Look, I don’t think you got out of bed this morning and said, “Ya know what? Today’s the day I’m gonna disappoint myself.”
But how often do you get to the end of the day and realize you never did the thing you MEANT to do? Things got busy. Kids got loud. It rained when it wasn’t supposed to. It happens.
So let’s go back to the very start of the day. Your alarm.
It goes off, you say a couple of four-letter words, hit snooze, and roll back over. Repeat… maybe more than once. This blog is not trying to make you a morning person. I don’t care what time you get up. But you set that alarm the night before. You knew what time it was gonna go off.
And when you hit snooze twice, you’re 30 minutes behind. If you’ve got kids, now they’re 30 minutes behind. You’re rushing around and they don’t know why, so now they’re stressed out. The dogs are barking because they’re getting let out late, it’s loud, and... and... and...
We set the standard of 5:00AM. We tolerated 5:30.
We set the standard of breakfast at home. We tolerated the drive-thru.
It’s not the mountains. It’s the roots we trip over.
So how do we approach this? I don’t have the perfect answer. There is no one-size-fits-all. Two people with the same age, the same job, and the same number of kids don’t have the same schedule or the same stress. So I’m not going to tell you how to eat or how many workouts to do. I don’t know you. Well... I might. But I don’t know the nitty gritty of your life.
The first step is to build your standards around the life you actually have.
WITHOUT (this is the hard part) excuses. People tell me all the time they don’t have time to work out. So I ask what they’re watching on Netflix. That’s not a jab. I’m watching Monsters and I’ll put Ted Lasso on repeat until the end of time. But without realizing it, we let our priorities set our standards. It should be the other way around.
Here’s some homework. Take 15 minutes and write down two things: your perfect day and your average day. Be honest, not judgmental. It’s okay not to be where you want to be yet. That’s literally why we’re doing this.
Then look at the gap. Pick one or two things from the perfect day that you could actually pull into the average one. Can you hit three workouts a week? No? Awesome. Then hit two. But those two are not up for discussion. They are your standard and you will not tolerate less.
And the last piece I can give you is to stop treating it like a touchdown you have to score over and over again. James Clear nails this in Atomic Habits. Real change sticks when it becomes part of who you are, not something you keep chasing. So make it a simple statement:
I am the type of person who gets up when my alarm goes off.
I am the type of person who eats breakfast at home.
I am the type of person who watches a movie with my kids without scrolling my phone.
Say it over and over again. You’ll wake up one day and it will just be the normal. No more thinking about it or hyping yourself up, you just are that person.
Let’s not pretend that life isn’t hard. Have a bad day, that’s fine! We all do. But never miss twice. Stuff happens, all the time. If you’re rushing out the door and end up in the drive-thru, fine. Give yourself some grace. But fight like hell to make sure it doesn’t happen two days in a row.
You don’t need earth-shattering standards. But you need to stop tripping over the same roots and blaming the tree. Pick your feet up. Set the bar where you can reach it, then quit ducking under it.
