“Give the gift two years. Two years of patience and consistency and grace and effort to change your lifestyle to go after the healthier version of you that you are dreaming of.  Give yourself two years because it will be worth it,” Leah Hope Health.  There is an unhealthy obsession, a fixation on how much we can do—and after I wrote those first few sentences, I had to stop to get some things done around the house so I went about my day.  As the day went on, I saw myself overwhelmed with how much we had to do—all of our own choice, of course.  We had begun moving things in the basement so we could clean things out and rearrange it how we want it and I don’t want it to sit in a state of disarray.  I was fully aware we wouldn’t finish it all in one day, that wasn’t the expectation, but I was fully of the mindset that we needed to get done what we could get done—throw away what needed to be thrown away, build the shelving that we could build, move the things for donation so we can get that out of the way.  Right now I’m about creating space and that space is so cluttered.  I don’t live comfortably in chaos and I am certainly not able to sit and play a game in chaos.  I no longer want to put off until tomorrow what can be done today and I want this to be a time of doing activities that yield real results.  So we decided on a project, I don’t want to leave it half finished. Losing momentum right at the start of any venture can be a death sentence to that project because the brain finds opportunities to quit and to follow the path of least resistance so it will find old patterns and do that. 

I am fully aware of those moments when we have to stop—I am not talking about pushing through the point where the body and mind truly do need to stop, but I am talking about those times when we THINK we need to quit.  There is a difference between overwhelm in the moment and the actual NEED to stop.  So we have to give ourselves time.  We have to pace ourselves.  We have to look at what the overall goal is and ask if what we are doing in that moment serves.  There are times the answer is going to be, “You need to sit for an hour.”  There are times the answer is going to be, “You’re done for today.”  But the most likely truth is that we can keep going.  It’s not pushing through, it’s rearranging mindset.  When we talk about playing the long game, pacing is even more important.  If we jump right off the bat and try to do it all at once, we are very likely to get overwhelmed and want to stop.  It’s not that we have to stop, but we will feel like we need to.  But with a long term goal or project, it is important to take the time needed, especially if it’s a bigger project.  It will take a hell of a lot longer to start and stop for 6 months than it does to do 20 dedicated minutes a day.  The long term is sustainable that way.  Change takes a lot of work and so many of us are looking for the quick fix, the easy answer, the immediate result  because we want to move on to the next thing.  Some projects take a while but they take even longer if we stop. 

There’s a saying I’ve shared before that we overestimate what can be done in a day but we underestimate what can be done in a year.  I want to add that we can’t sabotage what can be done in a year by not starting today—or by not doing what can be done today.  Don’t let fear stop us, don’t let the fact that everything isn’t perfectly in place stop us from even starting.  Don’t let the fact that we may need to take a break part way through be a permanent stop.  Learn to do what can be done in the moment and then do whatever else needs to be done next.  It doesn’t have to be done all at once, it just needs to get done. So we need to be patient with ourselves and we need to appreciate the work and time that real change takes.  It’s about consistency more than anything else.  Don’t fall in the trap of thinking if we can’t do it all in one day then we shouldn’t do anything.  If we can’t accomplish the thing then we need to ask ourselves what we can do that will at least get us in the right direction, what can we do that supports the thing.  Transition and change mean doing different things and often it’s more important to train the brain in little bits each day, to do things each day, that bring us closer to the goal rather than it is to finish the goal in its entirety in one moment.  So whether it is cleaning and organizing, shifting careers, changing mindset, changing our habits, becoming healthier, any of it.  Learn to let go of the old and be patient with the new—after all we are learning and that does take time.  But don’t give up.  Find the actions we can take every day, no matter how small, and take them.  Do what needs to be done every day even if it’s not everything, and we will get there.