The Power of ONE DAY: The small and consistent ways to build the years ahead
Updated: Apr 15
There are multiple times every day that we experience emotions, problem solving, and relationships with others.
Each moment adds up, each one can add or diminish your life.
What if there was a way to optimize each emotion, issue, and challenge? What if we could thread all of these experiences to create the best us, a more consistent and real us? Would you do it?
The power of small and consistent is a principle that can see you through the rest of your life.
How powerful is one day?
The phrase, years tell us what the days never knew seems to say from day to day, you do not know the potential that a year can make. Doesn't it feel like a day isn't really that powerful, yet a year is life changing?
C.S. Lewis said, “isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different”.
This is true. If you want to see what your life will be like in five, ten, or even fifteen years, look at the way in which you spend your day, the way you talk to others, the way that you build yourself in the here and now.
Creating Power In Your Day:
The present is all that you have to work with. You can plan for the future best you can, yet the real work comes in the value you give to the time that is present and currently occurring.
Mindfulness is a practice that can help us become more aware of the present and to invest in it more fully. Mindfulness is an ability to cut through the noise and to quiet your mind -- to make it empty. In this process you naturally observe yourself and understand how to cultivate a self-mastery with yourself.
When you continually are bombarded with the past, you can find yourself dragged to and fro. Hardly anything can hold you in the present moment because of the way the past haunts you. Trying to mitigate risks in your future can be good, yet it can cultivate anxiety as you worry and worry about all the what if's and already convince yourself that you will fail no matter how much you plan.
The Tactics of Escaping the Present Moment:
Your body and mind seek refuge and there are many tactics it will try to use to cope, disappear, or elude the issue. It is the small tactics that will give you a worst direction in the long run.
Keep an eye out for the small things that are going to bring you down or try to bind you into halting your progress or your growth.
Addictions
Escaping into Media
Procrastinating
Hostile response/reaction
Overreacting or not caring
Look out for these things because they will continue to bind you. (Check out this article Focus to Expand: Taking life 1 percent at a time for more information).
The small things you do impact your life steadily over the course of your life. How you fill and add to your life matters because the little things you do daily become the wave you ride in the future.
Being Present: Questions to help you cultivate your day with intention.
How do you build your day?
Do you seek to be complete by the end of it? How do you complete things to ensure that you feel you have accomplished the things you needed to get done? Do you know what finishing looks like?
What do you need to have a good day? Is it a drink? Is it holding space for yourself? Is it exercising or doing something you love?
What do you choose to get done first?
Do you have a morning and evening routine that set you up for success and for relaxing?
How do you repair and heal from things that have happened today?
How do you handle deviations, emergencies, or disruptions? Can you get yourself back on track afterwards?
What can you do to close the day and to say, "it is good"?
Choose to direct your life. Choose how you will build each day with presence. You have what it takes to invest in each day to make it a successful and rewarding life. Link each day together and you will find that how you prepare and value one day will magnify the life you build for yourself.
What can you do to adjust and value to your day?
Article Written By: Kaitlyn Andrews, an International Life Coach for Women
