Building a Healthy Year: Our Theme for May is Maintenance
May is about Maintenance (May-tenance…😊)
If April was about assessment, taking a closer look at the routine, what is working, what is not working, what do we need to change or do more of? May is about maintenance. Maintaining your routine is just as important as starting it. In fact, you could argue that maintenance is the whole game. This gives us a nice progression from last month:
April: Notice what’s working (and what’s not)
May: Protect the time, habits and activities that are working
The key to living healthy is to make it, whatever your routine is, to make it last long enough for it to matter.
The people that have the best long-term routines aren’t the ones with the most intense or hardest workouts. They don’t have more willpower than you do. They don’t even have knowledge that you don’t have. They simply do something repeatedly.
Practice and repetition is the whole process. Every time you do something, you are training your body, mind and even your planning muscles that you can do it and the more you do it the more impact you are going to see over time.
It sounds like it’s “too simple”. It sounds like it’s one of those “we all have the same 24 hours in the day” speeches, but it isn’t that. I promise you I’m not just blowing smoke. I’m telling you that if you have a routine, you will see results. It’s that simple.
What’s not as simple is putting the pieces together for that routine. I get it, where do we start, what do we do, how long, etc. Those details aren’t as important as one simple detail. Well actually, two simple details:
1. Are you willing to do something?
2. Are you willing to do it again tomorrow?
The trick is not forcing yourself to do something and then repeatedly forcing it each day after that. That’s the trap we all get caught in from time to time. If we are looking to get started, it is easy to see the whole routine at once and it feels like a lot to build up to. That’s true, but we don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, we can’t do it all at once. When we try to do that, we may have an intense day or week, but we aren’t changing the routine.
That’s why in order to be consistent, you don’t need willpower, you just need to do something that you can honestly see yourself doing regularly. In other words, start simple and stay with it. It’s that simple.
Maintenance is the long-term progress we all want. It’s easy to get caught up in the short-term details, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Pick one small thing and do it.
This month, think about maintenance. What steps can you take that you won’t have to force. You don’t want to do something that is a giant leap just to do once. You want to start with something you can do. Do it. Then do it again. Repeat.