Today is day #23 of a 100 day exercise commitment I’m doing. What that means is, I am choosing to move my body for a minimum 30 minutes EVERY day – whether I feel like it or not.
I’m actually not doing it to lose weight or be healthier (although it will probably result in both)
This is an exercise in strengthening my ability to truly COMMIT to something.
Really commit. Not half ass, lying-to-myself, pretending-I’m-really-committed-but-letting-it-slide-if-it-gets-hard-or-inconvenient, or, I’ll-get-to-it-tomorrow, kind of “commitment”. (can you relate?)
I usually like to exercise first thing in the morning before I start my work day, so in the past if I didn’t get to it for some reason I would just “let it slide”. With this new commitment, I’ve found myself at the gym at 10:00 pm after a busy day.
My old modus operandi was that if I didn’t feel like doing something, I simply wouldn’t do it. This led to patterns of inconsistency and ultimately, inconsistent results. Most devastatingly, it led to disappointment in myself because even though I was successful in the eyes of the world, deep inside I knew I was capable of so much more. I wasn’t really playing full out.
“When you truly commit to doing something, feelings don’t really come into play anymore. You just do it” ~ Suzanne Evans
In my past career as a Physical Therapist, I was an expert on exercise, yet I had never exercised 23 consecutive days in my life. We were taught that you have rest days to allow the body to “recover”, so this is a completely new experience for me. I actually had to let go of that mindset – the fear that by not having ‘rest days’ I would injure myself – to be open to doing this challenge.
Here’s what this challenge has taught me so far:
- Most times when we get “stuck” it’s because we haven’t truly COMMITTED to getting what it is we say we want. (Usually because we aren’t clear about what we want or don’t believe we can have it).
- When you commit to something, you take the emotion out of it and just do it. You don’t waste precious time and energy “psyching yourself up” to do it, or “wrestling with whether you feel like doing it or not”. Most people spend time in the emotion of the task, rather than just DOING the task.
- You only need to decide to do the task ONCE. If you truly commit, you are not wrestling every day with deciding whether or not you want to do the task. You are just deciding when that day you will do it.
- When you do something consistently, you get better at it. You build your skill level, your effectiveness, your efficiency, your strength and your confidence. (This is priceless!)
- To meet your commitments you have to plan when you will do them. Put them in your schedule.
- What worked to get you here, will most likely not get you there. You have to be willing to change something – your commitment level, your mindset, your habits, your focus, your environment, etc.
- To sustain your forward momentum you have to introduce different ways of doing the task as your body and mind accommodate to it in order to stretch to the next level.
- You have to let go of where you are now, to get to where you want to be next.
If you are looking to get better results, to be more successful, ask yourself:
– Where am I struggling with consistency?
– Have I truly committed to what it is I say I want?”
– Am I getting caught up in the emotion of the tasks I’ve committed to doing?
– Do I have a plan to get my tasks accomplished?