Episode 52: Don't Miss Twice

Hello, my friends welcome to episode 52! Thanks for joining me here today!

I had something happen this week and I think it is a topic worth discussing with you. I started a meditation practice about 3 months ago. It is a really simple app called pause and it has a 30- day to resilience program. Where it gives you a 10 min meditation every morning and 10-minute meditation every night.

It has a lot of other cool features, where it reminds you at a specific time to do your meditation and it tracks your progress. Both in days that you meditated and times that you meditated so you know how many of these sessions that you have done.

So just a few days ago I woke up in the morning and realized that I had not meditated the day before. The morning had been crazy so I had got up and just gone to work. The evening I had gotten distracted and had just rolled into bed, lights out, and done for the day. The reminders had come up, and I had ignored them with the intention that I would do it later, and later just never happened.

That morning I realized that I had just broken an 85-day streak of meditating at least one time per day. It felt devastating.

So there are a couple of things here.

1.      Streaking – is such a cool thing to do. Just seeing how long we can consistently we can do something. There is incredible power in consistency. So we can break things down into incredibly small tasks that when done consistently can allow us to accomplish incredible things.

So I have been using meditation to calm my nervous system, connect to God, learn more about myself, expand myself, and become more self-aware.

So after doing this for 85 days to see the changes in my way of thinking, the way that I approach the world shifted.

Especially when we find something that is little that we can do consistently, so it gives our brain time to rewire and to change.

So this was a program that was supposed to be 30 days. So I completed it 2 times and on my 3rd time is when I broke my streak.

So what do we do when we break streaks? Especially 85-day streeks.

There is a quote by James Clear, in his atomic habits book. It reads:

“No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up – you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of the simple rule: never miss twice.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits.

We will break our streaks!

Don’t miss 2 days in a row.

We are human

We all make mistakes.

We all know that we forget things.

We all know that things come up.

I would not be able to continue that forever.

But I can continue it most of the time.

So the most important thing is Don’t miss two days in a row.

Now, what would cause us to miss more days in a row?

Or to just give up altogether. Miss the boat on getting back on the bandwagon.

OUR THINKING!

Initially when I realized that had missed doing it yesterday. I felt shame, disappointed, and mad at myself.

All those things.

I am working on being aware of those emotions and asking if these emotions are constructive and watching where I am beating myself up.

Now missing a meditation is not something I want to be hard on myself for because when I am hard on myself it is something that will stop me from doing things in the future. And this emotion will stop me from getting on the bandwagon again because it is so painful when I mess up so I will just stop doing things altogether.

But I can shift my brain from being negative – Oh my goodness, that was horrible. You are so dumb for missing that. You have wrecked everything. There was no point in those 85 days. All of that was pointless.

But all of that was lies.

These 85 days have been incredible. Extremely growth promoting. Helpful for me to develop myself. Expanding my vision and my terminology of how I view the world in how I can connect to myself and god.

So these have been a very good use of my time. And days happen that we miss them.

So we don’t want to beat ourselves up for these little things when we have missed being consistent because it stops us from continuing with that consistency.

Now we want to be consistent as possible but if we miss a day, this is not a big deal.

If I get started again.

We likely will not even notice anything in my progress, unless I miss months or weeks. That is the joy of doing things consistently for a period of time. They start to become who we are and we have these strategic by-products that come from them.

And often those will carry us through the missed days. It becomes not a big deal to miss a day. When we don’t miss two days in a row.

We simply get started on the habit again. Move on from the missed day.

And we don’t need to spend any more brain power on it.

So to go along with this, how do we not beat ourselves up for things?

Processing emotion.

Start with naming it.

Oh, I am feeling disappointed.

There is so much power in naming it and recognizing the emotion.

I am feeling disappointed because I broke an 85-day streak. It will take me 85 days to get back to making a longer streak.

I am feeling disappointed.

I could have done it earlier in the day.

I forgot at the end of the day.

It’s okay to feel disappointment.

What does disappointment feel like?

It is a heavy weight on my chest.

It is caused by my thinking.

Thinking this shouldn’t have happened.

Now I can shift my thinking.

Isn’t it amazing that you can do something consistently for 85 days? I can do this again. This is incredible.

I was consistent for 85 days.

Hold the awe of that that for just a few seconds. Be so proud of yourself.

So often we have this happen we beat ourselves up for these things and we forget to actually see what we did.

Wow, you did that for 85 days. That is incredible.

We forget to savor the changes we make in our lives and our accomplishment.

We are too busy telling ourselves the one thing we didn’t do.

We forget the 85 days that we did it.

And we focus completely on the 1 day we didn’t do it.

We don’t want to be doing that.

There are so many changes that have come into my life because I did the 85 days.

So I am just starting again today.

Now there may come a time that I don’t want to be meditating day and night. If this program isn’t serving me and then it is completely ok to stop doing it.

Make that a conscious choice.

I don’t want to quit because I feel so much disappointment when I miss a day.

If I am willing to feel the disappointment I am willing to keep going.

There is incredible freedom in giving yourself grace around these things.

Things may come up in my life and it may be incredibly difficult to fit meditation into my life. Camping phone dies, etc.

If I have the grace, then I am much more likely to get started again then I don’t lose progress. There is nothing I won’t do because I will always just get started again when I fail.

There is so much power in this.

Think about some of your habits.

Think about the things you are trying to do.

1.      Consistency is so important. Break it down into a little tiny consistent task. I don’t meditate for hours. I do 10 mins when I am in my bed.

2.      It has to be small enough that you can do it consistently.

3.      When you miss a day just don’t miss two in a row.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.