Break the switch

What keeps you going when that momentum fades?

When the day is early and your eyes are heavy.

When your body is tired and you just can’t seem to think coherent thoughts.

When your mood is sour and every little thing seems to just dig that nail deeper into your aggravation.

When you feel like you just can’t get anything right, like you’re new to something even though you’ve been doing it for years.

I’ve had a lot of these days. I am kind of the queen of self doubt. When something isn’t going my way, the anxiety floods right in with a vengeance and I am just left with a raging mind that won’t stop bringing the negativity.

In a lot of ways, it has kept me from doing plenty of things throughout my life. But I’ve learned to manage it a lot better in recent years. Susan David’s book Emotional Agility was one I heard about on a podcast, and I instantly bought it on Amazon. It’s about the art of getting un-stuck with thoughts, feelings, emotions and behaviors that maybe worked in the past but are no longer serving a meaningful or helpful purpose.

I really loved this idea; the book was an amazing read. I can’t say I’ve fully embraced everything in my life, but it has helped me move forward in so many different ways, doing things the old me would never do, or would never dream of doing, or would never have the guts to do. You have to step out of your comfort zone if you ever expect to grow and change. And life is all about growing and changing.

So that brings me to Nick Bare’s idea of “Breaking the Switch.” We’ve all seen those light switches that are taped on, or the light that won’t turn off unless you literally unscrew it. (I had one of these in the basement of my former house. So annoying, actually!)

When you are pursuing lofty goals, you need to be like that light bulb in the basement. You are on, you are shining, and nothing but a concerted effort to turn you off will actually succeed in dampening that light inside you. You don’t go halfway … no, you are in this till the end.

I really love this thought. It’s along those lines of not relying on motivation but discipline, because motivation will not always be there. Motivation definitely will not always be there. And what then? If that’s all you had, then you are not going to push through those hard days. You are not going to do suck it up and do the scary thing because, you know, today is just not your day, week, month year …

Nobody is going to crush it every single day. Sometimes, yes, you are going to fail miserably. Sometimes you are going to feel like you wasted your time, or embarrassed yourself, or maybe went a bit too far, or even not far enough. But in the end, it’s really all about staying on track, staying on focus, and pushing through. That’s what it takes to do those things you’ve always wanted to do.

Break that switch and don’t look back.

At the finish

Me and my used bike. We rode 76 miles of the (Double) Triple Bypass. None of my gear matches, I was bloated, and I probably didn’t smell too great. It was one of the scariest and most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life.