#24 Make Your Bed!
~ 18 minute read time ~
With Christmas done, dusted and many of us now resting with some time off during Twixmas. Many will be wondering what the New Year will bring, especially with winter getting colder and the days being short, some people struggle more when the days are darker.
Now’s the time to keep showing up for yourself on a daily basis. Self-care, self-love, just doing you - whatever you want to call it! Now’s the time to get entered, balanced in yourself so that you can move through this winter with a calm, powerful grace rather than feeling like you’re struggling through.
Do little things that make you feel better - get up, make your bed, shower, brush your teeth, comb your hair, cook a nutritious meal. Do it even when you can’t be bothered, go for a walk, get some air, expose yourself to whatever daylight there is. Put some music on, have a little dance, go for a bike ride, climb a tree - whatever, bring some movement into your day.
There is a famous commencement speech given by Admiral William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy four-star admiral, to graduating students of The University of Texas at Austin on May 17th 2014. It’s on YouTube, it’s really worth a watch.
It’s a beautifully astute, succinct speech that contains so much wisdom that it bears repeated viewings. The lesson I love most from it is the simple maxim “if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed”.
Sounds somewhat simplistic right? Well, it is as simple as making your bed but also it means so much more. He talks about the constant struggle we all have in wanting to change ourselves for the better, and by changing ourselves we can change the world.
Here’s a short transcript from the speech:
“Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack — that’s Navy talk for bed.
It was a simple task — mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”
The Team GB Cycling Team of 2012 famously dominated the London Olympics, to the point where their opponents questioned if they were using special wheels or illegal equipment.
None of this was the case, their Sporting Director Sir Dave Brailsford, had them focusing on ‘marginal gains’. Which meant putting the most focus on the smallest of improvements. The thinking was that if the team could incrementally improve by the tiniest of margins, then when added together it would yield outstanding results.
It didn’t just work, it produced phenomenal improvements. There was a huge benefit in performance that yielded 8 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze medals for a total of 12 cycling medals.
If you can put some focus and energy into the little things in your life, the quick wins, the things that you often leave and never get done - if you start addressing them head on, and be consistent with it - over a relatively short period of time, you’ll start to notice massive results. Try it. Small changes when aggregated equals significant improvement.
Pick one area you really want to improve on - you may want to lose weight or get fit, it may be waking up 15 minutes earlier each day, it may be going for a walk or a short run, or journaling, it could be spending less, it could be anything but just choose one thing for now. Firstly, do it for a few days, then see if you can string together consecutive days, keep count and aim to not break the streak. If you sustain it for 30 days, you’ll have made it a habit.
Tick it off, but keep doing it. Now build in another thing you want to achieve. And do the same with that.
You’ll go from getting up 15 minutes earlier, then making your bed, you now have a little more time in your day to maybe try meditation, or do a HIIT workout or to take the time to mindfully enjoy your morning cup of coffee. Feel the warmth of the cup, savour the taste, take a moment to feel gratitude for yourself.
You can stack habits like Lego, you build up one to part make sure it’s robust, then connect it to another part and before you know it, you have built an amazing castle or sports car or unicorn! By focusing on making improvement on one area, you give yourself a better chance of sticking to it.
The challenge isn’t in the difficulty of the task, it’s in consistency. It may sound mundane but it’s in doing the simple, small things repeatedly where the difference is made.
There’s no difference between you and a super-successful person, don’t assume the people you admire are more talented or just better at stuff than you. They still have the same worries, fears and insecurities as you, but they have an inner drive and discipline. They do the thing that made them a success repeatedly until they became world class at it, until the world started paying them to do their thing.
Do your thing, make your bed, get up a little earlier, go for that walk/run, do the yoga, do the meditation, do the breath work, prepare and cook your own food.
Honestly, there is no magic pill to creating the life you want other than showing up.
Every.
Single.
Day.
It’s not sexy, it’s not exciting but it works.
