Imagine the following situation: You get home from work and you are kind of tired. Your plan was to go for a run, but somehow you end up with a pizza and Netflix on the couch. What happened? You betrayed and talked yourself into the path of least resistance. Or, to put it in other words, your inner demon had the final saying because he won the fight with your ambitious self. You perhaps thought:

• If I don´t do it for at least 30 minutes, it is not even worth doing at all.
• I won´t be able to do it for the rest of my life, why bother doing it now this one time or this month.
• I will never reach a level where I will be really good at it.
• The circumstances are bad right now, but for sure I will do it tomorrow.
• At the end we all die, why put in the effort?

First of all, it is your life, your journey, your choice! You only justify to yourself. But know, today is the easiest day to change. The longer you stick with a bad habit, the harder it is to replace it with a good one. Consider these thoughts instead:

• Why should anything be only worth it if done for 30 minutes? For example, if you can go outside even for a 1-minute run, do it. You got fresh air and moved. One minute is better than no minute.
• Now is now and tomorrow is some other time, so focus on what you can do now. As soon as you build momentum, things will become easier.
• It is never about reaching whatever we think we need to reach, but about enjoying the journey.
• If you can manage difficult circumstances today, imagine how easy it will be with better circumstances tomorrow.
• At the end we all die, so why not put in the effort?

If you can give your life a small positive impulse now and perhaps another one later and another one tomorrow, you will start creating momentum and a habit. The beautiful thing is the more you work on creating a habit, the smaller the required effort will become. Once the habit is fully developed there is no more inner resistance. The habit you have built keeps you gliding like a rock in space, without any effort. There is also a deeper level to living up to your higher standards.

• You train discipline and discipline is control over your comfort-seeking habits.
• Discipline is enforced by your will and your will is like a neurological muscle; it grows through training.
• 90 % of the obstacles in your life are internal obstacles and don´t exist in the external world.
• Practice patience. Sometimes it is about making a decision and not expecting results for a certain period of time.
• Momentary comfort is no comfort if its long-term pain.
• Momentary comfort is no comfort if it betrays your ideals.

Everything starts with that small positive impulse: choosing water over a soft drink, going for a run instead of sitting on the couch, meditate instead of scrolling on the phone, or sleep instead of Netflix.

That one-minute stretching or that 5-minute run does more deep down than it appears on the surface.