Eat That Frog!

I recently read a great book by Brian Tracy called Eat That Frog! The book is about prioritizing important tasks in order to get the most important things done in the limited amount of time that we have. 

The title comes from an old saying that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you can get on with your day knowing that you have probably done the worst thing that you will have to do that day.  It’s a metaphor for taking on the most challenging tasks that you are faced with first. Then everything else seems easy.

With the next Life By Design 30 Day challenge fast approaching, I have been thinking about how this metaphor applies to all areas of Life By Design.

For every person, there are parts of Life By Design that are more difficult than others. Maybe you are great at staying on track with Eat By Design but are having trouble developing a good routine for your Move By Design. Or maybe those 5am wake ups and morning Think By Design Power Hour are a real struggle. Maybe you are getting up regularly and have the Move By Design down but have not yet started to get your spine checked. 

If you are completely new to Life By Design, it can be a overwhelming to think about doing ALL of these things.

The purpose of the 30 Day Challenge is to push yourself to be better. No one is perfect. Even the people who have been living By Design for years have slip ups, off tracks, missed work outs and sleep ins. That is life.

Instead of shooting for perfection in all areas, for this challenge, I propose that you think about swallowing your ‘frog.’

My frog is the 5am power hour. I go through a few days of consistently doing it and then a week will go by where I just can not seem to make it happen. My alarm magically is not loud enough, I betray myself by hitting the snooze button 30 times, there are events in my schedule that run until midnight and I would rather die than get out of bed after 4 ½ hours of sleep… Excuses, excuses and very little excellence. This is my frog.

When I DO get up at 5am though – MAN! What a difference. I feel accomplished for just getting that out of the way. Then I have a great focus hour, set my goals for the day and by noon I feel like the most purposeful human being on the planet. Do you know how good it feels to check off all of those little boxes I draw for myself? SO GOOD!

So this 30 day challenge, I am going to stay on track with my Eat By Design, I am going to get checked every week and I will do my best to stick to my training schedule. But my main focus, my ONE big goal is to Eat That Frog! by getting up at 5am everyday.

What is your frog?

Pick the ONE thing that you know is hardest for you to do and put all of your energy into mastering that over the 30 days between November 11^th and December 11^th.  Write it down. Put it somewhere that you can see it every day to keep you focused.

You can do it!