The success you see in others and want for yourself is just the tip of the iceberg, the visible part above the water. You won’t have seen the hours, days, weeks, months, years of hard work, disappointments, discomfort, sacrifices, injuries and pain that led to the ‘overnight success’.
There is no magic pill in achieving the things you want. Just make sure it’s something that you deeply, truly want, so that when you don’t feel like doing it one day, you refer back to why you’re doing it. You’ll re-connect to your purpose and then reaffirm your commitment.
You need to develop a drive. Drive is better than motivation, because it comes from within. Motivation is often dependent on outside factors, is the weather nice, do I have the right music on - motivation comes and goes. Drive is more likely to get you out of bed in the morning.
Pick one thing, do it consistently for at least 20-30 days, bed it in as a habit until it becomes automatic then focus on the next thing. This is how change works, sustainable, consistent incremental improvements. You have time, or if you think you don’t, make time - cut down on TV, social media, stop doom scrolling on your phone, you’ll soon realise how much time you actually have when you don’t waste it!
I know, because I had to cut out lots of time-sapping things. I quit Facebook, I stopped using Twitter, I vastly reduced my consumption of TV and by doing that I suddenly found I had time to read, to exercise, to cook meals from scratch and it really makes you feel much better.
You feel good because it’s ‘alive’ time, you’re actively engaging in things that serve you better than the ‘dead’ time where you’re passively consuming other people’s ideas, opinions and it takes you out of yourself, it drains you.
Social media can be fine if it connects you with loved ones, but it can also steal your joy because, if you’re not careful, it forces you into comparing your situation with everyone else’s. Your mind is tricked into thinking that the carefully curated life that people post on social media, is much better than your ‘boring’ life - it’s all storytelling when you think about it.
It’s all a contrivance.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Just practice gratitude for what you have, all the blessings in your life. The problem is you feel good about yourself, then you go online and someone has posted some amazing photos. Then your monkey mind tells you that you wish you could do that, then you feel bad about yourself - when 5 minutes before you felt perfectly fine.
Remove things that block the best version of you from being uncovered. Create or add things that help build you up. Make sure you’re accountable to yourself. If it helps, ask a friend to be your ‘Accountability Buddy’. Get them to check in on you and ask you how your chosen change is going. Then you feel you not only need to do the thing for yourself, but also because you know you’re going to be asked about it.
That’s powerful.
Imagine how the chat would go depending on what you’ve done or not:
Buddy: “How’s getting up earlier in the mornings going?”
You: “Um, slept in!”
Buddy: “Oh no…really? I thought you were trying to change?”
OR
You: “Great thanks, I’ve been getting up 20 minutes earlier for 10 days straight and my mornings are much less stressed. I’ve even started meditating!”
Buddy: “Brilliant, you’ve inspired me to do something similar!”
Inspiration is catching. By wanting and acting to become a little better each day, you’ll send out a different message to your circle of friends/family. They’ll want some of what you’re having, and they’ll become motivated to do better for themselves.
See how it works? Self-love helps to spread love to others.
Change yourself, change the world!
That’s why New Year’s resolutions never stick, they’re only based on woolly hopes and imagined willpower that when the going gets tough or dull, people give up. There’s a statistic that shows 80% of all New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by the first week of February. Every year!
But, small, daily changes that are achievable will stick. We can all create or find 10/20 minutes here or there during our days, if you can’t you really need to have a look at the life you’re living and re-assess your priorities. Set some boundaries as you might be doing too much for others. Kindly push back and offer others the chance to do for themselves what you’ve been doing all along. If they throw their toys out the pram, that’s on them - not you!
It’s your life, take some ownership and start steering your ship how and where you want.
So, start tomorrow morning by making your bed, do it again the day after and so on and your world will start changing for the better.
Love
LP x
P.S. As a New Year’s gift to my wonderful readers, I’ve invited a special guest who has kindly written a lovely article to inspire you going into 2021. Don’t miss it next week.
