Look Around for Signs of Progress

“If you see the red barn, you went too far.”

Have you ever gotten directions from someone who includes signals that you messed up and need to correct the course?

“If your soup is too salty, add a potato.”

Learning from the experience of others can help us correct mistakes with solutions that someone else has already tested.

“It’s all fun and games until your jeans don’t fit.”

Oh yeah. Been there! Party time is over.

Life is a constant cycle of learning new things and, if we’re smart, adjusting our behavior as we do. In fact, I often encourage my clients to, “do the best you can until you know better, and then do better.” But this week I wondered how often we pay attention to the signs that things are going well, instead of looking for signals that they are not.

It happened in a conversation with someone who enjoys endurance running but has a habit of being so enthusiastic that she over-trains and either gets injured or experiences burnout. We discussed her life being like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, and she said she wants to keep her pendulum closer to the center.

As we discussed how she could do that, I asked how she knows she is letting her pendulum swing too much. “I don’t sleep well even when I am tired,” she replied. “I don’t look forward to my runs, and I wake up starving in the morning like I didn’t eat enough the night before.”

Then we switched gears, and I asked the other side of the question: how do you know when you are doing things well? That was trickier for her to answer. The signs that life is in balance are quiet, calm, and subtle, so we don’t notice them as much as the loud, frantic, obvious signs of imbalance.

I wonder if we could rewrite those pieces of advice so they are proactive instead of reactive.

“If you see the red barn, you are almost to where you will turn left.”

Staying on track with health goals requires a bit of multi-tasking. You need to know where you are going, where you are, and what is coming up all at the same time so you don’t miss your turn.

Apply this to your life by knowing what daily activities you need to thrive. For one client, when she does at least fifteen minutes of yoga or walking each day and drinks her water, she knows she is on her healthy path. The first sign of progress is that it’s been a long time since you’ve made a u-turn.

“Follow the recipe, and season to taste.”

Popular culture would have us believe otherwise, but there is not really anything new to healthy living. Eat lots of vegetables, drink water, exercise daily, and chill out. There is a recipe to healthy, balanced living, and it only really gets messed up when we think we know better and start adding in our own ingredients.

The second sign of progress is that results are pretty predictable, and that happens when we follow life’s recipe and season to taste, rather than improvising and then having to correct it later. For my clients, that often means reducing the medications they take or not needing to add new ones because their lifestyle has improved. What a great signal of progress!

“It’s all fun and games until your jeans don’t fit.”

I know, I know….swinging on the pendulum is fun sometimes. Some of life’s best discoveries are found when we throw away the map and just go. If we always follow the recipe, we will never invent new ones. All of that is true.

But.

Let those exceptions apply to your creative outlets, cultural perceptions, political debates, social interactions, and other ways that you live. Definitely break the rules of conventional thinking! But keep your body intact.

Signs of healthy, balanced living are all around us. Are you paying attention? Notice them this week, and enjoy a new pace.

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