things slowly, building step by step, making adjustments, and about being kind to yourself, and all of those things are important and useful when building habits.
However, if you find yourself needing to make adjustments to your plans EVERY day or if you have to work hard to talk yourself into your habit-related planning or tasks EVERY time, you may have to approach things differently.
I still want you to be kind to yourself, of course, but the nature of that kindness might go a bit beyond ‘letting yourself off the hook’ from time to time.
You *may* have to be kind to yourself by changing your systems or your goals to match your capacity.
We all get things done through systems – they may not be effective systems, they might even be chaotic systems, bur we have systems for everything. And when we decide to change or add a habit, we are introducing something new into those systems – something that that system was not designed to handle.
That’s going to create a challenge for us.
And, we might have even gone so far as to create a new system for this new habit that works on paper but that is hard to integrate into our lives and difficult to connect to our existing systems.
So, in these sorts of situations, we will keep running into the same frustrations over and over.
We’ll be attempting to add a new task, a new habit, or a new plan and, over and over, we will find that we don’t have the time or we don’t have the energy to work on it.
THIS IS NOT A FAILURE ON OUR PART.
This lack of time and energy is not a lack of willpower, it’s not a lack of discipline, it is definitely not about us ‘not wanting it enough’, and it is NOT about not working hard.
It’s about our capacity and about our systems.
As annoying as it is to accept, we all have limited capacity. That capacity changes from day to day (sometimes from hour to hour) and it changes in relation to our life circumstances and the external pressures we face.
We can’t beat ourselves out and beat ourselves up trying to follow a system for its own sake.
Instead, we need to look at the plans/goals/habits we are trying to integrate into our lives and we need to look closely at our systems and see where the friction is, see what is getting in our way.
The problem is not YOU.
The problem is that your current systems don’t match your current capacity.
To address the problem, you may need to identify and adjust your systems, you may need to change your plans/goals/habits, you may need to work on recognizing and accepting your capacity, and you’ll need to make changes in your expectations of yourself.
AND
You will DEFINITELY need to be kind to yourself during the whole process.
So, if you are struggling with these habit-related tasks, day after day, and your struggle goes beyond feelings of resistance and reluctance, please don’t blame yourself.
Instead, I invite you to consider this as a systems/capacity issue and start the problem-solving process there.
Once you have removed ‘I’m the problem’ from the equation, what other solutions start to present themselves?
If you recognize the limits of your capacity, how does that change the scale of the habits and the tasks that you want to try to include in your life?
And with that information in hand, how can you apply the information from Tracy’s and Martha’s posts to help reshape your plans for your next steps?
Please remember that changing your plans or making different choices based on new information is NOT failure, even if part of your brain tries to tell you that it is.
Changing plans based on new information is actually the only logical way to proceed.
After all, why would you stick with a plan that isn’t going to get you where you want to go? That would be like trying to stick with the route that your GPS has set out even though you can see that the bridge it is telling you to cross is washed out. You wouldn’t stubbornly plunge your car into the river just because the bridge *should* be there, you’d back up, turn around and then get the GPS (aka – the system) to recalibrate.
Note: Speaking of the value of systems, have a look at this post from James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) – Forget About Setting Goals. Focus On This Instead. He’s talking about systems you deliberately create to work on something that is important to you, and I have been talking about noticing your existing systems in relation to your capacity, but the two are connected, of course.
ANYWAY!
Here are your gold stars for your efforts today – there are a lot of bits and pieces in this post and in the work related to it so I thought it would be good to have lots of gold stars on hand to reward your efforts.
Go Team!
Image description: Another drawing of stars by yours truly – this one features a leafless branch with 9 small gold stars in a line tied to the branch with string. Each corner of the drawing is framed with a black line that extends to meet the line from the next corner at a dot roughly in the middle of each side of the square paper. The background is white but it is sprinkled with small purple dots.
Image description: digital timer set to 02:00, framed by a circle with options “cancel” and “resume” underneath.
Early January is crammed with all sorts of advice about how to make those January 1st changes stick. I have often dissed the idea of resolutions as a sort of set-up for failure. But this year I’m actually in a change-is-good mindset, and I have high hopes for the blank page that a new year seems to offer. Having said that, like so many other people, I have been here before. And those high hopes for change often feel dashed by the end of the month. So how to make things stick?
One way that’s getting some attention (or at least Sam brought it to my attention) is “the two-minute rule.” According to the article, “How the two-minute rule can help you beat procrastination and start new habits,” consistently spending two minutes on something can lead to transformative change. The rule says: starting a new habit should never take more than two minutes. It is a take on author and productivity consultant David Allen’s rule that “if it takes less than two minutes, then do it now.”
