It hasn’t been a great winter for running for me. Between the cold snowy weather, late sunrises and general busyness, I’ve just not gotten out there that often.
That didn’t stop me from deciding, this past weekend, to take my one free daylight hour and head out for a 7 mile, very hilly run in 25°F weather. Brilliant, I know. Usually I feel like most of the effort is in just getting out there, and after I start things get easier. This time, between the cold and the brutal hills (I think there was maybe 1 mile of true flat road on this run), I spent the better part of an entire run talking myself into finishing the run.
Even in that context, one moment stood out. The last mile of this run is practically straight uphill, and steep, and I was at the base of the steepest part of that incline. I had psyched myself up by convincing myself that this section of the last hill was short and steep, and the strategy had been working as I trudged along with my head down. Then, reflexively, I looked up to discover that the hill was about three times as long as I’d pretended it was.
At that moment I had an overwhelming urge to stop.
The interesting part is that being out of breath or feeling a huge burn in my legs didn’t demotivate me, but seeing how far I still had to go did.
And so, switching gears, I wonder: how do we really go about making changes in our lives? (Alternately: why do New Years resolutions fail?).
I’d propose that the thing that holds us back is that “looking up” moment, when you see how big the hill you want to scale is and decide that it’s just too darn big, too hard, too much, so you don’t start.
Despite being a believer in big audacious goals, when it comes to the hard work of personal transformation, I’m most successful when I start small. If I want to cut out eating sugar, if I want to meditate daily or be more generous or ignore my inbox for an hour a day or give myself more whitespace for reflection, I’d much rather set myself a clear one-week goal and start on it today.
You can do anything for a week, easily. And by committing to just a week, you don’t have to engage in the meaningless anticipation of what this undertaking will mean for you – because, let’s be honest, until you do it (whatever IT is) you really don’t know what IT feels like. The powerful part is that a week is long enough to start getting used to a new habit: it’s long enough to change how salty your think food should taste (try it, it’s true). It’s long enough to discover whether mornings or evenings work better for you for _______ [YOUR NEW ACTIVITY]; long enough to discover why, really, it’s hard not to check your smartphone right when you wake up or right when you go to bed or every time you step into an elevator.
Just one week.
Don’t allow the sight of the big hill keep you from starting to run. Give it a week, start today, and see how you actually feel when you behave differently. Then decide how big this is going to be for you.
So spon on Sasha.
I call this “the false summit phenomenon” and my insight here is: most people stop, sit down, or turn around as soon as they hit the “false summit”.
But your advice at this critical point is exactly right. When we hit the false summit, we need to tell each other: “Come on, just one more step. Now another one. Now another one. Now two more. Now three more. ”
The *real* trick of the false summit is when you realize that there’s no *real* summit, either. Because then you have no choice but to commit to the process forever. And that’s when you really start excelling.