"We need to stick to the plan, not your mood."
Those were my words to my wife yesterday morning. Sunday is a working day for her, she had been out early since morning, came home and slept. When she woke up, I reminded her that we are going for a run this evening.
What followed was twenty minutes of wailing, moaning and every reason under the sun why this evening, of all evenings, was not the one. I listened to all of it and then I said the only thing that mattered - "We need to stick to the plan, not your mood."
You have said yes to something. A goal, a habit, a version of yourself you are building toward and then a Sunday evening arrives, or a Monday, or any morning, and your mood shows up with a perfectly reasonable case for why today should be the exception. You listen to it. You believe it. You call it self-care, or being kind to yourself, or just not being in the right headspace.
Your mood is not lying to you on purpose. It is just not designed to tell you the truth about what you need. It is designed to keep you comfortable in this exact moment, and comfort and growth have never lived in the same room.
We are training for something which includes running and my wife hates running. She has always hated it, and she will tell you so without hesitation. On Saturday we agreed Sunday was the day. Then Sunday came, and her body and her brain put up the fight they always put up.
I did not argue with the fight. I did not try to talk her feelings away or convince her she would enjoy it. I just held the plan steady. "Stick to the plan, not your mood." Not unkindly, just unmoved.
She got dressed, she complained the whole walk to the door and then she ran. We did five kilometres. She came home tired, properly tired, and something else was sitting on her face that the tiredness could not hide. Pride. She had done a thing her mood had spent the whole evening telling her she could not do.
This is not really about running.
I say these words to myself more than I say them to anyone else. They are the words I bring into the work I do with the founders and senior leaders who sit down with real intentions, real plans, and then come back to the next conversation having done none of it. Something happened, they got busy, they did not feel ready. Their mood took the wheel, and their intention quietly fell into the gap between who they meant to be that week and who they actually were.
This week, find the one thing you have been putting off because you are waiting to feel ready for it. Do not wait for the feeling. Do the first five minutes of it today, exactly as planned, regardless of what your mood says when you wake up.
- What is the plan you made for a version of yourself that your current mood is now trying to talk you out of?
- If you keep listening to your mood instead of your plan, what does the person you are becoming look like in a year?
- How many times has your mood already won this month, and what are you telling yourself about why those don't count?