Sometimes it’s useful to just say what is so. There are stories we tell ourselves that are unexamined and do not contain all the truth. This is one of them.
As you know by now if you’ve been reading my blogs, one of the things my clients do on their calls with me is “declare” action steps. These are often things that are not easy for them. (Most people will not hire a coach for the “easy” things.) And so each week when they come to the call, we go through their declared action steps from the week before and they tell me what they have done and not done.
And here is what I hear, with some regularity: “Well, I didn’t do that, but this was an unusual week.” 
Unusual how? Well, all these things came up that I wasn’t expecting and my mom came to visit and my daughter didn’t have school on Monday. I heard this many times before I said, “Hmmm, it seems like most of your weeks are ‘unusual’.”
Circumstances – we all have ‘em. They are all the outside factors in our lives – people’s demands on our time, the size of our workload, how helpful our co-workers and spouse are, the moods of our children. Some circumstances we can affect and some we cannot. But the truth is this – they will always be there.
That’s step one – state the truth. You will always have your circumstances. There are no normal weeks.
Step two, in the words of Paul Simon, “What are you gonna do about it? That’s what I’d like to know.”
