What progress actually looks like

➖We often imagine change or "progress" as a linear graph➖

We think we get better each day until we're ‘perfect’ and ‘fit’ humans who've got it all 'figure out'.

➰Reality Check... change and progress look more like a drunken sailor heading home. Wiggly and messy, but determined to get there. 〰️

We are full of motivation and embrace better food choices for a bit, then crush our kids' mac and cheese for a week, then we ace our new habits for a while because we know we can do better, and then a business trip throws us off for a minute, then we're back on the horse....

👍🏻👎🏻We move through good weeks and hard weeks, feeling empowered and positive with our new systems and then...WHAM! Life throws us a curve ball and progress pauses, or moves backward. 

⬆️⬇️➡️⬅️Up, Down, Forward, Back. 

There are a number of perfectly good reasons for this:

❓Maybe we need to address a question we avoided answering when first asked.

↩️Maybe we do need to regress a bit. Dip into our old habits to remember why we are building new ones (like visiting an ex to remember why we left them). 

🏹Or maybe it's that we simply don't have the skills yet to reach the next level of our progression and, like everything else in life, we need to accept that doing things badly is a precursor to doing things well. 

Regardless of the reason, progress can stop or even go in the opposite direction which usually happens on the tail end of a stretch where we've put our exercise routine on hold or decided to dive into a week of food/drink debauchery! 

If you're determined to minimize the damage and ‘level out’ some of the wiggles of your journey, focus on your systems. 

🛑Stop looking at the end goal. 

Instead, find something small TODAY that you can improve on and repeat that quality habit every day. You'll never be perfect and progress will never be linear but you can help yourself out by conquering small EASY habits each day.