The gap between intention and implementation: Why your self-care habits aren't sticking
I am never one to rush the end of summer. I love the longer days, slower pace and the freedom the summer schedule provides.
And yet, every year when the calendar turns to August I always immediately start thinking about fall. Even I have to admit that I’m always a little bit excited about the idea of getting back into more of a regular rhythm, especially around my routines and (of course) self care practices.
The change of seasons is the perfect time to re-evaluate what self care practices I want to let go of, keep, or change. And if there are any new ones I want to start.
Based on the 450+ registrants for my workshop this week, Sustainable Self-Care: How to Create Habits that Stick, I see I'm not the only one who’s starting feeling the pull towards more self care!
If you’ve ever tried to start a new self-care habit and then found yourself falling out of it, it seems you’re in very good company.
We tend to make this experience mean something about us.
We assume we need more motivation.
More willpower.
More discipline.
But motivation and willpower are really meant to help us get started. They were never meant to be the things that sustain us through every challenging moment of creating a new habit.
I often hear clients say…
“I was so motivated when I started, and then I lost my motivation.”
“I know what I should be doing. Why can’t I just do it?”
“Maybe I’m just lazy.”
What if we got curious about what is actually happening in the space between knowing what we want to do and actually doing it?
We can have the information. ✅
We can know what we want to do and have every intention of doing it. ✅
And still struggle with implementation. ❌
From curiosity's perspective, there’s simply a gap between the information we have/our intention to use it and our implementation.
Instead of assuming something is wrong with you or feeling like you failed, you can get curious about understanding your unique gap.
From there you can start creating the specific bridge you need to get from information and intention to implementation.
What does this look like?
I'll give you a very simple example from my own life this past week.
I found myself struggling with the meal plan that I’d created. I had one specific dish that I was supposed to make on Tuesday that would last me for several days.
I didn’t make it on Tuesday and decided that was ok because I could rearrange some things on my plan.
And then I didn’t make it on Wednesday either, which was also fine but now starting to become a little bit problematic.
By Thursday, I was getting frustrated because I was running out of other options and didn’t seem to be able to find the motivation to "just do it".
There was a part of me that wanted to force myself. To use willpower and just push through.
But then I asked myself, why am I struggling so much to make this? What’s the resistance?
The answer:
The prep was much more labor-intensive than I had time for with my busy schedule
It would create more involved cleanup than I wanted
And truthfully, the dish didn't sound great based on the current high temperatures.
Well now I knew that motivation wasn’t the gap.
The gap was that this particular dish wasn’t actually meeting my current needs for the week.
And that was showing up as lack of motivation.
So instead of pushing through, I bridged the gap by changing the plan. I decided to make the dish much simpler, take out some of the ingredients, and prepare it in a completely different way that simplified the clean up.
And guess what? I had no problem making the revised dish that night as planned.
So the next time you find yourself, struggling to follow through, maybe instead of asking, "what's wrong with me?" You can get curious about what's actually going on.
You might find that there's nothing to fix. There's just simply a gap that needs the right bridge.
