Welcome back!
After you’ve charted your course, you’ll want to set a pace that can be sustained over time. The effort and energy required will vary depending on your task at the time. No whitewater rafting trip involves paddling nonstop at maximum effort. You spend a lot of time on the water conserving energy and paddling your hardest only when you really need to, otherwise people get exhausted. If someone is spent and unable to paddle it weakens that side of the boat, which can be dangerous depending on the size and complexity of the rapids. Don’t weaken your efforts or endanger your destiny by paddling full tilt the second the raft gets on the water. You’ve charted your course, and other than dealing with the unexpected, you’ve already plotted out the spots that will require more effort than others. Give yourself time to settle into the raft, get a feel for conditions, and trust your plan enough to follow it.
It is true that great achievements can sometimes mean we are out of balance for a short time. But those times need to be truly temporary. Building our destiny at the expense of our health or our family defeats the purpose. It may be that your start-up phase requires the most adjustment from you and your family. Time, logistics, and finances may all need to shift. But if you’ve done a mindful, strategic job of thinking things all the way through, you’ll have come up with a plan to minimize the impact. This is when self-discipline becomes a defining characteristic of your life. Some folks never come up with a plan to achieve their goals. Even fewer have a plan and do what it takes to get started. Even less get underway and stick with it when it gets hard. That means the self-disciplined person’s changes of success are pretty darn good! It’s going to take discipline to follow your plan. You’re going to roll out of bed some days, see the next rapid on the map and declare “not today!” That’s fine, breaks are absolutely necessary, but get right back to it as quickly as you reasonably can or you’ll lose both your focus and your progress.
Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to wisely discern the pace that genuinely works best for you at this point in the journey.
