the first step to creating your dream life is showing up
July 24th, 2020
Hi friends!
Today I just wanted to come on here to share some thoughts on habits and consistency. After recently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the biggest things I find sticking with me is the idea that habits create your identity. It’s one of the first concepts he explains in the book in chapter 2: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” Although this concept didn’t stick with me much at first, since finishing the book about a week ago, I have been thinking about this a lot. The actions you take everyday are slowly building up to form the identity that you take on. So it’s not so much the action itself that creates your dream, but the repetition of the good habit that helps make you into the person you want to be.
For me this has been showing up in the way of painting and creating art. Although I call myself a visual artist and that is the label I want to identify with, I need to continuously make efforts to maintain that identity through daily habits of creating. It’s really easy to slip off the train of creating when you hit a creative or motivational block. But by choosing to make time day after day to create something, this is the only way to maintain this identity.
Even on days when it’s really hard to show up, by making that choice to show up and be the person you wish to be, you are proving to yourself that it’s possible. It’s only then that you really start to feel that identity within yourself. So what I mean by showing up first is that even if all you do is roll out your yoga mat and sit there for five minutes, you kept that rhythm going within yourself. By just rolling out your yoga mat, you said to yourself “I am the type of person that makes time to take care of myself.” Even if that’s as far as you get today, by showing up again tomorrow maybe you’ll be able to get through a 10 minute routine. By making the habit itself showing up, then you take that pressure off to all of a sudden be amazing. And if you keep showing up, you will eventually find it easier and easier to get through the whole yoga routine or to paint for five hours all the way through.
This is seeming like I’m mostly giving myself a pep talk at this point because these are all things that I really need to work on doing. I find the hardest part of painting just setting up to paint. Especially since I can’t be in a studio space right now, going out of my way to make the room to paint in my house seems like an even bigger hassle than spending three hours painting. And that’s crazy to think! That some small step can hold me back from moving forward with my practice, yet here I am writing a blog post as a way to be productive while procrastinating. So together, let’s both of us kick our own butts and go do that thing we’ve been meaning to do! Let’s start by showing up to the first step and see how far that takes us. Good luck!
Take care till next time,
Hanna