Happy Sunday Everyone:
This hasn’t happened in a while but I’ve skipped the last two weeks of Sunday Thoughts. Two weeks ago I just didn’t feel like doing them, last week I was playing 72 holes of golf in 2 days (walking) and honestly didn’t have the time or energy for them. I also haven’t felt like doing them. I don’t consider myself a writer but the concept of writer’s block is something I could imagine being very real and very annoying. Doing these week in and week out is both good for me, and at times, something I consider to be a burden. The pros far outweigh the cons or I wouldn’t do them but in moments like this it’s a bit of a fight to get it done, then nagged by the feeling of “can they tell I don’t want to be writing this? is this crap?”….then followed by the reminder of why I did these in the first place, which was really for me to process learning lessons I take in throughout any given day/week, and then share with a few students. After that reminder I get a more calm/peaceful/easy feeling as a thought of “who cares” comes over me, which is where I am as I type right now.
Sunday Thoughts today is about not doing Sunday Thoughts and about the baby steps of getting off track. I have spent more time than you can imagine in the past two weeks thinking about the fact that I skipped doing Sunday thoughts i.e. personal guilt of not putting them out, coupled with a profound desire to quit doing them all together. The simple fact is this, I’m personally shocked by how easy it is for me to have the momentum I have to do something week in and week out, then take two weeks off and how quickly the motivation can fade if I don’t fight hard to get back on track. I don’t think I’m alone here when I say great habits can be very compromised if you don’t purposefully keep your head in the game. It’s much easier to drift off then it is to stay focused. Over-thinking creates lack of clarity for me. I know how I feel after I hit the send button, which is a sense of accomplishment, knowledge share, and mostly a good lesson I learned from writing them in the first place. When I don’t send them I feel lazy, I feel non-committed, I feel like my self-discipline is fading. Maybe that sounds crazy but that’s really happening. Although I’ve never tested this, I’ll bet the days that I didn’t send Sunday thoughts in the past are also the same days I didn’t exercise on Sunday.
If you’re reading this thinking I’m being a little hard on myself, I’m not…I’m just realizing more and more, daily, the more discipline I have, the more freedom I feel, and I’ve never really thought of it like that. In my own mind, I don’t always like having a plan, I can struggle with procrastination, I like to “relax” but at the end of the day, maintaining a high level of discipline to continue to do the things that make me feel good when I put my head on the pillow is something I need to think about before choosing not to do something. I’m certainly not the first to say this but the pain of regret of not doing something is usually, if not always, going to trump the pain of the effort to get something done. The push-ups are the best daily example of this. If I get them done before 7:00AM, I feel great throughout the rest of the day, if I haven’t done them, they cross my mind by the hour. I’m re-reading Atomic Habits right now, it’s a reminder of how many good habits we need to have on autopilot so it frees our brain to focus on new topics. Sunday Thoughts/push-ups fall in to good habits that need to be on autopilot. If I can just trigger my head to say “how is this going to make me feel if I choose not to it” I’ll more than likely just get it done, move on, and feel better for it.
Interestingly enough, today happens to fall on exactly 250 pushups, which will be completed after I hit the send button.
Have a great Sunday and make it count!!