It’s summer, the weather is warm and the holidays are approaching but, despite this, sometimes it is hard to feel optimistic. Optimism, hope and positive forward thinking are so important. They help us to endure and they give us the impetus to move forwards, but there will always be days when you just don’t feel motivated. Days when you can’t be bothered. Days when that thing that you were looking forward to seems to have lost its allure. On those days, what I say to you is Just Show Up.
Habits
When you Just Show up you don’t have to be brilliant. Your performance doesn’t have to be anywhere near how you’d like it to be but, if you have something scheduled in and you say to yourself, “On this day, at this time, I do this” then you’re helping yourself. Why? Because, as humans, a huge amount of our success comes from our habits. We enjoy the ease of just doing things without too much need for thinking. The brain is a greedy organ and uses 20% of all the calories that we consume, so established habits make it easier and our brains don’t have to put in too much effort.
This is why it’s so useful to Just Show Up. On the days when you are really tired and not performing well, show up and do the thing anyway. It will mean that on the days when you are full of energy and ready to do your absolute best, the habit is established. You have your chance to shine and move towards your goals. The alternative is that, on those days when you are ready to shine, your established bad habit of cutting yourself too much slack, of procrastinating before getting started, will get in the way. You will have some mental hurdles to jump before you can really get stuck in to the thing that you want to do.
For example, if you like to go to the pool twice a week for a swim, there will be days when you don’t want to go. On those days, still go. It doesn’t matter if you swim half the usual distance or if all the other swimmers are overtaking you. The fact that you are there and in the water is good enough. Your habit is established so that when you are bursting with energy, you’re there, in the water, and ready to break your personal best. By going swimming when you don’t feel like it, you are training yourself into the belief that, “I am the sort of person who shows up. I am the type of person who does what I say I am going to do.”
Become the person you want to be
You become that person. Maybe you cook dinner for your family every night. It doesn’t matter that some of those dinners don’t taste great and that maybe your family doesn’t want to eat them. The dinner is there because you cooked it and that’s what you do! Repeat the behaviour often enough and your neural pathways will establish patterns so that after a while, they do the work for you and it becomes a given that that is what happens.
There is a phrase that says, “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well”. It’s nonsense. I say, “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly, because doing it badly is better than not doing it at all.”
Rebecca Bartholomew, 13 July 2022
