Don’t build your habits around a perfect scenario
Building habits takes time, and it takes patience. Don’t try to set your habits or your goals around the perfect set of circumstances and scenarios. Plan your habits around realistic expectations. If you try to establish a habit that will require thirty minutes of your time, but you only have ten now, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Perfect is the enemy of good — Voltaire
We talked about starting small in the previous article. It is also important to avoid trying to establish perfection from the beginning. If your plan requires the sun, the moon, and all of the planets to align, it will end in disappointment.
It can be easy in today’s world to watch a YouTube video, follow someone’s Instagram stories or LinkedIn profile, and believe they have it all dialed in, and they are living the perfect scenario. Thinking that you can match their (curated) situation for yourself is a dangerous avenue to pursue. We must each make our path our own. We can accomplish many of the same things as others, we can aspire to achieve many of the same things, but how we get to that outcome will be uniquely our own. Building habits and routines are the foundation for that. You cannot hope to follow someone else’s fifteen-step morning routine if you do not have the same situation as they have. You may be in a different season of life, have differing responsibilities, and value elements of your life from another perspective. All of this leads to not striving to build new habits in the eye of perfection.
There are some simple steps to begin to establish the small changes you want to make, which in time can lead to the more significant changes you are seeking.
Real-time management
Take this in both ways that it can be read – real-time as in doing it at the moment and recognizing that your time must be managed. Both are required for building and sustaining new habits and routines for yourself and others. Yes, your routines will have an impact on those around you. Your family, your peers, and your team will benefit or (potentially) suffer from the habits you establish for yourself. Your success in this area matters to them as well.
Ask for help
Partnership in building habits and routines can be very helpful. On the front end, use your partner to bounce ideas off of to get feedback on what you are trying to achieve. On the backside, use them to help in holding you to your habits. It is usually much easier for someone else to look at your existing behaviors and schedule and tell you – “you’re not going to start reading for sixty minutes in the next two weeks; you don’t even like to read now.” That type of feedback is invaluable in setting yourself up for success. Having that same person ask you each day, “did you read your paragraph or page today” will help make the habit real and be a reminder of your commitment. Think of this person as your conscious and accountability partner.
Because of social media and the constant visibility to others, many people believe they need to do more than is realistically possible or even necessary to achieve the outcomes they are looking for. Define what you want for yourself and build a realistic plan to get there. That is the real approach that everyone could benefit from. Too much effort is spent on worrying about what should be versus getting to the actions that deliver what can be. Concentrate your time on what you can do right now at the level that is available to you. Don’t let the desire for perfection hold you back from getting started.
What steps can you take today to get started versus waiting for everything to align for a perfect scenario?
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