Monday again.
New week. Fresh start. THIS time you’re doing it right.
You’ve got the plan. Maybe the groceries. The workout schedule. The alarm set. Whatever your version is, you’re ready.
And for a few days?
I mean — look at you go!
Then Thursday happens…
You miss the workout. Eat the thing you weren’t planning to eat. Skip the habit. Lose your patience. Avoid the conversation.
Whatever it is, you drift from the plan.
And somehow one thing turns into:
Well, I blew it.
Which turns into:
I’ll start again Monday.
Wait. Hold up.
What just happened?
You missed one workout on Thursday and somehow Friday, Saturday and Sunday got canceled too??
I have done this more times than I’d like to admit.
For years, I thought progress meant staying on track. If I was doing the thing consistently, I was succeeding. If I slipped, I failed.
And once the streak was broken, continuing almost felt pointless because I couldn’t get the perfect week back anyway. All or nothing, right?
So I’d wait for another clean starting point.
Monday.
The first of the month.
After vacation.
After the holidays.
You know, one of those magical dates when apparently the person who makes imperfect choices just disappears.
Except she always came with me.
Because the problem wasn’t really Thursday.
It was what I made Thursday mean.
One missed workout became proof I was off track. One hard day became a bad week. One choice I didn’t love became permission to abandon every choice that could have come after it.
The stumble cost me one moment.
My response to it could cost me days. Sometimes weeks.
That’s one of the reasons the idea of being perfectly imperfect has stuck with me so much.
I read a book by that name, and the phrase itself gave me language for something I think I’d been fighting for years: being imperfect wasn’t the interruption to the process.
It was part of the process.
That sounds obvious.
Apparently I needed a book to point it out to me.
Because I kept trying to build plans that only worked for the version of me who followed them perfectly.
But what about the actual version of me?
The one who gets tired. Has a bad day. Changes her mind. Gets interrupted. Makes a mistake. Has a week where life does not care about the beautiful plan she made on Sunday night.
She has to be included too.
Otherwise I’m not really building consistency. I’m building something that only works under perfect conditions.
And those conditions do not exist.
Sorry, not sorry, but it’s true.
And we all know it.
That changed what I started paying attention to.
Instead of asking: Did I stay perfectly on track?
I started noticing how long it took me to get back on track.
Let’s call it my bounce-back time.
That became a much more useful measure.
Because I am going to drift.
You are too.
And it’s not because we don’t care. It’s because we are people.
We are human.
Plans collide with sick kids and bad nights of sleep and travel and stress and birthdays and hormones and meetings that run long.
And sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all.
Sometimes you simply make a choice you wish you hadn’t.
The goal can’t be creating a life where none of that ever happens.
We’d spend the rest of our lives starting over — and that’s its own kind of exhausting.
So what if the skill is coming back sooner?
Not Monday… the next choice.
You miss the workout?
Ok. So what happens next?
You said something you wish you hadn’t?
Apologize when you can.
You abandoned the routine for three days?
You don’t need a whole ceremonial restart.
Come back today.
It sounds almost too simple, which might be why we make it so much harder than it needs to be.
There’s something satisfying about a clean slate.
New planner. New plan. New Monday.
Starting over feels official, right?
But sometimes starting over is just another way of avoiding the discomfort of continuing imperfectly, while a fresh start lets me pretend the mistake belonged to the old attempt.
Continuing means I have to bring it with me.
Bam.
Learn from it. Adjust. Keep going without getting to erase what happened first.
Let that sit for a second… because I think that requires a different kind of resilience.
Proverbs 24:16 says the righteous may fall seven times and rise again.
The falling is already built into the sentence.
I love that.
Because sometimes I think I’ve been trying to build a life where I never fall and calling that resilience.
But the getting back up is the part that requires it.
Maybe that’s what grace gives us room to practice too.
We don’t have to turn every mistake into a verdict on who we are.
Sometimes it can just be:
That didn’t work.
I drifted.
I wish I handled that differently.
Ok.
What now?
Not:
What does this prove about me?
Not:
How do I erase it?
Just:
What’s the next choice I can make from right here?
Maybe you’re waiting for Monday right now.
Or next month.
Or some clean starting line where you can promise yourself you’ll do it differently this time.
What if you don’t need one?
Look at where you are today.
What can you come back to from here?
Because maybe the most important measure of progress isn’t how long you can go without slipping.
Maybe it’s how much less of your life you lose every time you do.
Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Listen to Episode 22: Building Resilience Through Every Setback →