I am loathe to admit that consistency works. I despise that the drudgery of making myself get on the exercise bike 4 days a week, and doing 4 sets of 5 tragic knee pushups a day moves the needle towards my clothing fitting better after a year of Covid comfort eating. I almost wish that my excuses that a) I'm getting older, and b) my metabolism has slowed, and c) I am just going to be higher weight than normal, and d) I am just lower energy than I used to be, were true, so that I could disregard the annoying exercise of, well, exercise.
The same is true of other life tasks. Consistently transferring the few dishes in the kitchen sink to the dishwasher at night prevents a messy catastrophe and means that I don't feel overwhelmed and grossed out at the state of my kitchen in the morning. Consistently picking the clothes up off the bedroom floor means that our bedroom doesn't become a mess and require a major cleanup every weekend.
Consistently writing down my daily priorities helps me to focus and not feel so frazzled about the million work and life administration tasks that need to get done. I can check things off orderly and move the overflow to the next day.
Consistently making investments that seem small on a monthly basis means that our retirement accounts are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were a couple years ago.
These are all small actions and so easy to dismiss or put off until the next day. But, they snowball together and make my life less chaotic.
Recently, my career/life coach had me commit to an exercise of committing to myself. To engage in 10 minute of consistent writing a day at the same time, blocked out on my calendar. The result is that I have 5 new draft blog posts, along with now 2 new published blog posts. It's just a tiny bit of time to set aside, but it's the consistency that creates the habit, that creates incremental gains that, over time, aren't so incremental.
I am frustrated with myself that it took external encouragement to commit to this practice. That I couldn't muster the discipline, the resolve, the self-care, frankly, to give myself and my hopes for my life all of 10 minutes a day. That I need the accountability to make it happen. And I lament that had I done this 5 years ago, maybe I wouldn't be in the position I am today, frustrated and burned out and so tired of being a lawyer...but we've all got to start somewhere. So here I am.