just five minutes
Have you ever tried to change your life?
Like, your whole life? Have you ever been so excited by the prospect of all the great things that making this change will bring you and then been crushingly disappointed when you weren’t able to make that change stick?
I have! And I know that it really sucks!
But through this (admittedly sucky) experience I have learned the very valuable lesson that trying to “do it all” never leads to sustainable, long-term success.
We often think that we have to change everything all at once, that we have to be “perfect” in our execution of this, and, even worse, we believe that if we aren’t absolutely perfect then we have completely and irrevocably screwed up and that we, as people, are failures.
This rigid, extreme, and unrealistic thinking usually gets us into a bind pretty quick! We take on more than we’re capable of (even if we can force ourselves through if for a few weeks or months we can’t sustain it long-term) and so we’re eventually forced to quit. Then, because we’ve bought into the lie that “only perfect counts,” we see ourselves as failures, as lost causes.
So it’s no surprise that we come to view any positive changes we may attempt to make as tantamount to torture.
No one wants to feel like a failure (and truly, none of us are failures; even those of us who have had the experience of failing at achieving a goal are still not failures as people). We don’t want to feel like we aren’t “good” at doing good things for ourselves. And so we learn to avoid this pain by running in the totally opposite direction: we do nothing, and, sadder still, we believe we deserve nothing.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
There is a vast continent between doing it all and doing nothing. When we embrace that we are not, and never will be, perfect creatures we can also embrace the possibility of finding a different way to approach making a positive change that will be far more effective than what we’ve tried in the past.
This understanding is the foundation of the Just Five Minutes philosophy.
And this philosophy leverages the accumulation of small actions over time to create positive change, without the need to do it all or do it perfectly.
It can help to think about this in terms of math: any number, no matter how small, is always more than zero. And if you keep adding numbers together, no matter how small, they will always accumulate into larger and larger amounts.
As long as you keep taking action, no matter how small the action is, it will ultimately add up to something larger, and more powerful, than what you began with.
That is how you make a change, even one that will eventually change your whole life, without needing to do it all or do it perfectly.
Let me give you an example: a few years ago I set out to write a book that would teach people how to engage in self-care in the simplest ways possible so that they could succeed. If you have never written a book -- well, I am not spoiling any surprises by telling you that it is an incredibly challenging endeavor.
Writing a book takes hours (and hours and hours and hours) of work, much of it tedious, much of it feeling exactly like torture. It is a solitary effort, it is lonely. And it is also work that will cause you to come face to face with demons you may have thought long-ago vanquished: who are you to write a book, who are you to think that anyone cares what you have to say?
And so the hardest part of writing a book is simply getting yourself to sit down and write it.
You can easily spend hours, and days, avoiding it: the kitchen is so clean, the dishes are all done, what else can you clean to avoid facing this onerous task? And all the while you’re aware of what you’re doing, you’re pulling your hair out and biting your nails because a deadline is approaching and there you are: cleaning the baseboards with a Q tip!
I set out to write that book and it was harder than I ever imagined it would be and ultimately I finished it. The way I did this was to tell myself that I had to write for Just Five Minutes each day. That’s it. That was my commitment to myself: the barest of minimums and that got it done!
Some days I wrote longer than that, and some days I didn’t. I did what I could. And doing what I could -- not doing it all, not doing it perfectly -- got it done.
There will be days, as you work to build regularity of practice, that a full daily movement ritual will feel like too much; it will feel like climbing an impossibly high mountain. And this is fine. (Remember: regular practice is not perfect practice!) You don’t have to climb a mountain, you can just take a short walk up to the base of the mountain and that is enough.
In other words: you can do Just Five Minutes.
Just Five Minutes works best when you approach it in this way: first, recognize that perfection is not your goal and second, give yourself permission to only do what you can.
I know that this might sound scary to you. I know that most of us were brought up to believe that if we don’t constantly berate, criticize, and bully ourselves that we won’t work hard. We were taught that we can’t trust ourselves to do what’s right or what’s in our best interest without treating ourselves harshly.
But is treating ourselves in this way right?
Is it in our best interest?
Is it even effective?
When you see the long-term effects of that negative treatment, the ways that we avoid taking action because we anticipate the bullying we’ll use to get ourselves to act and the punishment and criticism we’ll dole out when we inevitably can’t continue under those conditions, and how that keeps us from having the things we most want, it makes sense to look for another way.
This can take a long time to unpack because it involves unlearning things we’ve accepted for most of our lives. Be patient with yourself, be tender with yourself, be kind to yourself as you approach this. You don’t have to change the way you treat yourself over night! You can approach this change for Just Five Minutes, as well.
• • •
For right now, in regards to MVMNTCHVRCH, recognize that it is regularity of practice, not perfection, that is your goal and give yourself permission to only do what you can.
If that means that you practice for Just Five Minutes then that is the exact right amount of time for you to practice.
I can tell you, from my personal experience and from what I’ve directly witnessed with my clients, that if you approach making a positive change in this way that you will succeed because as long as you keep taking action, no matter how small the action is, it will ultimately add up to something larger, and more powerful, than what you began with.
If you start with Just Five Minutes, and allow yourself to do only what you can for as long as you need, your capacity will inevitably increase and eventually you will be practicing for six minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes, and so on as your confidence builds.
• • •
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
--Bruce Lee
• • •
In the final section of The #makeithappen Guide, I’ll be exposing the biggest lie about this process, to help you avoid it and focus instead on the one thing that matters most when it comes to making progress: regularly practicing. Remember: It’s okay to pace yourself and come back to this tomorrow if need be.