I am a big advocate of starting small and “doing less.” That’s why Sam tagged me when she posted about the two-minute rule. But even for me, two minutes seems so negligible as to be almost pointless. It’s not, though. I recognize that line of thinking — the “what’s the point of two minutes” line — as a mind-game to talk myself out of something. We have been conditioned to think that if something isn’t really hard or challenging, then it’s pointless. But really, if the alternative is NOTHING at all, then what’s the harm of doing just a little something towards your goal.
I’ve recently signed up for some writing coaching again with Daphne Gray-Grant, the Publication Coach. In the application form for her program, she asks how much time you’re planning to commit to your project each day. The first option is 5 minutes. The options go up from there: 15 minutes, 20-30 minutes, and if you want to choose 60 minutes or more there is a note that says you will need Daphne’s permission. Why? Because as a rule, people aim too high and then they lose steam and give up. Instead, making progress in small increments gives you a manageable habit that you can realistically maintain.
Knowing all of this, I still felt a voice in my head telling me I’m an under-achiever when I ticked the 5 minutes/day box. But I ticked that box because I can realistically expect not to feel overwhelmed by spending five minutes a day, five days a week on my book. It seems like ridiculously little time, but if the other option is spending no time at all on it, then I’m sure I will get further with five minutes a day than with zero minutes a day.
Having set that low expectation in the past and worked with it, I can also be confident that at least some days I will work beyond the five-minute timer. And I think where workouts are concerned, this is even more likely. I remember my yoga instructor once saying that if you want to start a home yoga practice, start by just putting down the mat. Next time you might put down the mat and do child’s pose. After that, you might put down the mat, do child’s pose, and follow it with downward dog. It actually works. Similarly, if you pack your gym bag, go to the gym, and commit to spending two or five minutes doing something there, that’s a start. It’s a small start, but doing it three days a week is the start of a habit. And in the end, that’s the goal: to establish a habit.
This year, besides my writing habit, my other “start small” thing is to spend time in the workout room in my building. We’ve got brand new treadmills and spin bikes, and enough free weights and weight machines to get a decent workout in. My goal is to get myself down there for at least five minutes, four days a week. Even as I type that, I can feel that voice saying “five lousy minutes — gimme a break.” But is five minutes better than nothing? Yes. And it gets me over the initial hump of not even putting on my workout gear or getting to the room, which is arguably the bigger challenge than making best use of it once I’m there.
I encourage everyone who is excited about the fresh pages of 2023 to experiment with starting small, especially anyone with a history of jumping in with both feet and then hitting a wall before the month is out. The goal is to establish a new habit, not to transform overnight into a completely different person. We are a week in and it’s not too late to moderate expectations, even for those of us who went out of the gate a little more ambitiously than is sustainable. Small habits grow. And even if kept small, they yield fruit. The voice in the head that says “this isn’t enough” needs to be challenged, perhaps with a stronger voice that says, “Oh really? Just watch!”
Is there anything you’ve been wanting to start that you can give two minutes a day to, a few times a week? Go for it!
Thanks to some combination of ADHD and personality, I often have trouble getting started on things. Whether it is starting a project in the first place or starting my work on it for the day, I find it really challenging to begin – no matter how much I want to do the thing.
This executive function ‘task initiation’ problem gets even more tangly if the thing I am trying to do feels important (to me or to someone else), if it involves many steps, or if the task is not clear.
Starting new habits often involves all of those things and the only way I have found to counter my inertia is by setting a limit – in time, task, or effort.
So, I agree that I am going to do just one task, or to work on the project for 10 minutes, or I am going to go gently.
And that can usually* help me find a way to get started.
If you are having trouble getting started with any habits you want to plan or develop, maybe setting a limit will help you, too.
Note: I’m NOT suggesting that having trouble getting started automatically means that you have ADHD/executive function issues. But, hey, you might as well borrow a technique from someone who has a lot of practice with the problem.
If you are having trouble getting started with your habit-related task for today – try setting a time limit or choosing a version of the task that feels accessible to you today.
If you are having trouble making a plan at all, try choosing a time limit and low-key task for this aspect of the plan. For example, you could say something like ‘I can’t set a plan for the whole month, that’s too big. I’m going to do 1 minute of meditation each day for the next 3 days and then reevaluate.‘
If you have repeatedly had trouble getting started, with your plan or with your habit tasks, the problem is not you – it’s a mismatch between your plan and your capacity. I’ll get into that in tomorrow’s post but in the meantime, please be kind to yourself about the whole thing.
And, of course, I have a gold star to offer you for your efforts today – no matter what they are.
Good luck out there!
*Not always, unfortunately, sometimes ADHD wins. I just have to be kind to myself about that and try again another time.
A small painting of a gold star with gold dots radiating out from it in all directions
When I coach writers, we always end up taking about inspiration and I always break out this quote from the author of Call of the Wild:
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
Sure, inspiration plays a part in writing but you can’t depend on it to just show up when you need it. If you wait to be inspired, you may never make your way to the page.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait for inspiration. Instead, you can take London’s advice and go after it with a club.
