Tag: sustained commitment

Two Plus Two Plus Two Plus Two Plus Three Plus Two Plus Two

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My running, for most of my life, has been intermittent. My typical run is 4 or 5 miles, a solid running week is two or three runs. That means that at most I’ve run 12 to 15 miles in a week, and most of the time I’m in the 0-to-10 mile a week range.

In fact, I’d guess that in the last 25 years, I’ve had fewer than 10 weeks in which I’ve run more than 15 miles.

Last week was one of those weeks. But the magic was that it didn’t feel like I’d run at all. That’s because last week, I turned my morning walk with our puppy into a relaxed jog: 2.3 miles every day, 3 miles on Saturday.

The math of 2+2+2+3+2+2+2 is, literally, elementary.

The fact that a 15-mile week has been sitting there, hidden in plain sight from me for decades, speaks to the elusive power of consistency.

Little, nearly unnoticeable things that we do every day are so much more profound than our big efforts.

We build deep strength not through the strain of pushing ourselves in the moment but through the discipline of daily commitment sustained over time.

To become a great public speaker, work on telling mini-stories throughout your day when talking to colleagues and customers.

To become more capable of speaking truth to power, say one (just one) more real thing to someone you trust each and every day.

To become a better listener, commit to asking three follow-up questions once each day instead of jumping to answers.

To become more generous, say ‘yes’ to every request for a month.

And, yes, to get rid of that nagging pain in your neck, or shoulder, or ankle, or knee, find a 10 minute stretching routine and a time each day to do it.

Since the magic is in the consistency, you might need hacks that help you keep your promises. Here are five ideas to get you going:

  1. Find a buddy who will help keep you accountable. A spouse, a colleague or a dog will suffice. You could even get an Accountability Dude (or, presumably, Dudette) in Slack, or a Supporti accountability partner.
  2. Find a way to make your commitment public to someone. Put up a 30-day challenge calendar somewhere public, write a blog post or email to 10 people letting them know your plan, make a pact with one person at work.
  3. Make a dedicated time in the day. There’s a reason people mediate first thing in the morning, and a reason I used to write this blog on my train ride home. A fixed time and place where you do the thing you’ve committed to do makes all the difference.
  4. Plan for the dip. Somewhere in the middle life will happen and you’ll feel like stopping. Know in advance that this is coming and decide now that you won’t let it stop you.
  5. Respect the power of “every day.” It’s not the same thing as “most days,” not at all. “Most” is vague, “every” is absolute. It doesn’t allow for any slippage, and that’s the point.

The math is easy. Living the commitment can be too. You just have to start, and build the structures that will help you keep at it.

10 out of 30

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Two weeks ago, to address some recurring pain in my knee, I made a 30-day yoga commitment: a minimum of 30 minutes of yoga a day for 30 days. I even have a big ol’ Austin Kleon 30 Day Challenge calendar hanging in my kitchen, with giant red-crayon X’s for each day I’ve completed.

10 days in, I noticed a few things.

The beginning is not the hard part. In fact, beginning big commitments is fun. There’s a bit of fanfare as you tell folks. A sense of self-validation that you’re doing something big and courageous. You spend time imagining the amazing results that will come at the end of 30 days.

This glow remains for a few days. Those first days are a living, breathing validation of all that excitement. They’re still fun.

Then, about a third of the way in, the excitement dies down.

You’re by yourself, alone with your commitment.

There’s no fanfare, no fans.

It’s just you, stuck in the middle. You’re tired and struggling for time and motivation. Maybe you’re noticing that you’ve not made as much progress as you originally imagined.

What a tempting moment to quit.

“Who will notice, really? Maybe I’ll just skip a day.”

I know that my motivation to start on Day 10 was zero. Same for days 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Here’s a dirty little secret about hard work, especially the kind that leads to real and lasting change: the middle bits (and lots of the bits) aren’t all that glamorous.

They’re hard not just because of the actual challenge of doing the hard thing we’ve decided to do. They’re also hard because the act of following through is itself sometimes a grind.

All of us, 3-4 months into this pandemic, find ourselves past the beginning stage of this new world and new life. We’re far from the shore we left, and we’ve got no clear end in sight. No doubt we have felt, or are about to feel, a dip.

Whether or not you’ve specifically made a 30-day commitment, you’re no doubt spending your days doing new things, trying on new approaches, working on new ways (slowly…but also surely) of becoming the person you’re meant to become: a healthier you, a stronger you, a more accepting you, a more confident you, a more grounded you, or maybe a you that’s more at piece with the fact that kid(s) + job(s) = a different calculus on what “productive” really means.

In case you find yourself stuck, I thought it might help to hear this reminder: just because the middle bits are hard doesn’t mean it’s time to give up.

In fact, the middle bits being hard are the best indication that you’re doing something worthwhile, something that will yield important results.

Keep showing up for yourself.

The results will come in time.

 

Reps

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Way (way) back when, when I was a high school wrestler, I used to lift weights. This was old school stuff. I spent most of my training time off-season at the local Y surrounded by barbells, dumbbells, and big metal plates, not the wooshing white, ergonomically advanced machines of today.

In my senior year of high school, the guy I trained with, who could bench press well over 300 pounds, changed our routine. Every other day, instead of a regular weight-lifting session, we’d do a pushup workout. In each set, you’d do as many pushups as you could, until your muscles failed. The trick was, instead of counting normally (1-2-3-4-5-6) you’d count in a pyramid:

1

1-2

1-2-3

1-2-3-4

And so on

The only other rule was that if you gave up before finishing a number you had to redo that number (meaning, if you were trying to get to 15 but you stopped at 10, when your next set started you had to repeat number 15).

The entire workout was to go up to 20 and back, and try to do it in as few sets as possible.

For those of you doing the math, you’ll quickly see that all we were doing was 400 pushups. So why all the rigmarole, and why, week in and week out, would we keep on doing the pyramid instead of counting our way up to 50, 60, or (on a good day) 70 pushups per set?

It’s because even that counting trick was powerful. Each milestone felt achievable. The structure made it hard to how big the whole was. Doing 400 pushups? Wow, that’s a lot. But just doing a first set counting from 1 to 10? That doesn’t seem that bad, now does it (even though it is 55 pushups)?

The work we are all doing requires walking long, hard roads. Long as in years, maybe decades. And hard because we’re taking on the gnarly, unsolved problems in the world.

Part of the way we do that is through deep exploration of and connection to purpose. We must turn on a light inside of us, through a deep investigation of our own “why,” and we must keep that flame burning by revisiting that why time and again.

But we can’t be revisiting all the time, and certainly not every day.

Because most days what the world needs from us is work, not reflection. And what our work needs from us is that we show up, that we see where we need to go today, that we do that work with skill, focus, energy, and with full and hopeful conviction, so that we move the ball forward a bit.

That next achievable, daily milestone is a very valuable thing. It takes the cross-hairs off of the big gigantic goal, moving it to our peripheral vision – still in sight, but not quite clear enough to overwhelm. We can set the milestones so we have to stretch some, because getting to pushup 15 when you feel like you can only do 10, is possible.

Over time, the daily work of doing a little more than we thought possible adds up to weeks, months and years of amazing, surprising progress. It’s always been that the act of showing up today, workman-like, and moving forward as much as we can is actually a great way to do big, important and great things over time.