As we dig into this series on change, it seems necessary to me to take a bit of a detour and talk about progress. I don’t know about you but I am a recovering “all or nothing” person. For decades I have tried to set goals and make plans and change all at once.
Who else can relate to trying a new “diet” that included cleaning out your fridge and pantry of all the junk, making a super detailed meal plan, grocery shopping and prepping? Did you also do what I typically do and follow the plan maybe the first day and half or so and then life happens. You had to stay late at a meeting so you don’t have time to make that dinner you planned. You packed a lunch that had to be heated up and the only heat at lunchtime came from the dumpster fire you were putting out not your microwave. You planned a recipe that seemed like a good idea when you read about it but now that you’re sitting in front of cold pea soup it really just makes you want to gag.
Maybe your goals have been around a fitness routine. You buy the sneakers or the gym membership. You pick out the classes you’re going to take. You even set your alarm for 4:30am. But wow, 4:30 is super early! And you had to stay up late last night grading those papers or at you kid’s soccer match or <insert other reasons here> … we could keep going – many of us have been there and can relate.
We have something we want to change – something that doesn’t work for us. You did the first step and identified something that doesn’t work for you – whether it’s how you take care of you body (eating or exercise) or how you teach reading (hello, structured literacy) or how you show up at meetings (let’s focus on the data). The first thing we have to do with any change is first identify a problem and decide there’s something we are going to change.
In my previous posts I mention giving yourself grace a few times. When we assess how things are going, giving ourselves grace is critical as we look at the progress we are making with the long game in mind. Very often we review our progress toward a goal focused on the short game – this week or sometimes just today. We said we were going to work out 5 days this week and we only did it two times. We planned a week’s worth of healthy lunches but we only ate lunch 3 of the 5 days. We wanted to give positive notes to all of our students every month but we only managed to do it in September.
Making progress toward a goal isn’t always linear. In our planning we may think of the milestones we plan to hit along the way to our end goal and see that happening in a straight line. However, change rarely happens that way. The key to sticking with the process it to keep going. Changing anything takes times and if we are changing a habit or pattern that we’ve had for many, many years, we have to accept that it will take a while to rewrite that pattern.
What we created in 30 years won’t be rewritten in 30 days.
This is where the grace comes in and we have to look at shades of progress. I mentioned that I am a recovering “all or nothing” person. I am still working hard to reshape the thinking that pops up for me around making change. Remember in my last post I mentioned that pesky brain wanting to maintain homeostasis and change sets of all kinds of alarms. You brain fires off all sorts of messages to you in hopes that you’ll give up and go back to the comfortable and familiar way it knows.
“See, you didn’t really want to do this anyway”
“you can’t commit to anything, you should just give up now”
“I don’t know why you thought you could do this”
“Is this really how you want to ____ for the rest of your life?”
“You didn’t do all the _____ so why bother doing this one?”
Insert whatever thought comes up for you here – they are all attempts from your brain to stop you from creating change. Any they are nonsense! You decided that you wanted to make a change for a reason. You identified a problem, something that didn’t work, and decided to do something about it. Good for you! So remind yourself why you decided to make this change in the first place. Your reasons are valid and they matter.
“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Walt Disney’s Meet the RObinsons (2007)
So if we are going to keep moving forward we have to recognize and celebrate the progress we are making – especially when it doesn’t match up to idea we had in our head of how this would go. Some of the most beautiful places in our country were not created overnight. The slow, steady wearing away of layers of the earth over many, many years created these masterpieces. What we stare at in awe today was created little by little. Small increments of progress over time. This is the long game.
So what does progress look like for the change you are making?
I wrote earlier about how I started running this past summer. I picked a training program and 5K goal race. I showed up every week and did the things and ran the race. Even after the school year had started and things got a little busy I still showed up and did the training runs. Since that 5K, I haven’t been showing up as consistently. I have run three other races since then – thanks to my husband who keeps registering us for them! I have shown up on the treadmill sometimes 3 runs a week sometimes zero runs a week. I set my alarm to get up early and over the last month, I haven’t gotten up one time to do that early workout. I reset it for later, hit the snooze a whole bunch, or lately I just set it for later the night before and don’t bother.
But here’s the kicker – progress isn’t linear. I only started working toward this goal maybe 90 days ago, maybe a little longer. So while I’m not perfectly showing up every morning when the alarm goes off, I am still showing up. I playing for the long game which is to be stronger and healthy so I can keep doing the things I love, like hiking, for many many years to come. So am I perfect? Of course not! Progress for me last week looked like lacing up my sneakers once and going for that run. The week before, it looked like showing up at the starting line for the race we’d registered for, even though I hadn’t run at all (not even once) in the two weeks since the last race. Progress felt like being able to participate in a charity basketball game at work this week and not feel like I was going to die as I jogged back and forth on the court in front of a packed gym. That’s a big win for me! This week, progress will look different too.
Progress looks different all the time. Just like in the photos from the National Parks in Utah and Arizona. Sometimes the water or wind eroded large layers of earth quickly, sometimes the layer it cleared is smaller, each progression toward change shaped these beautiful ravines, caves, and arches. So we keep moving forward, we don’t give up on the end goal – we’re in this for the long game.
BetsyWright 