40 Day Finish
You have a little less than 40 days until the end of 2022. As much as it seems like the start of a new year is the best time to work towards a goal there is no magical time for success. Start now
We are in the last 40 days of the year 2022. We are also officially in the part of the year where we allow our routines to be entirely hijacked by holiday events. We forgo moving our bodies and investing in ourselves and instead go from event to event or store to store. It is easy during this part of the year to let everything slide because, let's face it, making sure we have all the ingredients for the ten side dishes and desserts we are making PLUS making sure we cook healthy for the days before and after a holiday is mentally straining. I know because I am right there with you.
I was in church this Sunday when the pastor, a lawyer, and mother of five humans (five, I know, right?), noted that she and her husband do a 40-day finish each year. The focus of the 40-day Finish is to establish a small habit in the last 40 days of the year that will help you to finish the year strong. If we live in the whirlwind of random life storms each year from Thanksgiving until December 31st, we will miss out on growth in our lives--obvious, right? But really hard. While 40 days might not seem like much, by the time ten years from now rolls around, you have lived life in the whirlwind for one year out of those ten years. One year of just letting a storm batter you about while your goals crash down around you.
Math 40 days x 10= 400 days, 365 days in a year. Thus a bit more than a year if we are splitting hairs.
Vector to Your 40-day Finish
Before pilots take off, they put together a flight plan detailing their route. To get from one point to the next on their journey, they “vector” by making a series of gradual turns toward their destination. They also rely on support from air traffic control to set or change their course based on headwinds, turbulence, storms, air traffic, and other variables that change on the fly.
Without that support, as people who are also committed to safe flights, pilots might be forced to make a hard, ninety-degree turn to avoid unforeseen storms. Instead, and fortunately for us as passengers, pilots can vector their turns a few degrees at a time. Those turns are so slight we might not see how just one of them will lead to our desired destination. Yet connecting those vectored turns is how we go from one point to the next, advancing along our journey to our goal destination.
A 40-day finish is a transformation that happens like a pilot vectoring a plane, turning by tiny degrees and at varying speeds over time. The starting point for such incremental change begins with changing how we think. Based on my personal experience and the experiences of those I have had the privilege of coaching, I feel secure in saying that 90 percent of success and growth come down to renewing your mind. Renewing your mind is how you change your identity and grow into who you want to become.
Mind Your Mindset
Mindset is the single most important shift you can make. You will need support from your air traffic control to make it easier to maintain that change, but no one can make that mindset shift but you. Because the only person you can change is you. Your mindset and beliefs about how you do or don’t do life are complex and have likely developed over months and years. It’s unrealistic to think you can sustain a ninety-degree turn by implementing significant changes overnight—that is why most New Year’s Resolutions don’t work because they require huge turns. Just like a plane, it is unlikely you will have enough fuel to make huge 90-degree turns repeatedly so when storms arise. You might not have the energy to make it through them.
Success is almost totally dependent upon drive and persistence. The extra energy required to make another effort to try another approach is the secret of winning. Denis Waitley
Storms and Turbulence
While the goal in life might be to avoid as many storms as possible, there will be completely unavoidable storms. For those inevitable storms, the goal is that we do what we can to avoid going right through the middle of them. This means that you will be flying around the storms and will be buffed by turbulence frequently. What will get you through these storms committed to your goal destination will be a couple of key factors.
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” Proverbs 27:17
Air Traffic Control Support
Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. The truth is that when someone in the same space is cheering us on or encouraging us through a lifestyle change, it is EASIER. We need others that are constantly in pursuit of something more than the status quo in life. We need people who are not thermometers but are thermostats--they set the temperature and don’t just level up to the place of mediocrity.
Having these people in our lives does not mean we will only experience success. It does mean that we have someone to help vector us back into our goal destination because they are right there trying to revector themselves. They will also sit with us in disappointment and help us eliminate the thought process that we are flawed and can’t change directions. We need someone to make us yell we are not Josie Grosie anymore.
Turbulence Stabilization
When you are getting rocked back and forth, it will be easier to divert to a different destination rather than continue around that storm to your chosen destination. When you are heading towards goals, there will be bumps, trials, and micro failures, but the key is your willingness to revector and get back to the goal. You have to plan time to advance towards your goal. It will never just happen.
Commitment is doing the thing you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you. Darren Hardy
Remember the pastor with five kids I introduced at the beginning of this post? This is where you find out that last year was the first time she participated in the 40-day Finish with her husband. She hadn’t even done it with him before because she found it annoying that she should try to squeeze in one more thing during the holiday season. But last year, she committed to stretching every day for five minutes. She had back pain and started doing focused stretches nightly for it. And her perspective shifted. Her back pain which she thought was just a staple of life, began to ease. That one small change made her question what could be achieved if she changed her mindset to one where she had potential and hope for the possible.
Things start out as hopes and end up as habits. Lillian Hellman
When you have one win, like my pastor did, it changes who you think you can be because hope compounds. Hope sees the potential and shapes the possible. Likewise, the people around you help shape your potential, or they can negate your potential. If they hope for nothing, it is hard for you to see a reason to navigate around the storms of life. But you can still find your potential in this last part of the year. Take the next 40 days to start a small habit (5 min or less to do). The small compound wins you rack up between now and December 31st can help you create the new year with compound hope in your mental bank.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:
Get Deliberate: Are you in the right community? Who are you doing life with? Please take a minute to think of the people you know that are setting the temperature in their lives. My husband is one of the people I admire the most for his passion for continually setting goals and going after them. Even if it was annoying when we were first married, his commitment to himself has helped me develop new and lofty goals for myself.
Get Inspired: Who do you admire? Why do you admire them? Odds are they do not live status-quo lives. Write down the traits that.
Get Going: If you are lucky enough to be in a group of friends or a spouse that pushes you forward and helps you reach your goals, then plan some specific time with them. If you need to find a community, try signing up for a class to learn something you are interested in, or reach out to someone you know to see if they would be your long-distance accountability partner.
Want help with getting inspiration for your 40-Day Finish? I have a free course where you can harness your emotions to create a Scene of Success which will help you with the mental energy it takes to start something new. Click this link to access the Scene of Success replay and my two upcoming workshops next week! Share it with a friend and start a journey around life's storms.