I have been going down a rabbit hole lately.
It started with Mel Robbins. She just had Seth Godin on her podcast, and if you have not listened to it yet, go find it. Seth is the kind of thinker who takes something you thought you understood and turns it completely inside out. In the best way.
He said something that spoke to me. He talked about what it really means to be a professional. To make a promise and keep it. To show up because you said you would. Even if you don’t feel like it.
I heard that, and I thought about my Facebook group, Clearing for Clarity.
This week I marked eight years. Eight years of Monday with Meryl. Eight years of showing up, sometimes brilliantly if I do say so myself, and sometimes just adequately, but showing up. And I will be honest with you. I am more consistent now than I was in the beginning. I used to wonder about that. I thought maybe it got easier because I got more disciplined over the years, or because I created a good routine around getting it done. But that is not actually what happened.
I got clearer. I have clarity now that I didn’t have in the beginning. Yes, that thing I talk about all the time.
I am clearer on who I am talking to. I am clearer on what I want Monday with Meryl to do for the women in that room. And because of that clarity, Sunday night when I sit down to write, I am there, fully present. Sometimes I may not want to be. This very piece you are reading right now, I wrote it on a Sunday when I could have done other things. But I sat down anyway because I know why it matters and I know who it is for.
That feeling of telling yourself you are a person who does what she commits to, that is something willpower alone could never give you. Willpower runs out. It runs out every single day. But when you are clear on the why behind what you are doing, something else takes over. It is more subtle than motivation and more reliable than discipline. It is just clarity doing its work.
I see the opposite of this all the time with the women I coach. They come to me exhausted from trying harder. They have the apps, the planners, and the morning routines they found on Instagram. They have tried every system. And they are still in the same start-stop cycle, feeling like something is wrong with them.
Here is what 22 years of working with women has taught me. The stopping is not the failure. The stopping is feedback. Every time you fell off, something was out of alignment. The goal did not really belong to you. The pace was unsustainable. The reason was someone else’s reason. That is not a character flaw or a lack of anything. That is your inner wisdom asking you to look more closely. And let’s be honest. How often do we fall off on a commitment and say to ourselves, “Oh, that’s feedback, let me look at this”? We don’t. We say I failed. That is why I want you to look, notice, and name it differently from now on. No more blaming yourself.
Consistency follows clarity. It really is that simple and that hard, simultaneously.
So this week, I want you to think about one thing you keep starting and stopping. Think honestly about it for a minute. Ask yourself whether this is something you truly want or something you think you should want. Whether your reason for it is yours or borrowed from somewhere else.
That answer is your real starting point.
When what you are doing matches who you are becoming, showing up stops feeling like a battle. It starts feeling like something you just do. Like me, on a Sunday, writing to you.
