When you are in maintenance, you are going to have bad days or weeks. Don’t let it turn into bad months or years.
Look, if you are in maintenance for a decade you are going to have patches where you are unfocused, or life hits you hard, and you are going to go off the path.
That is inevitable.
It WILL happen.
The trick is making sure those days or weeks don’t turn into months or years. Sometimes you have extended periods where you can’t be perfect and it comes down to damage control. That damage control is important so make sure you don’t just say, “Oh well, it is bad already so I will just let it be bad”.
Try to minimize the bad. It is like a day when you are dieting… because you eat one cookie doesn’t mean you should say, “OMG the year is ruined, let me just eat a box of Thin Mints every day for the rest of the year because I had one Thin Mint at our company meeting. Don’t let problems compound. Don’t get in your own way.
This is something we see quite often. People will let a bad day compound into a bad decade. This is normal human behavior as we generally fall into feed-forward patterns of behavior and it can be very difficult to change course once we start down a path. This is why it is important to pay attention to our daily choices and try and correct our course as soon as we can.
Don’t fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Take the loss, minimize it, and move forward toward your goals. Even if it is a small step forward, a step in the right direction is twice as good as a step in the wrong direction.