Luckily, that rarely involves using an actual club.
‘Going after it with a club’ means creating good conditions for inspiration. That could involve just showing up and getting down to work or it might involve research or conversations with writerly friends or going for a walk or using writing prompts. Doing any or all of those things can help inspiration find it’s way to you.
And in fact, if you show up and get down to work, you will discover that you can write a lot of words without any inspiration at all. You may not keep all of them in the document later but they will get written and you will finish ideas occurring to you as you go.
So, you might ask, what does this have to do with motivating yourself to develop new habits for your well-being?
Ah, well, you can’t wait for inspiration or motivation on that either.
You have to go after that motivation with a club as well.
If you are still in planning mode, like me, it’s a good idea to schedule some time to think about what you want to do and how you might make that happen. Otherwise, you (and I!) could end up just winding our way through the next little while hoping we will just suddenly think of the perfect plan.
If you have your plan in place but you wait until you ‘feel like’ putting in the effort on any given day, you may find that you never feel like it. In this case, going after motivation with a club would probably look like picking a time to work on your habit and getting started at that time, whether you feel like it or not.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying ‘push ahead with your plans no matter what.’
Sometimes we need rest, sometimes plans change, sometimes we need to let ideas cook before we can turn them into a plan.
But, most of the time we know the difference between those things and the times that we need to go after our motivation with a club.
And if you *can’t* tell the difference right now, try resting for a while and then pick up that metaphorical club for a few minutes. Hopefully trying both will give you a sense of which one you need more time with.
Wishing you ease and self-kindness today and always.
Here’s your gold star for your efforts. 💚
Image description: a drawing of three small gold stars hanging from the top of the drawing on black strings. The piece of paper is outlined in black at the edges and the background is white with small black dots. My initials and the year are in the bottom right corner.
Whether you are already working your plan, still formulating your plan, or if you are continuing with what’s already working, it’s important to celebrate every single thing you do that’s related to your plan.
This is one of the reasons that I give gold stars (like the one below) for efforts instead of for results.
When you are working on a plan or working toward a goal, the end is a long way off – in time or in effort. And while it is good to keep our eye on that prize, it can be disheartening to compare our current position to that far-off result.
If we do make that comparison, we can end up feeling like we are behind or like we are not working hard enough.
To combat that feeling, I’d like to remind us all to also take a good look at what we have done so far.
When we consciously choose to notice our efforts, it helps us to see that our day-to-day practices matter, that they are adding up to something.
It keeps us from focusing on any gap between what we hoped we could do and what was actually possible.
It reminds us that we are all out here doing the best we can with the resources we have.
Noticing our own hard work helps us to be kinder to ourselves as we develop new habits and maintain the systems we have in place.
A drawing of a small star made of triangles of different shades of yellow and gold. The background is composed of horizontal black lines at the bottom 1/5th and slanted black lines for the top 4/5ths of the drawing.
I’m trying to figure out what to include in a fitness journal.
I love the idea of recording my plans and ideas and then writing my reflections on my practices but I know better than to try to put all of that onto a blank page.
If I have an open-ended journal, I will feel like I have to write AllOfTheThings AllOfTheTime and I will start avoiding journaling.
This is ironic, of course, because writing is one of the things that comes to me most easily…except when I start trying to do too much at once. Image description; A GIF of cartoon character Lisa Simpson exclaiming that writing is the hardest thing ever.
I looked for a fitness journal I could buy – thinking that a structured set of questions would be like ‘containers’ for my thoughts – but mostly I found fitness trackers.
Keeping track of the details may be part of my journaling but what I am really interested in is recording and reflecting on my physical and emotional experiences.
So, I am taking a DIY approach – choosing a set of 3-5 fitness-related questions to put on an index card that I will use as a bookmark in a regular journal.
I figure that if I have a set of questions ready it will not only help to structure my thoughts but I can also just number the answers in my journal and not create any obstacles for myself by having to rewrite the questions each time I journal.
I’ve found lots of suggested questions online (see links below) and I am mulling those over – not looking for perfect questions, just seeing what feels interesting to me.
But, speaking of interesting, I’d be interested to know what *you* think would make a good reflective question for a fitness journal.
What do find useful to consider about your fitness practices?
What do you wish you had made note of when you started something new?
What kinds of feelings or experiences do you think I should reflect on?
Image description: A GIF of Moira Rose from the TV show Schitt’s Creek dressed in black with a huge elaborate necklace and wearing heavy black eyeliner and dark red lipstick. She is asking “What?! I’m simply asking questions.”
If you’re interested, here are some of the articles I found online. (I think Sam suggested the first one in a previous Facebook post.)
