The Halfway Point

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] Yesterday marked 50 episodes of The Daily Five. We are halfway through the season and I can honestly say I'm enjoying myself far more than I was in season one by this point. You know, there's this saying about marriage that you have to choose to love your spouse every single day. I think it's excellent advice.

[00:00:35] And it doesn't just apply to marriage, it applies to anything. You have to choose the things you do, the work you do, all the different parts of your life every day. And not every day is a walk in the park. But we have also officially exited the part of the season called the slog. And now are in the section called the rally.

[00:00:58] At some point in any new habit or system you're trying, it's not that things are too hard, it's that you've given something enough time and effort, and now you can see all the ways you were wrong. Whenever we start something new, we start with a bunch of different assumptions. Some of them pan out, and some of them definitely do not.

[00:01:14] And while you do have to be flexible and adjust as you go along, 50 days in is definitely the time to pause, take stock, and make major adjustments. This happens in literally everything new we want to do, and in fact, it's when we are most likely to give up. Sometimes you still find yourself getting things done by the sheer force of your willpower, even into the slog.

[00:01:38] But eventually, that willpower dies out, just like we knew it would. I've also been in situations where whatever new thing I was doing, I was just limping along in. I wasn't increasingly thriving, I was just finding ways and shortcuts around it, violating the actual spirit and intention of the thing I wanted to do just to say I had done it.

[00:02:00] Which is, of course, such a cop out. Be wary of cop outs. They are more common than you think and they don't always look like cop outs because things are still kind of sort of getting done. So what am I saying here? What is the point I'm trying to make?

[00:02:18] I guess what I'm trying to say is that day 50 out of 100 or day 50 out of infinity. In both situations at this point you have to sit down and evaluate how you're doing, whether you want to continue and see if you want to continue giving it a real.

[00:02:34] This is going to sound just a little bit wild, but sometimes when I am about to give up on a thing that I know I shouldn't, I'll complain about it to this one friend of mine. And she knows I'm about to tell this story, so we're cool. The reason I complain to her is because she is supportive to an absolute fault. If I go to her and list out all of the very reasonable sounding arguments about why I should stop doing the thing I'm doing, she's going to absolutely take my side. And give me even more reasons sometimes for why I should stop doing it. She is so great. Except that when she does that I start twitching and finding reasons for why I should actually keep going. And just maybe modify how I'm approaching everything. And I manage to talk myself into sticking with it by the end of a 30 minute conversation with her.

[00:03:25] I know that probably says a few things about me right there, but the point is, I do the thing that introduces inner conflict. For me, it's my super supportive friend taking my side, because it makes me realize that by giving up, I'm not doing the right thing for myself. Now, when it comes to one of my other friends, and she starts complaining, I straight up give her tough love. I will set her impossible goals and tell her she can't do it. And then of course, she wants to prove me wrong while knowing fully what I'm doing, and that gives her what she needs to stick with it. Yes, we all know each other pretty well, and how to push each other's buttons, too.

[00:04:03] If, of course, you introduce conflict into the situation, and you still can't make yourself want to do a thing, I think that's okay too creating a better life isn't about putting yourself through torturous situations for a sustained amount of time. But, I bet you'll rally anyway, because you set that goal for a reason, and you had good intentions. So As we go into this rally, think about whether there's something big you could change that would change what you're doing, but still meet the goal, that original intention that you wanted to do something about in the first place. That's more important than doing the actual thing you committed to.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?