Today is the day

If you’ve ever made a change in your life, you’ve had to pick a day to get started with that change. If you are waiting for the perfect day to make that change, you are likely going to be waiting for a long time. No matter how well-planned your routine is, you will never have a perfect day to get started.

We’ve all heard (and maybe even said) “I’ll start on Monday.” Or “I’ll get started…someday.” Someday is not a great day to get started. In fact, someday rarely comes at all. As a Health Coach, I’ve worked with enough people and seen enough routines to know that Monday will be here every week. I also know that it probably won’t be the perfect day you’ve been waiting for.

As a nation, we have a problem. Many of us are sitting and waiting for the perfect day to get started. We need to start exercising. We need to watch what we eat. We need to quit smoking. We need to do many things, but we are not doing them.

There is something that we need to do first: get started. We need to do something, anything to get our health moving in the right direction. What is the best day to get started? Today is the best day to get started with any plan.

No matter what steps you are going to take, you need to take the first one. You have to take step one before you can take any other steps in the process. It is easy to say that you want to be healthy and think about all the things you would like to be doing. If you don’t get started, you can’t do any of it.

Let’s take a look at a former client that got off to a rough start on their routine:
Robin was excited to get in shape. She was going to join the gym and go every day. She had yet to join when we had our first conversation, but she sounded confident that it was going to happen. I asked her a few questions to get a better picture of when she was going to get started. Her answer was puzzling to me. “Someday very soon...in the next few weeks” she said. She had the whole plan mapped out, yet she didn’t have a realistic start-date.

The most telling detail of this situation was how long she had this “plan” in place. Robin had been thinking about getting started for nearly a year. She knew she wanted to join the gym. She knew she wanted to go every day after work. She knew all of this, but she was waiting for a perfect day to get started. Guess what: almost a year later her perfect day had not yet arrived.

Robin is not alone. She is only one of many people that have told me they were going to get started, but didn’t know when. It is easy to set a goal. It is easy to pick something you want to do. The moral of the story: it doesn’t matter what you want to do if you don’t get started.

You can have the best intentions and even have the best plan. If you don’t execute that plan, you get nothing. When it comes to health, we all know what we need to do. We can talk about it day in and day out, but if we don’t do it, our health will suffer.

Often the talking point is when we will get started. Just like Robin, many of us have an idea of what we want to do, but we have yet to get started. Many are waiting for the right day to get started. There is no perfect day to get started. If you keep waiting for a perfect day, you will be waiting forever. The only day that is perfect is today.

If you are trying to get started with a new routine, you just need to take the first step. Don’t worry about all the other steps or trying to do it all at once. The first step is the most important step. You have to take that before anything else. If you don’t take the first step, you can’t take any others. The best strategy to get that first step is to pick a day and take it. Today is the day.