Just do One Thing
Who can relate?
You know something’s going on with your health (or soon will be if you don’t start changing your crappy diet, or crazy-high stress levels, or the constant sleep deprivation, or those non-existent exercise habits, or whatever it is that’s going on in your world.)
But the thought of “fixing” things is ridiculously overwhelming & you don’t even know where to start. So you don’t.
Because you’re so busy looking at the far-off endpoint of where you think you should be, that it feels like you could never get there.
Quite frankly, it just feels too hard.
So screw it all, you’ll just sit on the lounge watching Netflix late into the night, after putting in a 10hr shift at that job you hate, while working your way through an entire block of chocolate & family size bag of chips – and feel “better” for an hour or two.
And when the alarm goes off in the morning, you’ll just do it all over again. Because you might feel crappy, but it’s a whole lot easier than tackling that mountain you need to “fix” it.
But what if instead of trying to change everything all at once, today you just picked One Thing and took the first tiny step towards where you’d rather be?
I mean, is One Thing really going to make enough of a difference?
Abso-freakin-lutely!
Success breeds success. So when you manage to make one small change you feel good about it. You feel capable, empowered. So you keep doing it.
And after a while, seeing as you were so good at making that first small change, you feel ready to make another small change. So you do. And that feels good too.
And ever so slowly your momentum grows.
Until one day, you look back & see how far you’ve climbed up that mountain with each tiny step you took. And you realise you Can do it - because you’ve already been doing it!
Don’t believe me? (Someone’s always sceptical)
Let me use myself as an example.
If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll probably know my health fell into a bit of a heap at the end of last year. Now I’m a nutritionist so my diet was ok, but as for the stress/sleep/exercise stuff, not so much. And I knew it, I just needed a little “encouragement” to deal with it.
Cue auto-immune condition. Wake-up call instigated.
But when I thought about changing ALL The Things at once, I knew it was way too much for me to manage. So I picked One Thing and started right there.
Instead of waking up between 4.30-5.30 am and heading to my office to get some work done before I had to wake the kids, I started reading in bed instead.
And actually, it turns out I wasn’t any less productive at work! And my stress levels started to creep a little lower. And it felt good.
And after about a month, I stopped reading 15mins earlier and did a short meditative breathing exercise before I woke the kids up. And that felt good too. And my stress levels came down even more.
And a few weeks after that I started doing a short series of leg stretches in the morning after I woke the kids up. And what do you know, it felt good! (Great actually, my leg pain had really been out of this world.)
And then we got to last week, and my leg felt good enough to do a bit more physical activity. So I did. After my morning stretches I started doing a 1 mile exercise walk via YouTube (1.6kms for us Aussie’s).
And it feels fantastic! And my leg is coping, and my stress levels are down, and somewhere along the way I started sleeping a little later in the mornings too (settle down, I’m still usually awake by 5.30am, but that’s a whole lot better than 4.30am!)
And what started out as One Thing - one tiny change – has built into a whole sequence of changes which I don’t even have to think about anymore.
And when I look back, I realise I’m halfway up that mountain that seemed so insurmountable at Christmas.
And to think, all it took was One Thing to get me started.
What’s One Thing you could change today?
