A Single Thought Will Not Make a Pathway

One of my students shared this with me once:

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

– Henry David Thoreau

One of the keys to success is repetition. You have to show up in your life even when you don’t feel like it. That’s the part from the quote about “walk again and again”. You don’t feel like exercising or you don’t feel like working on some movement or posture but to “walk again and again” is not based on how you feel.

You do it anyway because the act of doing it creates the path that you want to be on that leads to where you want to go.

And tied directly to acting in spite of how you feel is thinking differently about what you’re doing. If what you really want is to run again or hike or even just walk around the block or lose 10lbs., they key is to fix your mind on that goal and the actions tied to it and see it in your mind, thinking, “I am doing this”. This trigger is what you turn to when that voice shows up whispering to you, “Oh, this is such a waste of time. You’ll never do that again. Why bother? It’s so much work! Don’t you feel like sleeping in today?” Well, if you listen to that voice, you’ll begin creating a new path and I suspect it’s one that you really don’t want to walk down but you will because you’re listening.

Take Thoreau’s advice and create the physical and mental paths you want and walk down those over and over….even when you don’t feel like it.

Thanks for reading.

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