My 5 "non-negotiables."

The cold weather edition, at least.

For most of my life, I struggled with discipline. It became such an Achilles’ heel of mine that daily goals or habits became a big, fat, soft spot for me. Commitments around healthy hobbies, workouts, early wake-up times, diets or exercise still bring up all sorts of issues for me— there’s a lot of projection and moral judgment in my head.

In the past, I’d be able to commit to a new habit for a few days, max. Then I’d start slipping. I remember telling my dad on the phone once that I was going to start every day by surfing. He was sort of like “Sure, okay…”— and I heard the skepticism in his voice. It made me overcompensate by assuring him that surely surfing was the missing piece in my life and all would be solved now that I had discovered that surfing every morning was THE SOLUTION.

Reader, I hung up the phone and I actually never surfed another morning again in the rest of my life. So that’s how I was with “discipline” in my twenties. All in one day, abandoned the next.

Something shifted as I entered my thirties. I think life got busier, more complex. I had really change some of my food and lifestyle habits in my late twenties as part of a health diagnosis, and I realized that I actually could stick with new habits. It sucked, they were hard. I had up days and down days. But after a few years of honoring a commitment to take care of myself, for myself, I was proud. More importantly, I learned that I could show up for myself.

That changed everything. Now, I’m more than a little obsessed with discipline. Discipline is what allows me freedom.

Life is increasingly complex. In the last few months I’ve moved, barreled ahead full speed towards a wedding in another country, worked my ass off, side hustled away (ahem! you’re reading it!), read a kooky number of books, taken as many Portuguese classes as I can shove into my calendar and traveled nearly every 2 weeks. There is so much more, of course, but that’s sort of the point— busy-ness and chaos will fill up the size of any container they’re poured into.

All I can control, really, is the container.

I view the discipline as— almost— my own liberation. Most of my “non-negotiables” are me trying to set myself up to win. I’ve gotten to know myself as an adult the last few years, so I’ve engineered around how I can lay a foundation that makes her (me!) show up as her best self, avoid the shit that makes her (me!) tired/grumpy/hangry/anxious/sad.

So these are my few non-negotiables, the cold weather edition, at least. (Admittedly, the warm weather version includes a hell of a lot more time outside.) These are the promises I make and dutifully keep to myself. Sometimes it’s a recipe that I always have stocked in my fridge, sometimes it’s a wake-up time, sometimes it’s a tidyness thing. All I know is that when everything else feels like A LOT— and it does right now!— these are the things that keep at least one foot toe on the ground.