Small Actions to Sustain Momentum over Holidays and Vacations
Pursuing difficult goals over holidays and vacations is challenging. Obviously, pursuing a difficult goal is difficult in itself. But pursuing a difficult goal when you are knocked off your routine can absolutely kill your momentum and send you back to square one.
One of the best examples of this is pursuing a weight loss journey over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Many people (including me) put on 5 to 10 pounds in this 45 day stretch after living as model workout and healthy eating champions for the months leading up to November.
This type of setback is no different than any other goal pursuit setback. The root cause is the destruction of the routine that delivered your progress. In essence, you lose the benefits of momentum created by your routine.
Momentum is the motion of moving. Without a doubt, it takes far more energy to create momentum than it does to sustain momentum. When an object is in motion, small nudges can keep it in motion. However, that small nudge is not enough to start it in motion. That’s the power of momentum.
As a result, your goal pursuit mentality must change over holidays and vacations. You can’t play the all or nothing game with your routine. You have to realize that it’s okay to scale down your routine significantly, and plan in advance for this.
A routine filled with small actions that are easy to execute can keep you from losing momentum and grinding to a halt. The key is to not let holidays and vacations sneak up on you. Instead, plan for your scaled down routine in advance.
Scaling down from time to time will not impact your overall pursuit of a difficult goal. On the other hand, completely grinding to a halt has a huge impact and requires you to 10x your efforts to restart. With this in mind, it’s clearly better to use the power of momentum to your advantage than to your disadvantage.