Begin Again

 

Begin Again

Begin again. This phrase was first introduced to me in the context of mindfulness and meditation. It was incredibly helpful and helped me make that part of my regular routine. I went from thinking I couldn’t do something, to feeling like I was already doing it.

What’s even better, is that mindset has crossed over to other areas of my life. It applies to everything. Begin again. Let’s start from the beginning: I was trying to make meditation part of my routine. I felt like my mind was racing, felt stressed, and really needed something to slow things down and be a centering or grounding activity. Everything was going 100 miles per hour and I needed something to change. This felt like something helpful.

While the concept of meditation sounded helpful, the practice was really difficult. I was having a hard time quieting the mind. I couldn’t concentrate. I thought I was incapable of doing it. I had tried many times, but never felt like I was doing it “right”.

That’s when I heard it for the first time: “Begin again”. The full context was: “If you have a thought come, don’t fight it, don’t bristle at the fact that you were interrupted, or shame yourself for having a thought. Simply begin again. Your goal is not have the mind be completely silent. That isn’t realistic. The goal is to welcome the thought, let it pass, and begin again.”

No matter what you are doing, you will run into obstacles. You will have setbacks. You will have days that are harder than others. In this setting it was literally the mind racing and not being able to keep the thoughts from entering. Other days it might be too many meetings, weather changes, or kids activities taking more time than expected.

Going back to the meditation. The other important thing to remember is that I was trying to have it mastered, perfectly, without a single moment of challenge. That wasn’t realistic to begin with. The fact that I was trying to do it that way was already setting me up for failure.

That happens with other goals too. When we think about the goal to do something every day during a week. Even the mindset of “it has to be every day” could be setting us up for failure. Have you ever had a perfect week? Have you ever had each day go exactly as planned for the entire week? I didn’t think so.

So, when we are getting started with a new routine, or even keeping a regular routine going, we need to think about this. We need to think about what we can control, and what is a realistic execution of your new habit. More specifically, setting the goal in a way that allows you account for this on the front end.

For example. If you want to start with a walk each day, if the goal is weekly: “I’m going to walk every day” , if you miss a day, you are off and your goal for the week is not accomplished. You are also only giving yourself a check-point at the end of each week. Did you get all your days in? No? Then you failed.

Another way to execute this would be to simply start each day with a goal to get a walk in. Each day you do that walk is a day that you accomplished your goal. After 7 days, rather than just having a yes or no to that same question, now you have 7 straight days of success that you can celebrate and build on for next week.

And if there is a random scheduling issue on Tuesday, or if you don’t feel well on Thursday, you can still accomplish your goal on all the other days. 5 days of walking and the goal tracking showing 5 out of 7 is a much better way to end the week than just “No” or “Failed”.

The first half of the equation is setting up your week like that, so that each day is it’s own goal, almost its own plan. The other half of that equation is: Begin again.  

Each day, we have that opportunity. Even during the day, we have that opportunity. There isn’t just ONE way to do it, ONE time to do it, or any rule that says you have to have the exact number of sessions per week, or it doesn’t count.

It all counts. Each day counts. Each day, you get a chance to begin again. It doesn’t matter how the day before went, or how last week went, or even how you are feeling today. It is a new day and you can begin again.

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