Most people who eat healthy have something in common with those people who exercise regularly and those people who meditate and those people who consistently try to see the good in others.
Actually they have several things in common – including maintaining a healthy lifestyle and exercising self-discipline. But the thing they have in common that I am particularly talking about is their commitment to persistence. Very few people start out liking to exercise or liking to say no to some tasty but unhealthy foods or comfortably meditating without wanting to let their minds wander.
Being persistent requires a recognition that achieving a goal may require some behaviors that are hard and seemingly unrewarding at first, but that’s not a reason to quit.
Something funny happens when we pursue a goal with persistence. Eventually a tipping point is reached – the point where it is emotionally unacceptable to avoid exercising on an exercise day or to eat sugary snack even when your not really hungry just because it’s available to you. At some point, the meditator no longer accepts an excuse for not meditating. And many of us reach the point where our default position is to initially ascribe positive motivation to our neighbor’s behavior – even if we don’t definitively know that to be the case.
While almost nobody immediately enjoys the self-discipline required to develop a positive habit, you almost never hear regrets about it from the person who has made exercise or healthy eating or meditation or thinking positively a normal part of the lifestyle. That is a difficult concept to understand by that person who lacks persistence when pursuing a behavior change.
The initial motivation to make a positive behavior change is commendable – but it won’t happen without persistence.