The Perfect Month

As many readers know, my word of the year for 2023 (and 2022 lol) is Discipline. The month of May brought several milestones for me in my pursuit of discipline, but one stood out above the rest. It was a perfect month for me in that I prayed and worked out six days a week for the entire month. In reflection, I am still a little amazed that it happened. I cannot recall another month, ever in my life, that I have brought this level of consistency. Adding to the amazement, May was also likely the busiest month I have seen this calendar year (we had two seniors graduating from two different schools).

Some of you are likely very put off by this because it sounds impractical. But a few of you are wondering, “How did she do it?” “What’s the secret?” Sorry to disappoint, but there is no secret. There was no moment at the beginning of the month where I made a proclamation that this would be a perfect month. There was no heightened intentional commitment to accomplish this milestone. I started this month just like I had started every month this year, with a fresh (read: blank) habit tracker. I recognized about halfway through the month that I was on a perfect streak and even then, the idea of completing a perfect month seemed out of reach.

It wasn’t until the last four days that I even spoke about the possibility of a perfect month to the hubby. Then my commitment to the milestone and my excitement about accomplishing it increased each day.

At the beginning of the year, I read “The Pursuit of Excellence” by Ryan Hawk. In this book, he writes about the dangers of becoming obsessed with a goal and the importance of loving the process. My perfect month is an excellent example of both of these things. If I had resolved to have a perfect month back in January, I would have been very disappointed. My habit tracker would have become a tool of shame and defeat. I didn’t have the consistency and discipline that I needed to accomplish that back then.

Instead, I came to love the sense of satisfaction of filling in those little circles on my habit tracker. I came to appreciate the small streaks that I built up here and there. I can still remember the first time I worked out 6 days in a row. I was SO proud of myself and felt like I had actually earned my rest day. My habit tracker showed me trends of empty circles in the prayer box and the onset of feeling overwhelmed by life. Each month, I became more and more consistent. The small streaks became longer and longer. Each month there were less and less empty circles. I developed a love for the process and then, there was a perfect month.

Another example of loving the process- in May, I reached a total of 14 pounds of weight loss this calendar year. The recommended “healthy weight loss” is 2 pounds a week. If you are good at Math, you already recognized that I am averaging almost 3 pounds a month. But it’s actually worse than that. I started working out intensely at the end of January. For the last week and half of January, all of February, March, and April- I lost 2 pounds a month. If I had been obsessed with only a weight loss goal, I definitely would have gotten discouraged and quit.

For three full months, I had to love the process with very little measurable results. I had to come to learn to get excited about lacing up my running shoes. I had to enjoy spending money on workout clothes because we were having to do laundry too often. I began keeping better data of my runs so that I could at least measure progress there. In May, I lost 7 pounds. Which is still less than the recommended healthy weight loss rate but feels like a huge amount to me at this point.

In May, I also completed 3 full months of eating perfect. Same story, I didn’t set a goal for a perfect quarter. I just made the decision to be obedient to God’s prompting to change the way that I eat. I learned to get excited about a small bag of almonds, pecans, and craisins. I learned that I loved iced espresso as much as my iced horchata coffee. I paid attention to how good my body felt on the inside.

In a culture centered around immediate gratification, this is hard work. It is hard to love a process independent of results. Results are what make us feel good about ourselves. Results give us the feedback that we need to assure us that we are doing things right. Results are what we get to post about on social media. But the “secret sauce” of discipline is to love the process, not the results.

Great things do not happen overnight. Greatness is built over time. You may or may not call 1 perfect month “greatness”, but the principle still applies at whatever scale you consider to be greatness. Long-term greatness requires discipline in the everyday short-term decisions. Accomplishing anything, big or small, is difficult without building and developing this skill.

To the person standing in front of a daunting goal or task, I want to encourage you to get excited about the process! Yes, celebrate the small wins, short streaks, and intermediate goals. But more importantly, learn to love the process each step of the way!