#525 When the fear is at its peak

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.

My journey to overcoming self-doubt as a writer:

• I write every day, even when I didn’t feel inspired.
• I publish imperfect work every day, and saw nothing bad happened.
• I publish frequently to reduce the “burden of quality” on each piece (if I publish every day, it doesn’t matter if some posts don’t do so well, because I’ll post again tomorrow anyway.

In short: write and publish to overcome the fear of writing and publishing. Yes, it can be as simple as that.

You don’t need a motivational speech.

But you may need a reminder of who you choose to be, and what the person you choose to be would do right now.

And once you remember, you’ll have all the motivation you need.