Daily Gratitude: Sometimes it’s hard to remember this. We just want to quit trying because it seems nothing is going right. This happened to me in the 2025 Vol State race. Absolutely nothing was going right. I wanted to quit and I tried but the Meat Wagon Lady wouldn’t let me. So I had to keep going. I encountered more defeats in that one race than I ever had in my life. But because of her instincts and intuition I had to continue (yes some of it was being stubborn and wanting to say “I told you so” but that never happened). As such I was never defeated and I finished the race. Look at Thomas Edison and his inventing the light bulb – was it 13,000 or 14,000 times he tried and “failed?” He didn’t let all those defeats become his ultimate reality – total defeat. He kept on and we should too. It would be fun if instead of the routine emojis that people use they adopt a light bulb to use when they are trying to encourage someone to keep on going. That could then remind the person they are trying to encourage someone that had had a bad time to keep on going. Maybe even print out a light bulb and hang it around your house to remind you that a few defeats does not mean you’re defeated.

Daily Gratitude: We can’t just sit around waiting and hoping something will come along to make us happy. It just doesn’t work that way. If we’re not feeling happy, we need to take some sort of action. Sometimes it’s any type of action – doesn’t have to be planned or orchestrated. Often just going for a walk will do it – get those energetic juices going. Once that is started, you might just feel like doing something else. This weekend I didn’t want to go out for my training walk. I was feeling tired and listless. I’d had a migraine headache on Thursday and Friday so Saturday morning, the lethargy was still there. But I knew that if I waited around for the “urge” and “desire” to come, I might be waiting a long time. I had the impetus of knowing that I only have 3 months to train for Vol State and each day I sat around “hoping I’d be trained enough” was another wasted day. So I had to make myself go out. After if gone about a mile i forgot how I had felt and began to enjoy it. That happens a lot so I had that experience in my armory to draw upon. This, i technically knew it would happen. But it still required discipline to get me going. Then when I came home, I just wanted to rest and relax. But again, I knew that I only had another day and a half to put out items for “bulky trash removal”. So, if I didn’t want to wait another 6 months to declutter some more, I had to get my butt moving. That was hard too but I made myself get up and work. For each of these I had incentives and you’re wondering what to do if you don’t have such incentives. Make the incentive simply be “getting off your butt” or “getting started”. Think of it as priming the pump. If you want to be more active or more creative, prime the pump by taking some action – any action – and then see what happens. Try an experiment and just find a way to get up and do some simple little thing and then see what the rest of the day brings.

Daily Gratitude: Think back over your life and see if this has proven true for you. I bet you’ll find at least one example. But it’s interesting that even when we’ve seen it in action, we don’t seem to recognize it as a principle we should follow or a practice we should employ every day. And I think that’s because we’re programmed to look at the here and now and we forget the past – when it’s convenient to forget it. Ha. We’re really good at remembering when things didn’t go so well. Anyway, how do you think books or songs get written? Not all in one day but with continual effort. And a book doesn’t usually get written by talking about a different thing every day. Usually there’s a theme or idea or plot that all writing is centered around. Each day. Every day. Exercise is like that. Why do you think there’s so many “couch to xxx” programs where the xxx can be a 5K or a marathon or whatever. These programs are built around doing something every day that works toward the end result. What end result do you have in mind? It could be anything. Once you know what it is and have determined the best way to get it then put that action on the calendar for at least 6 of the 7 days a week. I’ve recently started writing every day thanks to having found an accountability partner. But I had to miss one day that wasn’t planned. The next day you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to “find the time” to do my writing. I had all sorts of reasons (aka excuses) why I couldn’t write that day. It shocked me. But it shows this effect too although in the opposite manner. It was more of the doing nothing will create more of the same – nothing. Fortunately I did pick up the computer and did write. That made it easier the next day and so on. Start with small actions and keep doing them. You can do decluttering that way. You’d be surprised how much you can get done in 10 minutes. I amazed myself one year when I decided I was going to declutter 10 minutes every day. I’m pretty sure I was just doing this to say “I told you so” (I guess I wanted to say it to all those who said it was possible). And guess what? I got a lot done in those 10 minutes repeated daily. Try this and let us know what happens. It works with anything.