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Days come and days go, but our goals and our dreams are a constant. So are the steps that we have to take each day to reach those goals. This is where the hard part comes in, because as those days go by, some of them are going to be good and some of them are going to be terrible. Yet we still have to find a way to push through. Generally, this is where your Why power is going to kick in and you will be able to use that as a lever to get yourself out of the bad days and back on the path towards your goals. Sometimes, the Why power is going to feel very far away and the only thing that will work is our commitment to ourselves.

By this time, we should have laid out the minimum steps that we have to do in order to reach our goals, the things that need to be done. When we came up with those daily stepping stones, we made a commitment to ourselves that we would take those steps. The bad days are the reason that we made that commitment in the first place. It is easy to hold to that commitment when things are going well, or even when things are just so-so, but on the bad days when our Why feels very far away, that commitment is going to be the thorn in our paw that gets us to actually take the steps we promised ourselves that we would.

Take today for example. Today I woke up in a foul mood. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before because of an argument with my wife. I started the day feeling worthless and like a failure. I was not supporting my wife the way that would make her happy, I’m not making enough money to keep the bill collectors at bay, and I go to work every day to talk on the phone (an activity I truly hate) to people that feel that my life should revolve around them. Frankly, I felt like lying down on the highway would be a more enjoyable day today and nothing was making a dent in that feeling. Yet here I am, writing about the steps that I took to still try and move forward. This is me stepping to that next stone and the only reason that I am doing it is because of the commitment to myself that I made to write one of these each day.

So on those days that your Why power isn’t there to push you and life feels like an utter waste of time, remember that commitment you made to yourself and let that be the lever that gets you to take the needed step, even if it is just a small step.