May 17, 2026- Manage our pace

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

~William Blake

When we would like to create a new habit, we won’t be served by meeting our capacity. All of our days are not going to be the same. We are going to have some rough ones. If we think we can go all the way up to our capacity every day, we are going to come up short often enough that we will feel like failures.

Is it possible that, when we fail to reach our goals, that it wasn’t that we were doing the wrong thing; we were just trying to do too much of the right thing? When we fail, we can be informed by the experience. By trying to do too much, we have more information about what is enough.

When we set goals and fail to reach them, we don’t always have to feel like a failure. If our goal is to save $1000 and we only save $800, we are still $800 richer than when we started. Isn’t that a win? Maybe we figured out that $1000 in that period of time was an unreasonable goal. Maybe our behavior wasn’t the problem; it was the metric by which we were evaluating our behavior.

We have permission to scale back. We can recalibrate our expectations. We can work toward a smaller, more sustainable change. We have our entire lives to turn ourselves into the person we would like to be. Let’s manage our pace so we can keep moving in the right direction.