Our modern lives are so completely crazy busy. We run from task to task, place to place, and meal to meal. Our lives are virtual tornadoes.
There’s always the option to simply and consciously decide to step out of this manic living. But, that’s really hard to do besides not being an option for many women.
So, how’s a gal to start exercising and keep it from flying out of her life as it whirls and turns with dangerous speed?
Keeping your exercise goals really small is a great strategy. Imagine trying to keep three to five 40-minute exercise sessions stuffed into your crazy life after a few weeks. Exhausting, huh? Large things easily gets tossed out from the strong winds and constant whirling.
If you aim to learn how to take care of yourself consistently instead of the repeating another short-term goal (e.g., “I need to drop a few pounds for the Summer”) a much more strategic approach for integrating self-care behaviors like exercise into the tornado of your life is to create a very small goal, like “to take a walk for 2 minutes almost everyday.”
I guarantee that the same seductions away from your planned two minutes of exercise will still arise. This is part of why this Two Minute Strategy is so important. You learn the key strategies to overcome your planned daily self-care/exercise because it’s simply to hard to justify NOT walking when your daily goal is only two minutes.
This is my Consistency First, Then Quantity Principle. It helps you acquire real discipline and strengthen your “Commitment to Self” muscle as you overcome the roadblocks to these small goals.
After you are able to master these skills and integrate a two-minute goal into your tornado, you can start increasing it – slowly. If your goal is life long integration and participation, then the physics of smaller goals make more sense for keeping exercise inside your crazy whirling life.
Learning how to become consistent is more important than anything else if you want to sustain a physically active life for the rest of your life. And, you have your WHOLE LIFE to be regularly active, why not take six months to learn how to it well?