#208 How to get out of your self-improvement prison

If I don’t meditate today, will I ever become a consistent practitioner?

If I don’t go for that run today, will I ever become a runner?

If I don’t stick to my diet today, will I ever get in shape?

There’s a time and place for being a hardliner about your habits – the first 30-45 days when the naysayer voice in your head still says, “let’s see how long it takes before I give up again.”

After all, you’re building a new identity and will still be pulled back towards your old ways.

But at some point, hardliners need to make the switch to “elastic discipline“:

Being disciplined about your daily practice while trusting yourself enough that when life inevitably puts you in a situation where you HAVE to violate your principles, you can navigate it, adjust your behavior, and afterward, like an elastic band, bounce back to your disciplined practice.

This is an overlooked part of habit-building. Because if you don’t consciously build the self-trust that you can, in fact, persevere despite setbacks, you’ll live in fear of giving up forever.

So initially, when you start a new habit, be a hardliner.

Use Tiny Trust Builders to start building confidence in your ability to persevere.

After 30 days, start asking yourself: do I trust myself enough to skip a day and then bounce back to my disciplined practice tomorrow?

Skip a day, then start again.

Build self-trust.

Feel your confidence and self-worth grow.

Cultivate “elastic discipline” and become free.

It’s about the way you say, “I’m tired, and I’m here anyway.”

It’s about the way you say, “I’m exhausted, I’m skipping this one, and that’s okay, because I’ll be back on track the next day.”

It’s about the way you say, “Come what may, I’m in this, and from my chosen path, I won’t be led astray.”

It’s about intentionality and elastic discipline.

It’s about direction.

Most of all, it’s about feeling good, not guilty.

The more frequent and the less intrusive the habit, the easier it is to stick to.

Commit to writing for an hour once week? You’ll find a million reasons to procrastinate until the very last moment, on Sunday night, to write.

Commit to writing for 5 minutes once a day? The timeline is so short, there are no more excuses.

Make it doable. Make it frequent. And suddenly every habit is within reach.

We’re not able to see almost everything in life and are blind to only a couple of things.

We’re blind to almost everything in life and are able to see only a couple of things.

And of the things we are able to see, we (consciously or subconsciously) focus on an even smaller subset, and then turn a blind eye to the rest.

To live a creative life, there’s no need to create anything new.

Open your eyes, prick up your ears, smell the air, and feel the earth beneath your feet.

Then open your heart, taste your thoughts, sense subtle shifts, and heed the voice in your head.

When you marry your inner and outer world
insights unfurl.