how does it work though? sounds like you are being rewarded for not holding your own end of the promise (next day you do less challenging thing). I'm not saying punishment should work better but curious how it works.
> sounds like you are being rewarded for not holding your own end of the promise
That's a risk, but I find that overall I pick things just hard enough to be challenging but just easy enough to make myself do. Then I do those things consistently until they become my new baseline and I increase the challenge. (2 pushups, 10, 20 pushups + putting on jogging shoes, ...).
The big idea is to pick things that you're almost certain you'll do. Falling back to smaller promises should be the exception.
> curious how it works.
Slowly, with lots of restarts, but the advantage of this method is that no matter how many times you fall off the wagon (and no matter how far you fall) you have something simple to start again.
Starting over at the proverbial "1 pushup" after you've spent time and effort building it up to so much more than that definitely sucks, but it's far better than other alternatives I've tried (such as waiting until I have the massive motivation needed to restart from exactly where I stopped).
Edit: I think it works for me because it slowly builds up self trust, which then becomes a positive feedback loop.
I can corroborate this method and perspective on why it might work. With a backstory similar to yours but earlier in the journey to transformation / success, I’ve found that locking in “wins” and completing the cycle of intent to follow-through turned out to be much more valuable and helpful than I ever imagined when I was slogging through the long era of seeking change but preemptively dismissing all visible paths.
Thanks for sharing and thanks for putting possible future obstacles / challenges on my radar!
That's a risk, but I find that overall I pick things just hard enough to be challenging but just easy enough to make myself do. Then I do those things consistently until they become my new baseline and I increase the challenge. (2 pushups, 10, 20 pushups + putting on jogging shoes, ...).
The big idea is to pick things that you're almost certain you'll do. Falling back to smaller promises should be the exception.
> curious how it works.
Slowly, with lots of restarts, but the advantage of this method is that no matter how many times you fall off the wagon (and no matter how far you fall) you have something simple to start again.
Starting over at the proverbial "1 pushup" after you've spent time and effort building it up to so much more than that definitely sucks, but it's far better than other alternatives I've tried (such as waiting until I have the massive motivation needed to restart from exactly where I stopped).
Edit: I think it works for me because it slowly builds up self trust, which then becomes a positive feedback loop.