Building a Healthy Year: May's Theme is Maintenance

May is about Maintenance (May-tenance…😊)

If April was about assessment, taking a closer look at the routine, what is working, what is not working, what do we need to change or do more of? May is about maintenance. Maintaining your routine is just as important as starting it. In fact, you could argue that maintenance is the whole game. This gives us a nice progression from last month:
April: Notice what’s working (and what’s not)
May: Protect the time, habits and activities that are working  

The key to living healthy is to make it, whatever your routine is, to make it last long enough for it to matter.

The people that have the best long-term routines aren’t the ones with the most intense or hardest workouts. They don’t have more willpower than you do. They don’t even have knowledge that you don’t have. They simply do something repeatedly.

Practice and repetition is the whole process. Every time you do something, you are training your body, mind and even your planning muscles that you can do it and the more you do it the more impact you are going to see over time.

It sounds like it’s “too simple”. It sounds like it’s one of those “we all have the same 24 hours in the day” speeches, but it isn’t that. I promise you I’m not just blowing smoke. I’m telling you that if you have a routine, you will see results. It’s that simple.

What’s not as simple is putting the pieces together for that routine. I get it, where do we start, what do we do, how long, etc. Those details aren’t as important as one simple detail. Well actually, two simple details:

1.      Are you willing to do something?

2.      Are you willing to do it again tomorrow?

The trick is not forcing yourself to do something and then repeatedly forcing it each day after that. That’s the trap we all get caught in from time to time. If we are looking to get started, it is easy to see the whole routine at once and it feels like a lot to build up to. That’s true, but we don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, we can’t do it all at once. When we try to do that, we may have an intense day or week, but we aren’t changing the routine.

That’s why in order to be consistent, you don’t need willpower, you just need to do something that you can honestly see yourself doing regularly. In other words, start simple and stay with it. It’s that simple.

Maintenance is the long-term progress we all want. It’s easy to get caught up in the short-term details, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Pick one small thing and do it.

This month, think about maintenance. What steps can you take that you won’t have to force. You don’t want to do something that is a giant leap just to do once. You want to start with something you can do. Do it. Then do it again. Repeat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Momentum

  Sometimes we can get stuck because we aren’t already doing something. It is hard to start things. If something is new, it is difficult to start it and even more difficult to be doing it regularly right away. I’ve talked about not being afraid to start something. I’ve talked about not being afraid to be bad at something. Anything you do for the first time, you will not be an expert. Period. That’s just how it works. But something else that can keep us from taking that first step, or trying to take another step after we’ve been off for a while. It’s momentum. We’ve heard the law of physics: an object in motion stays in motion. That is literally true. It can also help us get going. More importantly, it can help us not beat ourselves up about it. You can tell yourself that you want to be doing something. It can be any habit. More water, less screen time, more movement. Whatever it is, there is our desired place and there is where we are now. Even if that gap is small, it ca...
Read more

Listen to your body.

  Your body has a way of telling you something is off. Whatever it is, we really should listen. The best way I’ve heard it put as: "Powering through what’s draining you won’t make you stronger." We’ve always been told to push through, or "no pain, no gain", all the cliches, but think about life and all the situations where something just didn’t fit. I can think of many experiences like that myself. No matter how hard you are on yourself, it isn’t going to work. And that’s ok. We just have to do it differently. Or do something else.   I am thinking about that a lot today. I am thinking about what it means when something isn’t working. When something is harder than it should be. As I step into my new role…well it’s not new, but I had to listen to my body telling me to come back to this. I really feel like I’m coming back to myself. No matter what path we are on, we need to listen. We need to be able to look at ourselves and our goals. We need to be able to name wh...
Read more

Do you know what you want?

  Do you know what you want? I’m not used to deciding what I want. I’m an easy-going, go with the flow type of person, so if you put something in front of me and ask me if I can do it, the answer is yes. If you ask me if I will do it, I will. If you ask me if I enjoyed it after the fact, I will likely have done it with a smile and so yes, it wasn’t too bad. But if you ask me beforehand, what do I want to do. I often don’t know what I want to do. I’m working on that. My wife asked me the other day, what do you want to do. On a good day that is met with a question mark. But on a bad day, that can be met with genuine anxiety. I can handle a lot. I know I can do a lot of hard things. I have had some difficult tasks put in front of me and I take pride in my ability to get it done. But I have realized that just because I can do something, even well, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what I want to do, or even what I should do. In school, in our careers, many of us have been doing thi...
Read more