On the long journey to healing, sometimes you get lost.
You know how during the pandemic quarantine, the days start to blur together? Today is a day, but you don’t know which day.
Today is similar to yesterday—you’re similar activities, with similar outcomes. The same people around you. Similar close on your body. No major events, or even physical movement, to differentiate the days.
It feels demoralizing, right? Like you’ll never get anywhere. An endless swamp of days stretching as far as the eye can see into the future, and back into the past.
No good.
If our plan is to keep moving forward one step at a time, we must be able to KNOW that we have moved one step beyond yesterday. We must be able to look back and see the trail that we have travelled.
Calendars are good for this. Logging hours. Tracking. Keeping record of that trail.
Personally, tho, I feel no satisfaction logging hours. Tracking is necessary, but it only pays off long-term—when you look back and survey the land.
How to make tracking fun in the short term?
One solution: treat yourself like a kindergartener. Use every fun, cheesy way to track progress that you would as a six-year-old.
- Put a gold-star sticker on your calendar
- Give yourself a stamp
- Color in checkboxes with markers or highlighters
- Make a paper chain
Doing something FUN in the moment of tracking helps reward yourself for doing the tracking in the first place.
At first, it might feel weird. “I’m a grown woman,” I said to myself the first time I put a stamp on my calendar after working out. “I don’t need a silly thing like this stamp.”
Three days later, that stamp became the highlight of my post-workout routine. My inner six-year-old danced with glee every time I got to drop a stamp on my calendar.
And of course, that motivated me to work out even more. Double win!
My stamps started out pretty sporadic, but over time they became more consistent as I became more consistent.
The days may blur together, but there is now a concrete record of where I’ve been. Because I’ve done it in the past, I am confident that I can do it in the future.
The best path to be on, the upward path.
And you have proof: a trail of stamps.
Don’t have stamps? Get a cute one!
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