5. If It Matters, Do It Daily

I blogged every day for 730 days.

I meditated for 365 days in a row.

Because doing something every day is actually easier than doing it once in a while.

Listen to this episode to discover how showing up daily will change your life forever.

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   Hey, it's Sarah Arnold-Hall, and you're listening to How to Take Action.

  It is so much easier to do something every single day than it is to do it once in a while.

  That's why on today's episode we're gonna be talking about if it matters, do it daily. This is kind of my mantra because if something really matters to me, doing it once in a while is not going to be effective. It matters so much more what you do every day than what you do once a week or once a month.

  When you do something every single day, you never have to ask yourself: is today one of the days is do does today count? What about tomorrow? Like, maybe, could I do it tomorrow instead? If you haven't done it since you woke up today, you gotta do it before you go to sleep tonight.

  And the freedom that that allows is really amazing.

  I started a blog in 2016 and it had like 10 posts on it in the next 12 months, maybe 10 posts. I always used to think that if I did something every single day, it would take so much more work than doing it once in a while. Like at the time, posting on my blog once a month seemed so much more manageable than posting once a week or every day.

  But actually, it's complete opposite because it became totally unmanageable to do it once a week or once a month because it didn't, I didn't have a natural routine. It became so much more difficult because it wasn't really integrated in my life. I wasn't used to doing it. When it came time to do it, it was kind of like, ah, this thing that I'm supposed to do this month, I forgot I need to do it.

  Instead of, it became such a part of my daily routine, it actually became easier and I wanted to share the thinking behind why I decided to do two years, because like that's a really random amount of time. Why didn't I just do one year? And sometimes I think about that now I'm like, I could have totally done one year, but I wouldn't have learned the lessons that I've learned doing two years.

  I was actually inspired by someone named Sean West who wrote this blog post, and I'm gonna read it to you right off my computer right here. So, that you can kind of get the depth of why I decided to blog for two years in a row instead of just blogging for like 30 days in a row, for example. So this is what he says. He's talking about if you've got something that really matters to you in your life, then this is his advice.

  "Show up every day for two years. That's the golden answer right there. It will make you money. It will build an audience. It will solve most of your problems. It will develop the tenacity needed to survive in this world. It will teach you that those who are successful aren't successful because of some condensed version of their story, but because they made a commitment to show up every single day. When it was really hard, when it sucked and it looked like nothing would ever come of it, but no one will hear this advice because show up every day for two years isn't microwavable."

  That last line? I remember just thinking, boom. It like hit me like a ton of breaks. Show up every day for two years isn't microwavable. And it hit me because I was like, the reason I'm not being as successful as I could be is because I want the microwavable version. I want the one that you just pop in the microwave for 30 seconds and out comes all your success. I was looking for like a magic pill that I could take that would suddenly change my entire life. And I'd been searching for that.

  And this post itself made me realize there is no magic pill. I am the magic pill, and I'm gonna have. Show up every day for a long time. If I wanna see my overnight success happen.

  And you know what? He was right. It's not necessarily because of my blog that my business worked, but it's because of the dedication and the shift in the way that I started showing up for my business when I started showing up daily for something that really mattered. It completely changed the kind of person that I was and the way that I showed up for my business.

  And so now before I started, I was like working in a call center and now I have my own business and I'm running it full-time and it's going really well. And what's the difference, right? I learned to commit to showing up every single day for two years, and I think especially the two year piece hits me because it's like you're not just showing, one year surely would've been enough, but two years, it's like, can you wake up one day and commit for two years to this dream?

  And if you can't, you probably don't want the dream enough. You probably don't really want it. If you can't see yourself showing up for it every single day for the next two years, you probably only want the end result, and don't actually want to create it yourself. You just wanna be handed it.

  And listen, if we could all be handed our goals, that'd be ideal. I would not be opposed to that. But unfortunately that's not the way that it works.

  And so if you really want something, you're gonna have to be willing to show up for it every single day for two years.

  So think about right now, what is it in your life that you could be showing up for every single day for two years, and what could you commit to?

  I made a real public declaration that I was gonna do this. I said to my Instagram, my Facebook, my, on the blog that I was writing, I posted it to the world that I was gonna do this, and that really held me accountable.

  Like the embarrassment of not completing it would've been too much for me to handle. I would not have liked that at all. So I was devoted. I was completely committed. I was gonna do it and I did.

  But if I were to do a two year challenge again, I would do one that was really specific to the goal that I wanted to go after.

  So really think about, well, what is the goal that you want? And then reverse engineer that and think about what would be an action that I could do every single day that would really change things.

  It's gotta be a challenge, but you don't wanna set yourself up to fail either. So blogging was really good because there was no number of words that I had to write. There was no, I could do one line or I could do a massive paragraph as long as I showed up every day for it. So you wanna definitely not, you don't wanna be giving yourself the challenge to put out a 20 minute YouTube video every single day if you've never put out a YouTube video before. You don't wanna probably give yourself the challenge to run 10 k every day if you have never run 10 k, but run every day could totally be an option. Or film something every day could be an option. So other options that I came up with that I wrote down as well, get properly dressed every day, that could be a goal that for me, really made a difference.

  It might sound like it's not impactful, but when I am ready and like properly dressed and I have my hair and makeup, I'm like, oh, I can just quickly film something and put it, or I could do a live stream, or I could pop out in the street and talk to someone that I need to talk to. Like I'm suddenly more ready to attack my goals that day than if I'm not fully dressed in the morning. So that one actually makes a really big difference to me.

  Another one is you could write one page of your book every day, for example, or one of my clients wrote 600 words every single day until she hit 50,000 words in her book.

  You could pitch an offer every day. If you have a business, you could show up and make an offer every single day. That's actually something that I did every day. My, I committed to doing it every day until I created clients, and that was a really big turning point in my business a few years ago when I said, okay, I'm going to just put out an offer every single day. I'm gonna tell people every single day that they can come and work with me and I did it for 14 days straight and it was complete silence. And then on the 15th day, I had three applications come in, maybe even four. And I was like, what? This is amazing.

  So, I remember realizing how powerful it was to do something daily in the sense of my business like that.

  Another one that I did is I meditated for 365 days in a row every day. I had spent a long time in my life before that meditating on and off and on and off, but doing it for that 365 days was a real challenge, but I loved it because I knew I could meditate for like one minute or 20 minutes. It didn't matter what I was doing, I was just always showing up and always meditating.

  And through this process, you're gonna really develop your commitment and your discipline muscles to really continually show up for something that you want to do every day.

  I will say I don't recommend trying to do too many of these commitments at once. You probably just wanna pick the most important thing to you right now, and do that every single day.

  Because if you have a list, which I used to have of like all of these daily commitments that you're doing, it can start to get a bit overwhelming and you're more likely to just stop doing them entirely. So I would recommend picking one thing that really matters to you and doing it every single day.

  So my mantra can be your mantra now, "if it matters, do it daily," and I will talk to you in the next episode.

  Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, you're gonna love being coached by me. We're gonna solve your specific action taking struggles so you can hit any goal you set. Just go to saraharnoldhall.com to sign up.