What you do today matters, because you trade the day out of your life for it.
I love the simplicity of this statement: we are what we repeat. Many times we like to think about ourselves a certain way, including in our self-image something that we did once or do only sporadically. But is this a realistic and honest way of seeing ourselves? It might serve our ego for short term, but does it really help us become who we want to be?
We buy a membership to the gym, so we say we are taking care of our fitness, even though we go there only twice a month. We enroll to an online course, do three lessons and then leave it for later. Somehow ‘later’ never comes, but we tell our friends we are doing a course of website design. We start learning a new language, but we skip most of the lessons. Still, we can proudly say that “we learn Japanese”. Do we?
Far too often we take one isolated action and don’t follow it up. Why? Because it gives us an excuse that we can tell ourselves: I’m doing it. But let’s get real – are you really doing it? Going once a month to a tennis lesson doesn’t make you a tennist. A few language lessons won’t make you speak a new language. Only repeating the planned activities regularly will make you achieve any goal at all.
An episode of a self-development activity in most cases won’t give you real progress. Regularity is the only way to introduce real changes. And that’s valid for so many areas of our lives.
Then there is also the opposite: not labelling yourself with some ‘negative’ label although you repeat certain action more time than not. You don’t want to see yourself as having anger management issues, though you get irritated daily? You don’t want to think about yourself as someone who doesn’t take care of their health, but you eat junk food every second day? You don’t perceive yourself as someone who loses most of free time, though you spend most of it watching TV series?
Maybe it’s time for reality check. Whatever you repeat in life, becomes your nature, sometimes in an insidious way. So what can you do about it?
Coaching solution
You might benefit from an inventory of habits. Observing more closely how you spend your time, measuring time dedicated to them, describing the specific activities can make you realise some patterns you normally don’t notice.
Then you can consciously choose the habits that benefit you and put on black list those which lower the quality of your life.
And the final step is repeating the good habits until they become automatic, and avoiding the harmful ones until you don’t enter into the groove of repeating the same patterns.Sounds simple, but we all know it’s not, otherwise nobody would have had bad habits and we would all achieve what we want. So if you need support and accountability in introducing desired changes, you may consider to take advantage of coaching techniques.
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