Forming New Habits
After a smashing start to my writing everyday challenge last week, I, er, flopped pretty hard this week. I have a good excuse (day one and two of my period – aka, 48 hours to retreat, rest and cocoon from the outside world) but still. I hate not sticking to my word.
It’s a common experience amongst creatives – and everyone, really. We decide to create a new habit and are really excited and motivated about said potential habit, that we go in hard and fast and forget to incorporate this habit into our daily lifestyle. We forgo more sustainable techniques to plunge ourselves into the deep end of optimisation and assume that we can keep up this energy eternally.
Well, we can’t. Not most of us, anyway.
[I say ‘we’ because this is absolutely me too. It took until I was 25 to finally learn and practice creating new habits in a sustainable and effective manner. And I’m still fucking up – case in point.]
Once we begin these new habits, it becomes a drawn out game of Minesweeper for 30-60 days, navigating potential bombs and detours that throw us off our path.
Life gets in the way, or we forget, or we haven’t attached our new habits to another ritual or time frame so left in limbo they get pushed to the end of the day and we become too tired and sleep trumps consistently.
In other words, shit happens. We make mistakes. We fuck up. But then we have a choice: dwell on our lapse in judgement or decision to not do the thing we said we’d do, berating ourselves and feeling shit about it…OR we can accept that today was not the day, but tomorrow can be.
We choose to try again. To admit defeat for this block of 24 hours, and go into the next determined to give things another crack.
This must be an active, intentional decision. Hoping that things will work out tomorrow, or that we’ll have a perfect block of time when we also happen to have a natural burst of energy to do said new habit, is only going to set us up for more disappointment and another strike against ourselves.
So, what can we do? We choose to try again, yes, we let go of the need to do it every single day without fail.
Which is actually huge. Deciding to keep going even with an imperfect track record takes immense courage. Having the guts to give it another go knowing that you’ll never be able to say you’ve done this perfectly – and what’s perfect, anyway? – is major and should be celebrated as such.
We commit to ourselves, and promise to do the best that we can and actively work on showing up and doing this thing everyday. But we also make a clause to be gentle and kind and understanding. To know that we will get there. It might take time, and it might not look how we imagined, but we will get there.
Love, Viv