Before I begin today, I’d like to remind you that you do NOT have to make changes, start resolutions, or make new year plans. If you feel drawn towards those kinds of things, that’s cool. If you hate those kinds of things, that’s cool, too.
And, if you are a resolutions type of person with your plans for the year all set up and you’re working away at them – go you! We all need to find a way that works for us and keeps us feeling good about ourselves as we move forward. In your case, today’s post might be good to have in your metaphorical back pocket in case you need it one day.
Meanwhile, I’m over here with no actual plans yet, just a vague sense of wanting to improve my overall well-being through movement and rest this year.
I know that will take some planning and some up-front work and experimentation but I need to do some thinking and writing and research to figure out the details.
And I’m ok with that. In fact, as I noted in a recent post, I am in Planuary not January right now.
If you are also in Planuary, or just if you are still deciding what you want to do, or if you know what you want to do but are still getting in gear to do it, I’d like to invite you to decide something small.
By that, I mean to pick a little something that is at least somewhat related to a direction you may want to move in. (That might be the vaguest sentence I have ever written. Bahahaha!)
This isn’t about deciding on Step 1. It isn’t about keeping yourself busy. This is a way of anchoring the space you created yesterday.
So, for example, I know that I want to strengthen my core this year. And I know that any exercises for my core will help. I also know that I will need to get specific at some point or I won’t actually follow though.
But I don’t have a plan or strategy *yet.* Right now, I just have a sense that this is a direction I want to move towards.
So, yesterday, I decided that since on most days I can exercise in the evening, I would create mental space in my evening routine for exercise.
And since I don’t have a plan in place, anything would do for now.
So, I picked 5 core exercises I like and did 5 reps of each one.
It was a manageable amount. It had defined parameters (i.e. it was clear when I was done.) And it felt like I did something useful for my eventual plan.
I didn’t have to overdo it. I didn’t have to create a huge framework for future fitness. I could just decide on something small that would move me in the right direction.
And it is something I can keep doing while I decide what ELSE I want to do.
And I’d like to invite you to give this a try.
Whatever you are mulling over right now, decide on a small version to try. See how it feels, physically and mentally.
If it felt good – stick with it while you figure out what’s next. If it was too tiring or if it felt bad – adjust things for next time.
Note: Judging from my personal past experience, there’s a decent chance that your ‘something small’ will only seem small in comparison to your envisioned future result. When you try it, you may find that your ‘something small’ was actually fairly big. If that’s the case, don’t despair – just go smaller.
And, of course, please be kind to yourself in the process. Making plans, making changes, and trying new things can all be challenging, tricky, stressful processes. If you find these things hard, try to give yourself time to adjust and to recover – you need what you need and trying to ‘tough it out’ may just make things harder. Sure, we all need to persevere and push through sometimes but we can’t stay in that mode all the time.
Here’s your gold star for your efforts today whether you are working your plan, working on a plan, or working towards considering working on a plan.
Image description – a cartoonish drawing of a happy face gold star with big eyes and blue eyelids. The background of the image is overlapping blue lines and the corners are blue blobs.
I know you are probably saying, “Didn’t Christine say that she was done with the Making Space series and getting started on the Go Team series? Why is today’s post called ‘Make Space’?”
You’re right, I did say that. And it is true.
We’re done with the Making Space series for now and this is, indeed, the first ‘Go Team!’ post.
However, it’s ALSO true that before you can add new things into your life, you need to make space for them or everything else is going to get jumbled.
Note: For the record, it’s TOTALLY ok not to be taking on anything new or changing anything up this month. Some people *like* the whole new year ritual but if it makes you feel pressured or upset? Ignore it completely. Please be kind to yourself, no matter what.
You don’t need a huge idea.
You don’t need a crystal clear plan.
You don’t need to make sweeping, drastic changes.
You can just have a vague idea, a mere suggestion of a direction that you *might* want to move towards and you can begin to explore it by considering how the early, smallest steps might fit into your life.
For example, if you want to begin a meditation practice, you could ‘make room’ today by deciding what time of day would make sense for the smallest version of your practice.
Let’s imagine that you will start with 1 minute of meditation.
Where can you reliably find 1 minute most days?
When boiling the kettle? When sitting in your car before going to work? Right before your lunch? Right before bed?
Maybe you’ll want to give that one minute practice a whirl today but maybe you can consider your efforts to make space as your practice for today.
For most of us, changing or creating habits often depends on small, steady movements forward (and a few steps back and then moving forward again) rather than trying to magically transform ourselves in an instant.
It’s ok to count every part of developing your habit as part of the habit itself.
There are many steps involved in making change and the more steps that you can celebrate, the better.
Good luck! Be kind to yourself!
Go Team!
Here’s your gold star for your efforts today:
Image description: a drawing of a gold star happy face outlined in green, surrounded by gold and green dots.
