Often when we want to start a new habit, we look at someone who is already successful and try to imitate their strategy.
Sometimes this is useful. Learning from others is a great way to accelerate our own learning curve. After all, that’s how we learned most of our habits -- habits like brushing our teeth and turning on a light switch.
But it’s important to remember that the systems and strategies those successful people use today probably weren’t the same ones they used when they started forming those good habits.
Their strategy may be much more complex than the strategy you need to start your journey. When we set the bar too high, we either don’t start or we start, only to stop a short time later.
When we compare ourselves to others who are further along on their journey, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we need to learn one more thing or buy one more gadget or research one more subject before we start. Those things might be nice, but they often stop us from following through.
I had a client who decided she wanted to drink more water. She had seen a friend’s water bottle and wanted to get one at a sports store exactly like her friend’s. But with COVID-19 and limited hours, the store wouldn’t be open for two more days. She mentioned waiting until she got the bottle to start. When she realized it wasn’t necessary to have a fancy water bottle, she was able to start (while we were on the phone) by drinking a glass of water. By the way, this client has up-leveled her water intake and other habits consistently and has lost 28 pounds during the pandemic!
Another client was ready to start increasing muscle mass but wasn’t quite ready to go to the gym due to COVID-19. If you tried to find weights during the first 3-4 months of the pandemic, you know they were difficult, if not impossible, to find. She felt she had no option but to wait until she could find weights. We talked about ways to increase body mass without weights and she was able to start that day.
Both of these clients realized that they were making excuses that were preventing them from doing the hard work and moving forward with the things that really mattered in their lives.
Starting is generally the most difficult part of habit change. I’ve often heard that the heaviest weight in a gym is the front door. I encourage you to open the front door to all of your habits by starting small and avoiding that strife for perfection. There will be a lot of room to up-level later.
I like to say that “done” is better than perfect. You can always improve after you’ve started. But you can never improve if you never start.
So here’s to drinking one cup of water without a water bottle and doing one pushup or sit-up without the perfect workout equipment.
Start small, be consistent, and know you can up-level later.
And remember … “done” is better than perfect.
Here’s to an awesome 2021!
