In a world of instant gratification, one of the hardest lessons to learn (and to keep learning) for me is patience. This morning my daily planner, which is themed after the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, had this quote:
"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily difference we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee." ~Marian Wright Edelman
This is a hard concept worth grasping but makes the whole patience thing a lot more tolerable and a lot less painful. I first experienced this principle about two year ago when I finally decided to change my mind about losing weight and being healthy.
It was a 10 second clip I overheard on the TV one morning when listening to a health segment on a talk show - something I almost never do! The health expert explained that when first starting out to get healthy more often then not people go balls-to-the-wall getting in the gym and going on a fad diet - literally shocking their system into becoming a health nut. The problem is, that doesn't work!
Our minds are very powerful and after one or two balls-to-the-wall sessions you start to think a certain way:
- This is too hard to maintain
- I'm not seeing any results yet/This isn't working
- It was a lot easier to not do anything and ignore the body shaming or negative self image talk
And then in a few months/weeks/days it's back to the couch.
The health expert suggested a simple solution: just do what you can, when you can and eventually a little will turn into a little more and then a lot! (This is all my translation, if you didn't catch that).
So two years ago I paid $10 to join a small gym, hopped on the treadmill and walked as fast as was comfortable for 25 minutes and then left. For the longest time I thought you had to spend at least an hour in the gym 5 days a week to be healthy, but after 3 months of going to the gym for 25 minutes a day for 3 days and pushing myself to walk a little faster than the day before, I started losing weight. It wasn't extremely difficult to add an extra 40 minutes into my day (with travel) to get in more than 0 minutes of working out, because that's what I was doing before.
In that time I gave up my first love, television. I realized I would get sucked in to watching 2-3 hours of prime time TV on a nightly basis and for me I couldn't just watch one episode. Now I could fill that time with more active activities like cooking, playing outside, going for walks, anything! And the 40 minutes I spent getting exercise felt like chump change in my day.
After the exercise went from foreign to habit, I started focusing in on my diet which had not changed at all during the added exercise except for adding more water and craving less salt during which I still lost weight!
So I introduced vegetables into my diet in the form of green smoothies which helped acclimate my taste buds to veggies and I soon started valuing them far and above what I had before. I very, very slowly cut back on my portion sizes in a way that I almost didn't feel the difference from one day to the next. After some time I cut out fast food and minimized my juice/soda intake (coffee was off limits!).
This whole process was slow, spanning over a year and a half, only making one small adjustment at a time and letting my body acclimate to it's new lifestyle - and that's just what I did. I didn't decide to lose weight or get fit. I decided to live healthy and if it took 5 years to get healthy, I would still have the rest of my life to be healthy and that was good enough for me.
Through a lot of personal transition I lost some of my focus on living this healthy lifestyle, but I'm still 50 pounds lighter than what I weighed at my heaviest. I'm no longer afraid of the gym or vegetables. I cut back on ice cream in favor of chocolate. I still keep fast food to a minimum and I love my green smoothies.
I am two years closer to feeling the success of a healthy lifestyle for the rest of my life and I'm working on applying the principles I learned in having patience through getting healthy to my financial situation, my career goals and contributing to making this world a better place.
For you entry-levelers it may seem impossible to reach your career goals or even life goals, but if you start with one step today, you'll be miles ahead in no time. Each day counts and when your patience is wearing thin, remember to do just one thing to move you one step closer to your greater goal.
