Notice Mara Lindqvist
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Notice · · 1 min read

The year is not over. It’s only quiet.

November is when most January plans go silent. Three questions are enough to hear what they’re telling you.

Dear reader, somewhere around now the plan you made in January has gone quiet. You haven’t decided to stop. You’ve just stopped deciding.

That difference matters more than it sounds. A dead plan needs a funeral and a new plan. A quiet one needs much less: one honest look at what happened, and one small move before the week is out.

Last Tuesday a client, I’ll call her H., told me she had failed at running again. She hadn’t run since June. When we looked closer, she hadn’t failed at running at all. She had failed at running at six in the morning, which was never her plan. It was a podcast host’s.

You haven’t decided to stop. You’ve just stopped deciding.

Three questions for a quiet plan

I asked H. three questions. They take about ten minutes with a pen, and paper works better than your phone, because the phone will try to help.

Try this, ten minutes with a pen. When did it go quiet, and what else changed that week? Which part of the plan was yours, and which part did you borrow? What would make next week ten percent easier?

Her answer to the third question was almost embarrassingly small: put the running shoes by the door on Sunday night. She ran on Wednesday, at lunch, for fifteen minutes. It isn’t a comeback story. It’s a Wednesday.

Your answer will be small too. Let it be.

Mara

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